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(Reprinted from "UCLA College Report" -- a showcase of the people and
programs in the UCLA College of Letters and Science.)
Remembering the Voices
New social science approaches to studying ethnically-based oppression
and atrocities yield important insights about inhumanity and the
tenacity of the human spirit.
By Robin Heffler
UCLA drew worldwide attention this spring when the university
established the first endowed academic chair to focus on the World War
II internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans and their campaign to gain
redress. But the George and Sakaye Aratani Chair on the Japanese
American Internment, Redress and Community is only the latest example
of UCLA's strength in scholarship that aims to shed new light on
ethnically-based human oppression and atrocities.
In the UCLA College, the work of UCLA scholars across a number of
disciplines in the social sciences spans the Armenian Genocide of
1915, the Holocaust of World War II, and examples of "ethnic
cleansing," sexual crimes against women, forced segregation, and
coerced assimilation over the last several centuries.
Some of the College's most prominent faculty members received
acclaim-not to mention furthered truth and justice-by taking fresh
approaches to research and presenting new insights into these horrific
chapters in modern history.
"These faculty are among many in the College whose work has led to a
better understanding of inhumanity-scholarship that helps to create an
appreciation of how to work toward a more humane and compassionate
world," said Scott Waugh, dean of Social Sciences.
Richard Hovannisian: Speaking for Victims of the Armenian Genocide
Growing up in a small farming community in Central California during
the 1930s and '40s, Richard G. Hovannisian, the Armenian Education
Foundation Professor of Modern Armenian History, didn't feel much of a
connection to his Armenian heritage. But he did take notice of those
who had survived the 1915 genocide of 1.5-million fellow Armenians at
the hands of the Turks during World War I.
"Most survivors of the genocide didn't speak about their past, but it
was always there," said Hovannisian, who was an initiator of Armenian
studies at UCLA in the 1960s and is widely honored in the Armenian
community for his work. "At the same time, the Turkish government was
continuing to deny it, thus denying their suffering. As one in the
field of studying the oppressed, whose voices have not been heard, or
can't be, and need others to speak for them, I feel obliged to do so."
Hovannisian, an emeritus professor of history, began his research with
an oral history project that now consists of 800 interviews, mostly in
the Armenian language, that are being transcribed into English. By
comparing stories of people who came from different regions,
Hovannisian was able to confirm the genocide and see the coordinated
efforts of the perpetrators.
"The genocide was a double loss because it was not only the
extermination of people," he said, "but loss of land where they had
lived for 3,000 years with the cultural institutions they had built."
Hovannisian's latest book, Looking Backward, Moving Forward:
Confronting the Armenian Genocide, makes the point that survivors are
"prevented from freely moving forward because they are forced to spend
so much energy on getting recognition for an event that others are
trying to deny or forget. To be remembered, the genocide has to be
made a part of universal history and collective human memory much like
the Holocaust has become."
Saul Friedlander: The Holocaust-Setting the Record Straight
Saul Friedlander was seven years old when he fled from his native
Czechoslovakia to France with his Jewish parents after Hitler began
invading Europe. With the German occupation of France, his parents
placed him in a French Catholic monastery and tried to escape to
Switzerland, but they were shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp
and never seen again.
In his 1979 memoir, Friedlander, a professor of history who now holds
the 1939 Club Chair in Holocaust Studies, recalled how at age 13 he
first understood his parents' fate when a Jesuit priest told him about
what had been happening to the Jews of Europe, including those who
were gassed and cremated at Auschwitz.
"That changed my whole life, and in a way, my Jewish identity was
restored," said Friedlander, who had embraced Catholicism and was
thinking of becoming a priest. It also began a nearly 40-year career
in Holocaust research out of a "desire to preserve and set the record
straight."
Digging through German laws, police reports, films, and personal
recollections, Friedlander has documented one anti-Jewish Nazi measure
after another, beginning in 1933. Looking at why so many were silent
in the face of a "systematic policy of segregation and persecution,"
he concluded that Germany's largely middle-class, educated population
saw the treatment of Jews as a "peripheral issue" during a time of
economic prosperity and growing international power.
Among Friedlander's books is Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The
Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. A winner of a MacArthur Foundation
Award in 1999, he is using the proceeds from the award to write The
Years of Extermination, 1939-1945.
Michael Mann: Inside the Minds of Genocide Victims and Perpetrators
Sociology Professor Michael Mann has recently completed two books, one
called Fascists, a study of six European countries that led to the
other, The Darkside of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. For the
second book, Mann pored over victim and eyewitness accounts as well as
the transcripts of trials in West Germany and tribunals on Yugoslavia
and Rwanda.
"In many of the most serious cases of ethnic cleansing, the victims
didn't know how devastating it would be," Mann said. "The resistance
was not as strong as you might expect because people couldn't conceive
that other people would do this."
At the same time, he became fascinated with how the perpetrators could
be capable of mass murder and even call it "moral." In the case of the
1994 genocide of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda by Hutu
militia, he found many Hutus who described good relations with the
Tutsis before the mass killings.
"They attribute their actions to a war situation," said Mann. "Even
the most atrocious cases claim self defense. Because humans can't come
to terms with slaughtering in an unprovoked way, they tell themselves
a story that the other group is threatening them, even though it seems
implausible to us."
More than any other work he has conducted as a researcher, Mann has
been most disturbed by this research.
"This has been reflecting on evil, not about primitive people, but
about people like you and me," he said, "people who faced moral
choices and made the wrong ones for often mundane reasons, like
keeping a job or showing loyalty to comrades. It's what philosopher
Hannah Arendt called the 'banality of evil.'"
Kyeoung Park: Chronicling Sex Crimes Against Korean Women
War was also the backdrop for Anthropology Professor Kyeoung Park's
research into the abduction of some 200,000 "comfort women" to serve
Japanese soldiers in occupied Asian and Pacific countries during the
1930s. Under the policy, teenage girls and women were taken to the
frontlines of battle, held as prisoners, and repeatedly raped.
Park became interested in the topic while studying Korean immigrant
communities in New York. She had encountered old women who told her
they were forced by their families during the war to marry Korean men
who were handicapped or much older because their parents didn't want
them to become comfort women. Although Park's mother had been born in
Korea toward the end of Japanese colonial rule and was not affected,
"I thought it was my responsibility to study this historical issue,"
she said.
Examining testimonies by former comfort women, she has reconstructed
the circumstances in which they were recruited, the brutality of their
everyday life, and how they tried to resist in various ways, including
running away and pretending they had venereal disease.
"They didn't let themselves feel defeated, but rather took hope from
their daily survival and the idea that the Japanese might surrender
some day," Park said.
The experience remains an unhealed wound for the Korean comfort women
and for their champions, like Park, who are involved in a redress
movement.
"If we don't address this issue in a way that satisfies the women, we
are continuing to torture these women and their children who want
closure to this issue."
William Worger: Black Oppression and Resistance in South Africa
Oppression of Blacks under European colonialism in nineteenth-century
southern Africa and under apartheid in the country of South Africa
during the twentieth century has been the subject of two major
research projects undertaken by History Professor William Worger.
"In the earlier period, I looked at the way Blacks struggled against
oppression in their daily lives, using tactics such as strikes, work
slow-downs, or escaping from jobs to which the white ruling class had
tied them through taxation and criminal laws," he said. "In the
twentieth century, I looked at apartheid and how resistance to it made
the system unworkable."
Worger has studied government documentation, which because of
government censorship became more difficult to access for the period
after apartheid was imposed. But by using both court and business
records, he was able to begin piecing together a picture that was
fleshed out by testimony given to the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission after the fall of apartheid in 1994. The commission
collected statements from 22,000 people who described such things as
being tear-gassed and tortured by the police for their resistance to
the segregationist system.
His interest in the subject sprang from his experiences growing up in
New Zealand during the 1960s.
"New Zealand is a rugby-mad country, and in the 1960s South Africa
said its all-white rugby teams would only play other all-white teams,"
Worger explained. "New Zealand insisted that its own
already-integrated teams be allowed to play. South Africa relented,
but the controversy ratcheted up when New Zealand said that it would
only play integrated teams from South Africa."
Melissa Meyer: American Indians-Forced Assimilation and Survival
Being a child of the 1960s who critiqued American society explains
part of Associate Professor of History Melissa Meyer's attraction to
the history of American Indians, including the very dark chapters they
have experienced at the hands of the American government. In addition,
Meyer's ancestry is German, Scottish-Irish, and Eastern Cherokee.
In her first book, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and
Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservations, 1889-1920,
Meyer focused on the U.S. government's policy of forced
assimilation. Using census information, oral histories and traditions,
photos, and what she called "unusual but necessary" sorts of evidence,
Meyer documented the government's efforts to change a people and their
culture.
"They were forced to wear certain clothes, go to boarding schools, and
were forbidden to speak their native language," she said. "At home,
they were forced to take designated private plots of land on
reservations and the surplus was bought by outsiders. I had never
heard of the U.S. government being involved in anything so intrusive
and coercive as this."
Like her colleagues who study other peoples who have experienced
brutal oppression and atrocities, Meyer is surprised at how American
Indians have managed to survive. "Both scholars and native people
recognize that we're in the midst of a revival of American Indian
culture," Meyer said. "We're still recovering that story of survival."
- UCLA College -
programs in the UCLA College of Letters and Science.)
Remembering the Voices
New social science approaches to studying ethnically-based oppression
and atrocities yield important insights about inhumanity and the
tenacity of the human spirit.
By Robin Heffler
UCLA drew worldwide attention this spring when the university
established the first endowed academic chair to focus on the World War
II internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans and their campaign to gain
redress. But the George and Sakaye Aratani Chair on the Japanese
American Internment, Redress and Community is only the latest example
of UCLA's strength in scholarship that aims to shed new light on
ethnically-based human oppression and atrocities.
In the UCLA College, the work of UCLA scholars across a number of
disciplines in the social sciences spans the Armenian Genocide of
1915, the Holocaust of World War II, and examples of "ethnic
cleansing," sexual crimes against women, forced segregation, and
coerced assimilation over the last several centuries.
Some of the College's most prominent faculty members received
acclaim-not to mention furthered truth and justice-by taking fresh
approaches to research and presenting new insights into these horrific
chapters in modern history.
"These faculty are among many in the College whose work has led to a
better understanding of inhumanity-scholarship that helps to create an
appreciation of how to work toward a more humane and compassionate
world," said Scott Waugh, dean of Social Sciences.
Richard Hovannisian: Speaking for Victims of the Armenian Genocide
Growing up in a small farming community in Central California during
the 1930s and '40s, Richard G. Hovannisian, the Armenian Education
Foundation Professor of Modern Armenian History, didn't feel much of a
connection to his Armenian heritage. But he did take notice of those
who had survived the 1915 genocide of 1.5-million fellow Armenians at
the hands of the Turks during World War I.
"Most survivors of the genocide didn't speak about their past, but it
was always there," said Hovannisian, who was an initiator of Armenian
studies at UCLA in the 1960s and is widely honored in the Armenian
community for his work. "At the same time, the Turkish government was
continuing to deny it, thus denying their suffering. As one in the
field of studying the oppressed, whose voices have not been heard, or
can't be, and need others to speak for them, I feel obliged to do so."
Hovannisian, an emeritus professor of history, began his research with
an oral history project that now consists of 800 interviews, mostly in
the Armenian language, that are being transcribed into English. By
comparing stories of people who came from different regions,
Hovannisian was able to confirm the genocide and see the coordinated
efforts of the perpetrators.
"The genocide was a double loss because it was not only the
extermination of people," he said, "but loss of land where they had
lived for 3,000 years with the cultural institutions they had built."
Hovannisian's latest book, Looking Backward, Moving Forward:
Confronting the Armenian Genocide, makes the point that survivors are
"prevented from freely moving forward because they are forced to spend
so much energy on getting recognition for an event that others are
trying to deny or forget. To be remembered, the genocide has to be
made a part of universal history and collective human memory much like
the Holocaust has become."
Saul Friedlander: The Holocaust-Setting the Record Straight
Saul Friedlander was seven years old when he fled from his native
Czechoslovakia to France with his Jewish parents after Hitler began
invading Europe. With the German occupation of France, his parents
placed him in a French Catholic monastery and tried to escape to
Switzerland, but they were shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp
and never seen again.
In his 1979 memoir, Friedlander, a professor of history who now holds
the 1939 Club Chair in Holocaust Studies, recalled how at age 13 he
first understood his parents' fate when a Jesuit priest told him about
what had been happening to the Jews of Europe, including those who
were gassed and cremated at Auschwitz.
"That changed my whole life, and in a way, my Jewish identity was
restored," said Friedlander, who had embraced Catholicism and was
thinking of becoming a priest. It also began a nearly 40-year career
in Holocaust research out of a "desire to preserve and set the record
straight."
Digging through German laws, police reports, films, and personal
recollections, Friedlander has documented one anti-Jewish Nazi measure
after another, beginning in 1933. Looking at why so many were silent
in the face of a "systematic policy of segregation and persecution,"
he concluded that Germany's largely middle-class, educated population
saw the treatment of Jews as a "peripheral issue" during a time of
economic prosperity and growing international power.
Among Friedlander's books is Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The
Years of Persecution, 1933-1939. A winner of a MacArthur Foundation
Award in 1999, he is using the proceeds from the award to write The
Years of Extermination, 1939-1945.
Michael Mann: Inside the Minds of Genocide Victims and Perpetrators
Sociology Professor Michael Mann has recently completed two books, one
called Fascists, a study of six European countries that led to the
other, The Darkside of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. For the
second book, Mann pored over victim and eyewitness accounts as well as
the transcripts of trials in West Germany and tribunals on Yugoslavia
and Rwanda.
"In many of the most serious cases of ethnic cleansing, the victims
didn't know how devastating it would be," Mann said. "The resistance
was not as strong as you might expect because people couldn't conceive
that other people would do this."
At the same time, he became fascinated with how the perpetrators could
be capable of mass murder and even call it "moral." In the case of the
1994 genocide of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda by Hutu
militia, he found many Hutus who described good relations with the
Tutsis before the mass killings.
"They attribute their actions to a war situation," said Mann. "Even
the most atrocious cases claim self defense. Because humans can't come
to terms with slaughtering in an unprovoked way, they tell themselves
a story that the other group is threatening them, even though it seems
implausible to us."
More than any other work he has conducted as a researcher, Mann has
been most disturbed by this research.
"This has been reflecting on evil, not about primitive people, but
about people like you and me," he said, "people who faced moral
choices and made the wrong ones for often mundane reasons, like
keeping a job or showing loyalty to comrades. It's what philosopher
Hannah Arendt called the 'banality of evil.'"
Kyeoung Park: Chronicling Sex Crimes Against Korean Women
War was also the backdrop for Anthropology Professor Kyeoung Park's
research into the abduction of some 200,000 "comfort women" to serve
Japanese soldiers in occupied Asian and Pacific countries during the
1930s. Under the policy, teenage girls and women were taken to the
frontlines of battle, held as prisoners, and repeatedly raped.
Park became interested in the topic while studying Korean immigrant
communities in New York. She had encountered old women who told her
they were forced by their families during the war to marry Korean men
who were handicapped or much older because their parents didn't want
them to become comfort women. Although Park's mother had been born in
Korea toward the end of Japanese colonial rule and was not affected,
"I thought it was my responsibility to study this historical issue,"
she said.
Examining testimonies by former comfort women, she has reconstructed
the circumstances in which they were recruited, the brutality of their
everyday life, and how they tried to resist in various ways, including
running away and pretending they had venereal disease.
"They didn't let themselves feel defeated, but rather took hope from
their daily survival and the idea that the Japanese might surrender
some day," Park said.
The experience remains an unhealed wound for the Korean comfort women
and for their champions, like Park, who are involved in a redress
movement.
"If we don't address this issue in a way that satisfies the women, we
are continuing to torture these women and their children who want
closure to this issue."
William Worger: Black Oppression and Resistance in South Africa
Oppression of Blacks under European colonialism in nineteenth-century
southern Africa and under apartheid in the country of South Africa
during the twentieth century has been the subject of two major
research projects undertaken by History Professor William Worger.
"In the earlier period, I looked at the way Blacks struggled against
oppression in their daily lives, using tactics such as strikes, work
slow-downs, or escaping from jobs to which the white ruling class had
tied them through taxation and criminal laws," he said. "In the
twentieth century, I looked at apartheid and how resistance to it made
the system unworkable."
Worger has studied government documentation, which because of
government censorship became more difficult to access for the period
after apartheid was imposed. But by using both court and business
records, he was able to begin piecing together a picture that was
fleshed out by testimony given to the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission after the fall of apartheid in 1994. The commission
collected statements from 22,000 people who described such things as
being tear-gassed and tortured by the police for their resistance to
the segregationist system.
His interest in the subject sprang from his experiences growing up in
New Zealand during the 1960s.
"New Zealand is a rugby-mad country, and in the 1960s South Africa
said its all-white rugby teams would only play other all-white teams,"
Worger explained. "New Zealand insisted that its own
already-integrated teams be allowed to play. South Africa relented,
but the controversy ratcheted up when New Zealand said that it would
only play integrated teams from South Africa."
Melissa Meyer: American Indians-Forced Assimilation and Survival
Being a child of the 1960s who critiqued American society explains
part of Associate Professor of History Melissa Meyer's attraction to
the history of American Indians, including the very dark chapters they
have experienced at the hands of the American government. In addition,
Meyer's ancestry is German, Scottish-Irish, and Eastern Cherokee.
In her first book, The White Earth Tragedy: Ethnicity and
Dispossession at a Minnesota Anishinaabe Reservations, 1889-1920,
Meyer focused on the U.S. government's policy of forced
assimilation. Using census information, oral histories and traditions,
photos, and what she called "unusual but necessary" sorts of evidence,
Meyer documented the government's efforts to change a people and their
culture.
"They were forced to wear certain clothes, go to boarding schools, and
were forbidden to speak their native language," she said. "At home,
they were forced to take designated private plots of land on
reservations and the surplus was bought by outsiders. I had never
heard of the U.S. government being involved in anything so intrusive
and coercive as this."
Like her colleagues who study other peoples who have experienced
brutal oppression and atrocities, Meyer is surprised at how American
Indians have managed to survive. "Both scholars and native people
recognize that we're in the midst of a revival of American Indian
culture," Meyer said. "We're still recovering that story of survival."
- UCLA College -