The Last Page
Lukes, Steven
We live in an ever-widening circle of genocides, achieved and attempted, perpetrated in the present and discovered in the past. But we see and care about few of them. Such selective perception...
...Or does uniqueness lie in the religious dimension...
...Some resist the "normalization" of the Holocaust that places it, say, in the context of Hitler's antibolshevism or of Germany's rapid industrialization, arguing that this implies exculpation and even justification...
...Exploring such questions need not diminish our sense of, or our sensitivity to, what we have come to call the "Holocaust...
...The claim to uniqueness, they maintain, can only serve to devalue and even render invisible the Gypsy genocide, the Turks' destruction of the Armenians, the elimination of the native peoples of * See Is the Holocaust Unique...
...It is a sign of the passions this debate engenders that some advocates of uniqueness assume that all those who deny it are denying not the uniqueness of the Holocaust but its very existence...
...Consider the Gypsy genocide, comparable to that of the Jews, but almost entirely lost to history and our collective memory...
...STEVEN LUKES q 160 • DISSENT...
...What makes it distinctive can only emerge from analytical comparisons with other cases of mass enslavement and extermination...
...Was it the methods used, administrative and technical...
...Only by keeping the memory sacredunprofaned by comparison—can one preserve reverence for the victims and horror at an evil whose dimensions, methods, and goals were utterly un-banal...
...Did the anti-Christian Nazi state prosecute a holy war against the witness-people accused of deicide on behalf of European Christendom...
...They enable consideration of forgotten, unacknowledged, and suppressed genocides within our history and across the world, from the massacre of the Albigensians to that in East Timor...
...Was it the quantifiable scale—the proportion of populations destroyed or numbers actually killed or rate of destruction...
...Only by refusing comparison with a potentially infinite catalogue of atrocities can the memory of the mass extermination of the Jews be kept vivid...
...Moreover, by comparing the horrors of this century with its ultimate horror we make it harder to avoid the crucial question of complicity: of the inaction of the misnamed "world community" in the face of preventable mass atrocities such as have occurred before its eyes in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia...
...Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, edited with an introduction by Alan S. Rosenbaum (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996...
...Or the near-success in achieving it...
...Some resist "devictimization": they fear losing the moral authority that comes from a heritage of suffering...
...the Americas, not to mention the Atlantic slave trade or the Stalinist Terror...
...Denying uniqueness also stems from a variety of sources...
...Others are directly concerned with such cases...
...Some see it as the way to protect remembrance...
...To place the Holocaust outside history, they say, is to declare it unthinkable and inexplicable...
...Some even see the Holocaust as an unconditional source of legitimation for Israel's past and future policies, and an advance payment for future injustices...
...Was it the dehumanization, the use of language, expelling the Nazis' victims from the human race...
...Such selective perception is, I believe, encouraged by the oftenrepeated claim that the Holocaust is unique.* Those who say this do so for several reasons...
...For some, to deny its uniqueness can be a version of "revisionist" denial...
...Some see this in religious terms...
...Was it the intentionality of total annihilation of a people...
...Yet others, of course, have their own reasons for seeking to devalue or render invisible the Holocaust itself...
...In which respects does the historical evidence support the uniqueness of the Judeocide...
...Nor need answering them negatively have this consequence...
...Some reach for comparisons...
Vol. 43 • July 1996 • No. 3
