An
American Holocaust?
The Structure of Denial
By Ward Churchill
I
The first question people ask about my book A Little Matter of Genocide1
is where it came from or why I wrote it. My purpose was to be able to
really stretch out, explain, and fully contextualize my use of the term
genocide and the appropriateness of its application to the question
of what happened—and is still happening—to American Indians
over the past five centuries. And part of my objective is always to
bring consideration of American Indians into the main currents of global
intellectual discourse, rather than playing to the idea that we’re
an exotic sideline, of relevance only to “specialists” of
one sort or another.
This brings up a personal hook in addition to my intellectual motives.
It comes with the fact that I am myself of Muscogee and Creek descent
on my father’s side, Cherokee on my mother’s, and am an
enrolled member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. I’m
also married to an Ojibwe woman of the Lynx clan, from the Onegaming
Reserve in Northwestern Ontario. The truth is, although I’m best
known by my colonial name, Ward Churchill, the name I prefer is Kenis,
an Ojibwe name bestowed by my wife’s uncle. So there’s that,
and I suppose it speaks for itself.
There were also
a few galvanizing experiences which help explain what propelled this
particular book into being. The first was something that happened during
the run-up to the 1992 Columbian Quincentennial Celebration—to
use the official designator—while I was working as a visiting
professor at Alfred University. I wrote a little op-ed piece for the
campus newspaper that was picked up by the paper in Rochester, in which
I made a comparison between Columbus and Heinrich Himmler,2 and received
two very interesting responses on the same morning. One came by mail
from an official of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith
in Rochester. The other was by telephone from a visiting faculty member
from Germany. Both individuals were absolutely livid and wanted to stand
me corrected with regard to the comparison I’d made.
The letter argued
that the comparison was invalid since Himmler was in a position of power,
a highly placed official with policy-making prerogatives who implemented
that policy with catastrophic results for a targeted group of human
beings, while Columbus—as we all know—was merely an adventurous
explorer, a common seaman who happened upon the so-called New World.
While the results of his “discovery” may well have proven
catastrophic for those discovered, the results themselves were not personally
attributable to Columbus. The German, who at an earlier stage of his
career had been a member of Rudi Dutschke’s SDS, said virtually
the same thing. So basically we have a politically conservative Jewish
individual and a radical-liberal German expressing a precise confluence
of opinion on this particular question. And I had to stop myself and,
since they are not only both wrong but wrong in exactly the same way,
I had to ask “why?” So there’s one catalyst.
Another came with the publication in 1993 of a book by Deborah Lipstadt,
a fairly prominent Judaic scholar at Emory University, entitled Denying
the Holocaust.3 It deals with Holocaust deniers of the neonazi persuasion.
I found two things especially striking about the book. One was the system
of classification Lipstadt uses. I found that very useful, and entirely
applicable to the context with which I deal. So, if that’s all
there were to it, I’d have relied upon her method with thanks
and attribution, and that would’ve been the end of it. In the
second half of the book, however, she goes into a sort of extended polemic
having to do with the inappropriateness of suggesting that there might
be other peoples who have suffered experiences in any way comparable
to that of her own during the nazi genocide.
Here, she focuses
on denouncing Afrocentrism, including, presumably, its characterizations
of the effects of the transatlantic slave trade on American blacks as
genocidal4—interestingly, she fails to discuss the impact on the
societies of subsaharan Africa5—and repudiating the idea that
the camps in which the U.S. placed Japanese Americans during World War
II might be comparable to some of the nazi concentration camps. A couple
of points are worth highlighting here, beginning with the fact that
a page after they’re first mentioned the Japanese Americans have
somehow been transformed into “Japanese.” From there, they
quickly mutate into a sort of “racial fifth column,” real
or potential, at least in the quite reasonable perception of U.S. policymakers,
and thus their mass internment is presented as an “unfortunate”
but entirely justifiable national security measure.6 Unfortunately for
Lipstadt, the nazis often used an identical rationalization, picked
up by postwar deniers like Harry Elmer Barnes, to explain why it was
“necessary” to intern the Jews.7 At another level, she appears
to deliberately conflate concentration camps and death camps, thus setting
up a straw man to rebut. It’s true, as she implies, that comparing
Manzanar to Auschwitz would be absurd. But I’m unaware—and
she offers no examples—of anyone who’s actually made such
a comparison. To compare Manzanar and Dachau, on the other hand, which
several serious scholars have done,8 is another matter entirely.
What to make of this? One is left to conclude either that Lipstadt is
abjectly ill-versed in her subject matter—a possibility the quality
of her performance in the first half of the book renders utterly implausible—or
that she’s quite consciously engaging in exactly the same pattern
of obfuscation, distortion and outright deception she so ably exposes,
and quite rightly reviles, as the stuff of neonazi pseudoscholarship.
In other words, it wasn’t accidental or mere sloppy scholarship.
She knew what she was doing. Her goal, of course, is different from
that of the neonazis. Where they deny that the Holocaust occurred at
all, she wants people to believe that it happened, but that it happened
only to Jews, “uniquely” so, and that for any other people
to contend that any aspect of their historical experience is in any
way genuinely comparable, is to degrade and dishonor the memory of the
nazis’ Jewish victims, and thus to be objectively guilty of antisemitism,
and thus on the same moral footing as the neonazis. 9 Wow!
What I’ve
found is that this is very much a standard theme in “responsible”
or “respectable” Holocaust scholarship. Where the neonazis
deny a single genocide, those embracing the exclusivist posture of “Jewish
uniqueness” deny many. Indeed, they deny everybody’s holocaust
but their own. With this in mind, I couldn’t wait to see how Lipstadt
dealt with the destruction of indigenous peoples which attended the
U.S. exercise in “nation-building.” I mean, she had to deal
with it, right? She’s an American scholar purporting to explain
why the concept of genocide is inapplicable to the understanding of
American history. So, you’ll understand why, when I reached the
end of Denying the Holocaust, I thought maybe I’d been too eager,
that I’d read too fast and somehow missed the part about the campaigns
of “extermination”—that’s an official term,
not something I made up for effect—conducted against American
Indians. I didn’t want to go back and reread the whole second
half of the thing, so I flipped through the index, trying to figure
out where I should look. Nothing under “American Indians.”
Nothing under “Native Americans.” We’re never dignified
with so much as a passing reference anywhere in the book’s 250-odd
pages. We’re treated as if we’re either nonexistent or utterly
irrelevant. I’m not sure which, and I really don’t care,
because I submit to you that, either way, it’s impossible to conceive
of being any more denied than that.
A third galvanizer
was Steven Katz’s Holocaust in Historical Context,10 which was
published a year earlier than Lipstadt’s, but I didn’t get
into it until after I’d read hers. I think it’s both fair
and accurate to describe this tome—it comes to about 600 oversize
pages of dense-packed prose—as the definitive formulation of the
Jewish exclusivist position. All 600 pages are devoted to elaborating
in excruciating detail exactly why we’re supposed to conclude
that there has been one, and only one, “true” genocide in
all of human history, that it was inflicted by the nazis upon the Jews
during the period 1941-45,11 and that while other peoples have suffered
horrendous persecution from time to time—he runs down a whole
series of examples, from Carthage to Cambodia, and, yes, he does stop
off to “visit” the fate of American Indians12—the
conclusion in each case is that whatever happened was something other
than genocide, per se. In substance, Katz’s bottom line—like
Lipstadt’s, and using the same methods, only much more so—is
that if you weren’t at Auschwitz, you didn’t suffer genocide.
Of course, in order to make it appear that his thesis holds up, he has
to radically—and, given the way he does it, one dares say duplicitously—alter
the definition of the word itself (he calls it a “phenomenological”
definition).13
Finally, there’s a statement by Edward Alexander which snapped
the whole thing into focus for me. Sufferance of genocide, he said,
can be considered as “moral capital” in the political arena.14
His implication is that there is only a certain amount of this “moral
capital,” and that sharing the fact of genocidal suffering with
anyone else would thus correspondingly diminish the quantity of this
capital available to Jews. You have to admire his honesty in a way.
His is a “make no bones about it” articulation of the motives
underlying “uniqueness” scholarship—that is, the insistence
that the Holocaust was the only “real” genocide, and that
the Holocaust happened only to Jews—and the quasi-official adoption
of this “historical interpretation” by the State of Israel.15
Alexander, by the way, is none too shy about equating Jews to Israel,
so there’s a great deal of consistency in his position.
I’m going
to challenge this “the Holocaust happened only to Jews”
business right now. You see, there’s this little matter of the
Gypsies (Sinti and Roma—or Romani—as they call themselves).
Katz and Yehuda Bauer—an acknowledged dean of Israeli Holocaust
scholars—and others have spent quite a lot of time and energy
trying to explain why the Gypsies, who were exterminated by the nazis
in numbers proportionally as great or greater than the Jews, usually
in the same camps and by the same methods, should not be viewed as coequal
victims of the Holocaust. Their arguments are truly arcane: The Gypsies
were not defined in precisely the same way as the Jews (of course not,
they were Gypsies), not slated for total extermination (actually certain
groups of Jews—the Karaimes and Tats, for example, and there were
others—were exempted as well),16 and so on. You really have to
read this stuff to believe it, and even then it’s hard to wrap
your mind around the idea that “respectable” scholars are
producing it. The punctuation mark on this is that it’s all and
patently false. There’s a 1938 Himmler decree placing the Gypsies
on precisely the same legal footing as the Jews, to be “processed”
by the SS in precisely the same way.17 End of distinction.
There is something else that needs saying in this regard. Every Gypsy
who turns to a standard reference work like Louis Snyder’s Encyclopedia
of the Third Reich must feel just like I felt when I finished Lipstadt’s
book, because there’s not a single mention of Gypsies, Sinti,
Roma, Romani or anything remotely related to them.18 The same is true
in cinematic depictions. Take Escape from Sobibór, for example.
That’s a death camp in which thousands upon thousands of Gypsies,
as well as Jews, were exterminated. Yet, in the movie, the inmate population
is composed exclusively of Jews. The only reference to a Gypsy is the
name of a dog.19 An entry on Gypsies is included in The Encyclopedia
of the Holocaust, but Yehuda Bauer was selected to write it, and it’s
devoted mainly to explaining why Gypsy victims shouldn’t be seen
as genuine counterparts to Jewish victims.20 Small wonder, given this
sensibility, that when it came time to conduct the official Israeli/Polish
commemoration of the Holocaust at Auschwitz in January 1995, a group
of Gypsies whose ancestors had died there, and who therefore wished
to participate, were actually locked out.21
Obviously, Holocaust
denial takes a few forms Deborah Lipstadt neglected to mention. Maybe
that’s why there’s no more reference to Gypsies than there
is to Indians in Denying the Holocaust. The point is that the neonazis
hold no monopoly on Holocaust denial. The sort of Holocaust scholarship
I’ve been talking about, and it’s the predominating mode,
also comprises a form of denial. And it’s an especially ugly and
insidious form, consciously undertaken by one people victimized by genocide
at the direct expense of another, a smaller, weaker people victimized
in the same genocide. If you’re gathering the impression that
I feel a great deal of affinity for the Gypsies, you’re correct.
I do. And that’s true not only on the basis of what I’ve
been saying, which is I suppose rather academic, but also on the basis
of direct experience.
I was in Germany in 1994, along with another AIM member, Bob Robideau,
when the Germans set out to deport the Sinti and Roma, en masse, to
Romania. To make a long story short, Bob and I ended up standing with
a caravan of Gypsies—men, women, babies, old people, little kids—in
the pouring rain on a blacktop road outside the Neuengamme concentration
camp, near Hamburg. Neuengamme was the camp where the nazis sent Gypsies
for transshipment to Auschwitz and Sobibór and Chelmno.22 Now,
50 years later, these people we were with were trying to find sanctuary
inside the same camp, to use the symbolism of it in a desperate effort
to forestall deportation as “social undesirables.” And,
of course, the Germans locked them out. Posted guards, in fact. I’ll
never forget the look in one little boy’s eyes as he sat there
shivering in the rain. Such deep hurt. Anguish. Bewilderment. I’ve
seen that same look in so many of our own kids’ eyes. It haunts
me. And then, a year later, having been locked out of Neuengamme by
the Germans, the same people were locked out of Auschwitz… by
Jews, for god’s sake. Can you imagine how that felt?
II
At this point, the meaning of the confluent views expressed by the German
and the Jew with regard to my Himmler/Columbus comparison??and by extension
to the idea that there was an American holocaust— starts to reveal
itself. But first you need to understand why, beyond the obvious reasons,
the Gypsies were trying so hard to resist deportation. I mentioned that
they were being sent to Romania. Actually, Germany was paying Romania
to take them. Part of a nice little ethnic cleansing program they were
conducting in Germany at the time, and, for that matter, still are.23
You had gangs of skinheads running around all over the place, beating
up immigrant workers, Kurds and such, torching worker housing complexes,
burning a few people alive, “sending the message” that Germany
is for “Racial Germans” only, and the fact of the matter
is that the government wasn’t doing much to stop them because
the government itself was busily passing laws and implementing policies—removing
Gypsies being only one part of it—going in exactly the same direction.24
Any of this sounding familiar?
Anyway, bad as things were, and are in—can I start to call this
“the Reich” now?—they were at the time much worse
in Romania, where what amounted to a nationwide anitigypsy pogrom was
going on. So, the Gypsies were being put on trains in Germany, whole
trainloads of them, and shipped to Romania where—and everybody
knew this, not least the Gypsies—they were being met at the stations
by large groups of men armed with axe-handles and such. And, from there,
they were funneled into prearranged ghettos or “Gypsy camps,”
where, presumably, they remain.25 All this was common knowledge, but
nobody much was talking about it. The U.S. raised no protests, nor did
Israel, nor did the Jewish organizations, many of them with offices
in Berlin, that are ostensibly guided by the principle of “never
again.” About the only serious attempt to oppose what was going
on came from a fairly narrow sector of the radical German left taking
antifascism/antiracism as its paramount concern.26 Everybody else pretty
much just yawned and looked away while the trains rolled.
This is not all
that’s going on in post-unification Germany. There’s a generalized
desire, and it’s important to emphasize that this isn’t
some weird nostalgic fantasy on the part of the radical right, to recreate
what the nazis called “Grossdeutschland,” the “Greater
Germany.” That is, to merge Austria into Germany, and to reacquire
the “Ostmark” in Poland—mainly Silesia and contiguous
areas—as well as the portions of Prussia lost at the end of World
War II.27 And it should be clear from what I’ve already said that
they see Germany, in whatever configuration, as being ethnically cleansed.
So you end up with this massive and thoroughly aryanized geopolitical
bloc in Central Europe. They actually believe—this is usually
not stated openly, but it comes through clearly enough in casual conversation—that
this is their “destiny as a people,” that the obvious superiority
of their culture, their economy and so on entitles them to territories
and assets belonging to peoples who failed to utilize them “properly.”28
Rhetorical trappings aside, the substance is no different from what
was espoused not-so-long ago by Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank and Adolf
Hitler himself.29
Everything is articulated by way of euphemism, couched in terms of “progress”
and “democratic ideals,” and under a veneer of false humility.
Skinheads notwithstanding, you don’t have brownshirts as a literal
arm of the government out there terrorizing nonaryans these days, or
the SS herding them into camps and ghettos. Instead, Berlin pays the
Romanians to do it for them.30 And they’re not going to invade
Poland with panzers and Stukas. The takeover, which has already begun,
will be undertaken in a much more insidious manner, using checkbooks
instead of cannons, asserting hegemony through investment. That way,
they can pursue what to all intents and purposes are nazi policies—some
of the recent legislation concerning immigrant labor and the like reads
almost like a recapitulation of the Nuremberg Laws31—while pretending
that the opposite is true.
The differences
really boil down to matters of style, not substance. I don’t say
this to diminish the importance of style. Quite the reverse. Style is
absolutely essential. It serves as the mask behind which substance is
disguised and thus concretized to general applause, or at least without
significant opposition. But for this stylistic subterfuge to work, there
has to be a very clear benchmark against which the “differences”
can be discerned, even measured. And, for a lot of reasons having to
do with the all but universal revulsion with which it has been perceived
since the Second World War, that benchmark is nazism, or rather nazism
in the specific form of its practice during the period of the Third
Reich. The premise is that unless you’re doing whatever you’re
doing in exactly the same way the nazis did it during the 1930s and
‘40s, you must be doing something else. So the Nuremberg Laws
aren’t “really” the Nuremberg Laws unless there’s
literally an SA, an SS and a Gestapo there to enforce them. And racial
resettlement isn’t “really” racial resettlement, unless
the trains are dumping people in the Warsaw and Lódz ghettos.
Dumping them in Bucharest “must” be something else. So much
for “never again”!
The key to the whole
enterprise concerns the casting of that aspect of the Hitlerian version
of nazism which is deemed most evil and repugnant, its “defining
characteristic,” so to speak. And here, unquestionably we’re
now talking about the Holocaust.32 On this, there is consensus, although
there probably shouldn’t be, given that the Holocaust itself couldn’t
have happened minus the nazis’ ideological apparatus as a whole,
and the entire sweep of nazi policy formation/implementation from the
early-30s onward. In other words, that which is most evil and repugnant
about nazism is nazism itself, in all its guises, not one particular
aspect of it. Be that as it may, however, you’ll not get an argument
from the direction of Deborah Lipstadt, Steven Katz and Edward Alexander
if you state that the Holocaust was far and away the most awful and
unforgivable crime the nazis committed. And, irony of ironies, the same
view is held by the neonazi Holocaust deniers. That’s why they’re
deniers. They’re accused of being antisemitic, and that’s
probably a correct assessment, at least in most cases, but it’s
not their primary motivator. They’re neonazis, after all. What
they want most is to be able to rehabilitate the public perception of
nazism in its most overt form. And they can’t do it without “debunking”
the knowledge that nazism produced the Holocaust.33
David Irving, who,
along with Ernst Nolte,34 stands out as one of the most sophisticated
and accomplished of all the neonazi “scholars”—Irving’s
a Brit who’s long been considered a leading “respectable”
World War II historian?has recently laid things out very clearly. Everything
about nazism was pretty much A-okay, he says, except the Holocaust.
But, of course, the Holocaust didn’t happen. So, we’re all
kind of morally-bound to reconsider our views of Hitler and his projects,
giving the guy proper credit for his many accomplishments. You know
the rap: Hitler pulled off an “economic miracle” by lifting
Germany out of the Great Depression, reinstilling pride and bringing
the German people together at a time when it seemed Germany might come
completely apart; without him, we’d not have expressways or Volkswagens,
and just look at all those advances in genetics and rocket science he
instigated, etc. etc.35
Irving and his ilk are irrelevant for our purposes other than to demonstrate
a bizarre kind of agreement joining the two most extreme poles of what
we can call, for lack of a better designator, “the Holocaust debate.”
And from there it becomes unsurprising to find that agreement prevails
at every point along the continuum from pole to pole. Now, inject the
rest of the logic we’ve been discussing. After accepting that
genocide (the Holocaust) was definitive of nazism in its Hitlerian form,
everybody can claim one or another level of moral high ground by the
vociferousness with which they condemn Hitlerism and, it follows, genocide.
But, and here’s where the really slippery part comes in again:
genocide and the particular mode of genocide embodied in the Holocaust
end up being treated as synonyms.36 That’s why so much Holocaust
scholarship ends up being devoted to listing the criteria of what constitutes
an “actual” genocide. To be considered such, so it is argued
by people like Katz, a process of group eradication must devolve upon
killing, not other methods. And the killing must be done systematically,
on a certain scale, affecting a certain proportion of the target group,
and pursued with an express intent to annihilate every last member of
it.37 Often, the question of “killing techniques” is also
introduced, which is why Holocaust deniers like Arthur Butz and Robert
Faurisson expend so much effort trying to prove that there were no gas
chambers at Auschwitz.38 I’ve even seen the argument advanced,
apparently in all seriousness, that genocide is genocide only if the
victims fail to physically resist their victimization.39
Maybe it’s
time we took a deep breath, because we’ve plainly ventured a long
way into the domain of lunatic discourse. And, as should be patently
obvious, that’s true on both sides of the equation. On each side,
the lunacy has a purpose, but one side is plainly ascendant over the
other, and, equally plainly, the ascendant side is not that of the Irvings
and the Faurissons who seek to rehabilitate nazism by denying the Holocaust
(no matter how greatly their influence may exceed their minuscule number40).
Nope. Such laurels go to their opponents; that is, to those who discredit
nazism by their totalizing focus on the Holocaust, thereby narrowing
the definitional parameters of the word itself to the point where it
can be asserted in all seriousness, and popularly believed, that genocide
isn’t “really” genocide unless it’s a veritable
duplicate of the Holocaust. And, since there are no exact duplicates
of the Holocaust…
Lipstadt can relax.
The votes are in, long since, and her side won by a margin so decisive
that she needn’t lose another moment’s sleep over the largely
imaginary inroads made on her turf by the likes of David Irving. The
whole world has bought into the twin-track paradigm of Holocaust uniqueness
and Jewish exclusivism. The official view is pretty much the way Steven
Katz and Yehuda Bauer have formulated it, in close paraphrase: “genocide
has happened only once in history, and to only one people.”41
How neat. How tidy. How utterly self-serving.
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