File spoon-archives/anarchy-list.archive/anarchy-list_1999/anarchy-list.9910, message 196


Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 21:36:24 -0400
From: Chuck0 <chuck-AT-tao.ca>
Subject: FWD:  Howard Zinn on the Holocaust




-------- Original Message --------
Subject: FWD:  Howard Zinn on the Holocaust
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 14:39:21 -0400 (EDT)
From: 

>
> ZNet Commentary / Oct 10 /
>
>
> A LARGER CONSCIOUSNESS
> By Howard Zinn
>
>Some years ago, when I was teaching at Boston University, I was asked by a
>Jewish group to give a talk on the Holocaust. I spoke that evening, but
>not about the Holocaust of World War II, not about the genocide of six
>million Jews. It was the mid-Eighties, and the United States government
>was supporting death squad governments in Central America, so I spoke of
>the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants in Guatemala and El
>Salvador, victims of American policy.  My point was that the memory of the
>Jewish Holocaust should not be encircled by barbed wire, morally
>ghettoized, kept isolated from other genocides in history. It seemed to me
>that to remember what happened to Jews served no important purpose unless
>it aroused indignation, anger, action against all atrocities, anywhere in
>the world.
>
>A few days later, in the campus newspaper, there was a letter from a
>faculty member who had heard me speak - a Jewish refugee who had left
>Europe for Argentina, and then the United States. He objected strenuously
>to my extending the moral issue from Jews in Europe in the 1940s to people
>in other parts of the world, in our time. The Holocaust was a sacred
>memory. It was a unique event, not to be compared to other events. He was
>outraged that, invited to speak on the Jewish Holocaust, I had chosen to
>speak about other matters.
>
>I was reminded of this experience when I recently read a book by Peter
>Novick, THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE. Novick's starting point is the
>question: why, fifty years after the event, does the Holocaust play a more
>prominent role in this country -- the Holocaust Museum in Washington,
>hundreds of Holocaust programs in schools -- than it did in the first
>decades after the second World War?  Surely at the core of the memory is a
>horror that should not be forgotten. But around that core, whose integrity
>needs no enhancement, there has grown up an industry of memorialists who
>have labored to keep that memory alive for purposes of their own.
>
>Some Jews have used the Holocaust as a way of preserving a unique
>identity, which they see threatened by intermarriage and assimilation.
>Zionists have used the Holocaust, since the 1967 war, to justify further
>Israeli expansion into Palestianian land, and to build support for a
>beleaguered Israel (more beleaguered, as David Ben-Gurion had predicted,
>once it occupied the West Bank and Gaza). And non-Jewish politicians have
>used the Holocaust to build political support among the numerically small
>but influential Jewish voters - note the solemn pronouncements of
>Presidents wearing yarmulkas to underline their anguished sympathy.
>
>I would never have become a historian if I thought that it would become my
>professional duty to go into the past and never emerge, to study long-gone
>events and remember them only for their uniqueness, not connecting them to
>events going on in my time. If the Holocaust was to have any meaning, I
>thought, we must transfer our anger to the brutalities of our time. We
>must atone for our allowing the Jewish Holocaust to happen by refusing to
>allow similar atrocities to take place now - yes, to use the Day of
>Atonement not to pray for the dead but to act for the living, to rescue
>those about to die.
>
>When Jews turn inward to concentrate on their own history, and look away
>from the ordeal of others, they are, with terrible irony, doing exactly
>what the rest of the world did in allowing the genocide to happen. There
>were shameful moments, travesties of Jewish humanism, as when Jewish
>organizations lobbied against a Congressional recognition of the Armenian
>Holocaust of 1915 on the ground that it diluted the memory of the Jewish
>Holocaust. Or when the designers of the Holocaust Museum dropped the idea
>of mentioning the Armenian genocide after lobbying by the Israeli
>government. (Turkey was the only Moslem government with which Israel had
>diplomatic relations.)  Another such moment came when Elie Wiesel, chair
>of President Carter's Commission on the Holocaust, refused to include in a
>description of the Holocaust Hitler's killing of millions of non-Jews.
>That would be, he said, to "falsify" the reality "in the name of misguided
>universalism." Novick quotes Wiesel as saying "They are stealing the
>Holocaust from us." As a result the Holocaust Museum gave only passing
>attention to the five million or more non-Jews who died in the Nazi camps.
>To build a wall around the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust is to
>abandon the idea that humankind is all one, that we are all, of whatever
>color, nationality, religion, deserving of equal rights to life, liberty,
>and the pursuit of happiness. What happened to the Jews under Hitler is
>unique in its details but it shares universal characteristics with many
>other events in human history: the Atlantic slave trade, the genocide
>against native Americans, the injuries and deaths to millions of working
>people, victims of the capitalist ethos that put profit before human life.
>
>In recent years, while paying more and more homage to the Holocaust as a
>central symbol of man's cruelty to man, we have, by silence and inaction,
>collaborated in an endless chain of cruelties. Hiroshima and My Lai are
>the most dramatic symbols - and did we hear from Wiesel and other keepers
>of the Holocaust flame outrage against those atrocities? Countee Cullen
>once wrote, in his poem "Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song" (after the
>sentencing to death of the Scottsboro Boys): "Surely, I said/ Now will the
>poets sing/ But they have raised no cry/I wonder why."
>
>There have been the massacres of Rwanda, and the starvation in Somalia,
>with our government watching and doing nothing. There were the death
>squads in Latin America, and the decimation of the population of East
>Timor, with our government actively collaborating. Our church-going
>Christian presidents, so pious in their references to the genocide against
>the Jews, kept supplying the instruments of death to the perpetrators of
>other genocides.
>
>True there are some horrors which seem beyond our powers. But there is an
>ongoing atrocity which is within our power to bring to an end. Novick
>points to it, and physician-anthropologist Paul Farmer describes it in
>detail in his remarkable new book INFECTIONS AND INEQUALITIES. That is:
>the deaths of ten million children all over the world who die every year
>of malnutrition and preventable diseases. The World Health Organization
>estimates three million people died last year of tuberculosis, which is
>preventable and curable, as Farmer has proved in his medical work in
>Haiti. With a small portion of our military budget we could wipe out
>tuberculosis.
>
>The point of all this is not to diminish the experience of the Jewish
>Holocaust, but to enlarge it. For Jews it means to reclaim the tradition
>of Jewish universal humanism against an Israel-centered nationalism. Or,
>as Novick puts it, to go back to "that larger social consciousness that
>was the hallmark of the American Jewry of my youth". That larger
>consciousness was displayed in recent years by those Israelis who
>protested the beating of Palestinians in the Intifada, who demonstrated
>against the invasion of Lebanon.
>
>For others -- whether Armenians or Native Americans or Africans or
>Bosnians or whatever -- it means to use their own bloody histories, not to
>set themselves against others, but to create a larger solidarity against
>the holders of wealth and power, the perpetrators and ongoing horrors of
>our time.
>
>The Holocaust might serve a powerful purpose if it led us to think of the
>world today as wartime Germany - where millions die while the rest of the
>population obediently goes about its business. It is a frightening thought
>that the Nazis, in defeat, were victorious: today Germany, tomorrow the
>world. That is, until we withdraw our obedience.
>

   

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