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Preserving a Genuine Sense of Tragedy and Moral Outrage About All Genocides
From: Columbia University
| By:
Israel W. Charny |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The deliberate and systematic extermination of national or racial groups--genocide--occurred repeatedly throughout the twentieth century. Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, 1.5 million Armenians were massacred in Turkey. Six million Jews perished at the hands of Nazis between 1939 and 1945. As the century drew to a close, reports of "ethnic cleansing" poured out of Kosovo.
"There are kicks to committing genocide," says Israel Charny at a talk he gave at Barnard College in February 2000. Charny is a psychologist and the executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, in Jerusalem, and is the editor in chief of the just-published Encyclopedia of Genocide. "The same miraculous life source that makes us capable of duty, helpfulness and caring also makes us capable of delighting in the obliteration of villages in Armenia and Vietnam, or the incinerators of Auschwitz. Human beings validate and glorify their lives on the corpses of others."
Genocide's final act is denial--killing the memory of those who were killed--and Charny spoke of the different forms of denial as well. |
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When a genocide is denied, I don't feel the act is an innocent one. I feel the act is a dangerous one. I will begin this evening with a quote from a newspaper report: "He was 52 years old. In the bloodbath, he lost his wife and 5 sons and 3 daughters. He lost 3 grandchildren and his mother-in-law, and 8 from a sister-in-law's family and 7 from his brother-in-law's." |
And were I to begin with a quotation, "While I was lying on my back I looked down the ravine and I saw a lot of women coming up and crying. When I saw these women, girls and little boys coming up, I saw soldiers on both sides of the ravine shoot at them until they had killed every one of them." What would you be inclined to think of or feel about? |
What would be the reaction in your hearts? |
The first description was of a Cambodian survivor and the devastation of his family, and the second description was of the genocidal murder of the Sioux Indians by the United States Army. What does that do to you and to me? What is our machinery inside of us like when it comes to hearing about the genocide of other people, far-removed from ours, we who are privileged to care deeply about one or perhaps more genocides, beginning with our own people's, for whom it is natural that we care the most, but do we really pass the test of showing a relative degree of caring, involvement, outrage, and concern about the genocide of people who are not fellow whites, of people who are foreign to us, of people from other eras, of people who are strange to us? And if we don't care, are we not falling into the same boat that we talk about when we protest and criticize the many people who didn't give a hoot about the genocidal murders of our peoples. |
How I came to study genocide
I had finished my specialty exams in clinical psychology. There were two days of clinical work at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital where I was observed by five examiners to see if I would be worthy to be given the 'cloth.' I finished. I was now a specialist in human behavior. |
I had a Ph.D. from an excellent university. I was, in five, six years after the Ph.D., practicing. I had just gotten my advance specialization certificate. I was certified to understand human beings. The paper said so. I went to sleep one night very happy; my young practice was doing very well. And I woke up in the morning from a dream and the words in my heart and mind were, 'How the hell did they do what they did?' And I not only cried out in my Jewish heart at that moment about what had been done to my people in the Holocaust, I also cried out at the absurdity that I had just finished all this training in human behavior and nobody had mentioned one word in all those years of training about how lousy human beings are, and where destructiveness comes from and where it sits inside the human mind. And it was that day that I made the decision that I would study genocide, and I knew that this was something so vast that it would be forever. |
Origins of genocide studies
I then wrote a letter to Yad Vashem and asked them to direct me to materials about the psychology of genocide. And the reply that I got, which I often talk about, was very helpful. They said, "We're very sorry, but we have no material on the subject in our library." That's where we were 35 years ago. |
I convened a study group that met once a month over several years. We were an historian, several educators, a college president, a director of theater, people from different faiths and a number of different professions. Each month one person would prepare a paper and we would study together any and all aspects of human beings' availability to be violent to the extent of being genocidal. |
For example, the director of theater and I did a joint project in the course of that group which I presented years later to Amnesty in Amsterdam. As a theater director he knew how to reach an audience. The problem we confronted was, what happens to human beings when you tell them about human rights atrocities and genocide. It takes all too few seconds before the eyes glaze over.
People stop feeling, not because they're bad, but because they do not have the machinery developed for knowing how to handle such information, especially in an era when it was only information about so many people who were destroyed brutally, and there was absolutely no linkage to efforts to do something about it. What this does is to make the information a further experience not only in deep sadness, but of impotence, an inability to handle life and to deal with reality. So one's attention span goes out. The theater professional and I worked at methods to convey information about genocidal events that would help people to maintain a longer attention span. |
Understanding the notion of genocide
The only way to fight against a disease, to fight against a social problem is to understand it, to see it for what it is. If once upon a time cancer was a horrible concept, one concept for whatever form of cancer the patient had, we all know, too many of us from personal experiences with this dread common disease, that there are many kinds of cancers and the treatments vary as knowledge grows, and the treatments become more and more effective as our knowledge widens. |
I suggest that we need to understand the deniers and not just react to them as if they are all the same. The classification is a case study of our own learning process. The first stages of this learning process were to look at what are they saying to us when they say there was no Armenian Genocide? What are they saying to us when they say there was no Holocaust? |
Our first gut reactions are, "They're messing up the information, they're messing up the facts." But is that really all that they were saying to us? Why are they getting us so upset? An analysis of the meta-messages of denials of known events of genocide shows us that why they are getting to us so deeply is that they are also engaging in celebrations of, and calls to renewed violence. |
The first stage of understanding is to get a sense that we have to call a spade a spade, that when we hear deniers speaking, they are certainly denying responsibility for any wrongdoing. If they were responsible for the killings, and say, "I didn't do it," okay, that's one part of it. But they're doing something more. They're celebrating the destruction of the victims. They are reveling in the information that they're denying, and that's another reason why we're getting upset as we listen to them. |
In fact, they are humiliating us. They're mocking us. They're mocking the feelings, the sensibilities, the memories of individuals, of communities, the national communities, and the cultural communities of the victim people. |
The deniers say there were no gas chambers; that the Armenians were not subject to a planned program of extermination. So we fought back by saying, "No, that can't be true." Look, look at the facts. Here's this historian. Here's that historian.
But they're saying many more things in the meta-meanings of their denials. They're attacking the collective identity of the community to which they're referring, and in addition they're using the big lie to say, you were our slaves in the genocide, and you're still our slaves. We run the record, we control the facts. We possess the historical process. And I allow myself a final metaphor: the deniers are killing the record of the genocide and murdering the truth of human history. |
When you see the celebration that's in a neo-nazi group, for example, when they pass out their stories about how there were no gas chambers in the Holocaust, you feel the reaping of power in their messages, the domination, and the insult of the attack precisely as it takes place in more flagrant, full-blown forms when the genocide is committed. |
Scholarly denial of genocide
Scholars have stated denial is the last stage of genocide. Those who join in on denials are like the many people who join in committing genocide. You've got the leaders who are out for the kill. You've got the perpetrators who are full-blown consciously out to be the killers, the genociders. But you've also got the hundreds of thousands and millions of others who join in because, on many different levels, there are kicks to committing genocide. |
There are gratifications that are not only political gratifications. In addition to the historical, political story, there are ethnic hatreds, and there's even more to it through which even these hatreds are being mediated. There are too many human beings who enjoy the insulting domination and destruction of others. It is a part of human nature that lies waiting in humanity and many people make the wrong choices or fail to make the choices to monitor that potential for being rotten. |
So the fight against denials is the fight against insult. It is the fight against the celebration of violence. It is the fight against threats of further violence as well as the fight against the incorrectness of the historical record. |
The six categories of genocide denial
One: malevolent bigotry.
Two: self-serving opportunism.
Three, and I'll explain it again, what I dare to call, 'innocent denials,' but I put it in quotation marks, or single quotes, also 'innocent disavowals of violence,' which maintains views of oneself and/or one's people or society as just and not evil.
Four: another word in single quotes, 'definitionalism,' or an insistence on defining cases of mass murder as not genocide.
Five: nationalistic hubris or self-involvement which justify exclusion of other peoples' genocides.
Six: the last one, human shallowness, the dulling and depletion of a genuine sense of tragedy and moral outrage. |
Malevolent bigotry
The first category, malevolent bigotry, is easy isn't it? Because that's the garbage of those who say that there was no genocide because they're out to conceal it. It's that open and shut. A Turkish group says, there was no genocide of the Armenians. And a writer who's bringing material from anti-Semitic groups says the Holocaust is a lie. No genocide of the Armenians: You know the garbage, maybe 100,000 Armenians died, but that was no greater a percentage than that of the Turks and Muslims who died under the same wartime conditions. Similarly, there was no Holocaust: "Only" a million Jews died during the war. "Only." Quite a word. In both cases the deniers claim the deaths were brought on by disease and starvation. |
The parallels in denials of different genocides are terribly important. Please, my fellow human beings, whatever ethnicities we come from, when you fight the denials of the genocides of your people, please extend yourself to think and feel about fighting the denial of genocides of other people, past, present and future, because we need all the help together of all people who care or humankind won't make it. |
Anyway, this first category is easy. The killers deny, the governments deny. It becomes crazy, 'mishuggene,' when you get to governments that weren't even around. Why would they continue the denial? They're continuing the denial in a political culture and an historical culture. They say: Our people cannot be accused of such events. Why do the Turks today deny the Armenian Genocide they didn't commit? Why do skinheads of today do the denials of the Holocaust? They didn't spill the blood. There are historical reasons and political reasons, but it's also psychological. |
It is the joy of abusing victims, abusing people, insulting them, threatening them, terrorizing them, controlling the historical record. It is a marvelous game, the same as it is marvelous to put on the boots and go after the victims in the actual genocide. |
Self-serving opportunism and 'innocent denials'
In 1985, an amazing advertisement appeared in leading newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post. It was an advertisement signed by 69 scholars of the Middle East in which they questioned whether genocide had taken place to the Armenian people. And they did it under the duplicitous cover of a lie. They said: 'We must await further research.' They said 'the Turkish archives have not yet been opened but soon they will be and then we'll know.' |
For me, that was a major turning point in the beginning of new forms of sophisticated denials, because up until then, we had been fighting pretty much the blatant, vile nonsense of people who turn the historical record upside down, but here we had strange combinations. There were truly distinguished academicians in that list. You cannot fault them. The language that they used was not incendiary. The appeal they made was to a prime value all of us share who care about history and scholarship. We must learn more from research, they said. And yet obviously their message was a corrupt one. They were denying the known facts by an appeal to research, as if needing to learn more about the history. |
The Armenian Assembly of America rushed immediately to do a survey of who these scholars were, and seemingly came up with an answer in a piece of research they published. I don't think it's the whole answer, but I think it's part of the answer. The Armenian Assembly showed that many of these scholars had received grants from Turkey for their work. Did that prove that they were on the take and were being paid off? Ostensibly, yes. I suggest no. Speros Vyronis has since followed up on that work in another study and confirmed the information is out that many of these scholars have received Turkish financial support. |
Our institute decided that we would write every one of these scholars. We sent them a carefully constructed questionnaire which invited the participants not only to respond to the questions, but also to say anything they wanted. We also guaranteed that we would always preserve the anonymity of their responses and we've kept our promise. |
A large percentage of these scholars felt moved enough to respond to us. They were irate, they were upset, they were explosive. One after another of those who responded insisted that they had never gotten paid a penny for their participation in the advertisement. I believe them. That doesn't mean they didn't get grants, but they didn't get paid for the advertisement. One after another insisted that they only meant well, that they only wanted to see peace and reconciliation between the Armenian people and the Turks. And as I and our researchers read and content-analyzed and cross-referenced the materials that were coming in, we came to the amazing conclusion that some of them, more than some of them, really meant what they were saying. |
What does that mean? Well, the first thing it means is that if you were a guest for lunch at somebody's home and that somebody was a big shot in the Mafia, and gave you a marvelous lunch and offered you a great cigar and patted you on the back and said, "We must get together some more." And later that day or the following week, somebody said to you, "Don't you know who that is? That's the Mafia boss and he just wiped out so and so." Many of us who would be guests in such a situation would innocently say, "That can't be, because he was so nice--so human." |
If you've come to love a culture that you've been studying, if you've received grants and gone there over and over again, you get attached; you do not want to think badly of the people who are your hosts, your friends, the culture to which you have become sentimentally connected. |
I do not believe I am betraying anything of our cause when I say that the conclusion I came to and that I now propose, in formal scholarly thinking, is that there are also, notice the word, a good many deniers who consciously are 'innocent.' |
As it turns out, in that study that our institute did, which was published just a few years ago in a British journal, some of these 69 scholars agreed in their responses that the Armenians indeed had been killed. They still couldn't call it genocide that 'killed' them, but they agreed that the Armenians had been murdered en masse. Some of them agreed, moreover, that they knew that the Turkish government was trying to rewrite the history. Some of them said now that they understood the ways in which that advertisement was being used they never would sign again had they known or realized the implications of their participation. |
There was a movie about the Holocaust in the 1980s. It was a TV movie called Holocaust. There was a character in that movie, a Nazi Lieutenant, let's call him. When he starts out, it seems like he hardly knows what a Jew is. He couldn't care less. He is concerned with one thing. He is concerned with advancing. His wife also wants him to advance. A new opportunity develops in relation to the Jewish question. To advance in relation to the Jewish question, he must undertake certain roles. |
I do not believe that he can be called innocent when his hands turn bloody as he participates in the Holocaust. But I do believe that we need to understand that he gets into it, not because he hates Jews, not because he is out to kill them, but because he is out to get a better job and get a better promotion. It serves him opportunistically and that that's another major reason for thousands of people participating in genocides and denials of genocide. Yes, for the research grants directly and indirectly. Yes, for the promotions, yes, for the good that it does them in different kinds of ways. |
"Free" speech
Now we have a surprising type of denial based on the principle of free speech. I am a true believer in free speech, which is one of the most precious political gifts possibly in human society; an inviolate principle that the truth will win out. But you have to be very careful because there are too many situations where villains take over free speech and then there's no freedom after they've taken over. And I believe they have to be stopped before they take over. |
There's a brilliant Jewish professor by the name of Noam Chomsky. His father was a marvelous Hebrew educator, his mother was a Hebrew educator. |
Chomsky, whose brilliant work is as deserving of celebration in his field of linguistics as can be, and in addition is a very serious political philosopher, wrote an introduction to a book by a French professor, Faurisson, 20 years ago. This Faurisson is an out-and-out denier of the Holocaust. By writing the introduction, Chomsky facilitated his book. Chomsky is reported to have said he never read the book, that he simply wanted to make the point that everyone has a right to say whatever they want. |
I deeply disagree. I won't call Chomsky a denier of the Holocaust like David Irving, like Faurisson. I will call him somebody who is a denier of the Holocaust by engaging in a form of 'innocent' denial. 'Innocent' in quotes. Because of his love for free speech, which I deeply appreciate, and the extreme to which he takes that principle, rather than putting it in a context--I think all principles have to be contextualized and limited, because I know of nothing that stands up to totality and survives without being balanced and anchored in some context of definition and limitation--Chomsky goes all the way to defend the right of an open-and-shut denier of the Holocaust. |
I think we have to know whom we're fighting. I think we have to be very careful with the category of free speech because some of the vicious deniers will try to hide under this concept that only bringing the other side to the table when they're really not interested in free speech and they're really not innocent. I think we have to learn, like good clinicians, to know what the nature of the denier is. |
'Definitionalism'
For a long time the definition of genocide required that the victim people were another people and not the perpetrator's own people, so that when you talked about Cambodia, was it genocide? No, "because the Cambodians killed their own people." "Oh," said the scholar, "we can prove that they killed a Muslim people called the Cham and they killed the priesthood, a defined group which sort of has extra territorial meaning because they are not just Cambodians, they are priests. Therefore, at least in those two events, they committed genocide." |
For a long time, scholars said what happened in the Soviet Union was not genocide. Why? Because they killed their own citizens. Incidentally, do you know how many Soviets were killed genocidally? According to the brilliant researcher R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii, 54 million were killed by the Soviets. |
Was it genocide if every last one of them was a citizen of the Soviet Union? I have no question that any mass killing of any group of people, citizens or not citizens, our people or other people, is genocide. |
Nationalistic hubris
My own people, to my regret, have been responsible for a good deal of it, ignoring genocides other than the Holocaust, as if recognizing other genocides would take away from the validity or significance of the Holocaust. Because of our legitimate concern about what happened to our people, which is as kosher as it always is for every victim people, too many Jews took the position that the Holocaust was the only genocide. Too many others took the position the Holocaust was the worst genocide. I don't know what the worst genocide is. It seems to me that every genocide is the worst genocide. |
Do I want to study the distinctive features in each genocide? Yes. Do I want to classify genocide according to the characteristics that are present in this one, in that one, and the similarities and the differences between them? Yes. Do we want objective scholarship? Yes. Do we want to set genocides up hierarchically and say this one is worse and this one is least? Absolutely not. That includes the numbers. I don't have to make the genocide of the Soviets worse than the genocide of the Rwandans, because there it was 54 million and in Rwanda it was--the numbers are not clear--a million, or two million. |
I don't have to compare on number levels. The tragedy, the insanity, the ugliness is the same in each case. |
Human shallowness
There was a conference about genocide at a college near Boston years ago that was sponsored by the Armenian community. To lead us to dinner, there were signs--you know how signs look in colleges: Nice stencils that are posted on the wall. The signs read, "This Way to Genocide Banquet." |
Here are some statements overheard by tourists visiting Auschwitz as reported in a newsletter for genocide scholars recently: |
Tour Guide: "Folks, it is noon. Before starting the tour, I advise you to have lunch. You'll enjoy the tour better on a full stomach." |
Another Tour Guide: "We have reached the midpoint of our tour. We'll take a rest stop here before visiting the camp's latrine. While you wait you can visit the souvenir store next door." |
One American to another tourist: "Are you Jewish? You don't look it. Take my picture please. Gees, it's hot. I should have worn a T-shirt. Thanks, man." |
Or another tourist child: "Hey ma, come over here and see all those shoes. That's some collection." |
Celebrating life
I'll give you the serious side to it. There were years when I taught courses in genocide to undergraduates and I would tell the students the first day that during the course you are going to have terrible moments where your heart's going to break, where you are going to cry, where you are going to feel overwhelmed, tormented, about being a human being and yet, some of those very days, sometime that same night, you are suddenly going to get so hungry that you are going to want to have the best steak in Tel Aviv (in those days it was a big joke, because there were no good steaks in Tel Aviv.) You are going to want to eat well. You are going to want to see your boyfriend or girlfriend. You are going to want to kiss and make love. Then you are going to think to yourself, how can I do this when I just saw and felt what I did about the victims today, and I your teacher want to tell you, do it. |
It's fine to move from our concern about genocide to celebrating life and participating in life, because that's what we are fighting for. We are fighting for all people to live. The art is in the transitions. Transition honorably to celebrate your life, and enjoy yourself, and then come back to care and fight genocide, and move back and forth, and back and forth. |
Fighting genocide denial
These are comments about fighting genocide denial, and I want to take a quotation from Erich Fromm, shortly before his death: If you begin your resistance to a Hitler only after he has won his victory, then you've lost before you've even begun. For to offer resistance, you have to have an inner core of conviction. Anybody who takes this path will learn to resist not only the great tyrannies like Hitler's, but also the small tyrannies, the creeping tyrannies of bureaucratization and alienation in everyday life. |
"If you begin your resistance to a Hitler only after he has won his victory, then you've lost before you've even begun. For to offer resistance, you have to have an inner core of conviction. Anybody who takes this path will learn to resist not only the great tyrannies like Hitler's, but also the small tyrannies, the creeping tyrannies of bureaucratization and alienation in everyday life." |
I am again reminded of what Pastor Niemoller said, which thrills me every time I make a connection with it. I went to see the cell in the concentration camp where Niemoller was held by the Nazis. You know this text, and it deserves to be repeated over and over: "First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me." |
Now, I'm going to conclude with a personal statement about denial which I prepared for a conference in Vienna a few years ago. It's a position statement about the denial of any genocide. It's brief and it sums up what I want to say: |
I am deeply against denial of any, every and all mass murders that have been documented or recorded by bona fide survivors, travelers, reporters and journalists, diplomats or historians. I am firmly against exclusion of any event from definition as a crime of genocide in Lemkin's generic sense of mass murder in part or whole. |
There is room and indeed necessity for differential sub-classifications in science and law of different types of genocide, such as intentional genocide, genocide on a religious basis, genocide in the course of colonization, genocidal murder in the course of war, ecological genocide and more. |
But there is no room to deny any genocidal mass murder from constituting genocide. I am firmly against ranking as greater or lesser the tragedy or moral significance of any genocidal mass murder. I am firmly against over-involvement in crimes against my own people or to any specific people at the exclusion of or in competition with or in lack of profound sadness and outrage at the genocide of any other people. |
I am firmly against scholarship of genocide that is obsessively intellectualizing without moral centering or that is imperialistically self-aggrandizing, sarcastic or humiliating, or minimizing of the identity and significance of any other people. |
Finally, I am firmly against any remarks in the course of the study of genocide, that are patronizing, irreverent or insulting of any collective group or people including remarks about the perpetrators as a foredoomed collective, without any good people who were exceptions to the evil committed by their people and without potential for a greater humanity in that people's future evolution. |
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