[lbo-talk] Solidarity of Memory (was Nazi Holocaust and American Settler Colonialism)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 5/26/06, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Annoying the Jews would be another purpose . . . .
>
> I'm not sure there is any constructive political
> purpose served by the comparison. I'm no defender of
> the idea that the Holocaust, construed narrowly (and
> inaccurately) as merely Judeocide, was specially and
> uniquely wicked.  Comparative studies of genocide
> (like Holocaust so construed) and non-genocidal mass
> murder and ethnic cleansing seem to me perfectly
> legitimate).  But as Kelly has emphasized, in the game
> the WC is playing, there an implicit acceptance of the
> idea that Holocaust/Judeocide was uniquely wicked, and
> an anachronistic standard for earlier crimes against
> humanity.  In addition, there's the
> "more-oppresseder-than-thou" game going on (something
> parodied nicely in a couple episodes of the Sopranos I
> saw recently), which is really dull.

Can we get away from Ward Churchill for a moment?  That's what's
becoming really dull.  My view on the matter is not Churchill's (which
should be clear from my postings here, including some recent ones that
specifically criticize it), nor was I commenting on Churchill's view
per se in the posting to which you responded.

I'm thinking of people like Lilian Friedberg, a
"German-Jewish-Native-American-(Anishinabe)" scholar.

See Lilian Friedberg, "Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust,"
_The American Indian Quarterly_ 24.3
(2000) 353-380,
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/american_indian_quarterly/v024/24.3friedberg.html>.

 Her argument is that comparison -- or comparative studies, if you
prefer -- does not necessarily have to be a gambit aimed at winning a
contest for a hierarchy of oppression and that, if done generously, it
may very well serve to create a usable past for leftists (though she
doesn't explicitly put it that way) and "a 'solidarity of memory' that
might fundamentally challenge" (Friedberg, p. 369) the dominant
ideology, a "solidarity of memory" of displacement and dispossession,
exploitation and oppression, revolt and resistance and revolution,
that can unite, rather than divide.
-- 
Yoshie
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