[Newspoetry] FW: Howard Zinn on the Holocaust (fwd)

[Bill Wendling]

|| Bill Wendling			wendling at ganymede.isdn.uiuc.edu

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 14:41:43 -0500
From: "Boyle, Francis" <FBOYLE at LAW.UIUC.EDU>
To: "'peace at prairienet.org'" <peace at prairienet.org>
Subject: FW: Howard Zinn on the Holocaust



Sent: Sunday, October 10, 1999 11:00 AM
To: unlikely.suspects
Subject: Howard Zinn on the Holocaust


 ZNet Commentary / Oct 10 /


 A LARGER CONSCIOUSNESS
 By Howard Zinn

Some years ago, when I was teaching at Boston University, I was asked by a
Jewish group to give a talk on the Holocaust. I spoke that evening, but
not about the Holocaust of World War II, not about the genocide of six
million Jews. It was the mid-Eighties, and the United States government
was supporting death squad governments in Central America, so I spoke of
the deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants in Guatemala and El
Salvador, victims of American policy.  My point was that the memory of the
Jewish Holocaust should not be encircled by barbed wire, morally
ghettoized, kept isolated from other genocides in history. It seemed to me
that to remember what happened to Jews served no important purpose unless
it aroused indignation, anger, action against all atrocities, anywhere in
the world.

A few days later, in the campus newspaper, there was a letter from a
faculty member who had heard me speak - a Jewish refugee who had left
Europe for Argentina, and then the United States. He objected strenuously
to my extending the moral issue from Jews in Europe in the 1940s to people
in other parts of the world, in our time. The Holocaust was a sacred
memory. It was a unique event, not to be compared to other events. He was
outraged that, invited to speak on the Jewish Holocaust, I had chosen to
speak about other matters.

I was reminded of this experience when I recently read a book by Peter
Novick, THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE. Novick's starting point is the
question: why, fifty years after the event, does the Holocaust play a more
prominent role in this country -- the Holocaust Museum in Washington,
hundreds of Holocaust programs in schools -- than it did in the first
decades after the second World War?  Surely at the core of the memory is a
horror that should not be forgotten. But around that core, whose integrity
needs no enhancement, there has grown up an industry of memorialists who
have labored to keep that memory alive for purposes of their own.

Some Jews have used the Holocaust as a way of preserving a unique
identity, which they see threatened by intermarriage and assimilation.
Zionists have used the Holocaust, since the 1967 war, to justify further
Israeli expansion into Palestianian land, and to build support for a
beleaguered Israel (more beleaguered, as David Ben-Gurion had predicted,
once it occupied the West Bank and Gaza). And non-Jewish politicians have
used the Holocaust to build political support among the numerically small
but influential Jewish voters - note the solemn pronouncements of
Presidents wearing yarmulkas to underline their anguished sympathy.

I would never have become a historian if I thought that it would become my
professional duty to go into the past and never emerge, to study long-gone
events and remember them only for their uniqueness, not connecting them to
events going on in my time. If the Holocaust was to have any meaning, I
thought, we must transfer our anger to the brutalities of our time. We
must atone for our allowing the Jewish Holocaust to happen by refusing to
allow similar atrocities to take place now - yes, to use the Day of
Atonement not to pray for the dead but to act for the living, to rescue
those about to die.

When Jews turn inward to concentrate on their own history, and look away
from the ordeal of others, they are, with terrible irony, doing exactly
what the rest of the world did in allowing the genocide to happen. There
were shameful moments, travesties of Jewish humanism, as when Jewish
organizations lobbied against a Congressional recognition of the Armenian
Holocaust of 1915 on the ground that it diluted the memory of the Jewish
Holocaust. Or when the designers of the Holocaust Museum dropped the idea
of mentioning the Armenian genocide after lobbying by the Israeli
government. (Turkey was the only Moslem government with which Israel had
diplomatic relations.)  Another such moment came when Elie Wiesel, chair
of President Carter's Commission on the Holocaust, refused to include in a
description of the Holocaust Hitler's killing of millions of non-Jews.
That would be, he said, to "falsify" the reality "in the name of misguided
universalism." Novick quotes Wiesel as saying "They are stealing the
Holocaust from us." As a result the Holocaust Museum gave only passing
attention to the five million or more non-Jews who died in the Nazi camps.
To build a wall around the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust is to
abandon the idea that humankind is all one, that we are all, of whatever
color, nationality, religion, deserving of equal rights to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. What happened to the Jews under Hitler is
unique in its details but it shares universal characteristics with many
other events in human history: the Atlantic slave trade, the genocide
against native Americans, the injuries and deaths to millions of working
people, victims of the capitalist ethos that put profit before human life.

In recent years, while paying more and more homage to the Holocaust as a
central symbol of man's cruelty to man, we have, by silence and inaction,
collaborated in an endless chain of cruelties. Hiroshima and My Lai are
the most dramatic symbols - and did we hear from Wiesel and other keepers
of the Holocaust flame outrage against those atrocities? Countee Cullen
once wrote, in his poem "Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song" (after the
sentencing to death of the Scottsboro Boys): "Surely, I said/ Now will the
poets sing/ But they have raised no cry/I wonder why."

There have been the massacres of Rwanda, and the starvation in Somalia,
with our government watching and doing nothing. There were the death
squads in Latin America, and the decimation of the population of East
Timor, with our government actively collaborating. Our church-going
Christian presidents, so pious in their references to the genocide against
the Jews, kept supplying the instruments of death to the perpetrators of
other genocides.

True there are some horrors which seem beyond our powers. But there is an
ongoing atrocity which is within our power to bring to an end. Novick
points to it, and physician-anthropologist Paul Farmer describes it in
detail in his remarkable new book INFECTIONS AND INEQUALITIES. That is:
the deaths of ten million children all over the world who die every year
of malnutrition and preventable diseases. The World Health Organization
estimates three million people died last year of tuberculosis, which is
preventable and curable, as Farmer has proved in his medical work in
Haiti. With a small portion of our military budget we could wipe out
tuberculosis.

The point of all this is not to diminish the experience of the Jewish
Holocaust, but to enlarge it. For Jews it means to reclaim the tradition
of Jewish universal humanism against an Israel-centered nationalism. Or,
as Novick puts it, to go back to "that larger social consciousness that
was the hallmark of the American Jewry of my youth". That larger
consciousness was displayed in recent years by those Israelis who
protested the beating of Palestinians in the Intifada, who demonstrated
against the invasion of Lebanon.

For others -- whether Armenians or Native Americans or Africans or
Bosnians or whatever -- it means to use their own bloody histories, not to
set themselves against others, but to create a larger solidarity against
the holders of wealth and power, the perpetrators and ongoing horrors of
our time.

The Holocaust might serve a powerful purpose if it led us to think of the
world today as wartime Germany - where millions die while the rest of the
population obediently goes about its business. It is a frightening thought
that the Nazis, in defeat, were victorious: today Germany, tomorrow the
world. That is, until we withdraw our obedience.




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