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 collaborators of the 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.