SILENCE GOES WITH GENOCIDE
By Bill Friskics-Warren
The Tennessean, TN
?AID=/20071021/NEWS01/710210383/1006/NEWS01
Oct 21 2007
Unchallenged atrocities today show Holocaust’s lessons largely
forgotten
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once called the Holocaust a
fairytale, denying that it ever took place.
Members of the Syrian government and the Palestinian political group
Hamas have published similar statements in their ongoing battle
with the modern Jewish state. Representatives from both groups have
alleged that the Nazi genocide of Jewish people during World War II
is a fabrication.
The term "Holocaust industry," meanwhile, has been gaining currency
in France, Germany and the Netherlands among those who insist that
Jewish leaders have greatly exaggerated what happened during World
War II and exploited it for political and monetary gain.
Still, to many people, the Holocaust remains the stuff of the history
books – an unspeakable crime systematically perpetrated by one group
of people against another, but something that’s over and done with,
a horror from which the world has learned and moved on.
As recent or current genocides in Bosnia, Kurdistan, Rwanda and Sudan
gruesomely attest, few things could be further from the truth. Human
violence against groups of people deemed as "other" and somehow lesser
is, if anything, more virulent and pervasive than ever.
All of which makes not just keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive,
but learning from the lessons that it has to teach, so important.
University keeps lessons alive
Over the next few weeks Vanderbilt continues its annual Holocaust
Lecture Series – the longest-running forum of its type at an American
university – with the theme, "Broken Silence."
"The Holocaust has become a symbol of the need to defend barriers to
the unacceptable," said the Rev. Beverly Asbury, the retired Vanderbilt
chaplain who founded the Holocaust Lecture Series in 1977.
"The Holocaust overcame every hitherto unbridgeable moral, religious,
intellectual, cultural and educational barrier to the killing of
great numbers of human beings."
The issue of silence could hardly be more pressing, especially in
light of how many people in the global community – including the vast
majority of us here in the United States – have sat idly by as tens of
thousands of people have been raped, tortured and murdered in Darfur.
"Many regimes have perpetuated genocide based upon their understanding
of the world community’s tawdry record of indifference," said Shaiya
Baer, co-chairman of this year’s Holocaust Lecture Series.
"Genocide, persecution and scapegoating can happen anywhere, anytime if
suitable conditions and ignorance prevail," he said. "It is our civic
responsibility to understand the events that prompted the genocides
of the past in order to prevent the same injustice in our own time."
Such lessons, said Michael Bess, a professor of history at Vanderbilt,
are never completely learned. Not merely confined to the realm of
ideas, they have as much to do with cultural, economic and political
circumstances as anything else.
"It has a lot to with whether you’re in a democracy or a dictatorship,
with who controls the police and the forces of intimidation of normal
citizens," explained Bess, who will be lecturing on the human capacity
for "Deep Evil and Deep Good" on Oct.
28. "All of these rather complicated factors come together to create
a moral climate that allows atrocities to take place or prevents them
from taking place."
Asbury believes that genocidal campaigns are more likely to flourish
where there is a group of people within a society who can be viewed as
"others."
"The danger for us now is considering Muslims as others," he said.
Anytime a group of people can be perceived as others and somehow as
a threat, conditions are ripe for turning those others into enemies.
>From there, the slope that leads to confining, torturing and even
killing them is as slippery as it is treacherous.
"The contexts and the times may change, but the conditions remain
the same," Bess said. "This time it’s Arabs, not Jews, but we’re
going down that same awful road of prejudice and taking away people’s
rights again.
"The sad truth is that the forces of prejudice, of racism, of
dehumanization, do not go away. They just take different forms in
different historical moments. They are always simmering under the
surface, and that’s what makes the study of these types of historical
events so important, because the problem changes but it does not
go away."
Christians were complicit
Asbury, a retired United Methodist minister, said Christians too
often compartmentalize the Holocaust as something that only affects
Jewish people. Even more troubling, they fail to see that Christians
could have been complicit in the horrors perpetrated against millions
during World War II.
"The Holocaust is a moral and theological indictment of Christianity,"
he said. "The atrocities that took place during World War II grew out
of a Christian culture. However secularized that culture had become
with both fascism and communism, it nevertheless grew out of the
predominant kind of Christian culture in which the Jews were others."
Asbury’s claim likely won’t sit well with many Christians who embrace
the admonition of Jesus to love one’s neighbor as oneself and to reach
out to people in need, especially those who have been marginalized
or cast out by society.
Christians nevertheless were complicit, either in their silence or
in their active participation in the genocidal campaign of the Nazis,
in the persecution and killing of Jewish people during World War II.
Rooted in a twisted understanding of Christian theology, this legacy
of oppression began long before the rise of the Third Reich.
"Jews were not given civil rights in much of Europe until the late 19th
and 20th century," Asbury explained. "They were confined to ghettos and
confined to certain areas of professional life. They were victimized
by the Christian belief that the church has superseded Israel, and
supersessionism is built on a notion of superiority and exclusivism."
Asbury is especially interested in bystanders, in people who,
as he put it, "dodge" the question of whether or not they could be
involved in brutal, dehumanizing behavior like that witnessed in the
Holocaust. "People who are bystanders stand aside from genocide as
though they are unaffected by it and as though their humanity is not
called into question by it."
As an example, he cites the French Resistance, in which many more
people were at first believed to have participated than history
now reveals.
"It has since been shown that thousands, tens of thousands, were
bystanders," he said. "They didn’t participate in persecuting Jews but
they dodged the issue, and chief among them was the Catholic Church."
Many persist in denial
People have been denying that the Holocaust took place since World
War II, despite incontrovertible evidence and court rulings to the
contrary.
These denials, as well as those of other genocides around the
world, aren’t merely academic exercises. Just last week, the Turkish
government recalled its representative to the United States in protest
of the possibility that Congress would adopt the term genocide to
describe the crimes that Turkey committed against the Armenian people
during the first World War.
So-called "revisionists" are more sophisticated and insidious
than those who deny genocide outright. Foremost are those who wage
anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns to deny or minimize Nazi genocide
against Jewish people. Calling for "open debate" about the Holocaust,
these propagandists don’t deny that atrocities occurred. Instead
they argue, among other things, that the number of people who died
has been exaggerated in order to protect and promote Jews and the
nation of Israel.
College campuses are particularly vulnerable to manipulation by these
revisionists, who do everything from take out ads in school newspapers
to host forums on the subject.
"They’ve realized," said Bess, "that on college campuses, they have
a point of entry, a weakness, in the academic mentality that says,
‘Look, we should be willing to hear all sides. We don’t want to out
of hand to reject any point of view.’
"They play both on free speech and more broadly on the academic
climate of tolerance for a wide spectrum of points of view and ideas.
"What makes academia thrive intellectually is precisely the fact that
outlandish and fringe ideas are welcomed and debated. They’re often
rejected, but sometimes the fringe ideas come in and gradually become
more mainstream as they win over more and more people."