At the age of 80 Arthur Miller wrote his last play, "Breaking Glass", with Bosnia in mind. It is perhaps not so well known to New Yorkers because of the high price of theatre seats. It had its premiere in London.
It is about a non-observant Jewish woman who develops a hysterical paralysis in 1938. She receives psychotherapy from her cheerful, relaxed, informal, sexually uninhibited, non-observant Jewish doctor. Her obsessional non-observant husband is a servile functionary who never notices the racism of his WASP boss who uses him to extort profits from their tenants, until he is sacked as a result of the loss of a contract.
The woman develops her hysterical paralysis on the occasion of Krystalnacht. Although her life should otherwise be normal and routine, she has an unfortunate tendency to read newspapers. At one point she goes emotionally beserk. She has seen a report of old jewish men being forced to clean the pavement with toothbrushes. She screams hysterically: what is happening? what is the world coming too? when old men are forced to clean the pavement with tooth brushes? why doesn't Britain do something? Why doesn't France do something?
Clearly hysterical.
It is a highly intricate and formal play on many levels. It deals with uneasy moral choices in a socially and politically significant context. The Breaking Glass is mainly about Krystalnacht but also about the brittle personal relationships, which shatter. It is only in the programme note that Miller is quoted as saying he had Bosnia in mind.
Obviously it is ridiculous and hysterical to think that Britain and France could have done anything about an ugly bit of non-fatal racial humiliation. The play is written with the irony of hindsight.
As for the Munich deal that happened that year, it is manifestly the case that the borders of Czechoslowakia were populated by German-speakers and the handing over of the Sudetenland to Hitler's Germany might seem a reasonable compromise which would ensure peace for the generation to come. The fact that the Czech president protested, was to be expected but his opinion was not really taken into account in the Munich deal.
And the Anschluss with Austria? Certainly there was no proper vote, and the government fell apart, but German troops were welcomed enthusiastically. The German democratic and nationalist movement for 150 years had communicated freely across all the lands of the old former Holy Roman Empire.
Jews were put into concentration camps for the first time in large numbers only in 1938, with the occupation of Vienna. So how could the western "democracies" stop the slide to genocide when no genocide had occurred?
Was it obvious that they should have entered into a really robust pact with Communist Russia in 1939 to defend the borders of reactionary anti-Semitic Poland with credible threats if Germany attacked?
We know now that there was no one specific genocide decision. There was a momentum.
One key question was that of expulsions. Before Krystalnacht 17,000 Polish Jews were expelled from Germany to Poland, who resisted taking them. When Poland was occupied, Jews were rounded up near railway stations.
The Wannsee conference of January 1942 is regarded as the nearest thing to the moment of decision. It was to put Jews to work in such a manner "that undoubtedly a large number of them will drop out through natural wastage."
But the imperialists were already at war with Nazi Germany and this must have accelerated the crudeness and brutality of the solution. They would have lost any influence they might have over the Nazi's to behave more moderately, despite the fact that many Germans had a liking for England.
Just as the NATO attack on Serbia must have accelerated the plans and the methods already worked out in Bosnia, and made it highly likely that they would be implemented with draconian decisiveness, which the Pentagon foresore, but apparently did not plan for.
No, genocide is not something that we can identify only after the event, that occurred only to Jews and has occurred in Rwanda. As Nelson Mandela pointed out, Europe too has a terrible history of tribal wars.
The article quoted in this thread title is of an individual in the Jewish community in Belgrade.
The article that is really relevant, I suggest, with allowance for changed conditions, is in today's Guardian:
"Now I know how the Jews felt"
"The faithful who gathered for Friday prayers at the Bajrak mosque in Belgrade did their best to ignore the pocked white walls and the broken window panes in the clergy's offices next door; shattered by a grenade attack earlier this week.
The men, mostly elderly Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, and Roma, washed their feet in the courtyard of the 16th century mosque, a hexagon of honey-coloured stone with a sharp minaret, and ambled inside to pray.
"With NATO aircaraft raiding the city nightly, these are tense times for Muslims in Belgrade, especially the rapidly shrinking number in the ethnic Albanian community."
This is why the modern definition of genocide, as printed on this list, does not restrict itself only to situations where the race or group has been totally eliminated.
It is also now a crime that stands above repect for national sovereignty.
This is part of a developing body of international law that at present is holding General Pinochet under house arrest, and may one day put Milosevic on trial for what he has done in Kosovo.
To fail to implement action against such crimes is to appease fascism. That remains the case even though the state powers implementing action are usually imperialist and certainly capitalist in nature.
The alternative logic seems to be logically that articulated by Louis Proyect which includes the belief that the Second World War was a reactionary war, and that workers and progressive people should consistently have worked for the defeat of their ruling class in that war, even at the expense of having virtually no hearing at all from the population as a whole. A campaign for a Second Front would have been to side with the imperialist aims of one's own bourgeoisie, no matter whether people were being herded into concentration camps.
Chris Burford
London.