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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