Is there an expiration date on the public remembrances of atrocities? If not, should there be?

no, there shouldn’t.

Yeah, this week’s pretty full. On Monday we’ve got the Massacre of Melos Remembrance Day, to memorialize the hundreds of Melian men who were slaughtered at the hands of the Athenians in the sixteenth year of the Peloponnesian War around 415 BC, as well as the Melian women and children who were taken into slavery. Here’s my card:

Archimedes Demetrios

Impaled by a doru and consumed by Greek fire

Age 22

Then Tuesday is Proscription of 43 B.C. Remembrance Day, to remember all “enemies of the state” (hardly!) who were murdered at the beginning of the Roman Civil War.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Decapitated

Age 63

Wednesday I’m double-booked, because it’s both Plague of the First-Born Remembrance Day (when that rat bastard God knocked off the eldest son in each household in Egypt), and also Massacre of the Hivites Remembrance Day (when all the men of the city of Shechem were murdered in bed by a couple of Abraham’s great-grandkids).

Hamor the Hivite

Put to the sword

Age 40

Thursday I’m *supposed* to be working Sack of Rome Remembrance Day, but I have a paper due so that might have to wait until next year, and then finally Friday is the Destruction of Neyshabur Remembrance Day, when (who could forget!) Genghis Khan and his boys took out some million and a half Persian civilians.

Rashid Al-Min

Stabbed and trampled

Age 18

Human history is a book of brutality. I think a just and decent society remembers the basic fact without a parochial adhesion to particular acts, when they were all before our time and beyond our control.

Evan: How long did it take you to put that blog together?

First of all, saying that the Holocaust was “before our time” is a little misleading. Hamor the Hivite’s sister doesn’t still live in Bay Ridge, and Cicero doesn’t have old friends in Jerusalem who light candles for him every year or whatever. Even if one agreed with Frank’s proposition that public recognition of atrocities should come with an expiration date, and perhaps they should, we’re not running up against the Holocaust’s any time soon.

The notion that a “just and decent” society remembers its atrocities by blotting out the details strikes me as even more bizarre. Why should not the universal be illuminated by the particular, in this case a memorial whose common invocation is the sweeping exhortation “Never again?” Condolences if you find that message too parochial. It’s also parochial for ethnic Armenians to pursue official recognition of their country’s own genocide at the hands of the Turks early in the past century, but they might argue there’s meaning to be found in allowing a full accounting of the details instead of holding to a series of woefully dubious conventions out of political expediency. They have conceptions of justice and deceny as well, being perhaps less fatalistic about what we, as a society, are able to control. Agree or disagree, dismissing their position with a flick of one’s finger doesn’t really qualify as decent.

There’s a massive WSO discussion right now having a more drawn-out version of this same argument. I think the reasonable person’s conclusion is that all genocides/atrocities suck, and we should remember that, but the Holocaust deserves some sort of specific recognition because it reminds us that even a modern Western democracy is not immune.

Yeah, but to the EphBlog readership’s credit, no one seems to be talking past each other here. Ben F. actually understood and addressed Evan’s point. That doesn’t happen quite so much in the WSO thread, though it does in a few instances.

Ummm, wow. Not really sure how to respond. And I can’t believe I have to. First of all, the Holocaust is unique among human atrocities, or certainly atrocities in the modern world, by virtue of the sheer number of people slaughtered in combination with the fact that an entire people / religion were nearly purposefully eradicated from the face of the earth. Plus, Jews in particular have had to face the prospect of eradication throughout our collective history, and still face the same danger today. You can laugh, but if Israel did not have one of the best militaries in the world, as well as US backing, there is no doubt whatsoever that Iran, Hamas, et. al. would not hesitate a moment before wiping every Jew living in Israel off the face of the earth (I mean, that is part of their platform), which would once again halve the world Jewish population. I can’t think of many religions or ethnicities that have to consistently deal with neighboring countries and domestic political parties with a platform of “let’s kill all the Jews.” So the Holocaust is still highly relevant to this day, by not all showing the evil humanity is capable of, but also, frankly, by reminding Jews in particular of a need for vigilance.

And hell Frank, we remember September 11th each year (and are building a monument to that event), when 3000 random people died because of a handful of evil lunatics. I think we can indefinitely commemorate, once per year, when 6 MILLION people were targeted for systematic slaugher, many thousands were directly involved, and half of the civilized world was complicit or stood by and let it happen, and one of the world’s oldest, most established religions was nearly wiped off the planet in less than five years time. So if we’ve remembered Sept. 11th for five years already, and the Holocaust was about 5 million times worse, than by that logic we should commemorate the Holocaust for, oh, at least 25 million years.

With concurrent WSO threads suggesting that Global Warming is a hoax and that holocaust remembrance is offensive, I feel a little embarrassed to be a Williams student today.

Jeff: Commemorate for yourself if you like, but one should not reasonably expect very many of the current people of this earth (the vast majority of whom were not alive in 1945) to care about the subject of your commemoration or to accept any related intrusion on their lives!

You got me Frank. Let’s eliminate Columbus Day, Independance Day, Martin Luther King Day, Christmas and Easter while we’re at it. (And by the way, isn’t Easter commemorating ONE man / deity’s death, and that took place a lot more than 50 years ago. I don’t begrudge Christians that remembrance. Maybe the next time Jews are killed en masse, we can arrange for a few to rise from the dead, and people will be less up in arms about putting a day aside to mark this atrocity). And what intrusion? It’s not like stores and businesses are closed or anything, as they are on, say, Christmas.

I don’t begrudge anyone his commemoration of what he would like to commemorate, but he shouldn’t necessarily expect others to remember the subject of, or otherwise participate in, that commemoration.

a few thoughts on “never again”

a) “genocide” seems to be (Rwanda, Darfur, etc.) more “par for the course” than “never again.”

b) Even within the 20th century, special mention must be made of Stalin’s purges and gulag (at least, numerically, more impressive than the Shoah), Mao’s dislocations and executions, the activities of Pol Pot…

c) I’m not saying remembrance is inappropriate, but sometimes rhetoric about particular events does detract from the general awareness of the spectacular inhumanity of man qua man that human history presents.

d) Is it precisely because so many surviving family members of Holocaust victims are in the US, Israel, etc. that these events are remembered? Other than The Killing Fields and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich who speaks for the kulak, or the victims of the Khmer Rouge? Who speaks, or remembers, the faceless millions hacked to death by neighbors?

e) is there anything worse than to be forgotten?

Jeez! Seeing the vitriol here and at WSO (where it’s much worse) I’m starting to think the terrorists HAVE won. Or at least their agenda is making some major progress.

Frank, your position is pathetically self-absorbed. You should be ashamed of yourself. You sound like a petulant teenager.

I can’t believe I am wading into this, but I want to run with one of Jeff’s points.

We do commemorate 9/11 and it’s time to stop. We have this vague notion that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it (I wonder if that is actually true, empirically) but there is a difference between remembrance and public spectacle. Places like Auschwitz and the KGB offices in Vilnius and the Revolutionary Museum in Riga are powerful precisely because that aren’t spectacle.

Our world is, and has been for a very long time, a very shitty place. We know our planet is fucked up. It is a cesspool overflowing with hate and violence and disregard for each other’s humanity.

If everyday someone wanted to remind me of this with posters on my door about the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Palestinian problem, rape in Darfur and Rwanda, the eradication of Native Americans, and any other barbarity we commit on each other, frankly, I couldn’t function.

My bubble of happy Midwestern ignorance is important to me. I need it. I want to think about the Brewers chances of a pennant and who our quarterback will be next season. I don’t want to see roadside crosses marking traffic accidents or politicians using tragedy as propaganda or listen to bat-shit crazy zealots ask me when I am grabbing lunch if I know whether I will go to heaven or hell when I die. We see the same stories on the news, just different faces in different places. If anything, technology has us more aware of this sad fact at the same time it’s made it easier to kill and torture and degrade.

We each carry around our own little burden of pain: personal and communal. We each deal with it and hopefully do so on our own terms. I think a student waking up one morning and finding someone else’s thrust in their face has a right to be upset about it. They aren’t denying the Holocaust; they aren’t saying the burden one person carries is unjustified; they want their burden respected too.

Richard: Rest assured that barring injury or something unexpected, our QB next year will be Pat Lucey - and an excellent one at that. Now you can move to the next item on your agenda.

I am saddened by some of the blatant insensitivity on the WSO blog about the holocaust. There are some very clear headed Williams kids, but an equal number, at least on the blog, who are saying amazingly anti-semetic things.

Richard: for note:

The famous Georges Santayana quote goes somethng like, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” and there is of course “a country without a memory is a country of madmen,” which, in this context, plays so well with “I awoke to find that my nation transformed into an insane asylum.”

And then there’s Robert Penn Warren, “the past is always a rebuke to the present,” [...]

I thought Easter commemorates a human-sized bunny that went around hiding colored eggs around the world. How can you knock Christmas, the day that Santa goes around giving out free presents to good boys and girls?

I have heard some amazingly anti-semitic things in my life: none of them appear on the WSO blog. I am surprised by the quality of the discussion actually. At the end, it seems like people even made suggestions for future improvement.
I suppose it’s a good thing when our tolerance for bigotry falls so low.

Some people define “bigot” as anyone who opposes, fails to forward or cooperate with, questions, unflatteringly analyzes, corrects any “fact” espoused by the definer with respect to or otherwise makes it difficult for, the definer’s cause of the moment.

… in related news today, thirty-some Americans were massacred in western Virginia. In Mexico, across six states, twenty individuals are found tortured and murdered, prompting the EU to issue its citizens a travellers’ advisory regarding violence …

Ken, how precisely is that horrible news related to the Holocaust or our remembrance of that terrible genocide?

Ken, how precisely is that horrible news related to the Holocaust or our remembrance of that terrible genocide?

That is not a question that I can answer precisely, much less, not in the next half-hour (which puts me past bedtime).

I can tell you what is on my mind.

First, Hannah Arendt’s take on the remembrance of the Holocaust, and on culpability– specifically, that of the victims, and of the Judenraete that knowing sent them to their deaths. (I won’t attempt a gloss).

Second, of course, the political situation of Mexico, and the events of last July in Oaxaca, all of which I have considered in terms of the rise of fascism but (outside conference appearances) not been bold (or foolish) enough to describe as such.

A great deal of my thought (and limited research time) has been focused on trying to imagine– or “get a grip on” — what the Kristallnacht, and the preceding events, were like to experience and interpret– at the time, without the benefits of hindsight.

It’s easy to interpret “the Holocaust” as a horrific event five or ten or fifty years afterward– once the fog of war is long cleared. But what does it take to recognize such an emergent event — and act– in advance of all the benefits of hindsight?

John Donne, though I am not going to lecture on epistemology tonight, and try to connect Darfur to our own political and economic reality. (But I am asserting an essential connection, epistemologically, in the structure of human events).

July 2nd, and again during the August crisis in Oaxaca: I don’t know how to express that in both situations we were utterly unprepared– and still have very little clear idea of what occurred or was going on.

And yet: a city within a thousand miles of the US’s borders bombed and in flames, hundreds or a thousand dead in the streets, tens of them US citizens– including journalist Bradley Will–, and tens of thousands of refugees on US soil.

I’ve been to the Calderon/Fox rallies, and they stuck me to have the enormous compulsive power which William Schrirer described in Weimar Germany: the compulsion to, against rational will, bodily become part of the mass, to follow. And I’ve written that privately (but found it hard to convince myself that the metaphor is right, “provable.”)

Laura Nader (who was in Oaxaca in August) gave me a very different summary: what happened was, simply, that people peacefully protested against the (demonstrably fraudulent) election of the governor of Oaxaca– and suddenly death squads emerged on the street corners, and tortured American tourists and pulled their bloody bodies through the streets–

who sent the death squads? Who controlled the BrownShirts (as much as they are controllable)?

And then Fox sent in the Federal troops and the AK-47s, to the praise of my supposed friends at the Washington Post, and arrested the founder of the PRD in Oaxaca (and many others) as “terrorists,” leaving them in prison, without charge.

Where they remain.

Can I prove any of this (without the years of research which followed the Holocaust)? Do I know the PRD leader in Oaxaca, other than a pass-by or two at state functions– enough to trust that he had nothing to do with the violence of which he is accused?

(I won’t even go into how Laura’s description is wrong, does not match the details as I know them.)

…

(I’m going to truncate lot here).

What I do know is what I might call the “utter confusion” of the Obrador government as these events took place– and the same pattern in the Weimar Republic, the inability to assign sense to acts of terror and state violence.

Was Oaxaca quite the turning point of the KristallNacht– probably not, though the very idea of “turning point” is a historian’s construction, a neat shorthand for complex events;

was it “on the order” of the ‘pogroms’ which preceded in the previous years, events whose internal logic threatened to erupt into regimes which threated millions upon millions of individuals and civilization itself?

That’s both Laura Nader and Hannah Arendt’s message: take it seriously, do not fail to make the connection and presumption, treat the Holocaust as not just as a ‘unique’ historical event (as all events are) but as a threat that may occur again, except for human virtue and vigilance–

[in progress]

I skipped one of the best:

If you will understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.
(Aristotle)

I’ll leave the Neitzsche equivalent as an exercise.

[[add: forward- and back- references]]

how precisely is that horrible news related to the Holocaust or our remembrance of that terrible genocide?

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/04/17/africa/ME-GEN-Israel-US-University-Shooting.php