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'JEWS ARE NEWS'
Maclean's, Canada
September 12, 2005
Why does the Nazi Holocaust preoccupy us more than any other genocide?
In this excerpt from Beethoven's Mask, heavily condensed by
Maclean's, Toronto-based author and journalist George Jonas refutes
the popular notions -- articulated, among other places, in Daniel
Jonah Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners -- that the
Holocaust was a unique event, and that it arose from a peculiarly
German kind of anti-Semitism.
I SPENT the first 10 years of my life in Nazioccupied Europe. My
immediate family and I survived the war by hiding. Since I kept no
diary, had the Nazis found me as they had found Anne Frank, I would
have disappeared without a trace. This would undoubtedly have made
the Holocaust a singular and unique event for me. I am less sure
about the Holocaust having been a singular and unique event in world
history. To me it seems that it was one of many horrifying holocausts,
albeit of immense proportions. I also doubt that the Holocaust was the
inevitable result of anti-Semitism, and especially that the Holocaust
was inevitably caused by a singular and unique type of anti-Semitism
peculiar to Germany.
Goldhagen's thesis is that the Holocaust could never have happened
without the participation of ordinary Germans, who participated
because they were virulently anti-Semitic. This is true enough as far
as it goes, but it does not go very far. Saying that Hitler could not
have killed six million Jews without the participation of many other
people, and that people who participate in the wholesale slaughter
of Jews are likely to be virulently anti-Semitic, is saying something
singularly self-evident.
Goldhagen contends that German people and culture were anti-Semitic in
a unique way that he calls "eliminationist." For proof, he documents
the historic existence of German anti-Semitic ideas and policies
exhaustively and convincingly. But he offers no proof of its German
singularity, or that "eliminationist" anti-Semitism can be taken as
a precursor to, or at least a portent of, genocide.
Proof would be hard to come by, for history shows no inevitable link
between anti-Semitism -- or any other type of racial, ethnic, class, or
religious prejudice or hatred -- and genocide. What's more, traditional
German prejudice against Jews, though widespread and intense, was
less acute than traditional Polish prejudice, and not significantly
more acute than French prejudice. Before Hitler's time, Jews often
emigrated to Germany to escape worse discrimination elsewhere.
Was German anti-Semitism before the Hitler era materially different
from anti-Semitism in other times and places? I believe it was not.
Modern anti-Semitism developed side by side with nationalism, as
older organizing principles of the social order weakened. Ironically,
it came as a by-product of the Enlightenment. As the dynastic and
religious systems by which groups used to define themselves were losing
their grip, people were gradually beginning to think of themselves as
"Russians" rather than subjects of the Czars, or "Germans" rather than
subjects of the Hohenzollern emperors. The one-time vassals of the
Bourbons were turning into the Gallic sons and daughters of Marianne,
the emblematic figure of the French Revolution. The pilgrims and
warriors of Christendom or Islam were evolving into "Italians" or
"Turks."
Such definitions inevitably put a premium on ethnic identity.
Suddenly Jews were no longer patches in the colourful tapestry of
empires, but alien and potentially baneful cells in the bloodstream
of nations. As national identities assumed greater importance, a new
type of anti-Semitism was born.
But these modern, populist-nationalist-racist elements existed in the
anti-Semitic laws and opinion of all contemporary cultures, not only
in Germany's. The "Jewish question," so-called, was raised by almost
every nation from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. Raising it
was regarded as legitimate.
Why, then, did the Holocaust occur in Germany and not in some
other country? There is a danger of replying to this by attributing
some peculiar evil to Germans as a group -- i.e., as a "race." To
his credit, Goldhagen takes great pains to avoid it. The problem is,
unless we postulate evil, there is little in German history or culture
to provide an alternative explanation. Germany's traditions were
no less rational, no less civilized, no less chivalrous, than other
Western traditions during the same period. Her public laws and civic
morality, the personal habits of her citizens, their ethical precepts,
their customary religious beliefs, were not markedly different from
those of the citizens of other European nations.
German art, science, industry, and infrastructure were, if anything,
more advanced. Although the governmental institutions in Germany's
recent past were more autocratic than those of France and England,
not to mention the United States, they were not nearly as autocratic
as many other countries'. In any event, by the time Hitler came to
power, the Weimar Republic was a democracy.
Jews in Germany were well integrated -- not only far better than the
Jews of Poland or Russia, but on the whole better than the Jews in
many Western countries, including even the United States and Canada.
Most German Jews were German patriots. Though after their emancipation
in the mid-18th century, their contribution to music, arts, sciences,
commerce, literature, journalism and even politics far exceeded their
numbers (about one per cent) in Germany's population, Germany's
institutions were not overwhelmed by Jews (though this became a
frequent explanation offered by anti-Semites for their anti-Semitism),
not even to the extent that Austria's or Hungary's might have been. One
looks in vain for a rational -- or even irrational -- explanation
for a supposed "unique hatred" in the history of the relationship
between Jews and Germans. The search turns up nothing.
What, then, is the answer? Why did the Holocaust occur in Germany? We
can certainly view traditional German anti-Semitism as one contributing
cause. Hitler himself must be considered a significant factor. A
charismatic leader is like an ignition source, a spark: utterly
insignificant in the absence of an explosive mixture, but the direct
cause of a blow-up in a place filled with combustible fumes.
In another country -- or in Germany in another historic period --
Hitler might have died unnoticed in a flophouse or in a mental
institution. But he was where he was, therefore he did what he did.
The Holocaust would not have happened without him.
There were many reasons for Germany being unlike other countries
in the 1920s. Other countries lacked the shock that follows losing
a war that the Germans believed they were winning almost until the
last minute. The national trauma of that unexpected blow is still
insufficiently understood outside Germany. It was inevitable for
conspiracy theories to start flourishing after such a traumatic
event. The soil for Nazism was prepared by German indignation. It
sparked an immediate search for scapegoats. It seemed natural to
include Jews in this conspiracy.
The super-inflation that started in 1922 and lasted until 1924 was
devastating. The stock market crash of 1929 was undoubtedly a factor,
but the Depression did not necessarily lead to the rise of totalitarian
systems elsewhere. More significant was the rare, maybe even unique,
vulnerability of the Weimar Republic. Conventional analysis often
blames the treaty of Versailles for the rise of Nazism, but the status
of Germany as an adolescent democracy was at least as important. This
almost teenage-like stage in the nation's life probably had more to do
with the irrational eruptions in Germany's soul than any other factor.
Mature democracies, such as the United States or Great Britain, with
solid traditions of both individual liberty and checks and balances
on the exercise of power, would have been far more resistant to the
totalitarian nature of Nazism than Germany. Additionally, a class
society such as Britain's would have been far more resistant to letting
a party composed of tradesmen and petty officials grab the helm of
the ship of the state. Social snobbery alone would have prevented a
corporal like Hitler from becoming supreme leader of England.
But there is something even more important. The seemingly
insurmountable hurdle of "Why in Germany?" vanishes if we stop
insisting on the Holocaust as a unique and singular event. If it were
unique, we could scarcely explain it, in spite of all the points listed
above, except by attributing to Germans an inherent, subhuman barbarity
that comes perilously close, no matter how we try to get around it,
to the inherent, subhuman malice the Nazis attributed to Jews.
A race of barbarians with inherent streaks of virulent anti-Semitism
does not metamorphose into a race of liberal humanists overnight,
as Goldhagen incongruously insists in his book. The influence of
postwar education could not achieve such a miracle. If Germans are
not genocidally anti-Semitic today -- as indeed they are not -- it
is because Germans were never uniquely or inherently genocidal or
anti-Semitic. They were just situational murderers between 1933 and
1945, as many groups have been at one period or another.
If we view the monstrous tragedy of the Holocaust as only one of many
such monstrous tragedies in human history, then the accurate question
becomes "Why not in Germany?" Why could Germans not do evil in the
same way that so many other people have done?
"I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and
universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced
according to the play of circumstances." The French Catholic
philosopher Simone Weil, a converted Jew, wrote these lines in 1940.
The years since have given us no better insight.
A different question: If there is nothing unique about the Nazi
Holocaust (aside perhaps from its dimension), why does it preoccupy
us more than other holocausts?
Match it, for instance, with our attitude to the Communist holocaust.
While Nazi criminals who played a direct role in the murder of six
million are still hunted down and tried, we rarely prosecute Communist
criminals of similar degrees of responsibility.
(Interestingly, almost all the exceptions occurred in Germany, which
did prosecute some former East German officials after unification.)
Elsewhere it has been more usual for ex-functionaries of KGB- or
Gulagtype organizations to receive government positions or pensions.
The Nazi Party was immediately outlawed in post-war Germany. The
Communist Party, in contrast, is still the official opposition in
the former Soviet Union. Ex-Nazi officials like Kurt Waldheim, once
discovered, became international untouchables. Ex-Communist officials
like Mikhail Gorbachev are still asked to join think-tanks or lecture
at Western universities. It would be unthinkable for known ex-Nazis
to be invited to the same diplomatic cocktail receptions in Western
countries at which ex-Communists, or even current Communists, are
honoured guests. And imagine a former Gestapo officer being accepted
as the president of post-Nazi Germany, the way ex-KGB officer Vladimir
Putin has been accepted as the president of post-Soviet Russia.
Why do we react to the Nazi Holocaust and the Communist holocaust
differently? It is possible to postulate the following answers:
To begin with, the Holocaust provided people with the initial images
of mass slaughter as the Nazi death camps were being liberated.
Cinemas around the world showed -- for the first time in history --
heaps of skeletal corpses being pushed into mass graves by bulldozers,
along with mounds of footwear, gold teeth, artifacts alleged to have
been made of human skin, and charred remains inside the incinerators
of Auschwitz. No ordinary person had ever seen anything like it. Those
inaugural images literally shocked the world's conscience.
The Communist holocausts provided no comparable photo opportunities.
The islands of the Gulag deep inside the Soviet Union or China remained
inaccessible to the cameras of the Western media. Their millions of
victims between the 1920s and the 1980s perished unseen.
By the time a few snippets appeared on television screens, such as
the aftermath of the holocaust in Cambodia, audiences had become
inured to death and destruction through repeated exposure. Pictures
of slaughter in people's living rooms became commonplace during the
television coverage of the Vietnam War. By the end of the 1970s,
photographic images had lost their power to shock.
Another contributing reason, at least until recently, was the
contrasting attitude many opinion makers had to Nazism as opposed
to Communism. Identical as the two intoxicants may have been,
intellectuals could get drunk on the wine of one far more easily
than the other. Nazism never "travelled," to borrow an expression
from viticulture. Communism did.
There were self-evident reasons for this. It would have been
nonsensical for ideas of German superiority to become an export item
for non-Germans, or ideas of Aryan superiority for non-Aryans.
Marxist notions of the class struggle faced no similar obstacles. In
addition, Nazism as a social theory could rely on nothing but the
coldest and most selfish of human impulses to justify its call for
conquest and slaughter, but Communism could also enlist warm and
humane impulses of altruism to rationalize its own genocides.
Next, given that Nazism suffered an abject military defeat within
a decade of its emergence, while Communism appeared to march from
triumph to triumph until the mid-1980s, it is not surprising that
generations of opinion makers in academia, journalism and government
have been reluctant to discuss acts of Communist genocide in the same
breath with Nazi acts of genocide. To this day, Communist holocausts
may be respectably denied in countries whose laws treat the denial
of the Nazi Holocaust as a crime.
World opinion has also been affected by the fact that the largest
single group of Hitler's victims were Jews. Murdering six million
members of one group does not have exactly the same consequences as
murdering six million members of another. Recent massacres of Mayans,
Moluccans or Kurds have not resulted in the same echo as earlier
massacres of Armenians. The opprobrium that attaches to genocide will
vary not only with the slaughter's magnitude, cruelty, irrationality,
documentability and scope, but also with the ability of its victims
and survivors to attract attention and sympathy.
All victims are equal in their desire for, and entitlement to,
the world's notice, but they are not always equal in their capacity
to capture it. When Germans decided to exterminate the Jews, they
picked the wrong group. As individuals, Jews tended to be gifted and
articulate. As an aggregate, they were well placed to disseminate
information, especially in the Western hemisphere. Traditional
Jewish occupations, in addition to science, business and the law,
included such natural forums as the literary arts, the entertainment
industry and the media. What's more, the Diaspora spread Jews all over
the globe. Many rose to prominence in various fields. Jews always
amounted to a constituency in many key nations, at least in weight
if not in numbers. "Jews are news," as an eminent Western scholar on
Islam quipped in a speech in 2002, quoting an old witticism.
Anti-Semites have often pounced on these characteristics, distorted
them, or used them illegitimately, mixed with false ones of their
own invention, to raise the spectre of a mythical "Jewish conspiracy."
That is poisonous rubbish, but it does not mean that some of these
characteristics do not exist. It is hardly surprising that Jews were
traumatized by Nazism and resented being murdered. As they had the
necessary attributes to attract public attention, they relied on them
-- especially after the Holocaust -- in self-defence.
Still, the foremost reason for which we view the Holocaust not only
as one of many such abysses in humanity's past, but as a unique
occurrence and the epitome of evil, is probably different. Germany
was Europe's most cultured nation. It was a nation of Kant, Beethoven
and Goethe. Even if only a minuscule minority of its Nazis read poetry
or played Mozart on the piano, the gulf between the cultural history
of Germany's inhabitants and their barbaric behaviour during the Nazi
era was incomprehensibly wide. It stunned their victims as it stunned
the world.
The scope and barbarity of the Holocaust would have been stunning
even if carried out by headhunters from Borneo, but it was not. It was
carried out by Germans. It may be difficult for post-war generations
raised in the last half century -- during which Germans became
equated with the Nazi salute, not only in popular entertainment but
also in political and academic discourse -- to understand the sheer
bewilderment people felt in the decade between the mid-1930s and the
1940s as they were gradually discovering the full extent of the vulgar
brutality of Hitler's regime. It did not seem "typically" German, as we
might think of it today, but fundamentally un-German. It did not fit.
At the risk of trivializing a cataclysmic event by a facile metaphor,
the Holocaust was like a society murder. Society murders become
notorious because of the contrast between the criminal and the crime.
Butchery in the slums hardly makes the back pages, but the same act
committed in a mansion becomes headline news. The crimes of a serial
killer would be noted in any event, but if Jack the Ripper turns out
to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, it occupies a unique place in
the annals of crime. It becomes singular. This, I suggest, is what
happened in 1945 when the Allies entered Bergen-Belsen and revealed
the Germans to the world as mass murderers.
It is the human race that is genocidal, not the Germans. Saying this
is not to excuse the Germans, but to note a fact. In one vital sense
we are all Jews and we are all Germans, potentially, depending on the
conditions in which we find ourselves. Remembering this may reduce
the likelihood that we will ever be Jews or Germans again as Jews or
Germans were during one night-marish period between 1933 and 1945.
Reprinted with permission of Key Porter Books from Beethoven's Mask:
Notes on My Life and Times by George Jonas.
For original reprints (with graphics) available
http://www.rsicopyright.com/ics/prc_main/prs_request.html/
Maclean's, Canada
September 12, 2005
Why does the Nazi Holocaust preoccupy us more than any other genocide?
In this excerpt from Beethoven's Mask, heavily condensed by
Maclean's, Toronto-based author and journalist George Jonas refutes
the popular notions -- articulated, among other places, in Daniel
Jonah Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners -- that the
Holocaust was a unique event, and that it arose from a peculiarly
German kind of anti-Semitism.
I SPENT the first 10 years of my life in Nazioccupied Europe. My
immediate family and I survived the war by hiding. Since I kept no
diary, had the Nazis found me as they had found Anne Frank, I would
have disappeared without a trace. This would undoubtedly have made
the Holocaust a singular and unique event for me. I am less sure
about the Holocaust having been a singular and unique event in world
history. To me it seems that it was one of many horrifying holocausts,
albeit of immense proportions. I also doubt that the Holocaust was the
inevitable result of anti-Semitism, and especially that the Holocaust
was inevitably caused by a singular and unique type of anti-Semitism
peculiar to Germany.
Goldhagen's thesis is that the Holocaust could never have happened
without the participation of ordinary Germans, who participated
because they were virulently anti-Semitic. This is true enough as far
as it goes, but it does not go very far. Saying that Hitler could not
have killed six million Jews without the participation of many other
people, and that people who participate in the wholesale slaughter
of Jews are likely to be virulently anti-Semitic, is saying something
singularly self-evident.
Goldhagen contends that German people and culture were anti-Semitic in
a unique way that he calls "eliminationist." For proof, he documents
the historic existence of German anti-Semitic ideas and policies
exhaustively and convincingly. But he offers no proof of its German
singularity, or that "eliminationist" anti-Semitism can be taken as
a precursor to, or at least a portent of, genocide.
Proof would be hard to come by, for history shows no inevitable link
between anti-Semitism -- or any other type of racial, ethnic, class, or
religious prejudice or hatred -- and genocide. What's more, traditional
German prejudice against Jews, though widespread and intense, was
less acute than traditional Polish prejudice, and not significantly
more acute than French prejudice. Before Hitler's time, Jews often
emigrated to Germany to escape worse discrimination elsewhere.
Was German anti-Semitism before the Hitler era materially different
from anti-Semitism in other times and places? I believe it was not.
Modern anti-Semitism developed side by side with nationalism, as
older organizing principles of the social order weakened. Ironically,
it came as a by-product of the Enlightenment. As the dynastic and
religious systems by which groups used to define themselves were losing
their grip, people were gradually beginning to think of themselves as
"Russians" rather than subjects of the Czars, or "Germans" rather than
subjects of the Hohenzollern emperors. The one-time vassals of the
Bourbons were turning into the Gallic sons and daughters of Marianne,
the emblematic figure of the French Revolution. The pilgrims and
warriors of Christendom or Islam were evolving into "Italians" or
"Turks."
Such definitions inevitably put a premium on ethnic identity.
Suddenly Jews were no longer patches in the colourful tapestry of
empires, but alien and potentially baneful cells in the bloodstream
of nations. As national identities assumed greater importance, a new
type of anti-Semitism was born.
But these modern, populist-nationalist-racist elements existed in the
anti-Semitic laws and opinion of all contemporary cultures, not only
in Germany's. The "Jewish question," so-called, was raised by almost
every nation from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. Raising it
was regarded as legitimate.
Why, then, did the Holocaust occur in Germany and not in some
other country? There is a danger of replying to this by attributing
some peculiar evil to Germans as a group -- i.e., as a "race." To
his credit, Goldhagen takes great pains to avoid it. The problem is,
unless we postulate evil, there is little in German history or culture
to provide an alternative explanation. Germany's traditions were
no less rational, no less civilized, no less chivalrous, than other
Western traditions during the same period. Her public laws and civic
morality, the personal habits of her citizens, their ethical precepts,
their customary religious beliefs, were not markedly different from
those of the citizens of other European nations.
German art, science, industry, and infrastructure were, if anything,
more advanced. Although the governmental institutions in Germany's
recent past were more autocratic than those of France and England,
not to mention the United States, they were not nearly as autocratic
as many other countries'. In any event, by the time Hitler came to
power, the Weimar Republic was a democracy.
Jews in Germany were well integrated -- not only far better than the
Jews of Poland or Russia, but on the whole better than the Jews in
many Western countries, including even the United States and Canada.
Most German Jews were German patriots. Though after their emancipation
in the mid-18th century, their contribution to music, arts, sciences,
commerce, literature, journalism and even politics far exceeded their
numbers (about one per cent) in Germany's population, Germany's
institutions were not overwhelmed by Jews (though this became a
frequent explanation offered by anti-Semites for their anti-Semitism),
not even to the extent that Austria's or Hungary's might have been. One
looks in vain for a rational -- or even irrational -- explanation
for a supposed "unique hatred" in the history of the relationship
between Jews and Germans. The search turns up nothing.
What, then, is the answer? Why did the Holocaust occur in Germany? We
can certainly view traditional German anti-Semitism as one contributing
cause. Hitler himself must be considered a significant factor. A
charismatic leader is like an ignition source, a spark: utterly
insignificant in the absence of an explosive mixture, but the direct
cause of a blow-up in a place filled with combustible fumes.
In another country -- or in Germany in another historic period --
Hitler might have died unnoticed in a flophouse or in a mental
institution. But he was where he was, therefore he did what he did.
The Holocaust would not have happened without him.
There were many reasons for Germany being unlike other countries
in the 1920s. Other countries lacked the shock that follows losing
a war that the Germans believed they were winning almost until the
last minute. The national trauma of that unexpected blow is still
insufficiently understood outside Germany. It was inevitable for
conspiracy theories to start flourishing after such a traumatic
event. The soil for Nazism was prepared by German indignation. It
sparked an immediate search for scapegoats. It seemed natural to
include Jews in this conspiracy.
The super-inflation that started in 1922 and lasted until 1924 was
devastating. The stock market crash of 1929 was undoubtedly a factor,
but the Depression did not necessarily lead to the rise of totalitarian
systems elsewhere. More significant was the rare, maybe even unique,
vulnerability of the Weimar Republic. Conventional analysis often
blames the treaty of Versailles for the rise of Nazism, but the status
of Germany as an adolescent democracy was at least as important. This
almost teenage-like stage in the nation's life probably had more to do
with the irrational eruptions in Germany's soul than any other factor.
Mature democracies, such as the United States or Great Britain, with
solid traditions of both individual liberty and checks and balances
on the exercise of power, would have been far more resistant to the
totalitarian nature of Nazism than Germany. Additionally, a class
society such as Britain's would have been far more resistant to letting
a party composed of tradesmen and petty officials grab the helm of
the ship of the state. Social snobbery alone would have prevented a
corporal like Hitler from becoming supreme leader of England.
But there is something even more important. The seemingly
insurmountable hurdle of "Why in Germany?" vanishes if we stop
insisting on the Holocaust as a unique and singular event. If it were
unique, we could scarcely explain it, in spite of all the points listed
above, except by attributing to Germans an inherent, subhuman barbarity
that comes perilously close, no matter how we try to get around it,
to the inherent, subhuman malice the Nazis attributed to Jews.
A race of barbarians with inherent streaks of virulent anti-Semitism
does not metamorphose into a race of liberal humanists overnight,
as Goldhagen incongruously insists in his book. The influence of
postwar education could not achieve such a miracle. If Germans are
not genocidally anti-Semitic today -- as indeed they are not -- it
is because Germans were never uniquely or inherently genocidal or
anti-Semitic. They were just situational murderers between 1933 and
1945, as many groups have been at one period or another.
If we view the monstrous tragedy of the Holocaust as only one of many
such monstrous tragedies in human history, then the accurate question
becomes "Why not in Germany?" Why could Germans not do evil in the
same way that so many other people have done?
"I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and
universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced
according to the play of circumstances." The French Catholic
philosopher Simone Weil, a converted Jew, wrote these lines in 1940.
The years since have given us no better insight.
A different question: If there is nothing unique about the Nazi
Holocaust (aside perhaps from its dimension), why does it preoccupy
us more than other holocausts?
Match it, for instance, with our attitude to the Communist holocaust.
While Nazi criminals who played a direct role in the murder of six
million are still hunted down and tried, we rarely prosecute Communist
criminals of similar degrees of responsibility.
(Interestingly, almost all the exceptions occurred in Germany, which
did prosecute some former East German officials after unification.)
Elsewhere it has been more usual for ex-functionaries of KGB- or
Gulagtype organizations to receive government positions or pensions.
The Nazi Party was immediately outlawed in post-war Germany. The
Communist Party, in contrast, is still the official opposition in
the former Soviet Union. Ex-Nazi officials like Kurt Waldheim, once
discovered, became international untouchables. Ex-Communist officials
like Mikhail Gorbachev are still asked to join think-tanks or lecture
at Western universities. It would be unthinkable for known ex-Nazis
to be invited to the same diplomatic cocktail receptions in Western
countries at which ex-Communists, or even current Communists, are
honoured guests. And imagine a former Gestapo officer being accepted
as the president of post-Nazi Germany, the way ex-KGB officer Vladimir
Putin has been accepted as the president of post-Soviet Russia.
Why do we react to the Nazi Holocaust and the Communist holocaust
differently? It is possible to postulate the following answers:
To begin with, the Holocaust provided people with the initial images
of mass slaughter as the Nazi death camps were being liberated.
Cinemas around the world showed -- for the first time in history --
heaps of skeletal corpses being pushed into mass graves by bulldozers,
along with mounds of footwear, gold teeth, artifacts alleged to have
been made of human skin, and charred remains inside the incinerators
of Auschwitz. No ordinary person had ever seen anything like it. Those
inaugural images literally shocked the world's conscience.
The Communist holocausts provided no comparable photo opportunities.
The islands of the Gulag deep inside the Soviet Union or China remained
inaccessible to the cameras of the Western media. Their millions of
victims between the 1920s and the 1980s perished unseen.
By the time a few snippets appeared on television screens, such as
the aftermath of the holocaust in Cambodia, audiences had become
inured to death and destruction through repeated exposure. Pictures
of slaughter in people's living rooms became commonplace during the
television coverage of the Vietnam War. By the end of the 1970s,
photographic images had lost their power to shock.
Another contributing reason, at least until recently, was the
contrasting attitude many opinion makers had to Nazism as opposed
to Communism. Identical as the two intoxicants may have been,
intellectuals could get drunk on the wine of one far more easily
than the other. Nazism never "travelled," to borrow an expression
from viticulture. Communism did.
There were self-evident reasons for this. It would have been
nonsensical for ideas of German superiority to become an export item
for non-Germans, or ideas of Aryan superiority for non-Aryans.
Marxist notions of the class struggle faced no similar obstacles. In
addition, Nazism as a social theory could rely on nothing but the
coldest and most selfish of human impulses to justify its call for
conquest and slaughter, but Communism could also enlist warm and
humane impulses of altruism to rationalize its own genocides.
Next, given that Nazism suffered an abject military defeat within
a decade of its emergence, while Communism appeared to march from
triumph to triumph until the mid-1980s, it is not surprising that
generations of opinion makers in academia, journalism and government
have been reluctant to discuss acts of Communist genocide in the same
breath with Nazi acts of genocide. To this day, Communist holocausts
may be respectably denied in countries whose laws treat the denial
of the Nazi Holocaust as a crime.
World opinion has also been affected by the fact that the largest
single group of Hitler's victims were Jews. Murdering six million
members of one group does not have exactly the same consequences as
murdering six million members of another. Recent massacres of Mayans,
Moluccans or Kurds have not resulted in the same echo as earlier
massacres of Armenians. The opprobrium that attaches to genocide will
vary not only with the slaughter's magnitude, cruelty, irrationality,
documentability and scope, but also with the ability of its victims
and survivors to attract attention and sympathy.
All victims are equal in their desire for, and entitlement to,
the world's notice, but they are not always equal in their capacity
to capture it. When Germans decided to exterminate the Jews, they
picked the wrong group. As individuals, Jews tended to be gifted and
articulate. As an aggregate, they were well placed to disseminate
information, especially in the Western hemisphere. Traditional
Jewish occupations, in addition to science, business and the law,
included such natural forums as the literary arts, the entertainment
industry and the media. What's more, the Diaspora spread Jews all over
the globe. Many rose to prominence in various fields. Jews always
amounted to a constituency in many key nations, at least in weight
if not in numbers. "Jews are news," as an eminent Western scholar on
Islam quipped in a speech in 2002, quoting an old witticism.
Anti-Semites have often pounced on these characteristics, distorted
them, or used them illegitimately, mixed with false ones of their
own invention, to raise the spectre of a mythical "Jewish conspiracy."
That is poisonous rubbish, but it does not mean that some of these
characteristics do not exist. It is hardly surprising that Jews were
traumatized by Nazism and resented being murdered. As they had the
necessary attributes to attract public attention, they relied on them
-- especially after the Holocaust -- in self-defence.
Still, the foremost reason for which we view the Holocaust not only
as one of many such abysses in humanity's past, but as a unique
occurrence and the epitome of evil, is probably different. Germany
was Europe's most cultured nation. It was a nation of Kant, Beethoven
and Goethe. Even if only a minuscule minority of its Nazis read poetry
or played Mozart on the piano, the gulf between the cultural history
of Germany's inhabitants and their barbaric behaviour during the Nazi
era was incomprehensibly wide. It stunned their victims as it stunned
the world.
The scope and barbarity of the Holocaust would have been stunning
even if carried out by headhunters from Borneo, but it was not. It was
carried out by Germans. It may be difficult for post-war generations
raised in the last half century -- during which Germans became
equated with the Nazi salute, not only in popular entertainment but
also in political and academic discourse -- to understand the sheer
bewilderment people felt in the decade between the mid-1930s and the
1940s as they were gradually discovering the full extent of the vulgar
brutality of Hitler's regime. It did not seem "typically" German, as we
might think of it today, but fundamentally un-German. It did not fit.
At the risk of trivializing a cataclysmic event by a facile metaphor,
the Holocaust was like a society murder. Society murders become
notorious because of the contrast between the criminal and the crime.
Butchery in the slums hardly makes the back pages, but the same act
committed in a mansion becomes headline news. The crimes of a serial
killer would be noted in any event, but if Jack the Ripper turns out
to be the Archbishop of Canterbury, it occupies a unique place in
the annals of crime. It becomes singular. This, I suggest, is what
happened in 1945 when the Allies entered Bergen-Belsen and revealed
the Germans to the world as mass murderers.
It is the human race that is genocidal, not the Germans. Saying this
is not to excuse the Germans, but to note a fact. In one vital sense
we are all Jews and we are all Germans, potentially, depending on the
conditions in which we find ourselves. Remembering this may reduce
the likelihood that we will ever be Jews or Germans again as Jews or
Germans were during one night-marish period between 1933 and 1945.
Reprinted with permission of Key Porter Books from Beethoven's Mask:
Notes on My Life and Times by George Jonas.
For original reprints (with graphics) available
http://www.rsicopyright.com/ics/prc_main/prs_request.html/