Germans of Jewish descent protest faked Armenian genocide

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Part 3

The Soviet "collectivization" of the 1930s, in which millions of people were deliberately starved to death as a matter of developmental economic policy, is depicted as being "arbitrary" rather than "targeted [on] a particular group.""' This will undoubtedly come as a great surprise and comfort to the Ukrainians who have seen themselves as having been very much targeted by the Soviets, about five of the seven million estimated deaths by starvation during the winter of 1931-32 alone having accrued from their ranks." It will likely prove even more startling to the Kazakhs, who were totally obliterated.113 And, since "no citizen of the Soviet Union assumed that deportation and death were inevitable consequences of his or her ethnic origins," no legitimate comparison of Stalinist "terror" to the Holocaust is possible. To suggest otherwise, much less to argue the point, is to become 'David Duke without his robes" or, at best, guilty of Ilan unconscious reflection of anti-Semitic attitudes."

Such historical misrepresentations of other peoples' suffering aside, the essential claim to uniqueness for the Holocaust put forth by Lipstadt and those sharing her view, is lodged in a double fallacy concerning the experience of their own. The first half of this duality is the assertion that, under the nazis, "every single one of millions of targeted Jews was to be murdered. Eradication was to be total (emphasis in the original) ." This was true, according to senior Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, not just with respect to German or even European Jewry, but worldwide, because nazism set out in a "pseudo-religious" and "pseudo-messianic" fashion to extirpate Jews an a "global, universal, even cosmic" scale (emphasis in the original) .17 As Cornell University professor Steven T. Katz frames things, "the Nazi racial imperative [was] that all Jews must die, and that they must die here and now." And, Bauer concludes elsewhere, "total physical annihilation ... is what happened to the Jews (emphasis added)."119

These characterizations of nazi intent and its impact upon its victims couples readily to the second part of the dualism: nothing meeting this description of the Holocaust has ever happened to anyone else, anywhere, at any time. "To date," says Bauer, "this has happened once, to the Jews under Nazism."90 "The fate of the Jews under National Socialism was [therefore] unique," historian Lucy Dawidowicz continues.91 This is because, as Michael Man-us puts it his book, The Holocaust in History, in cases like that of the Armenians, the "killing was far from universal.1192 Or, as Yehuda Bauer is wont to wrap things up, in every other recorded instance of wholesale and systematic population eradication, "the destruction was not complete.1193
The problem is that neither half of this tidy whole is true. Rhetoric notwithstanding, there is no evidence at all that any nazi leader, Hitler included, ever manifested a serious belief that it would actually be possible to liquidate every Jew on the planet .94 Indeed, there is considerable ambiguity in the record as to whether the total physical annihilation of European Jewry itself was actually a fixed policy objectives What is revealed instead is a rather erratic and contradictory hodgepodge of anti-Jewish policies which, as late as mid-1944, included an apparently genuine offer by the SS to trade a million Jews to the Western allies in exchange for 10,000 trucks to be used Germany's war against the Soviets.15 Contrary to Bauer's irrational contention of a "cosmic" and unparalleled total extermination, approximately two-thirds of the global Jewish population survived the Holocaust, as did about a third of the Jews of Europe.16

This in no way diminishes nazi culpability. There can be no question but that nazism's program for creating a judenrein lebensraum (Jew-free living space) for "Aryans" entailed a substantial reduction in the size of the European Jewish population, thoroughgoing dislocation/expulsion of survivors, and a virtually total elimination of Jewish cultural existence within the German sphere of influence. Nor can there be any serious question as to whether the nazis were willing in the end to kill every Jew who came within their grasp, if that's what was required to achieve the goal. All of this, beyond doubt, qualifies as genocide," but it is a far cry from the uniquely totalizing and obsessive drive to achieve a complete biological liquidation of Jewry attributed to the Holocaust by "scholars" like Yehuda Bauer, Steven Katz and Deborah Lipstadt.

Stripped of the veneer of falsehood and invention with which such propagandists have larded it, the experience of the Jewish people under nazism is revealed as being unique only in the sense that all such phenomena exhibit ur-dque characteristics. Genocide, as the nazis practiced it, was never something suffered exclusively by Jews, nor were the nazis singularly guilty of its practice." In attempting to make it appear otherwise-and thus to claim the privileged status attending and "unparalleled" victimization peddled as being transcendently their own ("accumulating moral capital," as exclusivist Edward Alexander has unabashedly put it) proponents of uniqueness have engaged in holocaust denial on the grand scale, not only with respect to the Armenians, Ukrainians and Cambodians, but as regards scores of other instances of genocide, both historical and contemporary.
By doing so, they have contributed, heavily and often with an altogether squalid enthusiasm, to the invisibility of the victims of this hideous multiplicity of processes in exactly the same way the Jewish victims of nazism have often been rendered invisible even by those whose work falls well short of outright Holocaust denial."' To this extent, Lipstadt and her colleagues have greatly surpassed anything attempted by Rassinier and his ilk. Those who would deny the Holocaust, after all, focus their distortions upon one target. Those who deny all holocausts other than that of the Jews have the same effect upon many. Certainly, the latter is not an ethical or moral posture superior to the former.

Reclaiming the Invisible Victims
The costs of these systematic assaults on truth and memory by those who argue the uniqueness of Jewish victimization have often been high for those whose suffering is correspondingly downgraded or shunted into historical oblivion. This concerns not only the victims of the many genocides occurring outside the framework of nazism, but non-Jews targeted for elimination within the Holocaust itself. Consider, for example, the example of the Sinti and Roma peoples (Gypsies, also called "Romani"), whom Lipstadt doesn't deign to accord so much as mention in her book- Her omission is no doubt due to an across-the-board and steadfast refusal of the Jewish scholarly, social and political establishments over the past fifty years to even admit the Gypsies were part of the Holocaust, a circumstance manifested most strikingly in their virtual exclusion from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

In their zeal to prevent what they call a "dilution" or "de-judaization" of the Holocaust, Jewish exclusivists have habitually employed every device known to deniers to depict the Parramjos (as the Holocaust is known in the Romani language; the Hebrew equivalent is Sho'ah) as having been something "fundamentally different" from the Holocaust itself. The first technique has been to consistently minimize Gypsy fatalities. Lucy Dawidowicz, for instance, when she mentions them at all, is prone to repeating the standard mythology that, "of about one million Gypsies in the countries that fell under German control, nearly a quarter of them were murdered." The point being made is that, while Gypsy suffering was no doubt "unendurable," it was proportionately far less than that of the Jews."
Actually, as more accurate-or honest-demographic studies reveal, the Gypsy population of German-occupied Europe likely came to somewhere around two minion in 1939. Of these, it was known at least thirty years ago that between 500,000 and 750,000 died in camps such as Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Bergen-Belsen, Belzec, Chehmo, Majdanek, Sobib6r and Auschwitz. More recent research shows that there have been as many as a million more Gypsies exterminated when the tolls taken by the Einsatzgruppen, antipartisan operations in Eastern Europe and actions by nazi satellite forces are factored in. One reason for this ambiguity in terms of how many Gypsies died at the hands of the nazis, leaving aside the gross undercounting of their initial population, is that their executioners not infrequently tallied their dead in with the numbers of Jews killed (thus somewhat inflating estimations of the Jewish count while diminishing that of the Sinti and Roma). In sum, it is plain that the proportional loss of the Gypsies during the Holocaust was at least as great as that of the Jews, and quite probably greater.

Be that as it may, exclusivists still contend that the Gypsies stand apart from the Holocaust because, unlike the Jews, they were "not marked for complete annihilation.""' According to Richard Breitman, "The Nazis are not known to have spoken of the Final Solution of the Polish problem or the gypsy problem." Or, as Yehuda Bauer had the audacity to put it in his three-page entry on "Gypsies" in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust--that's all the space the Sinti and Roma are accorded in this 2,000 page work, the editor of which lacked the decency even to have a Gypsy write the material filling it- "[The] fate of the Gypsies was in line with Nazi thought as a whole; Gypsies were not Jews, and therefore there was no need to kill them all.

Keeping in n-mind the likelihood that there was always a less than perfect mesh between the rhetoric and realities of nazi exterminations in all cases, including that of the Jews, the distinctions drawn here bear scrutiny. As we shall see with respect to the Poles, such claims are of dubious validity. As concerns the Gypsies, they amount to a boldfaced lie. This is readily evidenced by Himmler’s "Decree for Basic Regulations to Resolve the Gypsy Question as Required by the Nature of Race" of December 8, 1938, which initiated preparations for the Oicomplete extermination of the Sinti and Roma (emphasis added)." Shortly after this, in February 1939, a brief was circulated by Johannes Behrendt of the nazi Office of Racial Hygiene in which it was stated that "all Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination. The aim should be the elimination without hesitation of this defective population.""' Hitler himself is reported to have verbally ordered "the liquidation of all Jews, gypsies and communist political functionaries in the entire Soviet Union" as early as June 1940. A year later, Obergruppenfiihrer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office, followed up by instructing his Einsatzcommandos to "kill all Jews, Gypsies and mental patients" in the conquered areas of the East.

Heydrich, who had been entrusted with the "final solution of the Jewish question" on 31st July 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the USSR, also included the Gypsies in his "final solution... The senior SS officer and Chief of Police for the East, Dr. Landgraf, in Riga, informed Rosenberg's Reich Commissioner for the East, Lohse, of the inclusion of the Gypsies in-the "final solution." Thereupon, Lohse gave the order, on 24th December 1941, that the Gypsies "should be given the same treatment as the Jews."

At about the same time, "Adolf Eichmann made the recommendation that the 'Gypsy Question' be solved simultaneously with the 'Jewish Question'... Himmler signed the order dispatching Germany's Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz on 16 December 1942. The 'Final Solution' of 'Gypsy Question' had begun" at virtually the same moment it can be said to have really gotten underway for the Jews."' Indeed, Gypsies were automatically subject to whatever policies applied to Jews during the entire period of the Final Solution, pursuant to a directive issued by Himmler on December 24,1941 (i.e., four months prior to the Wannsee Conference which set the full-fledged extermination program in motion). Hence, there is no defensible way the fate of the Gypsies can be distinguished from that of the Jews.

One of the more disgusting means by which Jewish exclusivists have nonetheless attempted to do so, however, concerns their verbatim regurgitation of the nazi fable that, again contra the Jews, Gypsies were killed en mass, not on specifically racial grounds, but because as a group they were "asocials" (criminals) . And, as if this blatantly racist derogation weren't bad enough, the Rabbi Seymour Siegel, a former professor of ethics at the Jewish Theological Seminary and at the time executive director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, compounded the affront by using the pages of the Washington Post to publicly cast doubt as to whether Gypsies can even make a legitimate claim to comprising a distinct people.

Predictably, Yehuda Bauer, no stranger to self-contradiction as he thrashes about, playing all ends against the middle in his interminable effort to "prove beyond all shadow of doubt" the uniqueness of Jewish suffering, presumes to have the last word not once, but twice, and in his usual mutually exclusive fashion. First, completely ignoring the 1935 Nuremburg Laws, which defined Gypsies in precisely the same racial terms as Jews, he baldly states that, "the Gypsies were not murdered for racial reasons, but as so-called asocials ... nor was their destruction complete." Then, barely two pages later, he reverses field entirely, arguing that the Sinti and Romani were privileged over Jews and were thus separate from the "true" Holocaust-because a tiny category of "racially safe" Gypsies were temporarily exempted from death. Besides trying to have it both ways, it is as if this leading champion of exclusivism were unaware of the roughly 6,000 Karait Jews who were permanently spared in accordance with nazism's bizarre racial logic.
To be fair, there are a few differences between the Jewish and Gypsy experiences under nazism. For instance, the Sinti and Roma have a noticeably better genetic claim to being "racially distinct" than do the Ashkenazic Jews of Europe. One upshot was that the racial classification of Gypsies was much more stringent and rigidly adhered to than that pertaining to Jews. By 1938, if any two of an individual's eight great-grandparents were proven to be Gypsy "by blood," even in part, he or she was formally categorized as such. This is twice as strict as the criteria used by the nazis to define Jewishness. Had the standards of "racial identity" applied to Jews been employed with regard to the Sinti and Roma, nine-tenths of Germany's 1939 Gypsy population would have survived the Holocaust.

All during the 1930s, while Gypsies as well as Jews were subjected to increasingly draconian racial oppression, first in Germany, then in Austria and Czechoslovakia, a certain amount of international outrage was expressed in behalf of the Jews. Foreign diplomatic and business pressure was exerted, resulting in an at least partial and transient alleviation in Jewish circumstances, and facilitating Jewish emigration to a degree (150,000 left by 1938). From then until the collapse of the Third Reich, the nazis displayed a periodic willingness to broker Jewish lives for a variety of reasons, and diplomats like Sweden's Count Folke Bernadotte made efforts to affect their rescue. None of this applies to the Sinti and Roma.

The Western democracies have been harshly-and properly-criticized for their failure to intervene more forcefully to prevent the genocide of the Jews, even to the extent of allowing greater non Jewish refugees to find sanctuary within their borders. The fact is, however, that nothing at all was done to save the Gypsies from their identical fate, and in this connection international Jewish organizations have no better record than do the governments of the United States, Great Britain and Canada. To the contrary, it was arguably the Jewish organizations themselves which served as the vanguard in obscuring what was happening to the Gypsies even as it happened, a posture they've never abandoned. As researcher Ian Hanxxxx describes the results: "It is an eerie and disheartening feeling to pick [reference books like Encyclopedia of the Third Reich] and find the attempted genocide of one's people written completely out of the historical record. Perhaps worse, in the English-language translation of at least one book, that by Lujan Dobroszycki of The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, the entire reference to the liquidation of the gypsy camp there (entry number 22 for April 29 and 20, 1942, in the original work) has been deleted deliberately. I have been told, but have not yet verified, that translations of other works on the Holocaust have also had entries on the Roma and Sinti removed. Furthermore, I do not want to read references to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the national press and learn only that it is a monument to "the plight of European Jews," as the New York Times-- told its readers on December 23, 1993. I want to be able to watch epics such as Schindler’s List and learn that Gypsies were a central part of the Holocaust, too; or other films, such as Escape from Sobib6r, a Polish camp where, according to Kommandant Franz Stangl in his memoirs, thousands of Roma and Sinti were murdered, and not hear the word "Gypsy" except once, and then only as the name of somebody's dog.

Or, to take an even more poignant another example: National Public Radio (NPR) in Washington, DC, covered extensively the fiftieth anniversary of Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 26, 199t, but Gypsies were never once mentioned', despite being well represented at the commemoration. In its closing report on NPR's "Weekend Edition" on January 28; Michael Goldfarb described how "candles were-placed along the tracks that delivered Jews and Poles to their death." But it was little wonder the Gypsies were-n't mentioned; they were not allowed to participate in the candle ceremony. An article -on the Auschwitz commemoration that appeared not the C.S. press) included a group of Roma staring mournfully reading 'Colci-shouldered: "Gypsies, whose ancestors were to watch the ceremony from outside the compound." In a speech said that the Jewish people "were singled out for destruction during the Holocaust."

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Part 4

The attitudes underlying such gestures are manifested, not merely in Jewish exclusivism's sustained and concerted effort to expunge the Parrajmo from history, but, more concretely, through its ongoing silence concerning the present resurgence of nazi-like antigypsyism in Europe. In 1992, the government of the newly-unified German Republic negotiated a deal in which it paid more than a hundred million deutschmarks to Romania-notoriously hostile to Gypsies--in exchange for that cashpoor country's acceptance of the bulk of Germany's Sinti/Roma population (a smaller side deal is being arranged with Poland to receive the rest). Summary deportations began during the fall of 1993, with more than 20,000 people expelled to date, for no other reason than that they are Gypsies. Their reception upon arrival? A December 1993 news story sums it up very well.

An orgy of mob lynching and house-bun-dng with police collaboration has turned into something more sinister for- Roma-m'a's hated Gypsies: the beginnings of a nationwide campaign. of terror launch led by groups modeling themselves on the Ku Klux Klan... "We are many, and very determined. We % ill skin-the Gypsies soon. We will take their eyeballs out, smash their teeth, and cut off their noses. The first will be hanged."

The German government had every reason to know this would be the case well before it began deportations. The depth and virulence of Romania's antigypsy sentiment was hardly an historical mystery. Moreover, a leader of the Romanian fascist movement, directly descended from the Arrow Cross formations which avidly embraced nazi racial policies during World War II, had openly announced what would happen nearly six months earlier: "Our war against the Gypsies will start in the fall. Until them, preparations will be made to obtain arms; first we are going to acquire chemical sprays. We will not spare minors either."

No accurate count of how many Gypsies have been killed, tortured, maimed or otherwise physically abused in Romania is presently available (unconfirmed reports run into the hundreds). What is known is that there has been a veritable news blackout m the topic, and that reaction from those elements of the Jewish establishment which profess to serve as the "world's conscience" on such matters has been tepid at best. No serious protest arose from that quarter, not even when Romani leaders, hoping to avoid what they knew was in store, took a large delegation of their people during the spring of 1993 to seek sanctuary in the Neuenganune concentration camp where their fathers and mothers were murdered a generation earlier. Certainly, no Jewish human rights activists came forth to stand with them as an act of solidarity.

As usual, it was Yehuda Bauer who produced what was perhaps the best articulation of exclusivist sentiment on the matter. As early as 1990, he was publicly complaining that such desperate attempts by Gypsies to end the condition of invisibility he himself had been so instrumental in imposing upon them was coming into "competition" with the kind of undeviating focus on "radical anti-Semitism" he'd spent his life trying to engender. No better illustration of what the distinguished Princeton historian of the Holocaust Amo J. Mayer has described as the "exaggerated self-centeredness" of Jewish exclusivism and its "egregious forgetting of the larger whole and all of the other victims" can be imagined.

Recovering the Holocaust
There should be no need to go into such detail in rejoining exclusivist denials of the genocides perpetrated against Slavic peoples within the overall framework of the Holocaust. However, a tracing of the general contours seems appropriate, beginning with the familiar assertion that "they were treated differently from the Jews, and none were marked out for total annihilation." As Lucy Dawidowicz puts it, "It has been said that the Germans ... planned to exterminate the Poles and Russians on racial grounds since, according to Hitler's racial doctrine, Slavs were believed to be subhumans (Untermenschen). But no evidence exists that a plan to murder the Slavs was ever contemplated or developed."

There is both a grain of truth and a bucketful of falsity imbedded in these statements. In other words, it is true that Slavs were not named in the Endlosung (Final Solution) sketched out for Gypsies and Jews during the 1942 Wannsee Conference. This clearly suggests that the last two groups were given a certain priority in terms of the completion of their "special handling," but it is not at all to say that Slavs weren't "marked out" to suffer essentially the same fate in the end. Presumably, the final phases of the nazis' antislavic campaigns) would have gotten underway once those directed against the much smaller Jewish and Gypsy populations had been wrapped Up. In any event, the idea that "no plan [for Slavic extermination] was ever contemplated or developed" is quite simply false.

As is abundantly documented, the Hitlerian vision of lebensraumpolitik-the conquest of vast expanses of Slavic territory in eastern Europe for "resettlement" by a tremendously enlarged Germanic population-entailed a carefully calculated policy of eliminating resident Slavs. In the USSR alone, this planned "depopulation" was expressly designed to reduce those’ within the intended area of German colonization from about 75 million to no more than thirty million. This sizable "residue" was to be maintained for an unspecified period to serve as an expendable slave labor pool to build the infrastructure required to support what the nazis deemed "Aryan" living standards.150 The 45 million human beings constituting the difference between the existing population and its projected diminishment were to be dispensed with through a combination of massive expulsion-"drive them eastward"-and a variety of killing programs."'

Plans for more westerly Slavic peoples like the Poles, Slovenes and Serbs were even worse (or at any rate set on a faster track). As early as Mein Kampf, Hitler unambiguously announced that they, like the Jews, were to be entirely exterminated. For the Poles at least, this was to be accomplished in a series of stages which seems likely to have been intended as a model for similarly phased eradication of the Ukrainians and other peoples to the east: immediately upon conquest, the Poles would be "decapitated" (i.e., their social, political and intellectual leadership would be annihilated, en toto); second, the mass of the population would be physically relocated in whatever configuration best served the interests of the German economy; third, the Poles would be placed on starvation rations and worked to death.153 Whether or not there would have been a fourth and "final" phase a la Auschwitz is irrelevant, since the results, both practical and intended, are identical.

Unlike the Gypsies and Jews, the Slavs were mostly organized in a way lending itself to military resistance.114 Consequently, planning for their decimation necessarily factored in attrition through military confrontational Insofar as German methods in the East, in sharp contrast to those employed against nonslavic western opponents, always devolved upon the concept of "a war of annihilation," the extraordinarily high death rates suffered by Soviet prisoners of war are not really separable from the extermination plan as a whole. Similarly, according to SS Gruppenf Wuer Eric von dern Bach-Zelewski, who commanded antipartisan operations in eastern Europe, the manner in which such warfare was waged was consciously aimed not just a t suppressing guerrilla activities, but to help "achieve Himmler's goal of reducing the Slavic population to 30 million."

Available evidence suggests that the principle victims in the partisan-Nazi confrontations were the civilian population. Thus, for example, when 9,902 partisans were killed or executed between August and November 1942, at the same time the Germans executed 14,257 civilians whom they suspected of aiding the partisans... A Polish scholar, Ryszard Torzecki, views the mass extern-d -nation of civilian population as the greatest drama of the Ukraine during World War II. According to him there were 250 sites of mass extermination of Ukrainian people-together with detention camps in which thousands of people perished .. En a great many cases, mass murder was related to partisan warfare. H. Kuhnrich estimated that as a result of the antipartisan war 5,909,225 people were killed. Since the Ukraine was the center of partisan activity, if was there that the greatest losses oc curred. According to Kuhnrich some 4.5 million people, both fighters and civilians, lost their lives in the Ukraine, as did 1,409,225 in Byelorussia.

Certainly, these slaughtered civilians should be included in the total of those taken by nazi extermination policies, not labeled as "war deaths." And, if the standard practice of lumping the deaths of Jewish partisan fighters into the total of six million Jews claimed by the Holocaust were applied equally to Slavs, then plainly the bodycount of partisans should be as well. And again, since the Jews killed by Bach-Zelewski's SS men during the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising are rightly included among the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, so too should the masses of civilian Slavs liquidated during the German seizures of cities like Kiev, Kharkov, Sebastopol and Mink be tallied . When the totals of those deliberately worked to death, who died of exposure during the process of being driven eastward under any and all conditions, who were intentionally starved to death, and who perished in epidemics which spread like wildfire because of a calculated nazi policy of denying vaccines, the true dimensions of the genocide of the Slavs begins to emerge.
'Between 1939 and 1945, Poland, the first Slavic nation to fall to the Germans, suffered 6,028,000 nonmilitary deaths, about ?? percent population reduction (three million of the Polish dead were Jews, and another 200,000 or so Gypsies, so the Slavic reduction would come to about fourteen percent). Virtually every member of the Polish intelligentsia was murdered.164 In Yugoslavia, some 1.2 million civilians, or nine percent of the population, were killed between 1941 and 1945 (this is aside from approximately 300,000 military casualties suffered by the Yugoslavs).165 Impacts in other non-Soviet areas of eastern Europe e.g., Slovakia and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia-were less substantial, although nonetheless severe.

The USSR suffered by far the highest number of fatalities. By May 10, 1943, the Germans had taken 5,405,616 Soviet military prisoners; of these, around 3.5 million were starved, frozen, shot, gassed, hanged, killed by unchecked epidemic or simply worked to death. Another five million people were deported to Germany as slave laborers--2.2 million from the Ukraine alone-where an estimated three million died as a result of the intentionally abysmal conditions to which they were subjected.168 By the time the Germans were finally driven completely out of the Ukraine in 1944, its prewar population of almost 42 million had been reduced to 27.4 million, a difference of 14.5 million. Of these, at least seven million were dead.169 overall, the Soviet Union lost, at a minimum, eleven million civilians to nazi extermination measures. The real total may run as high as fifteen million, to which must be added the 3.5 million exterminated prisoners of war, and perhaps as many as a million troops who were simply executed by Wehrmacht and Waffen SS units rather than being taken prisoner in the first place. A gross estimate of the results of nazi genocide against the Slavs thus comes to somewhere between 15.5 and 19.5 million in the USSR, between 19.7 and 23.9 million when the Poles, Slovenes, Serbs and others are added in. As Simon Weisenthal, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, long ago observed, "the Holocaust was not only a matter of the killing of six million Jews. It involved the killing of eleven million people, six million of whom were Jews." Weisenthal spoke on the basis of what was then the best available evidence. Today, some fifty years later, the only correction to be made to his statement lies in the fact that we now know his estimate of eleven million was far too low. The true human costs of nazi genocide came to 26 million or more, six million of whom were Jews, a million or more of whom were Gypsies, and the rest mostly Slavs. Only with these facts clearly in mind can we say have apprehended the full scope of the Holocaust, and that we have thereby positioned ourselves to begin to appreciate its real implications.

Uncovering the Hidden Holocausts
University of Hawaii historian David Stannard has summed up the means by with exclusivists attempt to avert such understanding. "Uniqueness advocates begin by defining genocide (or the Holocaust or the Shoah) in terms of what they already believe to be experiences undergone only by Jews. After much laborious research it is then "discovered"-mirabile dictu--that the Jewish experience was unique. If, however, critics point out after a time that those experiences are not in fact unique, other allegedly unique experiences are invented and proclaimed. If not numbers killed, how about percentage of population destroyed? If not efficiency or method of killing, how about perpetrator intentionality (emphasis in original)?" It is as Stephen Jay Gould has said of another group of intellectual charlatans, "They began with conclusions, peered through their facts, and came back in a circle to the same conclusions." As Stannard has concluded, this is not scholarship, it is sophistry.

To put it another way, as Gould does, it is "advocacy masquerading as objectivity." The connection being made is important insofar as Gould is describing the academic edifice of nineteenth century scientific racism which provided the foundation for the very nazi racial theories under which the Jews of the Holocaust suffered and died. Given that Deborah Lipstadt, Yehuda Bauer, Steven Katz, Lucy Dawidowicz and other exclusivists are of a people which has recently experienced genocide, the natural inclination is to align with them against those like Paul Rassinier, Austin App, Robert Faurisson and Arthur Butz who would absolve the perpetrators. Yet, one cannot.
'One cannot, because it is no better for Lipstadt to "neglect" to mention that the Gypsies were subjected to the same mode of extermination as the Jews-or for Dawidowicz and Bauer to contrive arguments that they weren't-than it is for Rassinier to deliberately minimized the number of Jewish victims of nazism or for Butz to deny the Holocaust altogether. C)ne cannot, because there is nothing more redeeming about Katz's smug dismissal of the applicability of the term "genocide" to any group other than his own than there is about Robert Faurisson's contention that no Jews were ever gassed. One cannot, because Yehuda Bauer's The Holocaust in Historical Perspective, Steven Katz's The Holocaust in Historical Context and Lucy Dawidowicz's The Holocaust and the Historians are really only variations of Arthur Butz's The Hoax of the Twentieth Century written in reverse. All of them, equally, are conscious exercises in the destruction of truth and memory.

Deniers of the Holocaust must, of course, be confronted, exposed for what they are, and driven into the permanent oblivion they so richly deserve. But so too must those who choose to deny holocausts more generally, and who shape their work accordingly. Deborah Lipstadt rightly expresses outrage and concern that Holocaust deniers like Bradley Smith have begun to make inroads on college campuses during the 1990s. She remains absolutely silent, however, about the implications of the fact that she and scores of other holocaust deniers have held professorial positions for decades, increasingly branding anyone challenging their manipulations of logic and evidence an "anti-Semite" or a "neo-Nazi," and frequently positioning themselves to determine who is hired and tenured in the bargain. The situation is little different in principle than if, in the converse, members of the Institute for Historical Review were similarly ensconced (which they are not, and, with the exceptions of App and Harry Elmer Barnes early m, never have been)."

Viewed on balance, then, the holocaust deniers of Jewish exclusivism represent a proportionately greater and more insidious threat to understanding than do the Holocaust deniers of the IHR variety. This is all the more true insofar as the mythology peddled by exclusivists, unlike that put forth by a Faurisson or a Richard Verrall, dovetails perfectly with the long institutionalized denials of genocides in their own histories put forth by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, France, Turkey, Indonesia and many others. Indeed, Lucy Dawidowicz has sweepingly accused those suggesting that the U.S. transatlantic slave trade was genocidal--or, by extension, that U.S. extermination campaigns against American Indians were the same-not only of anti-Semitism but of "a vicious anti-Americanism." She is equally straightforward in her efforts to contain what Robert Jay Lifton and Robert Markusen have called "the genocidal mentality" within the framework of uniquely German characteristics. "Steven Katz and James Axtell, the reigning dean of American historical apologism, have taken to virtually regurgitating one another's distortive polemics without attribution."

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Part 5

Plainly, if we are to recover the meaning of the Holocaust in all its dimensions, according i t the respect to which it is surely due and finding within it the explanatory power it can surely yield, it is vital that we confront, expose and dismiss these "dogmatists who seek to reify and sacralize" it, converting it into a shallow and sanctimonious parody of its own significance." Only in this way can we hope arrive at the "universality" called for by Michael Berenbaum, executive director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, when he suggested that the "Holocaust can become a symbolic orienting event in human history that can prevent recurrence."",' Undoubtedly, this was what the executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, Israel Charny, had in mind when he denounced "the leaders and 'high priests' of different cultures who insist on the uniqueness, primacy, superiority, or greater significance of the specific genocide of their people," elsewhere adding that:
I object very strongly to the efforts to name the genocide of any one people as the single, ultimate event, or as the most important event against which all other tragedies of genocidal mass-death are to be, tested and found wanting... For me, the passion to exclude this or that mass killing from the universe of genocide, as well as the intense competition to establish the exclusive "superiority" or unique form of any one genocide, ends up creating a fetishistic atmosphere in which the masses of 9 bodies that are not to be qualified for the definition of genocide are dumped into a conceptual black hole, where they are forgotten.

In restoring the Gypsies and Slavic peoples to the Holocaust itself, where they've always belonged, we not only exhume them from the black hole into which they've been dumped in their millions by Jewish exclusivism and neo-Nazism alike, we establish ourselves both methodologically and psychologically to remember other things as well. Not only was the Armenian holocaust a "true" genocide, the marked lack of response to it by the Western democracies was used by Adolf Hitler to reassure his cabinet that there would be no undue consequences if Germany were to perpetrate its own genocide(s). Not only were Stalin's policies in the Ukrainians a genuine holocaust, the methods by which it was carried out were surely incorporate into Germany's General plan Ost just a few years later."' Not only was the Spanish policy of conscripting entire native populations into forced labor throughout the Caribbean as well as much of South and Central America holocaustal, it served as a prototype for nazi policies in eastern Europe. Not only were U.S. "clearing" operations directed against the indigenous peoples of North America genocidal in every sense, they unquestionably served as a conceptual/practical mooring to which the whole Hitlerian rendering of lebensraumpolitik was tied.

In every instance, the particularities of these prior genocides-each of them unique unto themselves-serves to inform our understanding of the Holocaust. Reciprocally, the actualities of the Holocaust serve to illuminate the nature of these earlier holocausts. No less does the procedure apply to the manner in which we approach genocides occurring since 1945, those in Katanga, Biafra, Bangladesh, Indochina, Paraguay, Guatemala, Indonesia, Rwanda, Bosnia and on and on.112 Our task is-must be-to fit all the various pieces together in such a way as to obtain at last a comprehension of the whole. There is no other means available to us. We must truly "think of the unthinkable," seriously and without proprietary interest, if ever we are to put an end to the "human cancer" which has spread increasingly throughout our collective organism over the past five centuries.191 To this end, denial in any form is anathema.

[Heat]

Deceptive Linguistic Structures in the Phrase 'The Holocaust'

ROBERT A. HALL, JR.

At present, the phrase the Holocaust is almost universally used to refer to various aspects of the situation in which Jews found themselves under the National Socialist regime from 1933 to 1945, in Germany and occupied territories. In this usage, there are several features of linguistic, graphemic, and scmantic structures which command the belief of the average hearer in the reality of "the Holocaust" (normally quite outside his or her awareness) and at the same time leave its reference confusingly unclear. These features include the meaning of the definite article (reality), the singular number and capitalization (uniqueness), and the effects (confusion and ambiguity) of the reference of this expression.

l. The definite article the is often thought of as an "itsy-bit" word, unstressed and of little or no importance in contrast to words which are fully stressed, such as nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Yet the English definite article has a specific meaning and semantic function of its own. It commands a hearer's or reader s belief in the reality of what is referred to by the noun it modifies, and sets up a tacit presupposition, for the rest of the discourse, that this reality has been established. Consider the following joke, in which someone says: "If the dog would only catch a rabbit, we could have rabbit-pie for dinner - if we had a dog." The humor of this utterance consists in the contradiction between what we are led to believe at the outset of the sentence -- i.e. that the speaker has a really existing dog -- and the information given at the end, namely that he does not have a dog.

In the case of "the Holocaust;" the use of the definite article has a similar effect. Once we speak of "the Holocaust;" the presupposition is set up that we are referring to a reality, so that further discourse on the topic is perforce committed to acceptance of that reality. How could one even query the existence of whatever is referred to by that phrase? Hence "to deny the reality of the Holocaust" has come to be a stock slogan, used against anyone who questions any aspect of what is alleged concerning the experiences of Jews under Nazism, or even (as I know from from personal experience) to report on what others have said. It is as if one were denying the reality of the sun or the moon or the earth.

2. The meaning of the singular number of a noun in English is, of course, that only one member of the phenomena referred to exists or is relevant to the situation. In writing, we emphasize the uniqueness of an object or phenomenon by capitalizing the noun, thus giving it somewhat of the status of a proper name. There are for instance, a number of "water-gaps" in the Pennsylvania mountains, but around Stroudsburg one refers to the Delaware Water-Gap simply as the Water-Gap. Similarly with historical events, such as the Crucifixion. Many thousands of poor wretches died agonizing deaths on crosses, but for Christians, there was only one such object, the Cross, and one such event, the Crucifixion.

In the case of the Holocaust, likewise, use of the singular and capitalization of the noun serve to emphasize to any hearer (and even more so, to any reader) its uniqueness. Various commentators such as Michael A. Hoffman and Joseph Sobran, have been in the vanguard in expressing a growing awareness that the Jewish experience under the Nazis was only one of many such -- no matter how we define it -- that many groups have undergone since ancient times.[ Yet insistence on the uniqueness of "the Holocaust" has led even to such excesses as refusal to countenance the foundation of a Roman Catholic convent at Auschwitz (Oswiecim), because that place is regarded by some as exclusively sacred to the memory of the specifically Jewish victims of "the Holocaust." For the sake of the argument, let us assume for the moment that a given number of non-Jews were martyred there. Why is their suffering be considered less important than that of whatever Jewish victims there may have been? Why should the non-Jews, also, not be commemorated there?

3. The English word holocaust is a borrowing from Late Latin holocaustum "a burnt offering," which was borrowed in its turn from Greek holócauston "something wholly bumt." In addition to these meanings, it has acquired in English the further senses of "complete consumption by fire; complete destruction, esp. of a large number of persons; a great slaughter, a massacre " It is in this last sense that it has come to be used in the phrase the Holocaust, but it has undergone a further extension not justified by its previous history. Its use now covers a wide range of senses, from referring to the presumed mass-execution of Jews in gas chambers or other installations, to denoting the entire experience of all Jews in Germany and in territories occupied by German troops, from the accession of the National Socialist party to power in l933 until the end of the war in 1945. It is thus possible for a person who even questions any given allegation conceming concentration-camps or gas-chambers to be accused of denying that Jews underwent an pcrsecution or suffering at all. This type of unacknowledged shifting of meaning is known as semantic wrenching, and the taking over of a term for such special use is often called word-shanghaiing or word-kidnapping.

Unscrupulous discussants have, by using these linguistic features, induced naive, unsuspecting hearers and readers to believe in the reality and uniqueness of whatever is called the Holocaust, and have at the same time wrenched its meaning and made its reference vague and imprecise. They have thus eliminated objective discussion and replaced it by obfuscation and confusion. In this way, use of the phrase the Holocaust, without further qualification, prejudges the issue. Here, as in so many other instances of propagandistic "Newspeak," we must be on our guard whenever we hear, read, or use this phrase. We must be fully aware of it various and distorted uses, if we are to realize what is happening linguistically and thus avoid being duped.

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Denial Redux

Charles Glass
The London Desk

Who denies genocide? As a rule, the perpetrators and their apologists. The apologists do two things: first, deny the genocide took place; and, then, excuse it. Their strategy imitates that of defense lawyers, who assure the jury that while their client did not commit murder, he had a good excuse. In the Dec. 13 issue I wrote on this page that the British government was appeasing modern Turkey by refusing to acknowledge Ottoman Turkey’s last great crime, the annihilation of half the empire’s Armenian population. The Labor regime joins the ranks of Armenian-holocaust den-
iers this coming Jan. 27, when it honors all the other victims of the 20th century’s genocides.

Representatives of Britain’s tiny Armenian community, a mere 25,000 souls, complained that the BBC was following the government’s lead by excluding their forebears from all television coverage of Holocaust Memorial Day. The BBC’s response was, in its way, more shocking than the government’s position that the only genocides worth commemorating were the Nazis’ of Jews and Roma (Gypsies), the Hutus’ of Tutsis in Rwanda and the Serbs’ of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The BBC admitted in a letter to General-Secretary Misak Ohanian of the Center for Armenian Information and Advice that it had surrendered editorial control to the Home Office. "The BBC," wrote producer Gaby Koppel, "have been invited to produce the official event on behalf of the Home Office, who have retained overall editorial control."

Overall editorial control? The BBC is a state-owned corporation in which, according to its charter, the government is not allowed to interfere. The government puts its placemen in charge: Margaret Thatcher installed as deputy director-general (thus ensuring he would succeed to the top job) the egregious John Birt to sell off many of the BBC’s best assets and corporatize the place; and Tony Blair replaced him with Labor Party donor Greg Dyke to make Auntie, as the BBC is known here, more amenable to the New Labor’s vision of whatever the party has a vision of (like winning the next election). After putting their favorites in charge, governments are not expected to take direct control of anything, especially news. Granting the Home Office editorial control over Holocaust remembrance is a bit like CNN turning over its coverage of the Gulf War and Kosovo to the Pentagon. (In a way, CNN did just that. Unlike the British government and BBC, however, it never admitted the fact.)

This is the first time Britain has sponsored a Holocaust Memorial Day, and it has chosen the odd date of Jan. 27, anniversary of the Red Army’s conquest of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Death Camp, rather than the day in April 1945 when Britain’s own army liberated Belsen. That the whole enterprise was confused is reflected in Tony Blair’s explanation that it is intended to "celebrate our diversity and build a new patriotism that is open to all." What Nazi Germany’s crimes against humanity-specifically against Jews, Roma, Poles, homosexuals and communists-have to do with British diversity is a question best left to New Labor’s ideologues. The point is that, despite all the confusion surrounding this "celebration" (who celebrates mass murder?), the only victims of genocide during the 20th century who are excluded from the program are the Armenians. I suggested last December that the reason for their exclusion was Britain’s unwillingness to offend Turkey, a major market for British arms and a staging area for Anglo-American bombing runs against sanctions-starved Iraqis. The suggestion appeared to annoy another columnist on these pages, Melik Kaylan, who wrote that I "should know better."

Kaylan writes that for me and Edward Said, although I’m not certain why America’s greatest Palestinian intellectual was dragged into this, "the Turks remain unredeemable, a common sentiment in the West." I have never expressed animosity toward the Turks. While I decry their historic massacres of 1.5 million Armenians during the First World War and their filthy war against their Kurdish citizens for the past quarter century, I love Turkey, its people and its culture. In 1990, I published a book, Tribes with Flags (Atlantic Monthly Press-still in print, so please buy it), that was a long lament for the demise of the Ottoman Empire. To compare the architecture of the great Sinan in Istanbul and Damascus to the pathetic European structures that followed under British, French and independent rule is to see that the Middle East was far better under the Ottomans than subsequently. The borders that Britain and France drew across the landscape of the Middle East have scarred the region ever since. Turkey was a great power, whose greatest stain is the crime it has never admitted: genocide against the Armenians.

It sickens me that people still deny it took place. Their more or less successful denial helps us to understand why Israel and the Jewish Diaspora will not let us forget what happened to Jews during World War II. Since Oct. 29, 1923, when Turkey became a republic, the state has systematically denied the organized massacre of the Armenians. Where massacres are acknowledged, the official version was that rebellious Armenians provoked them. One of the more famous cases was the so-called revolt at Van in eastern Turkey in 1915, when the Russians intervened. What Kaylan does not mention is that American missionaries at Van (America was not at war with Turkey) observed that "The Russians cremated nearly 55,000 slain Armenian corpses they found." The missionary Grace Knapp, who lived through the massacre, wrote, "The fact cannot be too strongly emphasized that there was no [Armenian] rebellion." American missionary files record massacres at Akhisar and the long death marches to the desert, where Armenians were burned alive.

History can be denied. People forget. While a defeated Germany admitted its crimes against the Jews, Turkey did not really lose the war. It lost an empire, but the brilliant leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later called Ataturk, Father of the Turks) saved his country from colonization by the Allied Powers. Ataturk’s struggle to keep the Turks free enabled him to deny crimes with which he, who had an honorable record during the World War at Gallipoli and in Syria, was not associated. It is time for Turkey to admit what happened and take its place among the free and open societies of the world. Britain and writers in Western newspapers, meanwhile, should stop conniving in the lie.

[Heat]

Jewish suffering in the Holocaust far from unparalleled.

While much of the world was commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, a young man named Bela Ewald Althans was sentenced by a Berlin court to three and a half years in jail for telling tourists at Auschwitz that the Holocaust was "a giant farce." To many Americans who read about the case, the verdict must have seemed shocking. After all, as recently as 1992, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that placing a burning cross on a black family's front lawn, while perhaps violating local ordinances against arson or criminal damage to property, could not be prosecuted as a hate crime: It was an act of constitutionally protected free expression.

The German court's ruling, however, was not an isolated act. In recent years France, Austria, and Canada also have sent people to prison for publicly asserting that the Holocaust did not happen. All of those countries have passed laws that penalize the propagation of such views, not only because such denial defames the dead, as Elie Wiesel has put it, but also because genocide concealed is genocide likely to recur.

Typically, those who claim that the Holocaust never happened do not deny that Jews died in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. What they maintain is that far fewer Jews died under Nazi rule than commonly believed, and that these Jews were not true victims of genocide-the purposeful annihilation of a group.

It needs to be said, and said plainly, that the factual basis for such claims is less than zero. Holocaust denial rests on a foundation of willful distortion and outright fabrication that is sunk deeply in the mire of anti-Semitism.

But what also needs to be said and said just as plainly-is that the Holocaust is not the only genocide that has ever been carried out. And Holocaust deniers are not the only deniers of genocide among us. Those issues are at the heart of a controversy that erupted in May with the publication of a collection of essays (including one by me) titled Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives in Comparative Genocide (Westview Press).

IN RECENT YEARS, a number of people inside and outside of academe have begun using the same techniques employed by Holocaust deniers to assert their own claim that the agony endured by Jews under the Nazis was-and remains-historically unique. That is, they have attempted to make their case for the incomparability of Jewish torment by denying or trying to minimize the suffering of all other victims of genocide.

The most prominent such project is the multivolume The Holocaust in Historical Context (the first volume was published by Oxford University Press in 1994). Written by the Jewish-studies scholar Steven T. Katz (who also is a contributor to IS the Holocaust Unique?), its sole purpose is to show that all other mass killings in history pale by comparison with the annihilation of Europe's Jews during the Holocaust.

In fact, this claim is a demonstrably false and dangerous myth. Of course, in one way or another, all large-scale historical events are unique. But in terms of the major taxonomies used to analyze genocide, Jewish suffering in the Holocaust is far from unparalleled.

Compared with Jews in the Holocaust, for example, some groups have suffered greater numerical loss of life from genocide. The victims of the Spanish slaughter of the indigenous people of Mesoamerica in the 16th century numbered in the tens of millions. Stalin's deliberate "terror famine" of 1932-33 killed at least seven million Ukrainians. According to the Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg's definitive accounting, the Nazis were responsible for killing 5.1 million Jews-a monstrous amount, but lower than the number destroyed in some other genocides.

Other groups also have suffered greater proportional loss of life from genocide than did the Jews under Hitler. The Nazis killed 60 to 65 per cent of Europe's Jews, compared with the destruction by the Spanish, British, and Americans of 95 per cent or more of numerous ethnically and culturally distinct peoples in North and South America from the 16th through the 19th centuries. To put this proportional difference in perspective, it is worth remembering that a 65-per-cent mortality rate means that one out of every three people survives; a 95per-cent death rate means that only one out of 20 remains alive.

Then there is the question of the speed of killing. Some who argue that the Jewish experience remains unique contend that more Jews were killed by the Nazis "per unit of time" than any other victims of deliberate mass violence. Not only is this criterion questionable-why, after all, should rapid mass killing be any worse than slow but sure destruction?-but it is also factually wrong. Stalin's slaughter of the Ukrainians was much faster than the Nazis' killing of the Jews. And in 1994, the Hutus in Rwanda killed as many as 850,000 Tutsi people in less than three months. This rate of mass murder was far more rapid than the killing during the Holocaust as a whole.

Finally, there is the question of intent. Whatever the claims of the Holocaust deniers, the famous Wannsee Protocol of January 1942, approved by top Nazi leaders, clearly demonstrates their desire to eliminate the Jews of Europe. But the Nazis similarly targeted the Gypsy people of Europe: Indeed, among people of mixed ancestry, Gypsies were far less likely than Jews to be able to escape death.

Among other instances of clear genocidal intent, the first Governor of the State of California openly urged his legislature in 1851 to wage war against the Indians of the region "until the Indian race becomes extinct." Before the decade was over, state troops and mercenaries had destroyed, with $1.5-million of assistance from the U. S. government, more than 60 per cent of California's remaining native people (the Spanish had already killed off 75 per cent of the original population).

Anti-Semitic deniers of the Holocaust also contend that most Jews died from disease or other "indirect" causes, such as starvation, falsely claiming that these deaths should not be listed as genocide. Sadly, writers seeking to establish the uniqueness of the Jewish experience by minimizing the horrors undergone by other victims of genocide now do the same thing. In The Holocaust in Historical Context, for example, Steven Katz describes the destruction of the Western Hemisphere's native peoples as "an unintended tragedy," because many of the deaths resulted from disease.

Of course, in all genocides-including the Holocaust-an enormous proportion of deaths invariably derives from causes other than straightforward killing. For example, according to Raul Hilberg, between June and November of 1942 more than half of the prisoners taken to all German concentration camps died of disease or starvation. Of the two million Jews who died outside the camps during the Holocaust, nearly half succumbed to what Mr. Hilberg describes as "ghettoization and general privation," a category that includes high levels of death from disease.
SURELY no one other than a rabid Holocaust denier would claim that those "indirect" killings were not a part of the Holocaust. In the same way, the massive number of deaths from disease, starvation, exposure, and exhaustion that characteristically are suffered by other victims of genocidal assault cannot morally be separated from the rest.
None of these challenges to the "uniqueness" argument minimizes or denies in any way the horrendous suffering of Jews in the Holocaust. But they do suggest why those who insist on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, when faced with the growing body of information that refutes their claim, increasingly have had to turn to the manipulation, fabrication, and misstatement of fact to advance their argument.

Under scrutiny, a revealing pattern emerges in much of the recent literature that denies the comparability of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide: The advocates of Holocaust uniqueness resort to many of the same assertions used by those who deny that the Holocaust ever occurred. Over and over again, dubious massaging of the data leads one author after another to minimize drastically the death toll in other genocides; to claim that the deaths that did occur during those other "tragedies" were routine wartime casualties or the result of "natural causes" such as disease; to deny evidence of official intent to commit genocide.

But whereas Holocaust deniers are rightly seen as anti-Semitic crackpots, those who say the Holocaust was unique are regarded by many people as the bearers of truth. There are obvious political reasons why.

Contemporary scholarship on the case of Armenian genocide provides a glimpse of these reasons. From 1915 through 1923, between one-half and three-quarters of the Armenians in the collapsing Ottoman Empire-roughly one million to 1.5 million innocent people-were slaughtered by a government that had been taken over by xenophobic nationalists who considered the Armenians a dangerous religious minority.

Although debate continues as to the precise number of Armenians killed, no serious historian today questions the existence of the Armenian genocide. But the Republic of Turkey, which came into being in 1923 as the successor to the Ottoman Empire, officially denies that any such mass killing ever took place.

While it is not unusual for countries to deny the truth about their violent pasts, it might seem odd that Israel enthusiastically supports the Turkish government's position. Just last year, for example, the government of Israel banned from Israeli television a documentary on the Armenian genocide and quashed an effort by the Israeli Education Ministry to introduce the slaughter of the Armenians into highschool curricula. Moreover, on at least two occasions recently, Israeli government officials and Jewish lobbyists in the United States have joined forces with Turkey in blocking U. S. proposals to commemorate the Armenian genocide.

Why would the descendants of those who died in one of the most monstrous genocides in human history be motivated to join in a genocide-denying propaganda effort on behalf of a country that is demonstrably guilty of genocide?

The answer is what the essayist Phillip Lopate calls "extermination pride . . a sort of privileged nation status in the moral honor roll." The Holocaust historian Zygmunt Bauman has noted that Israel uses the Holocaust "as the certificate of its political legitimacy, a safe-conduct pass for its past and future policies, and, above all, as the advance payment for the injustices it might itself commit." Doing so creates the need to play down other genocides. As one proponent of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Edward Alexander, has put it, to describe as genocidal the ghastly agonies suffered by others-the Armenians, for instance-is "to plunder the moral capital" of the Jewish people. It is to "steal the Holocaust. "

In a classic case of quid pro quo, the Turkish government has demonstrated its gratitude for Israel's support in denying the Armenian genocide by declaring its agreement with Israel's claim of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. And in the middle of this cynical and dehumanizing reciprocation stand the pro-uniqueness writers, who have provided Turkey and Israel with their contrived intellectual support.

T0 BE SURE, those who maintain that the Holocaust was unique do not by any means represent the entirety of Jewish scholarship on the subject. On the contrary, dogmatic proponents of uniqueness are something of a cult within the world of genuine scholarship. Israel W. Charny, executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, describes them as self-appointed "high priests." He strongly objects to what he calls their "fetishistic" efforts to "establish the exclusive 'superiority' or unique form of any one genocide."

Yet in the public realm, Jewish suffering has attained what the religion scholar Richard L. Rubenstein calls "religio-mythic" status. Consider what the international outcry would be today, if reports surfaced of a massive deportation of thousands of Jews from Germany to Romania, where they were met with a nationwide campaign of terrorism, violence, and murder. But that is precisely what did happen recently-except the victims were Gypsies. No one has ever bestowed religio-mythic status upon their torment, and they have no political chips to play in the games of international power politics. Thus, no outcry has been heard over the brutality and persecution they continue to face throughout Europe.

Proponents of the uniqueness of the Holocaust not only do damage to historical truth, but in their determination to belittle all genocides other than the Holocaust, they are, in fact, accomplices in the efforts of numerous governments to conceal and deny their own pasts or to obscure current campaigns of mass violence, such as those in Guatemala (where more than 100,000 people have been slaughtered by the government in recent years) and in East Timor (where one-third of the indigenous population has been wiped out). What is true for the Jews is true for others, as well: Genocide concealed is genocide likely to recur.

This is not an academic game. Real people's lives are at stake. Horrendous as Jewish suffering in the Holocaust was, it is essential that false claims for its uniqueness not be permitted to denigrate the memory of other genocides-or to impede the desperately needed expansion of human-rights protections to other threatened peoples throughout the world today.

Although they claim to be against it, they all do it in one form or another, some more subtle than the other, but they still do it even while claiming to be against it at the same time. Katz does it, Bauer does it, Lipstadt does it, Auron does it, Wiesel does it, they all do it in one way or another.

[Heat]

Will Canadian 'genocide museum' kill plans for Holocaust facility?

TORONTO (JTA) -- A national Canadian museum commemorating genocide in the 20th century may disrupt the government's plans for a Holocaust museum in the country, according to Canadian Jewish officials.

John Gregorovich, chairman of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, is spearheading the campaign for the genocide museum. He has fashioned a coalition of about 20 Canadian ethnic associations with participants from diverse backgrounds, including Asian, Armenian, Turkish and Palestinian.

The coalition, Canadians for a Genocide Museum, is proposing a museum that would focus on events such as the Turkish atrocities in Armenia during World War I, Stalin's enforced famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, the mass murders in Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia, as well as the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Jews during World War II.

Moshe Ronen, national president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said his group has no objection to a separate genocide museum, but that the Holocaust museum should go ahead as planned.

The issue has sparked some tension and difference of opinion over the uniqueness of the Holocaust and its place as a defining event of the 20th century.

While Gregorovich criticizes Jewish lobbying for a museum that would concentrate only on Jewish losses, Sol Littman, Canadian representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, accuses Gregorovich of "issue envy" and said he is manipulating other ethnic associations.

Ronen said that government recognition of the Holocaust's uniqueness would be meaningful and important to Canada's Jewish community.

"Our view is that while history is replete with atrocities, the Holocaust is a special case," he said.

For more JTA stories, go to http://www.jta.org

http://www.jewishsf.com/bk990507/pagenews.shtml

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Debating the uniqueness of the Holocaust
COMPARISONS of the Holocaust with other historical events can provoke furious arguments. To both the people making the comparisons and those who object to them, much is at stake.

For the scholars who are offended when black slavery is referred to as a holocaust, or who balk at using the term "genocide" to describe the Serbs' campaign against Bosnia, language is being cheapened. They worry that the depravity of Hitler's attempt to annihilate the Jews will be forgotten if the Holocaust becomes an all-purpose measuring stick for other evils.

For advocates of the victims of other campaigns of horror, holding up the Holocaust as a unique evil has a moral cost, too. If the Holocaust is unlike anything else that has ever happened -- a pure evil floating above the rest of history -- then the admonition "Never again" has a scope so narrow that it is almost useless.

A new collection of essays edited by Alan S. Rosenbaum, a professor of philosophy at Cleveland State University, brings together advocates and bitter detractors of the "uniqueness thesis." Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives in Comparative Genocide (Westview Press) is sometimes rancorous. In fact, in his foreword, Israel W. Charny, executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, in Jerusalem, suggests that some of the essays are valuable only in demonstrating the ugliness of much scholarship on comparative genocide. Too many parts of the book, he says, are "spun from the same cloth of all-or-nothing, ideologically driven thinking, prejudice, arrogance or degradation, and posturing for power."

PROJECT ALMOST DERAILED

A nasty fight among several contributors and the editor, with charges of dubious scholarship and unethical editing, almost derailed the project. At the center of the dispute was Steven T. Katz, a Cornell University professor of Jewish thought and history who believes that the Holocaust is the one instance in history of the attempted eradication of an entire people.

After reading the galleys of the book, he was so upset by the attacks on him and his work that he threatened to withdraw his essay. He wanted the foreword to be toned down, as well as an essay by David E. Stannard, a professor of American studies at the University of Hawaii. Mr. Stannard had argued that Mr. Katz was the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier, because he rejected the idea that people other than Jews had experienced true genocide.

Mr. Rosenbaum, the editor, tried to smooth things over by pushing for a few changes in the two essays -- without saying why. The authors went along for a while. Then, in a slip that even Mr. Rosenbaum describes as Freudian, the editor prepared a fax updating Mr. Katz on the contributors' compliance with the changes -- and sent it to Mr. Stannard in Hawaii.

After two more weeks of infighting, as well as consultations with Westview's lawyers, the essays were largely restored to their original form.

Mr. Katz now refers to the book as "a disgraceful business." Mr. Stannard calls it a "setup," designed from the start to defend the idea of Holocaust uniqueness.

COMPARING TRAGIC EVENTS

Despite the tensions, the essays for the most part involve careful comparisons of Hitler's "Final Solution" with other events: the mass murder of Armenians in 1915, Hitler's campaign against Gypsies, the starvation of Ukrainian peasants during Stalin's forced collectivization.

Mr. Rosenbaum, whose previous work concerned the prosecution of Nazi war criminals and the philosophy of human rights, believes that comparisons with other mass murders are an inevitable step in the historiography of the Final Solution. "We have established a public record that the Holocaust occurred, and we have a very good idea of what its dimensions are," he says. "Now what we have to do is reach a settled opinion of how the Holocaust is going to be viewed by future generations."

The war in the former Yugoslavia and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda have intensified debates in the press and academic circles about the definition of genocide, a word that was coined in 1944 by a scholar and lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, to describe the Holocaust. Mr. Rosenbaum also notes that the debate over uniqueness rages in ugly ways outside the academy -- for example, in speeches by spokesmen for the Nation of Islam that dismiss the Holocaust as trivial next to the Atlantic slave trade.

Mr. Rosenbaum opted to concentrate on a few of the most discussed cases -- the book includes only passing references to Bosnia, Rwanda, and Cambodia -- to clarify philosophical issues and avoid the "laundry-list phenomenon."

'UNLIKE ANY OTHER'

The idea that the enormity of the Holocaust beggars comparison has theological overtones. Elie Wiesel has written that "the Event remains unique, unlike any other Product of History, it transcends History." Mr. Katz has been one of the most prominent proponents of the historical version of this argument. He is at work on the second volume of a
projected three-volume work called The Holocaust in Historical Context (Oxford University Press).

In the Westview volume, he explains his belief that the treatment of indigenous peoples by imperialists, the famine in the Ukraine overseen by Stalin, and the killings in Armenia were different in structure or magnitude from the Holocaust.

Most Native Americans, he argues, died from diseases spread, largely unknowingly, by Europeans. He assumes for the sake of argument that Stalin purposely caused a famine in the Ukraine. But still, he says, the death rate of 20 per cent in the Ukraine sets it apart from the Holocaust, in which two-thirds of all European Jews died.

In the massacres of the Armenians by the Turkish revolutionaries in World War I, he continues, eliminating every Armenian within Turkey's borders was not the government's ambition. The Turks had accused the Armenians of aiding Russian invaders and attempted to drive them out of northeast Turkey. Hundreds of thousands died during forced marches. The Armenian tragedy, Mr. Katz says, was an inhuman subjugation of a minority, but it was not a holocaust.

COMPETING CLAIMS

Other essays buttress aspects of the uniqueness argument. Barbara B. Green, a professor of political science at Cleveland State, argues that collectivization, not murder, was Stalin's chief goal. The University of Pittsburgh's Seymour Drescher, a historian, suggests that while the ships that brought slaves to the New World could be as disgusting and deadly as concentration camps, slavery ultimately depended on keeping its victims alive.

Still other contributors, however, argue that the uniqueness theory is an attempt by Jewish scholars to claim a special kind of victimhood for Jews, and Jews alone. Vahakn N. Dadrian, a sociologist who retired from the State University of New York College at Geneseo in 1991, says the Armenian genocide mirrors the Holocaust in all but the sheer number of dead and the technological proficiency of the murderers.

The Armenians, he says, were historically viewed in Turkey as a parasitic people, and the Young Turks seized on the pretext of wartime emergency to get rid of them. The U.S. Ambassador at the time reported seeing rivers clogged with Armenian victims of mass drownings.

"My contention is that case studies concentrating on either the Armenian genocide or Holocaust have very limited value," Mr. Dadrian says. "In order to analyze, you need to discern patterns. And to be able to generalize -- even to come up with a definition of genocide -- you need comparative studies."

But such comparative scholarship has barely got off the ground, he says, because some scholars "are actually resentful that Armenian scholars dare to compare the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust."

In another essay, Ian Hanxxxx, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, says the dearth of scholarly work on Gypsy victims of the Holocaust is due, in part, to efforts by some scholars to maintain the uniqueness of what happened to the Jews.

A SCORCHING CRITIQUE

The most scorching critique of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, however, comes from Mr. Stannard. His book American Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1992) catalogues atrocities against the people of North and South America from the beginning of colonization td the present. In his new essay, he blasts the "self-serving masquerade of Jewish genocide uniqueness." Mr. Katz, he charges, looks at other genocides with the sole purpose of minimizing them.

"By hanging on to all these finely tuned technicalities, and insisting on the priority of this one event, it serves to legitimize the killing of other people," Mr. Stannard said in an interview.

This is beyond the pale for Mr. Katz. "Nobody says that we all should agree, but there is a certain morality and ethics of scholarship," he says.

"Dadrian and I fundamentally disagree," he adds, referring to the scholar of Armenia, "but we don't call each other names. One is capable of writing about these things in a dispassionate and honorable way."

Mr. Katz was the only contributor allowed to see the book before publication. He had requested a copy because, he said, he wanted to refer to it in his next book. Mr. Rosenbaum says Mr. Katz abused the courtesy of being allowed to see the galleys.

CONTRIBUTING TO 'CLARITY'

The rawness of the book, Mr. Rosenbaum suggests, reflects the rawness of the debate. "It's going to take many years for the furor to settle down, but I want my book to contribute to the clarity that eventually emerges."

He adds: "We are hearing from the principals in this debate. They are making arguments on their own terms. Over time, we, the public, are going to forget who the principals are, and we are going to have to look more closely at the facts."

The bitterness enveloping the book raises the question of whether scholarship comparing genocides inherently invites moral one-upmanship.

Asking whether the Holocaust is unique "is perfectly valid," says Mr. Charny, who wrote the preface. "But it's obscene to take hold of the answer in an absolute way that excludes quiet, careful, respectful observation of other events."

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HOLOCAUST UNIQUENESS
by Alexander Kimel
Rudy R. wrote:

As to the horror involved, nothing said about the horrors others suffered can equal that actually felt by survivors of whatever mass murder. Moreover, I believe it is morally wrong to compare genocides as to which were more barbaric, inhumane, cruel, or savage. Mass murder is Mass Murder

It is with amazement and sadness I read the posts of Prof. R. and Dr. F. As a Holocaust Survivor and a survivor of Stalin's terror, I can assure you that there is more than a quantum difference in the violence, terror, inhumanity, indifference, breakdown of morality and failure of religion. My reasoning is as follows:
HOLOCAUSTS, GENOCIDE AND POLITICAL TERROR.
During the Genocides or Stalin's political mass terror, life retained semblance of normalcy, and upon removal of the violence, life returned to painful normalcy. After the Holocaust life did not return to normalcy, because there was no life left. The overwhelming majority of the victims were dead.
In the Ghetto of Rohatyn, in March of 1942, the Nazi Raiders, killed 3400 Jews, about 40%. Two months later life returned to a semblance of normalcy: new couples formed, people gossiped, the stains of blood were removed, people returned to food smuggling, etc. This happened during the early, Genocide phase, of the Holocaust. Two years later, out of 10,000 Jews, 9,900 were killed. Life did not return to normalcy, life ceased to exists. Exact description one can find in my site
Another difference between Genocides and the Holocaust is the rate of survival. Stalin killed 10 million people out of 230 million (4.3%), out of 800 million of Chines Mao killed 10 million (1.25%). Pol Pot killed about 11% of Cambodians. The Moslem in Serbia faced genocide, but today life returned to normalcy. In most Jewish communities especially in Eastern Europe, had a the survival rate below 5%. Those communities disappeared forever and ever. I believe that it is morally wrong not to recognize those fundamental differences.

HOLOCAUST CHILDREN.
The litmus test of any civilization is the way it treats its children. One million of Jewish children were gassed, burned alive, stabbed or starved to death. In no other genocides were the children targeted for destruction. How many Polish, French, or Ukrainian children were gassed? None. To forget the fate of the Jewish children that went up in flame - is immoral.

HOLOCAUST UNIVERSALISM
Genocides are caused by tribal or religious hatred, or political terror like in Russia or China, and are localized in one country. The Holocaust happened in many countries and Hitler's success was due primarily to the universal anti-Semitism, corroding the Western civilization. anti-Semitism was the universal glue.

The Holocaust is also an Universal tragedy. All the perpetrators were Christian or they arose from Christian culture. The Bystanders, who stood by and did nothing to save Jews, were also Christians.

DEMOCRACY AND DEICIDE. Rudy R. wrote:
The more absolute the power, the more likely the mass murder or genocide. Democratic regimes rarely murder their own citizENS......The answer, backed up by diverse case studies and quantitative analyses, is to promote democracy. The more democratic a regime (note that this is a continuum), the more secure people are in their lives--regardless of who and what they are.

I agree that Genocides can't happen in democratic states, but let me remind Prof. R. that the Weimar Republic was a democratic state and the Reichstag was a democratic institutions. They were both subverted by Hitler, in a blink of the eye. Democracies are built on fragile foundations. How long will Russia of today remain democratic? Hitler subverted the Weimar Republic with his anti-Semitic rhetoric, that is based on the age all dogma of Deicide. The conflicts between the Serbs, Croatians and the Moslems are fueled by religious differences. Shouldn't we examine our religious dogmas and beliefs, that caused so much violence and inflicted so much pain throughout history?

HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTATION
Dr John P Fox wrote:
It appears to me that Tom Kramer, like so many others, has been induced into believing that the Nazi genocide of the Jews ("the Holocaust") is somehow a "unique" case, only or mainly because of the overwhelming amount of documentary evidence ....

Undoubtedly, if all the same kind of policy and eye-witness documentation were to be made available in the same quantities and of the same quality for most of the other cases of genocide in the twentieth century, rapidly it would be seen how fatuous is all this talk of a "unique Holocaust."
When I watched the movie "Shindler's List" I realized that the picture conveys only 10% of the virtual reality of the Holocaust. I believe that the neither the printed word nor the electronic or celluloid images can convey the real pain, sufferings, irrationality, brutality of the Holocaust. To deny the "uniqueness" of the Holocaust is laughable.

CONCLUSIONS
Our civilization is a violent civilization, nevertheless the violence was always random, seldom directed against children and women. This changed with the Holocaust, a new precedence was created, a quantum jump.

http://users.systec.com/kimel/unique.html

Notice how the Armenians aren't even worth a mention.

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Studies in Comparative Genocide
Edited by Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian
Reviewed by Adam Jones

Levon Chorbajian notes in the introduction to this valuable volume that "our current state of theorizing about genocide [is] the product of a recent, incomplete and evolving process as well as a contested one" (p. xx). The relative newness of the inquiry -- Chorbajian points out that the "systematic study of genocide ... is only 25 years old" (p. xxi) -- lends the field of comparative genocide studies much of its urgency and vigour. It also accounts, as Chorbajian suggests, for continuing debates over core definitions and applications.

Both the debates and the passionate sense of urgency are amply on display in Studies in Comparative Genocide. The book has its origins in a conference on genocide held in Yerevan, the capital of the Republic of Armenia, in 1995. The conference brought together many of the most prominent names in this young field, including Yehuda Bauer, Vahakn Dadrian, Helen Fein, Henry Huttenbach, the Cambodia specialist Ben Kiernan, and Ervin Staub, author of The Roots of Evil. The published papers from the conference, though predictably uneven, represent an exceptional contribution to the theorizing of genocide, and the continuing search for markers and "early warning" signs that might allow outside forces to intervene more intelligently and directly in cases of genocide and other mass atrocities.

In the first part of the book, several scholars revisit the debates that have defined genocide studies thus far. Among these are: What, exactly, is a genocide? Should the Jewish Holocaust (or "holocaust," as some prefer) be viewed as sui generis, or as one genocide among others in the modern age? How central are state power and the conscious intentions of policymakers to the definition and perpetration of genocide?

It is fair to say that the broad trend in recent years has been towards more rather than less inclusive definitions of genocide. The original framing in the U.N. Genocide Convention of 1948 emphasized the destruction of national, ethnic, racial or religious groups, but ignored political collectivities at the insistence of the Soviet delegation. Steven Katz, among others, has sought to redress the oversight by redefining genocide as the "actualization of the intent, however successfully carried out, to murder in its totality any national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender or economic group, as these groups are defined by the perpetrator, by whatever means." (Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, Vol. 1, p. 132.) These broader definitions have allowed diverse instances of mass killing, including Stalin's purges, the collectivization crisis in the USSR, the Nazi annihilation of Soviet prisoners-of-war, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to be examined under the genocide rubric.

Katz's influential definition, however, has been criticized for demanding evidence of an intent "to murder in its totality" members of the designated groups (emphasis added). Yehuda Bauer takes Katz to task in the present volume for advancing an "all-inclusive" definition that "then ... becomes very exclusive, because [Katz] defines genocide as being limited to an intent to total murder, a matter that is very difficult to prove." "It is already clear," Bauer adds, "that he sees the [Jewish] Holocaust as the only case in which an intent to total murder can be shown. If this is so, then the Holocaust would be the only case of genocide that can be called by that term. I think it will be difficult to agree with that position." (Bauer, "Comparison of Genocides," ch. 3, p. 34.)

Nonetheless, Katz's case for Holocaust exceptionalism finds its supporters in Studies in Comparative Genocide, not least among them Bauer himself. While acknowledging the wide range of other genocides in the twentieth century (and earlier), Bauer places events such as the Armenian catastrophe of 1915-17, the Nazi killing of Roma (gypsies) or homosexuals, and the slaughter of the native population of the Americas in a different category than the holocaust against the Jews. Among the reasons he advances are the alleged "global and total" character of the extermination of the Jews; the central, bureaucratic coordination of the Nazi genocide; and the "purely ideological" nature of the assault, lacking "a priori pragmatic elements" (p. 39). "There was no reality whatsoever that motivated Nazi measures," Bauer claims. "... The Nazi motivation was illusory, ideological" (p. 40). This final assertion is somewhat undermined by his subsequent acknowledgment (p. 41) that "The Nazi project was directed against Western civilization as such, and it was almost inevitable that their rebellion against the liberal Western tradition from which they after all had come should turn against one of the major sources of that tradition, its physical carrier -- the Jews." Was this not a "reality," in the twisted minds of the Nazis at least, that helps to explain their particular targeting of European Jews?

Irving Horowitz ("Science, Modernity and Authorized Terror," ch. 2) argues along similar lines, distinguishing (as does Bauer) "between genocide and the Holocaust" (p. 20). Citing the Turks' genocidal campaign against the Armenians and Hitler's mass killing of non-Jewish Poles, he acknowledges that both are "terrible tragedies." But there was "little racism in the ideology that authorized and legitimized the liquidation of large portions of both peoples" (p. 21). And the killing campaigns, while atrocious, did not lead to the extermination of entire populations: while "the Germans doomed the Poles to bondage and slavery ... they condemned the Jews to annihilation" (p. 20). Bauer goes so far as to deny the application of the term "genocide" to events in Rwanda and Burundi, since "despite the brutality and the savagery involved, both the Hutu and Tutsi people survive" (p. 24).

There are numerous difficulties with this analysis. Dismissing the racist and ethnicist elements in, for example, the Turks' targeting of the Armenians seems highly dubious. As James Reid points out in his study of "Conservative Ottomanism as a Source of Genocidal Behaviour" (ch. 5), the prevailing view among Ottoman authorities was "that Armenians in particular were the perpetrators of 'depraved,' that is, tyrannical behaviour, and thus deserved severe punishment." The "tyrannous infidel subject stereotype," in recycled form, served to depict Armenians as belonging en bloc to "a 'terrorist' culture" (p. 61). The Nazi hatred for the Jews was surely more hysterical and highly-ideologized, but this is arguably a difference of degree rather than of kind.

Likewise, while it is true that 90 to 95 percent of Polish Jews were murdered -- surely one of the most complete obliterations of a definable group in human history -- while 90 percent of non-Jewish Poles survived, the issue becomes more muddied if we broaden the context to Nazi-occupied Europe, Europe as a whole, or the entire world. As Yehuda Bauer notes in his contribution, "one must remember that the Nazi project was not carried through, and while one third of the world's Jewish population, probably slightly less than six million, were killed, the other two-thirds were saved by the victory of the Allies" (p. 41). Thus, Jews did manage to survive "as a people." And when one recalls that the Armenian population of Turkey was reduced from approximately 2 million to about 100,000 by the genocide of the Ittihadists (Young Turks), the lines become still harder to draw. This author shares the view of David Stannard, who argued in a powerful contribution to Yehuda Bauer's edited volume Is the Holocaust Unique? that other genocides (Stannard's key example is the extermination of the American "Indians") are indeed comparable to the Jewish holocaust, and may in fact exceed it in terms of demographic destructiveness.

Labeling the annihilation of native populations under colonialism as "genocide" is often attacked on the grounds that the killing was not "intentional." Spanish colonialists, for example, "were obviously interested in using live Indians -- dead Indians could not work" (Bauer, p. 32). But if, as Bauer concedes, the Spaniards' "greed and racist superiority complex vis-a-vis the Indians, as well as their dehumanization of the victims produced a situation in which the native[s] ... were denied any motivation to reproduce or generally withstand the tortures that were inflicted on them" (pp. 32-33), then we have a situation that seems amply in keeping with the U.N.'s original framing of genocide, which included the imposition of measures to prevent births and transfer children of the targeted group.

It is also far from clear whether strict intentionality, let alone direct regime oversight, should govern definitions and interpretations of genocide. Roger Smith's comments in "State Power and Genocidal Intent" (ch. 1) are opposite here. "Sometimes," Smith contends, "... genocidal consequences precede any conscious decision to destroy innocent groups to satisfy one's aims. This is most often the case in the early phases of colonial domination, where through violence, disease and relentless pressure, indigenous peoples are pushed toward extinction. ... The distinction ... between premeditated and unpremeditated genocide is not decisive" (pp. 4-5). In his introduction, Levon Chorbajian cites Israel Charny's comment along similar lines: "it is my conviction that any and all neglectful, exploitative, or abusive bureaucratic procedures, including unintentional failures of will and organization on the part of governments and international systems which result in major patterns of death of masses of human beings ... are to be considered murders of our species, along with actual intentional mass murder" (quoted p. xix).

Some of these issues come to the fore in analyses of the Armenian genocide of 1915-17, which has been fobbed off by successive Turkish governments as either nonexistent, the unintentional byproduct of an international war, or merely local "excesses." As befits papers presented at a conference in Yerevan, it is the Armenian holocaust that receives greatest attention in Studies in Comparative Genocide, with five essays devoted to the subject. Of these, the most trenchant are the contributions from Vahakn Dadrian, probably the world's leading authority on the Armenian events, and Taner Akçam, a Turkish scholar at the Hamburg Institute for Social Sciences. Dadrian draws on his vast knowledge of the subject to evaluate "The Convergent Roles of the State and Governmental Party in the Armenian Genocide" (ch. 6). His analysis brings out the tangled relationship between the Ittihadist party and the reformist government installed after 1908. This culminated in the crisis of the Balkan War of 1912, which saw Ittihadist extremists succeed "in catapulting themselves into decisive positions within Ittihad's supreme body" (p. 103), and (in 1913) "become the direct and immediate master of the government, appointing Ittihadist luminaries to practically all the cabinet ministry posts" (p. 113). Control over the apparatus of government and state gave the extremists both the ideological cohesion and the bureaucratic resources they required to implement their long-cherished goal of destroying Turkey's Christian minorities.

Taner Akçam's "The Genocide of the Armenians and the Silence of the Turks" (ch. 7) is an extraordinary contribution. Akçam claims as "a Turkish historian" to be "critically approaching this subject for the first time." "The genocide of the Armenians has been a taboo topic for us Turks for 80 years," he observes. "The 80-year silence has produced such tension and a mountain of prejudice ... that even the development of a common language in which the subject could be discussed is becoming a serious problem." Positioning himself as "a member of that collectivity which produced 'the perpetrators'" of the genocide, Akçam seeks "to explore the topic fully conscious of what it means in this sense 'being a member' and 'bearing collective responsibility'" (all quotes from p. 125). His essay is a reflective and highly critical examination of the construction of Turkish nationalism, which depended both on anathematizing non-Muslim minorities and obliterating the memory of violence against them, the better to buttress a "heroic" creation myth for the modern Turkish state. The background of humiliation and defeat that brought Kemal Ataturk to power was also a crucial factor in both the targeting of Armenians and the wilful neglect of the calamity visited upon them. In a memorable passage (p. 137), Akçam contends that the genocide was the direct result of "the slow but continuous disintegration of the great empire, the military defeats in wars that continued over the years, the loss of tens of thousands of people, a society whose dignity was scorned along with the constant loss of self-worth, overwhelmed by the imagery of a great history, fantasies about recreating the past, the terminal bursting of these dreams, and the inability to absorb and integrate these numerous contradictions."

The concluding section (Part III) of Studies in Comparative Genocide is something of a grab-bag, but for the most part a rewarding one. Frank Sysyn's essay on "The Ukrainian Famine of 1932-3" (ch. 11) attests to the light that can be cast on lesser-known historical events, by carefully expanding the genocide framework to include state strategies beyond direct mass killing. Sysyn manages to convey the horror of the famine (in which upwards of five million Ukrainians died) by concentrating on the magnitude of the cover-up: the atrocities themselves are never plainly detailed. The chapter, with its meaty discursive endnotes, is a polemical jewel, the more so for Sysyn disciplining his obvious passions and outrage throughout. It deserves to be required reading in introductory courses on genocide.

Henry Huttenbach's examination of "The Psychology and Politics of Genocide Denial" (ch. 12) is a briefer but also deeply-felt contribution. In providing an etiology of denial movements and mindsets, Huttenbach includes some eloquent passages on the fate of the Roma in World War Two -- and (as with the Ukrainian case) the relatively recent public resurrection of the genocide that befell them. While those seeking to entrench the famine in Ukraine in historical memory tended during the Cold War to be dismissed as right-wing and reflexively "anti-Soviet," the Roma, according to Huttenbach, "remained a non-people after World War II, as they had been before the war, more or less despised, socially stunted in both East and West Europe, legally marginalized in some countries, refused minority status in others, and virulently persecuted by a few governments and societies ... The Roma tragedy during World War II was never forgotten or ignored, since no one but the Roma remembered. ... Here, then, is an instance of denial terminated, a denial that rested in part on an age-old ethnic prejudice and, in part, on academic myopia and arrogance" (pp. 221-22). He rounds out his analysis with a stinging rebuke of "the proprietary attitudes of those who guard the centrality of the [Jewish] Holocaust and endow it irrationally with absolute exclusivity vis-à-vis the Roma or any other perceived threat to their ideological protection of the Holocaust's uniqueness" (p. 223).

While the industry of denying the Jewish holocaust is well-known, the Turkish government's machinations to disguise the Armenian genocide are somewhat less so. Huttenbach examines both these bleak phenomena, and concludes his essay with an intriguing and little-appreciated case-study of denial: that of Croatia under and after the fascist Ustasha regime, which "sought to rid [Croatia] of its Orthodox Serbian population by the most brutal means." The postwar Tito regime, "for the sake of domestic peace," imposed an "ideologized and camouflaged" history amounting to "a suppression bordering on total denial." The denial became more malevolent under the nationalist government of Franjo Tudjman in the 1990s, with its "numerous uses of Ustasha insignia, uniforms, symbols and rhetoric" (p. 224). Ironically, writes Huttenbach, "while the Croats still semi-deny or rationalize their Ustasha past, Serbs steadfastly deny their contemporary genocidal policies of ethnic cleansing which has victimized both Muslims and Croats" (p. 225).

Franklin Littell ("Breaking the Succession of Evil," ch. 13) begins with a flourish, proclaiming that "an elementary science is appearing for the detection, identification and timely anticipation of genocidal situations" (p. 233). But after a promising discussion of "genocidal culture" and the possibility of developing an "early warning system" for incipient genocides, Littell's essay wanders off track into abstract religious musings and a discussion of competing conceptions of governmental "legitimacy." While instructive at points, the chapter promises more than it delivers.

Stronger is Ervin Staub's concluding essay on "Preventing Genocide." Staub argues among other things that "early and strong reactions by bystander nations" can inhibit the momentum of genocidal movements and perhaps throw them off course. "Unfortunately," he notes, "nations usually remain passive, or even support the perpetrators" (p. 252). The prevention of genocide, Staub asserts, should be grounded in a recognition that "the beginnings of any form of systematic or widespread mistreatment of a particular group is a sign of the probable increase in their mistreatment." But "information about human rights abuses is useful only if it is used" by international organizations and agencies (p. 253). He also offers helpful insights into the challenge of "healing historical antagonisms" between peoples (p. 254), addressing "the severe economic problems, political conflict and social change that new and emerging nations face" (p. 257), and "raising caring children" who "value[e] other people" (p. 259). Some may find such proposals mawkish or overly idealistic, but Staub's frank and heartfelt approach resonates well after the book is closed.

What is notable about most of these concluding contributions is the clarity and cogency of the argument. In contrast with many other exercises in comparative politics and international studies, there is a sense that time is short; that important and often-overlooked data need to be presented; and that discussion and action by policymakers, academics, and the wider public are urgently required. As noted at the beginning of the review, this approach is characteristic of the genocide literature as a whole. While still in its youth, the literature has added inestimably to our understanding of what is perhaps humanity's greatest blight. Studies in Comparative Genocide is a first-rate addition, both encapsulating the state of the field and moving it forward.

[Adam Jones, Ph.D., is a professor of international studies at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), Mexico City, and executive director of Gendercide Watch.]

http://www.ideajournal.com/jones-comparative-genocide.html