Genocide against Jews and American Indians

Max B. Sawicky maxsaw at cpcug.org
Tue May 19 13:09:53 PDT 1998



> >From David Stannard Into to "A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust
> and Denial in the Americas 1492 to Present" by Ward Churchill:
> . . .
> 4) "But remembering the Holocaust does remain necessary--as it
> should. So, apparently, do claims for the historically unrivaled
> magnitude of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust--which should not.
> Indeed, so insistent is Israel on retaining its 'official story' of
> the Holocaust . . .
> . . .
> 5)"Nor can the existence of 'other' genocides be acknowledged by
> Israeli officialdom. Thus, the government of Israel has banned from
> . . .
> 6) "Thus, what began as an understandable and admirable effort to
> 'never forget' has evolved into official Israeli policy to undermine
> the efforts of others to have their own historical victimhood
> acknowledged. Yet, in the world of scholarship, there exists a
> strange paradox: while some of the most prominent opponents of this
> state-sponsored exclusivist agenda are Israeli scholars such as
> Israel Charny, the head of Jerusalem's Institute on the Holocaust and
> Genocide, the majority of the most prominent proponents of Holocaust
> exclusivism are Jewish American writers." . . .

Most of this post is well-taken, by and large, except in one respect, the tendency to over- generalize from the actions and words of specific Israeli's and American Jews (even from a majority of them) to terms such as "Israel" or "the most prominent proponents of Holocaust exclusivism are Jewish American writers . . ." (this last is different from the proposition that most Jewish American blankety-blank are proponents of said exclusivism.)

The doctrine at issue is a political and/or cultural posture, it is obviously not genetic or unanimous among the implied groups.

The relative notoriety of uncritically pro-Zionist American Jews and Holocaust exclusivists and the rest of us is a political fact, I daresay, and not the consequence of any disinterested assessment of the merit of our respective words. The grip of the Right in Israel is also political and not racial or national.

Then again, maybe I'm an exclusivist. I think the European Holocaust is different from, say, the Middle Passage or the European conquest and settlement of the Americas. Not more horrible, but different. Why is a long story which might require an attending psychiatrist, but does this make one an exclusivist?

Another point is that some styles of criticism of excluvism tend to reinforce it or generate it where it never existed in the first place. For instance, when the cue-ball aspiring to replace Farrakhan, before someone shot him in the foot, held a little demo in front of the Holocaust museum denouncing exclusivism and talking about the Middle Passage, he probably created a few more exclusivists. He was basically saying, you're excessiviely focused on your own tragedy, you swine, and you helped to perpetrate our tragedy (slavery). In other words, you are no victim at all; you are a perpetrator, really a butcher.

Of course, it's hard to not be excessively focused on one's own tragedy, the more catastrophic its dimensions. Kind of like someone bargeing into your mother's funeral and scolding you for being too self-absorbed.

It is possible to intellectualize holocausts (emphasis plural) in such a way as to sap them of moral context. Insofar as holocausts are understood as numerous or routine--a notion not inconsistent with the endless cataloging of atrocities on this list--the specifics tend to lose force. If holocausts are everywhere, then they are nowhere. The actual stories give way to theory, and not particularly good theory at that. Sterile theory takes away from the actual stories and the emotions suitable to them.

I suppose we should try to theorize about why mass murder happens. I guess I wish such discussion was more informed by historical material and less by heroic efforts to reduce such events to minimalist economic, class, or sociological models.

MBS



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