About the Genocide Forum

A Platform for post-Holocaust Commentary

  1. See No Evil! How Many Early Warnings Does it Take?
  2. A Timely Publication: Teaching the Holocaust to Christians
  3. For Whom are Holocaust Museums? Us or Them?
  4. No Comparing, No Thinking! The Unavoidable Future of Studying Genocide
  5. Hitler, Mao and Stalin: Distinguishing Genocidal Killers

July-August 2000
Year 6, No. 6

Bonnie Falchuk: Managing Editor
Carol Rittner: Associate Editor
Henry R. Huttenbach: Founder- Editor
Sandrine Dikambi: Assistant Editor

See No Evil!  How Many Early Warnings Does it Take?

They are in constant danger in China; they are lethally threatened in Egypt; they are being assaulted in Indonesia; they are genocidally endangered in Sudan; they are steadily increasingly insecure, threatened in life and limb, in Nigeria; and they suffer in India.

Who are they?  They are Christian minorities: they are mainly Anglicans, Catholics and Coptics, but their enemies are Muslim majoritarian governments and a Communist regime. Over 164,000 Christians fell victim to deadly violence in 1999 alone.  They were killed simply because they professed a Christian faith.

Collectively and individually, these Christian minorities face increasingly intolerant regimes determined in the long run to drive out the Christian presence in their midst.  The rationalizations for the elimination of Christian communities in these six countries vary from the secular ideological to the unbending religious, dogmatic prejudice.  The violent means vary, but the aims are the same – the expulsion of Christians and the extinction of Christian life from the national population.

And the world watches.  Governments remain unmoved, though fully informed.  And what of those claiming to be concerned about the dangers of genocide?  They meet at conferences, searching for new academic projects, occasionally cobbling ineffective statements of "profound concern," even while gathering footnotes for new monographs on Early Warning Systems.  And what about the Christian Churches in the "free" world?  Thunderous silences emanate form the Vatican, from Canterbury (UK), etc.  No emergency sessions, ecumenical or otherwise, give a sense of outrage at the escalating emergency.  Why not?

The answers to this question point to the crisis of the last mid-century, when Christian Know-Nothingness, on both sides of the Atlantic, looked away.  Immoral, ostrich-like, head-in-sandism guided the churches through the moral minefields of World War II.  They emerged institutionally unscathed and launched a post-war policy of Christianity as usual.

And now, fifty years later, the fatal, ironic and tragic consequences: immobility in the face of violent, existential outrages perpetrated against fellow Christians.  It reads almost like a Greek drama in which the gods repay the negligence of humankind manifold in kind.  Desensitized against the past existential agonies of the Jews – which they ignored – they now are immune to the martyrdom of their own.  Euripides could not have penned a better plot.  But let us not forget another constituency of potential but non-action that – if history teaches lessons – should have been sensitized to the genocidal dangers faced by others.  I refer to the Jews, beginning with survivor organizations, not to mention the Anti-Defamation League and its corporate parent, B'nai Brith.  Need one say more?

The danger is not always emanating from an unfriendly state.  The government of President Hosni Mubarak has attempted on numerous occasions – some vigorous, others pro forma – to guarantee the safety of the Coptic Christians.  But to little avail.  His regime lacks the long range power to curb the rising tide of grassroots Islamic radicalism, as much an enemy to him as to the Christian minority.  That is not the case in China where the regime is waging an intense war of suppression against all non-conforming groups.  In Indonesia, decades of government incitement against Christians has triggered off, now that it is weak, a local dynamic of anti-Christian violence no longer requiring government prompting.  The same is true for Nigeria.

The warning signs are unambiguous.  What are the diplomats, the clerics and the academics waiting for?  For a full-scale crisis so they wring hands in empty supplications and post-facto prayers and articles?  Will we have more debates over "Who was at fault?" or, "Was it really genocide?"  Will the dozens of delegations that attended the Stockholm meeting and inaugurated an annual Holocaust memorial day in their respective countries, will they express active concern for contemporary genocidal incidents against Christian minorities?  Or will they be content with thinking about Auschwitz once a year on January 27 when the camp was supposedly "liberated" (incidentally, by Soviet troops, though no mention of that was made in Stockholm.  Why?)

Will readers of The Genocide Forum do more than read these angry words?  Will some resent the intrusion into their comfortable world?  Will the best be counter-articles over an obscure point or minor inaccuracy?

Will more than 164,000 Christians be murdered in Year 2000, in the last year of the 20th Century?  Does any one really care?  Perhaps we should re-read the open letter "J'Accuse" in Genocide Forum (3/8)

Henry R. Huttenbach

A Timely Publication: Teaching the Holocaust to Christians

Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith, Irena Steinfeldt, eds., The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future (Kuperard: London, 2000) 263pp., videography and index.

Teaching the Holocaust is no simple task.  How to do so bedevils most educators; the complexity of issues, ethnic, moral, philosophical, etc. can discourage the most devoted to the cause of presenting the tragedy of this genocide.  One systematic problem at the very heart of the Final Solution is the distressing fact that six million Jews were slaughtered in the epicenter of Christian Europe.  No teacher can, in good conscience, evade the question: where were the Christians and their churches?  Were they major or bit players in the Holocaust drama?  Did humanitarian Christian values prevail or not?  And what about two millennia of Christian animosity against Jews and Judaism?  How can one discuss these emotionally explosive subjects dispassionately and fairly without rancor, bitterness and resentment?

Classroom materials, selected readings and texts, for the Christianity-Holocaust connection are almost non-existent.  The book under discussion is designed to meet this need.  The essays are short and to the point, with guiding quotes and questions, for instructor and students, conveniently placed in the margins.  All pertinent topics are correctly raised in chronological order: Christianity and antisemitism, the complicity of the churches with the Nazis, resistance and rescue (if any), the policies of the Vatican, post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian relations, and study guides.

Having said this, not all is well with this pioneering endeavor; one hopes the following criticism will help in preparing a second edition so the baby is not thrown out with the bath-water.

First: it is unclear to whom this volume is directed.  For High Schools, the text is too long (given the tyranny of the "unit") and the style of many texts is lifeless; for undergraduates, the individual chapters are too abbreviated.  For non-academic study groups, the present volume seems better suited, certainly for lay Christians and Jewish gatherings seeking to "build bridges", though I suspect some discussions will generate more heat than light given the sensitivity of the subject.  Often the simple truth is too painful and does not necessarily lead to reconciliation but to a hardening of hearts.  The editors must, therefore, sharpen their focus on a more clearly defined readership, making this equally clear to their authors.  I suspect the editors had secondary schools in mind, a reality most of their university-based authors have had little contact with.

Secondly, even more serious, there is a crucial dimension absent in the book's quest to account for the failure of Christianity at mid-century.  For far too long, uncritical emphasis – almost mantra-like – has been placed on Christian Judeophobia (not antisemitism).  True as this link to modern racist antisemitism may be, it is the wrong path to take in search of what really led Christians and their churches into the moral traps of Nazism and Fascism.  The better answer lies in the corrupting politicization and nationalization of the Christian churches, both Protestant and Catholic.

The pact with the devil was made as early as the sixteenth century when Popes and Protestant leaders subordinated themselves to secular rulers.  Of course in the Christian Orthodox East, sundry Patriarchs had long made this an article of faith, accepting the dictates of earthly authorities and embracing the principle of caesaro-papism.  Once in the service of the state, the official religions rapidly metamorphosed from conscience of the realm to apologist for the government and its policies at home (suppression) and abroad (war).  Post- French Revolution nationalism accelerated this process of loss of institutional authority and spiritual integrity.  By World War I all Christian churches in Europe had become agents of patriotism and, some, of bellicose chauvinism, validating gingoisms and accommodating themselves to the most extreme forms of anti-Christian regimes and ideologies from Portugal to Poland.  The ability to "adjust" to National Socialism and its barbarisms was forged over centuries of compromise with Caesar.  This utilitarian rapprochement was not primarily an alliance against Jews, a merger of Christian doctrinal Judoephobia with secular political antisemitism, but a fruition of a long tradition of greater and greater clerical submission to state authority.  Repeated compromises over four centuries led to an almost absolute loss of independence and moral autonomy.  The logical consequence was the tragedy of Christianity during the Holocaust; while genocide raged the churches lay supine in the face of evil in the form of the anti-Christ.  The animus towards Jews was but a side issue.  At stake were the very souls of the churches.  In brief, they failed as Jews were gassed.

The only remaining issue is: what of Christianity, if any, can be salvaged from the ashes of Auschwitz?  Where does post-Holocaust Christianity receive its authenticity?  Other than an act of social politeness, what lies at the heart of the so-called Jewish-Christian dialogue?  Limp Papal apologies?  These questions are not faced head-on.

What is needed are books that raise and answer the basic historical and theological controversies.  In this sense the present book qua introduction is much too polite and hesitant to address these awful (awe full) and agonizing questions.  They are cruel and tragic and I know few persons of good will prepared to enter a classroom to lead the discussion of Christianity and the Holocaust in the directions indicated above.  Most readers will say this approach is divisive when the goal is reconciliation. That is true.  But what is the viable alternative?  One might begin with a careful reading of Wolfgang Gerlach's And the Witnesses were Silent (University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

Another omission – if pedagogical goals are to be achieved – is the absence of any stress on the continued collaboration between Christians, churches and genocidists.  The case of Rwanda has already been referred to in previous issues of the Genocide Forum; but the sordid ties between the Churches (Catholic and Orthodox) and State in the case of Bosnia are less known, despite several excellent publications.  Readers are urged to consult Paul Mojzes' Religion and the War in Bosnia (Scholars Press: Atlanta, 1998).  If lessons are to be taught and learned, forthrighness about the past must include forthrightness about the present.  The lesson so far?  That nothing has fundamentally changed.  The theology of intra-Christian hatred and intolerance is alive and well.  This time radical intolerance is aimed against groups other than Jews.  However, Jews should not be relieved; theologically fueled hatred knows no bounds.  The pendulum can and does swing back.

In conclusion there is a final suggestion of a technical nature.  The present book seems to have been done in a hurry to meet an unstated deadline: hence its numerous typos and infelicities of style, besides its overall lack of focus on its intended readership. 

Henry R. Huttenbach

For Whom are Holocaust Museums? Us or Them?

On February 16 of this year, Jörg Haider, the ideological father of Austria's far right Freedom Party, was denied entrance to Montreal's Holocaust Museum.  A few years earlier, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. saw fit to invite the late Franjo Tudjman – the then president of Croatia and an ardent admirer of the World War II pro-Nazi Ustashe movement – to its opening ceremonies.  What is going on here?  Haider, for all his follies, is no proto-Hitler, and certainly not an antisemite, despite his atrocious public statements.  Yet Tudjman authored and never repudiated a blatantly antisemitic tract.  How can one square these circles, these inconsistencies, expect to ascribe them to two separate and distinct institutions?

So what are Holocaust Museums for if their administrators can veer off in so many contradictory directions?  Are their doors open only to those who pass a purity litmus test or to all, friend and foes alike, including Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization?  Over a half century ago, after the concentration camps were freed of SS rule by Allied armies, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his British counterparts saw fit to force German camp guards and nearby civilians to look upon the "achievements" of the Third Reich.  Was he right to do so – as an act of punishment – or ought he to have refrained giving an order that was of no military significance?  What did Eisenhower expect the Germans to see or to learn?

Could we not argue that the Montreal Museum director and his staff should have heartily welcomed Haider precisely to refresh his twisted memory of the Nazi past he so glibly refers to?  After all, is that not one of the purposes of a Holocaust Museum, namely, to educate those who seem to be or are ignorant?  Or did they feel Haider was beyond persuasion?

In turn, one could argue that the solemn celebratory opening of a Holocaust Museum is not the time to invite and honor controversial dignitaries of the order of Tudjman.  Let him visit alone and see – uncelebrated – the exhibits; but one should not have him share the company of survivors and others who helped build this edifice of remembrance of victims, and of the perpetrators of genocide with whom he openly identified.

The incident in Montreal may have been an exception, a hasty decision dictated by hasty emotion rather than by reasoned policy.  At least one hopes so.  The Genocide Forum's Canadian readers might be moved to inquire and inform us further.  The Tudjman affair was never explained and was soon followed by the Arafat débacle, exposing another version of ad hoc decision (and counter-decision) making motivated by fleeting emotion instead of a rational guiding policy.  A non self-serving explanatory statement should have been forthcoming, but never came, leaving the observers confused and distressed.

In short, what are the criteria for opening and closing the doors to visitors seeking entrance to Holocaust Museums?  Regardless of whether they are private, semi-private, or public institutions, some basic agreement should exist to avoid future incidents such as the one that kept Jörg Haider from entering, thereby contributing to his propaganda machine.

What if a LePen decides to visit?  Or a Zhirinovsky?  Or David Irving?  The list of unreconstructed enemies of the Holocaust is legion.  Should these persons be welcomed or shunned?  Ought skinheads to be turned away or allowed in?  Are Holocaust Museums only for the converted or explicitly for those of other ideological persuasions?  Holocaust Museums are designed to preserve memory and to foster understanding.  Does that mean access only to the tolerant, those without hate?  Or does it mean an invitation to the intolerant, to those consumed by hate?

These questions deserve serious airing, for their answers determine the purpose of Holocaust Museums.  I certainly do not need these edifices; but perhaps those who despise me, my "race," do.  If we decide that these Museums are only for our friends to refresh their memories and to mourn the victims, then the museums become simple shrines and lose their fundamental pedagogical raison d'être, namely, to influence minds and hearts for the good.  If the latter is abandoned, then these institutions might as well close their doors.

That may sound harsh, but their tasks and responsibilities are far too majestic to risk further sloppy thinking and counter-productive decisions in lieu of sound policies.  These policies ought to be publicly debated and openly arrived at to avoid the recent errors of doors left open when they should have been shut, and closed when it would have been wiser to keep them open.

Future genocide museums will have to state their own policies; they can certainly learn from the past mistakes of those Holocaust institutions which preceded them.  Already two more genocide museums are planned for Washington, D.C.; one for the Armenian tragedy and one for the Cambodian.  What will their individual policies be?  Perhaps it is time to contemplate a museum of genocide with a global perspective, free of parochial concerns that are inevitable with single genocide institutions.  What do the readers think?

Henry R. Huttenbach

No Comparing, No Thinking! The Unavoidable Future of Studying Genocide

The wording of the first part of the title may seem unduly harsh, but it is designed expressly to make a central point, namely, without comparison genocide studies remains severely impaired as a full-fledged academic multi-dimensional discipline.  The study of individual genocides is but a preliminary step towards understanding genocide per se.  However, expert knowledge of a single genocide is an obvious sine qua non in the process of comprehending the phenomenon of group annihilation.  To be well versed in but one genocide is to find oneself eventually in an intellectual cul-de-sac.  Like any other major historical event, each genocide only partially contains the clues to its own meaning.  It must, therefore, be seen alongside other events.

To begin grasping the overall reality of genocide – to arrive at a basic conceptual comprehension of the phenomenon – each genocidal incident must be seen in comparison with other genocides.  To determine the essence of genocide – or, for that matter, of war, civil war, revolution, etc. – one must be able to find a common denominator that unites all genocides, no matter when, where, or how they occurred.  If scholars are to theorize about genocide they must extend their expertise beyond their initial mastery of one genocide.  Without comparison as a tool, for example, scholars are prevented from experimenting with various definitions of genocide.  Lacking a theory of genocide, neither finding an adequate definition of genocide nor performing extensive analysis is possible.

To rely on the insights afforded by just one genocide is to parochialize genocide scholarship and condemn it to a corpus of disconnected monographic studies.  Hence, more accurately, with no comparison there can be very little fruitful thinking about genocide.  The present dearth of applying the methodology of comparison to genocide studies is due to three primary causes: first, a virtual absence of specialists thoroughly trained in two or more genocides; secondly, a tendency to overrate the importance of the genocide with which one is familiar, thereby discouraging the need to compare; and third, a prejudicial aversion to the practice of comparison out of fear of having ones "own" genocide somehow lessened, either in significance or in specificity.  This last cause is largely a product of the second, that is, once one is hyper-specialized one loses perspective and develops a tendency to exaggerate the significance of what one has learned just from one genocidal incident.

So, how to escape from this trap?  To begin with, genocide scholars will have to develop a sophisticated system of comparison.  Other disciplines – literature and political science, for example – have long practiced and honed the skills of comparison according to agreed upon ground rules to determine basic commonalities and specificities.  The pursuit of various kinds of similarities and dissimilarities – central and peripheral – has to conform with strict guidelines.  This calls for a detailed study of the component parts of each genocide, first to expose the basic skeletal foundations true for all genocides, then to identify secondary common characteristics of sub-groups of genocide, and thirdly, to pinpoint the individual traits of each genocide.

Towards that end, a series of articles devoted to finding a reasoned methodology of comparative genocide in particular has been commissioned for Genocide Research.  They will appear seriatim in future issues of the journal in the hope they will serve as a springboard for further discussion among all practitioners of genocide studies and their students.  There is still a long way to go; but there is no reason to postpone thinking about comparing genocides.

Henry R. Huttenbach

Hitler, Mao and Stalin: Distinguishing Genocidal Killers

All three tyrants possessed virtual total power over the machinery of state and wielded corresponding power of life and death over their respective population.  All three dictators harbored utopian visions of the future, in whose name they were willing to incur enormous human costs.  All three political leaders were prepared to do everything in the name of ideology to achieve their ultra-radical goals.  In the process of pursuing their ends – the accumulation and exercise of total power, namely, state violence – they condemned millions, indeed tens of millions, to death in the name of race, class and/or ethnicity.  For the sake of reconstructing from the ground up their respective societies, each tyrant unleashed lethal state power on their victims, variously classified as sub-human or capitalists or some other category justifying extinction.  In retrospect, it is quite clear that all three heads of state manifested absolutist mind-sets, harbored genocidal thoughts and committed crimes at least genocidal in scope.

Legitimate academic differences separate Hitler from Stalin, and both from Mao.  Yet all three employed political violence on an unprecedented scale.  They practiced merciless extermination of their "enemies," starting with those inside their own borders.  Their motives and means may have differed, but their destructive domestic policies, nevertheless, were genocidal in dimension.

Much of the thrust of this essay depends on the definition of genocide.  In the narrowest sense, only Hitler's mass killings of Jews in Germany qualify to be classified as bona fide genocide.  A broader definition would include Stalin's disposal of five million peasant households, largely in Ukraine, by means of artificial famine, brutal deportation and incarcerations; given what is now known, no one would dispute that Stalin's "resettlement" to Central Asia of a half-dozen non-Russian ethnic peoples qualified as instances of attempted genocide.  An even wider definition of genocide would encompass Mao's systematic murder of uncounted millions of ethnic Chinese.  Some might object to naming Mao's mass murderous domestic policies practiced on fellow Chinese as genocide.  If that were the case, what are we to make of the Pol Pot killings in Cambodia where perhaps close to two millions Kampucheans, nearly 25 percent of the population, were killed by the regime, a deed classified by scholars as auto-genocide?

Obviously much depends on a precise definition of genocide to determine whether Hitler, Mao and/or Stalin were or were not at all genocidists.  Key to an answer are the operating ideologies which provided each of the three mass killers with an abstract construct to fabricate an "enemy" – of the master race, of the proletariat, or of the regime itself.

Strict constructionists understandingly insist on narrow parameters for a definition of genocide in order to avoid an inflation of meaning.  That, academically, is a proper stance of caution to assume.  However, in order to avoid what may be interpreted as a self-defeating, arid, scholastic mind-set, room must be made for exceptions.  There are times when the parameters of genocide are too limiting if drawn too tightly for the sake of conceptual purity.  This is not a question of mere semantics but of conceptual accuracy: the mega-killings perpetrated by Hitler, Mao and Stalin went beyond genocide.

All three committed genocide by any definition.  But, in each case, the range of their mass murders extended further than the intellectual confines of genocide.  The destruction of vast swaths of their population was of a sort that is best conveyed by the term democide of which genocide can be but a part; that is, democide can, at times, include genocide but genocide  is always a form of democide.  In short, what the three tyrants committed is a crime whose boundaries extend into a trans-genocidal realm. 

Thus, scholars must be prepared to study genocides in a context of mass murder that can on occasion transcend genocide.  The killings of tens of millions of peoples should not be negatively classified as non-genocide and, therefore, by implication, as "less" than genocide, but instead, as an act qualitatively more than genocide.  The state crimes of these three tyrants went a step further than just genocide.  They killed regardless of group classification.  That is, for example, why there has been difficulty labeling the impact of Stalin's state-fabricated famine of 1932-3.  Critical food shortages embraced a huge terrain that included all of Ukraine.  Yet, the famine also affected peoples from Byelorussia to Kazakhstan.  Numerically, the Ukrainians were hardest hit; thus, from the bottom-up perspective of the Ukrainians, the famine was of genocidal proportions – whether Stalin intended that or not.  Nevertheless, seen from above, Stalin's greater goal of fully restructuring the Soviet rural society, at whatever cost in human lives, led to outright democide within which was the genocidal assault on Ukranians.

Given this kind of analysis, it is important to recognize that the definition of genocide – while enhancing one's ability to classify accurately instances of that crime – should not obstruct one's seeing yet a bigger picture – democide – within which a genocide can take place.

Henry R. Huttenbach

 

About The Genocide Forum

 The Forum is a publication of the Center for the Study of Ethnonationalism located on the campus of the City College of New York.  The founder and editor of The Genocide Forum is Professor Henry R. Huttenbach.

 The Genocide Forum, which appears bi-monthly, is intended to serve as a convenient vehicle of exchange to discuss critical issues of common interest to students of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.  The Forum is designed to accommodate experts in the field to share their concerns via concise (1,500 words) analytic essays.

 Contributors are invited to submit their essay on a 3.5" disk (Macintosh/MicroSoft Word) with one double-spaced print-out to Professor Henry R. Huttenbach, History Department, The City College of New York, Convent Avenue at 138th St., New York, NY 10031. Tel: (212) 650-7384; Fax (718) 624-0450.

 Back Issues of The Genocide Forum are available on request as long as supplies last.  Complete sets of back issues are available on 3.5" diskette (Macintosh/Microsoft) for $25.

 Quotations may be made as long as proper credit is given.  Duplication of long passages or entire articles require the written permission of the editor.

  The Genocide Forum is made possible through the partial support of the Division of Humanities of the City College of New York. 

  Nota Bene: Views expressed by authors are not necessarily those of the editor.

Henry R. Huttenbach
c/o History Department
City College of New York
Convent Ave. at 138th Street
New York, NY 10031
 

A Publication of The Center for The Study of Ethnonationalism
The City College of The City University of New York