REMEMBERING THE GENOCIDES OF THE 20TH CENTURY
YNet, Israel
April 19 2015
Op-ed: The commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian
genocide and the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II has
created an opportunity to cast local and global meanings into the
memory of the Holocaust in Israel, beyond the simplistic statement
‘never again.’
Raz Segal
The 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, in which the Ottoman
Empire authorities persecuted, expelled, robbed and murdered about
a million and a half Armenians during World War I, is being marked
around the world this year.
The world is also marking 70 years since the end of World War II –
the end of its European part in May 1945, with the surrender of Nazi
Germany, and its full end in September 1945, after the United States
dropped two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan and killed
tens of thousands of people.
At the same time, the world is also marking the 70th anniversary of
the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945 –
the camp which turned into the symbol of evil in Western culture,
the mass murder enterprise which slaughtered more than one million
people, almost all of them Jews.
All these processes and events – the two world wars, the Armenian
genocide, the Holocaust and the use of a nuclear weapon – are integral
parts of the 20th century. During this century, the great empires –
the Russian, the German, the Ottoman, the Habsburg, the British,
the French and the Japanese – collapsed, and were replaced with the
development of the international system of the nation states.
At the same time, engineers and scientists developed bureaucratic and
technological means for population management and mass murder at an
unprecedented scale in human history.
The Holocaust did not take place on a different planet, but in the
heart of the modern world and as an integral part of the 20th century
(Photo: Reuters)
The research which has developed over the past two decades about
the Holocaust as part of this history has undermined the idea of the
Holocaust as a unique event. Nonetheless, researchers have reached
a broad agreement that all the persecutions, expulsions and mass
murders gathered under the name “the Holocaust” are an extreme case
of genocide. Some researchers see the Holocaust as a paradigmatic
case of genocide – in other words, the criterion for mass murder.
In any event, these three depictions – unique, extreme and paradigmatic
– create a hierarchy under which even if the Holocaust is not
perceived as completely unusual, it receives a separate reference,
which is reflected in the use of the concept “Shoah” in Hebrew and
“Holocaust” in English.
But if we refer to the Holocaust as an extreme event because of the
almost complete destruction of the post-WWII Jewish cultural world
in Eastern Europe, why not refer to the Armenian genocide, in which
the ancient Armenian communities in eastern Anatolia were destructed,
as an extreme event as well?
And if the intention to murder all the Jews in the areas controlled
by the Germans makes the Holocaust unique or paradigmatic, why not say
that the earlier and more successful attempts to completely annihilate
native populations in the areas which turned into the US, Canada,
Australia and New Zealand in the colonialist violence processes are
the unique or paradigmatic cases?
Such questions, however, preserve the hierarchical way of
thinking about genocide – a way of thinking which is built, even
if unintentionally, on the problematic attempt to determine who
suffered more.
We can, on the other hand, think about the meaning of the memory of
the Holocaust in a world in which the memory of the Armenian genocide
is still subject to a strong attack of official denial from Turkey,
which has grown out of this violence, and the attempt to build an
ethno-national state without Armenians and other groups.
We can also inquire about the connection between the memory of the
Holocaust in the Western world and the vague memory of destroying
entire cultures which were replaced by popular travel spots, like
California.
The Holocaust, in other words, did not take place on a different
planet, but in the heart of the modern world and as an inseparable
part of the 20th century. This year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day,
which was held at the same time as the commemoration of the 100th
anniversary of the Armenian genocide and the 70th anniversary of the
end of WWII, has therefore created an opportunity to cast into the
memory of the Holocaust in Israel both local and global meanings,
way beyond the simplistic statement “never again.”
Dr. Raz Segal is a Thomas Arthur Arnold postdoctoral fellow at the
Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University.
,7340,L-4648546,00.html