The Jewish Telegraph Agency reports that a Holocaust education bill (Senate bill 2651 and Congressional H.R. 4604) sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center is making its way through Congress. The bill provides $2 million in cash grants and is intended to be used for education in 9 states with requirements to teach about the systematic murder of 6 million Jews in Nazi Germany. Only this group of genocide victims is mentioned in the bill. I’m sure, with a topic so untouchable, a price tag so cheap, and political advantages so great, the bill will be passed without a single objection.
But here’s what’s wrong with it.
Before the Nazi’s Final Solution there was the Armenian genocide which destroyed 1.5 million human lives, the Rape of Nanking in which 300,000 were killed, and many others – including the murder of approximately 12 million Native Americans between 1500 and 1900.
In our own lifetimes we have seen genocides in Rwanda, which killed almost one million, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where almost a quarter of a million perished. Unimaginable mass-murder motivated by politics has been an even greater feature of the Twentieth Century. Mengistu killed millions in Ethiopia, then there was Pol Pot’s murder of 1.7 million, Stalin’s purges and forced collectivization which killed over 10 million, Kim Il Sung’s 1.6 million concentration camp victims, and Mao’s cultural revolution, which was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.
And even the Nazi atrocities were not limited to 6,000,000 Jews. Hannah Arendt in “Eichmann in Jerusalem” makes the case that all Poles were “next” on the Nazi’s list of extermination victims. Besides homosexuals, gypsies, Communists, and other enemies of the state, the Nazis actually ended up extinguishing over 10 million human souls. Timothy Snyder’s article in the New York Review of Books provides a startling account of the much greater scope of Nazi genocide.
The grand total for our century is well over 120 million victims of sinat chinam, the Jewish word for baseless hatred.
To memorialize only this one group is immoral. And not only does the bill trivialize genocide, which is manifestly greater than the bill’s scope, it will only serve political purposes for the constituency that promoted it and will do nothing to actually combat the human urge to hate or destroy the “other.”
Years ago I read an essay by Theodor Adorno entitled “Erziehung nach Auschwitz” (Education after Auschwitz). In it Adorno warns of the relapse into barbarism and cautions that the most important way to prevent this relapse is by looking at root causes: > One speaks of the threat of a relapse into barbarism. But it is not a threat – Auschwitz was this relapse, and barbarism continues as long as the fundamental conditions that favored that relapse continue largely unchanged. That is the whole horror.
Adorno also warns about creating saccharine caricatures of the victims, of nostalgic images of a world destroyed. Instead, Adorno wants us to scrutinize society itself and – specifically – how we raise our children: > I also do not believe that enlightenment about the positive qualities possessed by persecuted minorities would be of much use. The roots must be sought in the persecutors, not in the victims who are murdered under the paltriest of pretenses. What is necessary is what I once in this respect called the turn to the subject. One must come to know the mechanisms that render people capable of such deeds, must reveal these mechanisms to them, and strive, by awakening a general awareness of those mechanisms, to prevent people from becoming so again. > > It is not the victims who are guilty, not even in the sophistic and caricatured sense in which still today many like to construe it. Only those who unreflectingly vented their hate and aggression upon them are guilty. One must labor against this lack of reflection, must dissuade people from striking outward without reflecting upon themselves. The only education that has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection. But since according to the findings of depth psychology, all personalities, even those who commit atrocities in later life, are formed in early childhood, education seeking to prevent the repetition must concentrate upon early childhood.
In other words, stopping baseless hatred requires a totally different approach than using grant money to produce materials that will certainly “explain” the need for a Jewish state. It’s a more difficult process of a society looking at itself and its institutions.
Finally, Adorno doesn’t let the “peaceful” superpower off the hook: > Furthermore, one cannot dismiss the thought that the invention of the atomic bomb, which can obliterate hundreds of thousands of people literally in one blow, belongs in the same historical context as genocide.
The cost of self-reflection and coming up short in one’s own estimation is probably what will actually keep modern society from following Adorno’s advice. $2 million for slick Zionist brochures is a bargain in comparison.
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