Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
some to seek redress for that situation in what Charles Stevenson would have called a persuasive redefinition of the terms Holocaust and genocide.
If—such people feel—the descriptive meaning of those terms could only be redefined in such a way as to make them capture descriptively any episode of mass killing, then the emotive meaning of the words, the responses of pity and horror indelibly associated with them, would transfer over to a multitude of eminently deserving cases in exactly the manner described by Stevenson.
The trouble, from the point of view of those who think like this, is that both Holocaust and genocide are uniquely linked in their origins with one specific episode of mass murder. And that episode has generally been supposed to stand in a unique relationship to one particular people—namely, the Jews.
For the emotive connotations of the terms to transfer smoothly to other episodes of mass murder involving other, non-Jewish groups, that link must be broken. To a degree, it has been broken in the case of the term genocide. Significant ambiguities attend the word genocide, as they do all the contested terms in the uniqueness debate. It remains contestable, for instance, whether for an act of genocide to have occurred the people in question must have undergone total extermination or “merely” have endured persecution aiming at total extermination, or at the very least, at extensive loss of life. Equally, people disagree over whether it can be appropriate to speak of “cultural genocide,” where the people of a nation, or some of them, remain extant but where everything that gave their nation its original character, as a special human group, has been systematically extirpated. But on any of these readings of the term, historical instances both Jewish and non-Jewish can be found. Among cases of more or less total extermination (by systematic hunting among other things), one might cite the Tasmanian and Western Australian aboriginals. As survivors of cultural genocide, one might cite the Inca or the inhabitants of a few mountain villages in Portugal of whom I once read, remnants of campaigns of persecution and forced conversion of Jews in earlier centuries, who know that they once were, or were descended from, Jews, but know nothing of Jewish religion or culture.
Genocide, then, has become, for better or worse, a general term. There can be—have been—genocides other than the Holocaust. The term Holocaust, on the other hand, remains obstinately possessed, in common usage, of the logical characteristics of a proper name. A proper name, such as Bismarck or Gandhi, names a single individual; in the case of those names, an individual person; in the case of the term Holocaust, an individual act of mass murder—namely, the Nazi destruction of the bulk of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945.
The uniqueness controversy has concerned, for the most part, the issue of whether that link—the link between the term Holocaust and a specific act of mass murder—can and should also be broken. Some—David E. Stannard, Ward Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, the late Tony Judt in some of his writings, and many others—consider that there is nothing about the murderous events commonly denominated by the term Holocaust that links those events specifically to the Jewishness of their Jewish victims. According to such views, Holocaust becomes to all intents and purposes a synonym for genocide and shares all the ambiguities as well as the resulting subordination to a multitude of political uses that have come to characterize the latter term.
The thought is that what happened to the Jewish victims of the Nazis has also happened to large numbers of non-Jewish victims, whose sufferings, it is then alleged, are diminished and obscured by the concentration in commemorative activities, including museums and educational programs, on the sufferings of the Jews. Should we not, such reasoners suggest, universalize our conception of the Holocaust by recognizing that what made it a crime against humanity was that its victims, irrespective of whether they were Jews or gentile Germans, Poles, or Soviet prisoners of war, were human beings? And does not that eminently humane and reasonable shift of perspective, they conclude, commit one to seeing the Holocaust not as something confined to World War II or to Europe but as a type of human aberration that has had, and continues to have, many exemplars, from the starvation in the Ukraine brought about by Stalin’s policy of forced collectivization in the 1930s, to the Cambodian massacres under Pol Pot, or to Srebrenica, or for that matter, to the history of Palestine since 1948?
Against this way of reconceiving the Holocaust, a broad spectrum of scholars, whose Jewish representatives include Elie Wiesel, Yehuda Bauer, Emil Fackenheim, Lucy Dawidowicz, Steven Katz, Deborah Lipstadt, Daniel Goldhagen, and latterly Alvin Rosenfeld,5 have in general retorted that one cannot universalize the Holocaust without de-Judaizing it in ways utterly false to the historical record. The basic thrust of their objections is that to treat the Holocaust as a crime against humanity rather than against the Jews is not only to render its nature and origins impossible to understand, except in terms of some vague and explanatorily vacuous notion of evil or “the darkness of the human heart.” It is to erase Jews and Jewishness from the historical record in a manner entirely agreeable to, and indeed reminiscent of, the ideology of National Socialism.
THE JEWS AS PUTATIVELY JEALOUS “PROPRIETORS” OF THE HOLOCAUST
Given the seemingly progressive and humanitarian note characteristically struck by opponents of the uniqueness claim, such as Native American historians David E. Stannard or Ward Churchill, it might appear surprising that their views should attract the promoters of openly antisemitic, revisionist, and white supremacist websites.6 Codoh.com, for example, the website of a Holocaust-denial group calling itself the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, currently carries a 1996 essay by Stannard, titled “The Dangers of Calling the Holocaust Unique,” despite the fact that in that piece Stannard expressly dissociates himself at the outset from both Holocaust denial and antisemitism.
What strikes one about these caveats on Stannard’s part, however, is that the internal logic of the enterprise of universalizing—and thus necessarily de-Judaizing—the Holocaust itself works to defeat any such attempt at dissociation. Arguments involving what Stevenson called persuasive definition are, by their nature, arguments about ownership, even though the asset whose ownership they contest is no more than a word—or to be more accurate, the emotional connotations of a word. From the perspective of those questioning the singularity of the Holocaust—the perspective, that is to say, of the putatively disinherited—the attempt to defend the singularity of the Holocaust, especially when conducted by Jewish writers, can hardly be perceived otherwise than as an attempt to assert a proprietary claim to the word and its emotional connotations and thus as an attempt to exclude other abused groups from enjoyment of any benefit that might accrue to them in consequence of the horror and sympathy widely evoked by the very word Holocaust.
Furthermore, once the notion of ownership has been introduced into the debate—as it must be if the debate is to get off the ground at all—it can hardly fail to evoke by association a familiar range of antisemitic stereotypes. There is, for a start, that of the obstinately “particularist” Jew with no interest in anybody’s suffering but his own, attached passionately to his own community but chillingly unresponsive to wider humanitarian causes. Then, more darkly, there is the stereotype of the Jew as owner of assets that should not by rights belong to him at all; of the Jew who uses his legendary business abilities in underhand ways that baffle the simple blond gentile to acquire suspiciously vast assets of just the kind to afford him the means of exercising secret and illegitimate kinds of control over non-Jews. More darkly still, there is the stereotype of the Jew who controls Hollywood or controls Wall Street—and who also, it now appears, “controls” the history of World War II. And finally—one could extend the list further, but an end must be made somewhere—there is the stereotype of the Jew who, whenever anyone attempts to reclaim his ill-gotten assets in order to put them at the service of a wider suffering humanity, uses the craven and dishonest cry of antisemitism to smear and obscure the sterling nobility of his opponents’ motives.
These stereotypes, and others related to them, have no particular political constituency. Historically important as they are, they can equally be found nowadays, figuring, though usually in ways less overtly expressed, as much in the public discourse of far-left political groupings as in that of movements on the far right.7