Sasha has responded and further clarified his position on moral uniqueness. It's clear that we have a major, major difference of opinion here. Okay. Now what?
I've been in this ring before, too many times. I'm reluctant to prolong a debate that will, under no circumstances, go anywhere but bad. There are links to lots of books in my previous post. Many years ago, in connection with an undergraduate thesis on the subject, I had to read all of those, and several dozen more. I've kept them around. In fact, I'm looking at them on my bookshelf as I type.
Perhaps it takes the sheer weight of volumes upon volumes to bring this notion home. Perhaps it takes dozens of hours spent sitting quietly and listening to people who were there, who lived through it, but just barely. Perhaps it takes the willingness to part with cherished views of the way the world works. I just don't know.
What I do know is that statistics, legal arguments and analogies don't work. And I know this, as well: as long as well-intentioned people refuse to accept the notion that there was something unique about the Holocaust (no, once again, the term really does not refer collectively to the 11 million "dead people" who were all victims of the Nazi genocide campaign), it will happen again. Whether it happens to Jews or to some other race or religion or unanticipated group, it will happen again. Because in order to prevent it, we need to understand what it was that happened, how and why it was permitted to happen. And if we insist on trying to turn it into "just another" mass murder of innocent people, we won't be able to do that. We won't see the writing on the wall and we won't do anything to stop it until it's far too late. Again.
What we will be able to do is dilute the meaning of what happened to the extent that every time someone feels oppressed, they'll find it acceptable to say it's "another Holocaust," to make casual analogies to "death camps," to say that whatever side they're up against is "just like the Nazis." But I forgot. We're already there. (That's the other palestinian connection, Sasha.)
But there is this one other thing. It wasn't only six million people that were murdered in the Holocaust. It was a way of life. It was an entire civilization. Yes, some European Jews survived. But European Jewry, their communities, their customs, their educational systems, their language, even, did not. This wasn't a byproduct, it was part of the plan, cleanly executed. What's harder to understand is that there was even a systematic effort to wipe out the very memory of these people, the fact that they had ever lived. A friend of mine sent me a very interesting article yesterday about John Kerry's Jewish roots. Since I was already thinking along these lines, this stuck out:
Stibor told Gundacker that on June 20, 2002 he had received an unusual inquiry--a letter in English from a certain "Samuel C" which carried the seal of a high-ranking Washington, D.C. official. The mysterious letter noted that John Kerry was a candidate for president (though the senator had yet to publicly announce his intention to run) and inquired about a man named "Fritz Cohn." [Kerry's grandfather] Stibor knew he couldn't be of assistance; the [Czech] archives had stopped processing foreign requests several years earlier. In any case, the war and local antisemitism had left little evidence of a former Jewish presence in the region. "The Germans didn't want any trace of the Jews left," Stibor says, "even after so many of them were taken away. So many of the records were simply destroyed."
It's been pointed out to me that some Jews use the Holocaust as a club to beat other people into submission, to get their own way, to get a pass. That may be. I've never known anyone like that, but it's a despicable and cynical manipulation that shouldn't be countenanced. I don't know a single Holocaust survivor or family member of Holocaust victims who wouldn't trade his "specialness" in a nanosecond for it all never to have happened.
I don't care about being "unique." I don't want to be "special." I just want to live in a world where nothing like this will happen to anyone, ever again. So I'll continue to say what I think needs to be said toward that end. How to do this while respecting the thoughtful opinions of others who differ, well, that's always a challenge with such an emotional and monumental issue. I'm working on it.
