Originally published in GPN, Genocide Prevention Now, Special Issue 5, Winter 2011
We, sons and daughters of our own people’s specific genocides, engage in more denials of genocides than we usually acknowledge, beginning with degrees of indifference and omission of information of various other peoples’ genocides, and continuing with denials of the evidence and relabeling as lesser crimes and minimizing meanings of the genocides of any number of fellow victims who were killed alongside of our people. This paper proposes that hateful Perpetrators and Victim peoples who deny the genocides of others become mirror images of one another in a pursuit and attribution to one selves of a uniquely superior status over others. A new organization is proposed: R2L – A Worldwide Union of Genocide Victim Peoples -and All Caring People-On Behalf of the Right to Life of All Peoples.
Introduction
We all know there is an abysmal lack of information in our world about so many genocides, but rarely are we aware that this abysmal lack of information also includes many of us and our peoples who were ourselves victims of genocide and want the world to know of us, yet we ourselves do not care to know very much about other victims.
All of us, sons and daughters of our own people’s genocides, and all of us students and scholars of genocide who want a better world with far less mass killing, are fully aware of the lying and obscenity of the deniers of established genocides. In this respect there is no single major institution on the world scene that outdoes the government of Turkey as the tried and true master of falsehood, concealment of historical information, and hardball realpolitik to coerce compliance with denials that she was responsible for the genocides of many non-Turkish peoples including the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Yezedis, and also some Kurds – a people being attacked genocidally in our time– for all that many Kurds served as direct perpetrators of the genocide. We are alternately disgusted, outraged, and frightened by the continuing implications of these denials by a government, not only as continuing insults to intelligence and sensibility, but as totalitarian control of minds, as well as a legitimation and threat of renewed and further violence and genocide by a government that allows itself to do whatever it wants to do in exercising its power.
But little do we allow ourselves to know that we sons and daughters of our own people’s genocides and students and scholars of genocide also engage in considerable denials, beginning with different degrees of omission and indifference, and continuing with denials of evidence and relabeling of meanings of the mass murders of any number of fellow victims who were killed right alongside of our people in a genocide. Thus in respect of the Armenian Genocide – for whose recognition we fought so long and hard and successfully – there are denials of the accompanying fates of the above named Assyrians, Greeks, Yezedis, and some Kurds; and thus in respect of the Holocaust with denials, at least in the way of minimization and omission, of the accompanying fates of the Roma (Gypsies), Soviet POW’s, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and also the fates of millions of other civilians in Nazi-occupied countries.
There is of course also another form of denial of other peoples’ genocidal fates that is widely prevalent among many of us and many of the institutions of our peoples even as we are devoted to the memorial of our genocide, and that is a genuine and devoted recognition and concern with a great many other cases of genocide to other peoples. Thus, Professor Yair Auron has researched the level of awareness of Israeli students of genocides other than the Holocaust of the Jewish people and reports what he describes as disappointing and shameful results. And central institutions for the memorial and study of the Holocaust in Israel, such as Yad Vashem and Holocaust studies at almost all schools, colleges and universities in Israel for the most part do not report and certainly do not engage in comparative study of other genocides in our world.
The present paper addresses the psychology of denying other victims of genocide, especially escaping from information and recognition of fellow victims in the genocide of one’s own people, but also escaping from knowledge of and devotion to the memorial of other cases of genocide.
I will conclude this paper with an action proposal for our several peoples to join together to establish a new organization that is devoted to the right to life of all peoples:
R 2 L!
A WORLDWIDE UNION OF GENOCIDE VICTIM PEOPLES – AND ALL CARING PEOPLE-ON BEHALF OF A RIGHT TO LIFE OF ALL PEOPLE.
Needless to say such an organization will be devoted to accurate and respectful recording of all victims of all genocides. I will suggest moreover that such an organization help establish and maintain a WORLD GENOCIDE SITUATION ROOM in each of the many important museums around the world that are devoted to a specific genocide, and also will help to establish and maintain a WORLD GENOCIDE EARLY WARNING SYSTEM.
The cardinal rule for R2L will be the authenticity and scientifically established validity of information, for which purpose it is not difficult to establish clear procedures for ruling on the admissibility of information, such as use of multiple multiethnic and multidisciplinary evaluation committees working in parallel but entirely separately from one another and protected to the utmost from political pressures from any source.
Finally, it should be clearly understood and anticipated that in the course of such assembly of information, it is inevitable that data also will be presented about the execution of genocidal massacres and even larger genocidal campaigns by some of our otherwise victim peoples — yes in various cases our own beloved peoples for all that we legitimately remain strongly identified with our sorrow and anger at our having been victims of genocide (on the same or on other historical occasions). There must be no censorship or tampering with such information which will also be dealt with responsibly and reverently.
The goal is to work towards R2L becoming a window into a far better world with less ethnic rivalries and less ethnic cleansing and genocide. After all, the natural cry on the lips of all of us when we memorialize our losses to past genocides is “Never Again.” Genocide scholarship must be based on full and objective truth and an overriding loyalty to humanity as a whole and to life that are greater than our heartfelt loyalty to our own beloved people.
Denials by Omissions of Other Victim Peoples Alongside a Known Victim Group
Noteworthy denials of other victim peoples and groups alongside a known defined victim identity group in a genocide include instances of the Armenian Genocide with denials, variously, of the accompanying fates of the Assyrians, Pontian and Anatolian and all Greeks, Yezedis, and some Kurds who were victims; and the Holocaust with denials, variously, of the accompanying fates of the Roma (Gypsies), Soviet POW’s, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and also the fates of millions of other civilians in Nazi-occupied countries.
Various scholars and reports bring up figures totaling 2.3 million or more victims of other peoples alongside the 1 to 1.5 million Armenian victims of the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the|Turks; and various scholars and reports bring up figures totalling several million other ‘direct victims’ of the same Holocaust machinery of concentration camps, gas chambers and crematoria as well as millions more in the populations of the occupied countries for a grand total of 14 million victims alongside the 6 million Jewish victims. In other words, for whatever it means, there may well have been even larger numbers of victims of from peoples and identity groups other than the victim groups for whom the genocides are otherwise entirely legitimately known, the Armenians in the Armenian Genocide and the Jews in the Holocaust.
Explicit Denials of the Meaning and Significance of Mass Murders of Other Peoples as Constituting Genocide
Another major form of denial involves explicit denials of the meanings and significance of mass murders of other peoples as constituting genocide and rejection of comparisons to previously identified cases of genocide, and to any equivalence of between the victims and a previously identified victim identity, e.g., victims of the Armenian Genocide or victims of the Holocaust. Thus we have seen prolonged delays in defining as genocides mass killings variously in Cambodia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and Sudan, and these delays had potentially powerful political implications and consequences in delaying possible responses and interventions that might be initiated were the world consensus more emphatic that genocide was taking place. After the genocide is over denials of the meaning of a mass killing as constituting genocide may continue in intractable insistence on exclusivity, uniqueness or overriding hierarchical significance, e.g., Professor Steven Katz’s aggressive (and I believe shameful) claims that there has been no other case of genocide other than the Holocaust as he proceeds systematically to defrock other cases of mass murder from being recognized as genocides, or an Armenian writer who all too poignantly identifies the Armenian Genocide as “the most genocidal genocide.”
Some ‘Behind the Curtain’ Accounts of Enormous Anger, Rage and Cutthroat Political Maneuvering for the Purposes of Excluding Various victim Identity Groups from Official Recognition – with selected stories from Yerevan, Jerusalem, Washington D.C., and the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
As a veteran genocide scholar over five decades, I have the privilege of seeing the field of genocide studies develop more and more significantly, but also the questionable privilege of being present at a variety of rage-filled interactions in respect of allowing or disallowing the recognition of ‘another’ people’s genocide. The stories of such events and dramas are obviously of human interest, but they also are serious vantage points for revealing the passions and motivations that define efforts to exclude various cases of genocide from history and from major scholarly discourse. I have witnessed directly such scenes in Yerevan, Jerusalem, Washington D.C., and the international Association of Genocide Scholars that sadly involved enormous anger, rage and cutthroat political maneuvering in efforts exclude various victim identity groups from official recognition.
The Expected Payoff: A Quest for Exclusivity and Superiority Usually for One’s Own People
What are the purposes of the denials of other victims? It does not take long to reveal that the major forces driving the adamant exclusion of other peoples and identity groups from major appearances in discussions and representations of genocide are conscious and unconscious efforts by or for a given people to retain a special position of prominence and importance, ‘to star’ as it were in a historical tapestry, and to be the major focus of sympathy and protests of injustice in a given context of memorial and/or scholarship. Thus, to continue behind-the-curtain glimpses for purposes of illustrating this issue, I once witnessed a senior Yad Vashem staff member explode angrily at a lecture by an outstanding Armenian scholar, Prof. Richard Hovanissian, “How dare he come here (to Yad Vashem) and compare what happened to the Armenians to the murders of the Jews in the Holocaust?”
In excluding recognition of other victims of the same genocide in which one’s own people were murdered, or in wiping out the record of another people’s genocidal fate, the message is clearly that we are not only legitimately the first focus of our own concerns but that —
Our people’s fate is unprecedented/incomparable/the ultimate case of tragedy and-or evil/a result of infinitely more malevolent motivations and/or intentional planning and execution/
and also the indifference, cynicism, or complicit hatred, and-or economic self-interest of the powerful countries that could have intervened but did not do so.
We are, in fact, a superior people. In some ways, we are unique and exclusive, and the history of the genocide of our people must be kept in a central position without allowing for diminishing of its importance and significance by being allied to or even compared with the fates of other peoples.
So that, without being insulting to others, we are historically more special and significant than others, and insofar as their history is portrayed alongside of ours, and especially if their victimhood is in any way subjected to comparisons with our victimhood, they diminish the significance of our memory and position.
Of course there is an infinite array of human rights abuses and atrocities in world history, but our genocide is in a class of its own.
Such sentiments are delivered both manifestly or more subtly but nonetheless powerfully by the guardians of the exclusiveness and superiority of any people. Within any given ethnic domain, they are applied with full ‘1984-political power’ against anyone who dares to stand away from the required consensus – thus, in any number of instances young people who have worked as trained guides at Yad Vashem have been forced out after they dared to take more than cursory or lipservice note of the fate of non-Jewish victims or of other genocides.
The Surprising Mirror Images of the Perpetrators and Deniers of Genocide
What is it that the perpetrators of genocide are saying in their cruel drive for ethnic, national, religious, political or whatever k-i-l-l-i-n-g those who are different from them?
Clearly the explicit and implicit claims of genociders are for their uniqueness, exclusivity, and ultimate superiority.
We are unprecedented/
incomparable/
unique and exclusive/
superior/
the ultimate people
In other words, we make the startling discovery that the hateful Perpetrators and Victim peoples who deny the genocides of others are in fact mirror images of one another. The shared characteristic is a pursuit and an insistence on attributing to one’s selves uniquely superior status over others. It is amazing how through the years of responding to the claims of our various peoples to be in one way or another the most important and chosen people, to the extent of denying the presence of other victim peoples alongside us in the genocide we suffered, and to the extent of not “knowing” or wishing to know of the genocidal tragedies of many other peoples, most of us have not caught on to how claims for superiority and power over others are at work in our victim peoples much as had been the case in the people who had destroyed us in genocide.
I conclude that a quest for exclusivity and superiority is the core of a widespread spiritual human cancer that results in mass killing of millions of one another. It is still very much with our species.
R2L
I conclude with a proposal for our several peoples to join together to establish a new organization that is devoted to the right to life of all peoples:
R2L !
A WORLDWIDE UNION OF GENOCIDE VICTIM PEOPLES – AND ALL CARING PEOPLE – ON BEHALF OF A RIGHT TO LIFE OF ALL PEOPLES
The following are some proposed activities for such an organization:
Proposal of a GENOCIDE SITUATION ROOM in all Museums of Genocide of Individual Peoples – with core materials made available by R2L, a Worldwide Union of Genocide Victim Peoples
Proposal of a WORLDWIDE GENOCIDE EARLY WARNING SYSTEM on behalf of All Human Life –with core materials made available by R2L, a Worldwide Union of Genocide Victim Peoples
Proposal of a WORLDWIDE CAMPAIGN FOR THE RIGHT TO LIFE (R2L) OF ALL PEOPLES –
with core materials and leadership resources made available by R2L, a Worldwide Union of Genocide Victim Peoples
The proposed concept of R2L is immediately recognizable as a companion to the historic proposal of R2P or the Right to Protect which was put forward by Gareth Evans, former Foreign Minister of Australia, and Mohamed Sahnoun, Special Advisor to the UN Secretary-General. The Commission issued its report in December 2001. It has been adopted by the United Nations and has been considered by many as a momentous breakthrough in human thinking and the value system of the international community. On a legal level it is a breakthrough concept that instead of countries being responsible not to intervene in the domestic affairs of other nations, each nation has no less than a responsibility to intervene on behalf of saving human lives when it became clear that the government of another nation is failing to do so or itself is actively involved in mass killing.
R2L is a companion concept that asserts the inviolable right of every human being to live. In the present proposal I begin with the establishment of such a movement by no less than victim peoples of past genocides, for who should be more sensitive than the peoples of past victims of genocide to the right of all living people to live? At the same time, the proposed organization is obviously for all people, and those who hail from non-victim peoples are no less invited to further the work of R2L.
Beyond the symbolic value of such an organization and the statement it makes to mankind, I see R2L undertaking meaningful action projects.
Genocide Situation Room in Holocaust and Genocide Museums
At this point I will suggest that R2L help establish and maintain a WORLD GENOCIDE SITUATION ROOM in each of the many important museums around the world that are devoted to a specific genocide. Amazingly, but then per the very subject of this paper not at all surprisingly, I know of no Holocaust or genocide museum that has made a real transition from its dedicated presentation of the genocide with which it deals to the actual current and future threats of genocide in the world in which we are living-there is some exception in what was the Committee of Conscience and then the Academy for Genocide Prevention at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, but it is limited and not really reflected in the museum experience for the visitor. Here too I have clear personal experience from my many years in genocide studies of proposing such situation rooms to museum directors, and in more than one case finding great interest and in fact excitement in the senior professionals heading the development of the proposed museum project only to find that the situation room does not come into being when the museum opens-usually with an explanation that many of the members of the board of directors did not or would not approve devoting their resources to a focus on any people other than their own.
World Genocide Early Warning System
I will also propose that R2L undertake to establish and maintain a World Genocide Early Warning System headquartered somewhere in the world-perhaps in a particularly symbolic location such as the scene of a past genocide –on behalf of all peoples. The proposal for an early warning system on genocide has a long and honorable intellectual history and a very ‘dishonorable’ record in real action. The original proposal by me with my colleague Chanan Rappaport in Jerusalem in the late 1970’s with a major publication exposure in 1982 earned widespread interest and praise from heads of state, the United Nations, the New York Times, and of course many professional reviews, and over the years was reprinted several times; but we never succeeded in getting together the funding to put such an early warning system into operation. Nor did other pioneer thinkers and even some social scientists who did in fact go further operationally in important pilot projects, such as about minorities at risk around the world – Ted Robert Gurr and Barbara Harff have been outstanding among such researchers, but no one has succeeded in putting into operation an overall genocide early warning system for the world.
The overriding purpose of a Genocide Early Warning System is to combine the authority of scientific information systems and the voice of an international agency whose identity is carefully cultivated and maintained to express the responsible and disciplined voices of a group of trusted and respected senior leaders of many of the world’s peoples, including leaders of different religions and ethnicities and political orientations, joining together to issue warnings of genocide based on responsible empirical information.
Worldwide Campaign for the Right to Life of All Peoples
I see R2L as a major international office conducting an international cultural campaign on behalf of the sanctity of life and commitment to protecting human life, in projects conveyed in the different languages of our world, through the various cultural forms known and trusted by different peoples, including religious leaders and activities, folk art, music, and more.
Thus I propose that R2L undertake a Worldwide Campaign for the Right to Life of All Peoples. I have described such a campaign at some length in my recent book on the psychology of suicide bombers. At the core of such a proposed campaign would be the mobilization of many major leaders of the world’s religions — priests, ministers, imams, rabbis, and other holy leaders spanning the globe — to join together in an international ecumenical group which will be devoted to honoring and celebrating the core religious value that all human life is scared.The intention will be to invoke the special appeal and archetypal power of religious images for millions of people on our globe, including secular people many of whom also have in their early memories and imagery an imprinting of a basic religious emphasis on “Thou Shalt Not Kill” or the mercifulness of Allah who, as in the dialectic that will be found to some extent in most religions between respecting life and calling for violence, calls on the faithful not to spill the blood of various strangers and innocents. These religious leaders are to be joined by a wide distribution of major cultural heroes, from politics, and medicine, and sport, and the military, and science, and more, all people who are honored in their cultures and regions and in the world as representing decency and integrity. The proposal is for all of these culture leaders to come together in a broad advertising campaign, which would be scheduled and enabled to function over a good number of years, to inculcate a new level of cultural prohibition against killing and its replacement by greater reverence for human life.
As I said at the outset, the cardinal rule for any R2L project or activity must be the authenticity and scientifically established validity of information, for which purpose it is not difficult to establish clear procedures for ruling on the admissibility of information, such as use of multiple multi-ethnic and multidisciplinary evaluation committees working parallel but entirely separately from one another and protected to the utmost from political pressures from any source.
I also noted that in the course of working with information about past genocides, it is inevitable that data also will be presented about the execution of genocidal massacres and even larger genocidal campaigns by some of our otherwise victim peoples, yes in various cases including our own beloved peoples for all that we legitimately remain strongly identified with our sorrow and anger at our having been victims of genocide (on the same or on other historical occasions). The facts and critiques of the faults and errors of our various peoples also need to be dealt with responsibly and respectfully, and in no case should they be taken as weakening the memorial of our experiences as victims.
To the best of my knowledge, the first scholar to call critical theoretical attention to the fact that victim peoples too have been genociders is Nicholas Robins who studied genocide and native peoples and noted that “there are also cases in which Indians were the perpetrators,” and he makes the important observation that this dimension of human history is often obscured.
I found powerful examples in Japan where I visited reverently the two museums of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and found no acknowledgment of the history of Japan’s invasion and genocidal persecution of the Chinese in Manchuria in earlier years, its clear cut aggression against the US, and its brutal to genocidal treatment of Allied prisoners. These in no way remove the onus from serious consideration of the nuclear attacks and deliberation as to whether they constitute genocide for all that they were avowedly in self-defense and intended and did save Allied lives. Agree or disagree with him, the venerated father of genocide studies, Leo Kuper, took the position that genocide did take place. The point for us is that genuinely mature genocide studies must involve no censorship or tampering with information.
The goal is to work towards R2L becoming a window into and for a far better world with less ethnic rivalries and less ethnic cleansing and genocide. After all, the natural cry on the lips of all of us when we memorialize our losses to past genocides is “Never Again.” Genocide scholarship must be based on full and objective truth and an overriding loyalty to humanity as a whole and to life that are greater than our heartfelt loyalty to our own beloved people.
Table 1 presents a simple pedagogical tool for use in bringing to peoples’ attention a wider range of the genocides of many different peoples. I first used this tool with a group of diplomats from many different countries who were assembled at Auschwitz for a seminar, by the Auschwitz Peace and Reconciliation Institute (AIPR), on the meanings of Auschwitz and their future responses to genocidal situations they may face in the course of their diplomatic duties.
Arch Nazi-hunter, the late Simon Wiesenthal, who among other things played a decisive role in the capture of Adolph Eichmann by Israel, wrote me a personal letter in 1988 as follows:
For many, many years it has been my opinion that in a humane, in a political and educational sense we Jews failed to stress the point that we were persecuted and suffered in concentration camps together with people from 18 other nations during the Nazi reign. Right after the war, I dreamed about the formation of a brotherhood of victims which could also be fighting body against any new – or old – forms of National Socialism.
In the 1950’s I appealed to all to not always talk just about the six million Jews who had been murdered and ignore the others; this reduced National Socialism into an exclusively Jewish problem. No one was prepared to listen to me. When I agreed to give my name to a Center which was about to be built in Los Angeles in 1977, my one condition was that it would be dedicated to the six million Jews and the millions of others who had suffered with us.
You can imagine how all at once, the chorus of hateful people accused me of wanting to reduce the meaning of the Holocaust.
It simply does not suffice to just stress the uniqueness of our Holocaust and not to think about the future, about those who have been and will remain our friends. It is true that when a dictatorship is installed in a specific country, the Jews are always the first victims, but then, the others get their share of abuse, too. We were the best example for that. But we were not able to make use of it, just like there are whole nations who have chapters in their history called “missed chances.”
I am very happy that there is such an institution like yours in Israel.-Simon Wiesenthal
Click here for the Personal Learner Worksheet.
Israel W. Charny is the Executive Director, Institute on the Holocaust & Genocide, Jerusalem; Editor in Chief and Executive Director, GPN GENOCIDE PREVENTION NOW, a Web Magazine published four times a year www.genocidepreventionnow.org; Co-founder and a Past President, International Association of Genocide Scholars; Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Genocide; Retired Prof. of Psychology & Family Therapy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University.
He is the author of Fascism and Democracy in the Human Mind: A New Bridge between Mind and Society (University of Nebraska Press) — awarded “OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC BOOK OF THE YEAR” 2007 by the American Library Association, republished in paperback); and Fighting Suicide Bombing: A Worldwide Campaign for Life (Praeger Security International, 2007; reprinted by three publishers in India and Sri Lanka – that have known much suicide bombing, including by many women).