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III
It’s time to examine who benefits from this absurdity, and how they
do so. For Jews who identify with Israel—let’s take them at
their word and call them zionists, shall we?—the answer’s
easy, bound up as it is in Edward Alexander’s notion of “moral
capital.” For Germans, as we’ve already discussed, there’s
the clear advantage of being able to resurrect nazi attitudes and policies
more-or-less at will, so long as they’re scrupulous about maintaining
a requisite stylistic distance from the Third Reich, a matter signified
in catechistic expressions of repentance for nazism’s “incomparable
crime.” This is not to say that there aren’t other complexities
involved. There are antizionist Jews, for starters, and antifascist Germans.
It’s also true that the very fact of the Holocaust, like any genocide,
generated layers of genuinely traumatized people among victims and victimizers
alike, who retain an obsessive preoccupation with the source of their
trauma.42 Pathologies and opposition politics aside, however, the more
cynical motives of monopolizing moral capital and maintaining stylistic
subterfuge unquestionably predominate.
As for everybody else, well, at one level they can be viewed as a sort
of chorus backing up the German lead. By offering the example of Hitlerian
nazism and its Holocaust as a singularity—the proverbial “epitome
of evil,” or “novum,” as Steven Katz would have it43—they’ve
been able to mask the bedrock realities attending their own outlooks,
policies, and actions, many of which have been far more extreme than anything
exhibited by Germany over the past half-century. It helps that a number
of the major players in this regard—the United States, for instance—can
rightly claim to have had significant roles in militarily crushing Hitlerism
during the 1940s, thus bringing the nazis’ extermination of Jews
to a halt (usually omitted from the narrative is the fact that this last
result was entirely collateral; the Allies’ motives in waging war
against the Third Reich had nothing at all to do with ending the Holocaust44).
The result,
staying with the U.S. example, has been the ability of federal policymakers
and their counterparts in the American propaganda industry—oops,
I meant to say “news media”—to continuously play both
ends against the middle. On the one hand, they habitually tout the noble
legal principles laid down and enforced by the United States at Nuremberg,
and quote the lofty rhetoric of Justice Jackson to the effect that the
U.S. would never hold the nazis accountable to a standard of law with
which it would not itself comply.45 On the other hand, they just as habitually
dodge the bullet of these very principles and pronouncements—especially
the part about how the Germans were guilty of complicity in the crimes
of the nazis because of their collective failure to do whatever was necessary
to bring the Hitler government to heel, a principle holding considerable
implication for any polity, including the U.S., whose government engages
in a fundamentally criminal course of action46—by holding up the
popular image of the Holocaust peddled by “uniqueness” scholars.
Whatever else can be said about U.S. policy, the story goes, it’s
never been exactly like that.
Thus, the
U.S. could engage in a 10-year “war of attrition” in Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia, slaughtering something on the order of three million
Indochinese, the vast majority of them civilians, meanwhile suffering
fewer than 60,000 fatalities itself, while the New York Times and Washington
Post editorialized that the convening of a Nuremberg-type tribunal would
be “counterproductive” in terms of changing what they’d
finally admitted was America’s “misguided” policy in
Southeast Asia.47 Less were they prepared to admit that, given what the
U.S. was doing to the Indochinese, a fullfledged violent overthrow of
the government was not so much morally warranted as it was the legal obligation
of American citizens under provision of the Nuremberg Doctrine.48 Their
main line of defense on this score? That, contrary to all appearances,
U.S. leaders were not “really” nazis, as evidenced by the
“fact” that they “weren’t really” committing
genocide. This assertion, in turn, was always anchored, usually implicitly
but sometimes quite explicitly, in the observation that the U.S. had constructed
no Auschwitz-like “death factory” in Indochina.49
They weren’t
completely successful in selling this bill of goods, of course, but it
was enough to truly confuse the issue. There were those in the antiwar
movement of the late-60s, Sartre being a prime example, who were quite
willing to call genocide by its right name.50 But the truth is that even
within the antiwar movement, there was an abiding attitude that such clinically-accurate
descriptions of what was going on were somehow “overstated,”
“exaggerated” or “hyperbolic.” Witness Chomsky,
who’s as astute and tough a critic of U.S. policy as you could name.
He’s been very careful never to just come right out and call what
the U.S. did in Indochina a genocide; it’s always this “genocidal”
policy and that “near-genocide” —whatever that’s
supposed to mean—never genocide, as such.51 One upshot of such equivocation
was the inculcation of a false conscious- ness among those who opposed
the war that allowed them to define “success” in the rather
limited terms of policy reform—”Stop the War,” for example,
or, far worse, “Stop the Draft”—rather than as fulfillment
of the imperative to destroy any regime or system which proves itself
capable of “the ultimate crime.”52
The difference
may seem subtle, but it’s not. The mass mobilization against the
war in Vietnam destabilized the U.S. status quo considerably. The movement
actually held the potential to “bring the whole motherfucker down,”
as the saying went in those days. But to do so, the opposition as a whole
would have had to be imbued with a genuine comprehension of the real nature
and consequent meaning of the war, and thus that it was up against something
absolutely intolerable and utterly unreformable, something truly “just
as bad as”—although not interchangeable with—Hitlerian
nazism, something just as necessary to altogether abolish as nazism in
its “pure” form. The movement, apart from a few Maoist fringe
groups that were increasingly isolated as the years wore on, stopped well
short of achieving that level of consciousness.53 Indeed, there was a
profound resistance to it.54 And this allowed those in power to cut their
losses, to withdraw from the war in fairly good order and then undertake
a period of reorganization—this includes what Chomsky himself has
described as a “reconstruction of imperial ideology”—and
end up in a stronger position than ever.55
The benefits
to U.S. elites resulting from this elemental misapprehension of reality
on the part of their purportedly radical opponents were quite evident
during the so-called Gulf War. To put it another way, the costs are glaringly
apparent in the quarter-million Iraqis butchered with virtual impunity.
What casualties did the U.S. sustain during the “war”?56 Less
than 300, total? Worse is what has happened since the war supposedly ended
in 1991. As of 1996, the United Nations was estimating that well over
500,000 Iraqi kids under the age of 12 had died as a direct result of
a U.S.-imposed and militarily-enforced embargo on things like food, medicine
and the materiél necessary to repair the country’s war-ravaged
sanitation infrastructure.57 There’s no way to contend that the
figures are exaggerated, since no less authoritative and official a spokesperson
than Madeleine Albright went on 60 Minutes and confirmed their accuracy,
observing that she and her colleagues in the U.S. foreign policy establishment
had decided it was “worth the price” in someone else’s
children to impress upon their government that there’s a “New
World Order” in which “what we say goes.”58 Could Goebbels
have put it any more plainly? Could Hitler himself?
Actually,
approximately the same number of Iraqi adults and children have died as
a result of the embargo over the past five years. So, you add it all up
and you’ve got well over a million dead—only a couple hundred
thousand of whom were military personnel—in a country with a population
of 18-20 million, a toll quite deliberately, or at least knowingly inflicted
by the United States as a matter of policy.59 The general public has been
aware of this for three years, and yet there’s not been a whisper
of popular outrage, much less mass protest. Frankly, I attribute a lot
of this moral/legal default to the unforgivably self-indulgent approach
to issue-framing and organizing adopted by America’s “peace
movement” during the 1960s and early-70s.60 But, then, I attribute
quite a lot of that to the blinders imposed by their indoctrination in
the “one people, one genocide” paradigm which prevented the
vast majority from seeing things clearly, and thus from responding appropriately.
There are
plenty of other recent examples of genocide being met by silence in this
country: East Timor, Rwanda, Bosnia,61 and, oh yeah, how about Palestine?
The 1948 massacre of Palestinian villagers at Deir-Yassin was perpetrated
by members of Lehi, usually known as the “Stern Gang,” as
well as the Irgun.62 Both Lehi and Irgun were straight-up zionist terrorist
organizations, and officially classified as such by the British authorities
in Palestine from the mid-30s onward.63 These zionist terrorist groups
greatly predate the emergence of any others in the area, so those of you
inclined to cut some slack to Israel because of “the threat of Arab
terrorism” would do well to remember where the Arabs got the idea.64
Hardline zionists like Avraham Stern—he was a fascist, really, enthralled
by Mussolini65 —established the template.
Of course,
it’s always pointed out that Stern’s group, Lehi, was tiny.
From that, we’re to adduce that it was unrepresentative of zionism.
But, if it was really so unrepresentative, how did one of its leading
members, Yitzhak Shamir, end up being elected prime minister of Israel?66
Not much “marginalization” there, obviously. Same with the
Irgun. Menachem Begin, who was its head at the very time of Deir-Yassin,
was, as we all know, later elected prime minister.67 Far from being unrepresentative
of zionism, then or now, these guys—not just the top dogs like Begin
and Shamir but the member-ship as well—have been integrated into
Israel’s dominant rightwing party, the Likud, since day one.68 You
don’t suppose their “terrorist background” might have
anything to do with the nature of Israeli policy, do you? Aside from having
everything to do with founding the state, I mean.
I’ll
give one example and then move on. Ariel Sharon, the man most responsible
for the Sabra and Shatila massacres, is also a prominent Likud member.
His background is a bit different from those of Shamir and Begin in that
he was too young to serve in their organizations during the pre-1948 “years
of struggle.” He’s a military man in the more formal sense;
made his career in the army as a paratroop officer. He didn’t work
his way up by excelling at regular military duties, however. His area
was “special operations.” He “made his bones,”
so to speak, commanding Unit 101, a commando outfit, when it massacred
the inhabitants of Qibya, a Jordanian village, in October 1953. That was
to “send a message” to the Arabs during a water dispute. In
early-54—a time when Israel was supposedly “at peace”
with its neighbors—he led the so-called Gaza Raid into acknowledged
Egyptian territory, destroying a military installation and murdering about
50 soldiers.69 This was to prompt a response from Egypt that would serve
as the pretext for a war in which then-Prime Minister David Ben Gurion
was sure Israel would prevail and thereby extend its southern border all
the way down to Sharm el-Sheik, on the Red Sea.70 Sharon’s whole
background consists of things like this. Like Begin and Shamir, he’s
a world class terrorist. So what he did in Lebanon—Sabra and Shatila
are only the tip of the iceberg—was right in character.71 There
were no surprises there for anyone who knew his history, and how it conforms
to the contours of zionist history—or Israeli history—more
generally. Only by knowing that history can you be in any position to
assess the current relationship between Israel and the Palestinians.
The principle,
of course, extends far more broadly. It works like this: the ruling elite
in every country in the world aspires to maintain the order upon which
its own power and privilege depends by continuously pumping up “national
morale,” inculcating among the citizenry a triumphalist notion of
what they’ve achieved and the process through which, over time,
they’ve achieved it. It’s more complex than what’s usually
referred to, wrongly, as “nationalism.” The idea of “patriotism”
comes closer, although there are almost always hefty doses of cultural
chauvinism—eurocentrism, for instance—and racialist ingredients
like white supremacy mixed in. Social constructions of sexual domination,
articulated as “virility” or “machismo,” also
play a role. In any event, the goal is to always have a critical mass
of the population feeling proud of itself in a way that’s at once
abstract and deeply personalized, because—this one’s a no
brainer—people don’t tend to rebel against the source of their
pride.72 This remains true, as a lot of marxist organizers in the U.S.
have discovered, much to their dismay, even if the source of pride is
objectively the source of things like class oppression. The end product
here is by design a public consciousness that is neither objective nor
particularly rational.
What we’re talking about is what Antonio Gramsci termed “hegemony,”
or, more accurately, creation of a “hegemonic bloc.”73 And
establishing the hegemonic bloc requires that there be a “master
narrative” of history, into which these triumphalist subsets of
national narrative can fit.74 Well, it’s a little difficult to construct
a triumphalist narrative of a national history that includes commission
of the crime of genocide. So genocide must be denied. But how? I mean,
it might be plausible to simply expunge the record in certain instances,
but overall? Too many facts are known, so denial in its crudest sense,
that of simply asserting that “nothing happened,” is unworkable.
The trick is therefore to come up with a means of accounting for these
inconvenient facts, conceding that “things happened,” but
interpreting the “things” themselves as “unfortunate
incidents” or “regrettable events”—the word “tragedy”
comes up a lot—rather than as genocides.75
This is where
the concept of Holocaust uniqueness comes into play for real. The “one
genocide, one people” thesis that Jewish exclusivists have done
the major work in crafting affords everyone but the Germans the service
of taking them off the hook. The Germans must bear “the burden of
guilt,” not only for their perpetration of the Holocaust, but for
all genocide.76 That’s a heavy load, and an obviously unfair one,
although I personally have a hard time feeling sorry for them on this
score since they’ve done and are still doing so much to deserve
the weight they’re carrying. Besides, they’re compensated
rather well for carrying it. So it’s not unfairness to Germany that’s
problematic; it’s the exemption of other perpetrator countries from
bearing the same burden. And that’s exactly why Holocaust uniqueness/Jewish
exclusivism has found such resonance among the world’s ruling elites
that it has been embraced as a matter of Official Truth.
Official
Truth. Once again, I should note that I’m not overstating things
for effect. Consider the arrangement between the governments of Israel
and Turkey, wherein the Turks will deliver in their schools a curriculum
in which children are instructed that the Holocaust, or the Jewish aspect
of it at any rate, was history’s only “true” genocide.
In exchange, Israeli school children are instructed to believe that the
Turkish extermination campaign directed against Armenians from 1914 through
1918 was not genocide. When Armenian Americans approached the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum with the idea of observing a day of commemoration for
the million-plus victims of the Armenian genocide, both governments, Turkish
and Israeli, intervened with the board to protest.77 And so, of course,
the commemoration—which is to say, the public education aspects
of any such proceeding—never occurred. Now that’s pretty damned
official, wouldn’t you say?
So was the
policy of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1990-91, when it
was soliciting proposals for public education projects it could fund as
part of the planned national celebration of the Columbian Quincentennial
in the U.S. The evaluation procedure began with a screening where any
proposal in which the word “genocide” appeared was simply
removed from further consideration. There’s a delicious little irony
involved in this one because it turned out that a bunch of proposals for
projects designed to prove that genocide is not an appropriate descriptor
of either the “initial encounter” or “Columbian legacy”
were arbitrarily weeded out, merely for having mentioned the word. People
are always shocked when I mention this one, but I don’t know why.
The NEH policy in this case wasn’t especially different from that
embodied in the accreditation “standards” imposed with respect
to the teaching of history in every public school in the United States.
Japan notoriously excludes information concerning its atrocities in China
and elsewhere during the 1930s and ‘40s from its public school curricula,78
but, in that, one can find little difference from how the U.S. excludes
information about what was and is being done to American Indians.
While we’re
on the topic of official truth, has anyone considered the implications
of there being a museum memorializing the Holocaust in Washington, D.C.,
and none for the American Indians who were by all accounts eradicated
as part of the process of forming this country? And none memorializing
the institution of slavery? I’m not saying there shouldn’t
be a Holocaust museum. Actually, I think there should, and that it should
include Gypsies on an absolutely equal footing with Jews,79 that Slavs
should be included as well, and that it should serve as the sponsoring
vehicle for commemorating genocides other than the Holocaust (that of
the Armenians being only one example).80 But my point is that an institutionalized
focusing of the public gaze on a genocide or genocides occurring half-a-world
away, meanwhile remaining silent about the holocausts that occurred here,
adds up to a calculated diversion of attention. And it doesn’t redeem
the situation a bit to observe that the Holocaust museum is only quasi-official.
The vacuum against which it’s balanced is very official.
I don’t want to be accused of leftwing bias here, especially since
I’m not by any stretch of the imagination a leftist, so I’ll
note that the record in the socialist countries has been no better. Not
“worse,” mind you, but no better. The Large Soviet Encyclopedia,
for instance, defined genocide as “an offshoot of decaying capitalism.”81
All the stuff Stalin did to the Ukrainians and others during the collectivization
drives of the 1930s was officially described as “criminal”—Khrushchev
announced it as such during the mid-50s—but never as genocide.82
That remained by official designation a peculiarly nazi crime. And China?
I’ve got a hot news flash for anybody who’s sporting a “Free
Tibet” sticker on your bumper. There are a few dozen other nationalities
subsumed in what used to be called “Red China,” all of whom
are in as bad or worse shape than the Tibetans, and the fact that none
of them happens to have developed a spiritual tradition appealing to the
Naropa Institute doesn’t make them any less worthy of notice.83
I’d like to build on Santayana a bit. If “those who forget
history are doomed to repeat it,” as he observed, then what are
we to say of those who are prevented from learning it in the first place?
Worse still, how about those force-fed a false history? Being denied the
ability to recognize genocides past translates into an inability to recognize
genocides present. Inability to recognize the phenomenon for what it is
precludes the ability to combat it effectively, and that, in turn, paves
the way for future perpetration.84 So, the official silencing and deformation
of history we’ve been discussing is not motivated simply by elite
desires to infuse the body politic with properly triumphalist outlooks.
It’s motivated even more strongly by the desire of those same elites
to preserve genocide as a viable policy option, even while they outlaw
it in a formal sense and indulge in the loftiest rhetoric condemning it.
The way in which the United States recently purported to have finally
ratified the 1948 Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide, meanwhile attaching a “sovereignty package” in
which it claimed the “right” to be self-exempting from compliance,
is a perfect illustration.85
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