From: mss2@quads.uchicago.edu (Michael S. Schiffer)
Subject: Re: Cruelty in Human History (was Re: The Painted Bird)
Reply-To: mss2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 20:23:03 GMT

In article <1992Mar26.224236.6426@eff.org> mnemonic@eff.org (Mike Godwin) writes:
>In article <1992Mar26.155952.18406@nas.nasa.gov> wismith@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (William R. Smith) writes:
>
>>I also think its because the Nazi holocaust is better publicized.  There
>>are numerous books, movies, museums and the camps themselves in 
>>Germany.  There are groups dedicate to keeping the memory alive.
>
>Uh, there was a fellow named Solzhenitsyn who wrote a few words about the
>Soviet camps. It's not that the Soviet camps were underpublicized--it was
>that theey were different in character. Read THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO and
>compare it to, say, Primo Levi's THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED or A SURVIVOR
>IN AUSCHWITZ.

Still, while keeping the memory of the Nazi holocaust alive is vital,
it's equally important _not_ to think of it as so unique that we put
it into a special box and don't imagine it relates to other people
in other places.  The NKVD and KGB managed cruelties which matched the
Nazis in individual impact if not on quite as wide a scale, and Stalin
outdid Hitler in mass murder, racking up tens of millions of deaths
(not counting WWII, which, as is occasionally forgotten, he helped
start).  I suppose the point is not to de-emphasize the Nazi holocaust,
but to increase the number of people who are aware of the crimes
of Stalin and Pol Pot (and one wishes that the CCP would fall in China
so that we can get a good look at how many deaths Mao managed).

If the unprecedented bloodshed and cruelty of the 20th century can
serve any good at all, it must be remembered so that we understand
that calling an act "inhuman" is hyperbole, and that no atrocity is
beyond our species.  This isn't a condemnation of humanity, but a
warning to be constantly on our guard for those who would tell us that
the world can be made perfect if we're willing to sacrfice the ones
holding us back from paradise, and who even offer us the chance to
avenge ourselves on the Jews or kulaks or counterrevolutionaries or
intellectuals who are responsible for all our suffering.  It reminds
us to fear and resist those who would tell us that (in the 70's) "it's
all the fault of the Arabs" or (in the 90's) "it's all the fault of
the Japanese".  Most of those people would never commit single murder,
let alone mass murder.  Most Russians would probably never have even
gotten into a fight with a Ukrainian, let alone kill ten million of
them.  Most Germans, even German anti-Semites, doubtless thought in
terms of expulsion or ghettoization, not extermination.  But somehow,
in many different countries, organizations of thousands have existed
which operated to kill millions.  At some point, it ceases to be a
unique aberration, and starts to be, like murder for the individual, a
crime, which decent people abhor, but one they concede exists and take
steps to guard against.  And for that reason, the mass murders of
polities other than Nazi Germany should be better known than they are.
(Actually, given the Holocaust revisionists' volume (in both senses of
the term), even the Nazi Holocaust needs to be better known than it
is.  :-(  )

Mike
-- 
Michael S. Schiffer, LHN, FCS	"Never let your sense of morality prevent
mss2@midway.uchicago.edu	 you from doing what's right!"
mike.schiffer@um.cc.umich.edu	 --Mayor Salvor Hardin of Terminus
mss2@usite-next.uchicago.edu     Isaac Asimov, _Foundation_
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