From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: Cruelty in Human History (was Re: The Painted Bird)
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1992 16:08:28 GMT


   On the Uniqueness of the Holocaust

                              Tuesday, the 14th of April, 1992

Mike Godwin writes:
    On the other hand, there is another risk that comes of trying to downplay
    the Holocaust's uniqueness. Arguments that the Holocaust is just one of
    many examples of historical mass murders are arguments that ultimately
    lessen the impact of the Holocaust. 
    
    Besides, I think there are strong arguments that the Holocaust was
    unique--not in the number of people killed, of course, but in the scope,
    the target, and the sheer cruelty of the effort. It can be truly said that
    the target of the Final Solution was *every Jew on Earth*, and all Jews
    for all future time. Hence the ingathering of children from every
    territory controlled by the Nazis--children who were later killed just as
    cruelly as the adults. Neither the Stalin purges nor the Pol Pot massacres
    aimed so "high".
    
    In sheer cruelty and hatred, only the Cambodian massacres come close to
    the Holocaust--Stalin looks merciful in comparison. (Where Stalin would be
    content to starve perceived enemies to death, the impatient Nazis would
    insist on deaths that were far more cruel and more humiliating.)
I've read no one say quite what I think ought to be said on this,
so I'm going to give it a *try*. I do think Mike's paragraphs here come
close to saying it, although I'd quibble that his first paragraph makes
it sound a little like we all ought to agree to call the Holocaust unique
only as part of a conspiracy to keep its impact strong, which isn't what
he meant.

It is my understanding, from hearing Bruno Bettelheim talk about it in L.A.,
that ``Holocaust'' was coined by Elie Wiesel to describe the Jewish experience
of the Final Solution. Bettelheim expressed reservations about the word (it
is Greek for ``whole burning''---originally a kind of special, and especially
holy, burnt offering) because of the blasphemy of mixing what is most
holy with what is wholly evil. Still, the religious content of this word
captures something important, I think. Even in Bettelheim's talk I can
recall him being asked a question from an old man in the audience,
``Where was God?'' To which Bettelheim responded in the only way of
wisdom I think is still left to a man of faith, ``Where was Man?''

And yet ``Where was God?'' is natural to ask. It is asked intensely
in Primo Levi's short story, ``Lilith''.

The Holocaust was an atrocity of atrocities, unique or almost unique for
the scale of its cruelty. Now, it will be said, there have been many atrocities
that have gone before and have come since. But, I want to argue that, in the
case of the Holocaust, this scale, a difference in degree only one might think,
really amounts to a difference in kind. And here's where Mike was on target:
That etymological ``whole'' makes all, or almost all, the difference.
That is the way in which the event acquires a significance beyond
the simple sum of the murders of 6,000,000 people. I understand this from
Jonathon Schell and from Hannah Arendt: Imagine a plague has hit the earth,
a plague in which no one dies but *absolutely everyone* is rendered 
sterile. No more children and we know it. No one need die from anything
but natural causes, but within 200 years no human beings will be left
alive. And we are certain of it. Now, I can *imagine* that some could still
derive meaning or consolation from a faith in an afterlife even in the
face of such an event, but for me at least, and I suspect for most
human beings, ``No more human children ever'' would be a plunge into
a madness of meaninglessness. These children---they don't have to be exactly
my children, or even my neighbour's children---are so important to me
because they carry Hannah Arendt's ``common world'' forward into time,
and it is this common world---the chance someone I have loved will 
prosper and think of me, some paper I have published will matter, some thing
I have done or will do will have been for the better---that gives meaning
to me right now, that answers for me the question the Greek tragedians asked
---whether it is better not to have been born---by affirming life. The
Holocaust exceeded atrocity by its attempted destruction of *all* Jews, to
exterminate not only many individual people, but their common world, too.
To extinguish not only their lives, but in a very real sense their
``having lived''.

As much as genocide exceeds in evil many murders, so much
is annihilation like genocide. Thus Elie Wiesel, when I heard
him speak about the connection between the Holocaust and the
potential nuclear holocaust at Occidental College five or so years
ago, put it ``Now, we all are Jews.''

But, it will be argued, I have not demonstrated *uniqueness*,
I have only argued that the Holocaust was an attempted genocide,
and that genocide is like annihilation, which is worse than a ``mere''
atrocity.  But that is from the victims' (or potential victims',
or survivors') point of view. There is another point of view that is
just as important for us to weigh (and to judge), and that is the
victimizers'.

I believe that at least 3 components contributed in an essential way
to the execution of the Final Solution. They are:
       (1) Anti-Semitism;
       (2) Evil in Charge
           (a) Pathological-Megalomaniacal
           (b) Political-Philosophical;
   and (3) The Acquiescence of Ordinary, Ordinarily Decent People in the Crime.
The first of these I would regard as a particular evil with a long, much
too long ancestry in human affairs which had the function here of choosing
out the particular direction or course for the horror to take. The second I
would regard as first of all recognizing that the Holocaust should not be read
(as some in the past have read me as saying) simply a manifestation of
a psychotic Dahmer-like killer inside everyman. There were particular people
who chose to perform particular crimes. But I would also regard (2) as
referring to the contribution of movements (OK, by way of caricature even)
within political philosophy---illiberalisms from the right which would raise
what I call an aesthetic standard of judgment (the Nation, the Folk, Purity of
Blood, Patriotism, Spirit, Authority, A Passionate Intensity, whatever) above
the liberal and moral requirement that individuals not be violated in their
inalienable Rights, however bourgeouis-boring and inglorious these individuals
turn out.

But it is the third of these that is morally simply the most important.
Without the cooperation or acquiescence or turning away of many
ordinary, ordinarily decent human beings, the scale of the crime
could never have happened. You see, I'm saying that among genocides,
when it comes to morally judging the makers of the crimes, I'm
at a loss judging Saul and his campaign of extermination against the
Amalekites, I'm at a loss judging Tamberlaine the Great and his mountains
of skulls, I'm even at a loss judging the conquistadores for what they did
to the Central and South American Indians. The cultures were so very
different and the cultural contexts so very different that it
is very hard for me (even though to the victims it may have amounted to
the same thing) to acknowledge them as one and the same kind with the
Holocaust. But the Germans (or the Americans for that matter who turned away
refugees) who cooperated, or acquiesced, or turned away were church-goers, were
technologically literate people who didn't believe in witches or medieval
Christ-killer and baby-killer tales. They were ordinary, ordinarily decent
people who read the newspaper, drank their coffee and their beer.
They were like me. Again, it's not that there's necessarily a raging Hitler
inside every one of us. In a sense, it was only a very little thing they
lacked. Only a deficit of moral courage perhaps. But it is that
default that seems to me enough to have made the whole difference. Their
mocassins, I believe I walk in, in a way I could never assert for the
New England settlers.

What is unique about the Holocaust is that, among all the many atrocities
of human history, among the genocides even, it was made, or at least
*allowed to happen* by reasonable and sovereign people like me. Unthinkable
evil acquiesced in by reasonable people like me.

For me at least, and I understand also for many Jews (from
conversation with Jewish friends, from having listened to and read
Bruno Bettelheim and Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi), the Holocaust has a
special, almost mythical significance. I put it this way: On the one hand,
the Crucifixion is the story of one atrocity, which story has become Great
Myth. The Myth connects its suffering to Resurrection. It thus
makes up a mirror for the Fall and eventual Redemption of Man. The
structure is basically tragic, with moral and spiritual insight (and position)
gained from the tragic Fall. The Holocaust, on the other hand, represents
a new archetypal Fall, this time on the face of it non-redemptive.
Essentially non-tragic, only down into an extreme pathos, not tragedy.
       
            Mike Morris
      (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)