Is the Holocaust really unique among genocides?

This morning, I heard a discussion on the Vanessa Feltz show (which I don’t listen to much now, except when I’m in the shower — that’s what comes of being out of work!) about Holocaust Memorial Day (which was today), and one letter-writer claimed that the Holocaust shouldn’t be commemorated among other genocides such as Rwanda, Bosnia and so on, because it was “meticulously planned and legislated for by central Europeans renowned for their advanced culture” and that the Nuremberg laws and “Protection of German Blood Act” went far beyond other acts of genocide. The massacres in Cambodia, she said, was the result of “social engineering” and not a deliberate policy to eliminate Cambodians.

I’m not sure if social engineering refers to the genocide being an attempt at socially engineering the Cambodian population, or the engineering required to motivate so many people to kill so many people. However, it was not like any of the other genocides which were aimed at eliminating a group for reasons that were against racially-defined groups, rather than an ill-defined ruling class. However, the Nuremberg and German Blood laws were not the only examples of races being targeted by specific laws restricting their movements and dictating who they could marry. Similar laws existed in Tsarist Russia, confining Jews to increasingly smaller pockets of the former Polish empire; laws banning intermarriage (mainly against blacks) existed in South Africa under Apartheid (after the fall of Nazism) and in the USA before, during and after World War II.

The other genocides included ordinary people to a far greater extent than the Nazi Holocaust did. Granted, people worked in industries that were intended to facilitate the concentration camp and murder complex, but not everyone had to know that the Jews being transported to the camps were being murdered and various myths were circulated such as “evacuation to the East”. Even the collaborationist regimes in eastern Europe stopped sending Jews to Poland when they learned that they were, in fact, being massacred. By contrast, in Rwanda ordinary people killed others, and betrayed friends to the killing gangs; in Bosnia, people also turned on their friends and neighbours who had assumed that there was no real difference and certainly no enmity between them until months earlier. Bosnia involved people that were probably just as well-educated as the Germans of the late 1930s and there were actually schools in Rwanda as well (some of the elite had, no doubt, been educated in France or Belgium).

Some of the more recent genocides include a further factor: an international community that stood aside and did next to nothing while people were massacred under their noses. It’s true that the western powers, such as the USA, turned back shiploads of refugees and expected some to settle in places which were vulnerable to invasion by Germany, but they were not in a position to actually stop the Holocaust taking place. In Rwanda and Bosnia, the UN stood by and in one case allowed the Serbs to seize men and boys from a town they had captured, who were subsequently massacred; at international conferences, people procrastinated by quibbling over terminology, using “acts of genocide” rather than simply saying “genocide” (which would have automatically mandated action), and designating “safe areas” rather than protected “safe havens”, which proved not to be safe at all. The UN could not stop every incident of genocide or mass murder, of course, but at that time, there was enormous popular support for military action to stop the killing but nothing happened until it had been going on for four years (in contrast to 2003, when there was an invasion of Iraq in the face of massive popular opposition in this country).

I also believe that Holocaust Memorial Day should be about all recent genocides and not just the Holocaust. We were actually fighting the Germans at the time they were carrying out the Holocaust; when Rwanda and Bosnia were in flames, we wrung our hands and pulled up the drawbridge and quibbled about words. I have some suspicion that this is, in fact, why we concentrate on the Holocaust: because there is no guilt on our part or our political classes’ part. As well as this, Holocaust memorialising is often linked to advocacy for Israel at a time when it is the perpetrator of injustice, and has a noisy international propaganda machine and influential supporters in most western capitals. We should not be reinforcing myths about the Jews being the most persecuted race ever when they are, in fact, a privileged minority in modern British society. Rather, we should be using the opportunity to look at how we treat downtrodden people, refugees and so on, and expose “acceptable” prejudices and the way our media fosters them, because these are the things that laid the foundations for the genocides of the past. The event should not just be about patting ourselves on the back for something our grandparents did more than sixty years ago.

(Image source: Wikimedia.)

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