The Particular Holocaust

...Moreover, they died as Jews, because they were Jews...

...If commemoration of the Holocaust is somehow ethnocentric, and implies lack of compassion for others, then where, rationally or morally, is the stopping point...

...Are their lives somehow more precious, or are they more worthy of being commemorated, than are the young men who were drafted into military service to be killed before their time...

...Wiesenthal has done, I cannot concur in his apparent compulsion to assimilate every Jew, living and dead, into the non-Jewish community...

...Accomplishing that, however, does not require either a redefinition of the Holocaust, or a falsification of the historical fact of the Final Solution, or a denial of the uniqueness of the Jewish experience that the Holocaust represents...

...For just as each person is unique, so is each people, and the calamities of each people, unique...

...How can we be so callous as to exclude the civilian victims of the Nazi firebombings of London...

...In studying the systematic destruction of the Jews by the Nazis, the President added, we can seek to learn how to prevent the recurrence Monroe Freedman is the Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council...

...It has been suggested, however, that a commemoration of the Holocaust—even in its historical context and with full recognition of its universal implications—is somehow inappropriate, unless the Holocaust is to be redefined as an event involving not six million Jews, but eleven million civilians...

...Indeed, why are those who died during World War II more worthy of remembrance than those who died in other wars—or in peacetime, for that matter...

...That is another aspect of universalism...

...Indeed, the extreme universalist position succumbs ineluctibly to the logic of its own rhetoric...

...Moreover, just as the Armenian genocide should have become an object lesson to the world, rather than a precedent for brutality unrestrained, so the Holocaust must provide lessons to humanity of the individual, national and international moral responsibility for such catastrophes as we have subsequently witnessed in Bangladesh and Nigeria, and are witnessing today in Cambodia...

...As a further example of Mr...

...It was a uniquely Jewish event, and it cannot be understood if we deny that fact...

...The Commission recommended a permanent memorial/museum to the victims of the Holocaust, an educational foundation, and a Committee on Conscience, to monitor and provide early warning against threats of genocide worldwide...

...And indeed, why should a memorial be limited to civilians...

...The original Commission recognized at an early point, however, that the Holocaust could not be appropriately memorialized— historically, logically, or morally— as an event unrelated to Nazi atrocities throughout the occupied countries of Europe...

...Also, the United States subsequently became the homeland of many survivors...

...Wiesenthal's universalism, we have a full-page ad from the Wiesenthal Holocaust Center...

...I understand that there are religious groups who posthumously convert people to their faith...

...In September 1979, that Commission fulfilled its responsibilities by presenting to the President its Report and Recommendations...

...The event was all the more ghastly because it was committed by a modern European country with an extraordinary history of achievement in science, the arts and philosophy...

...Where, indeed, is the rational or moral stopping point...

...To say, therefore, that the Holocaust was unique, and that its victims were Jews who died as Jews because they were Jews, is to recognize a horrible historical truth...

...And each, in my mind, has had univeral implications...

...Once one starts trying to impose a sense of guilt for commemorating a particular group of victims, there is no valid justification to stop short of all humankind...

...And through the years of anti-Semitic race laws, persecution and extermination, the world acquiesced in its silence and MONROE FREEDMAN inaction...

...Indeed, those very achievements, which might have been expected to provide a civilizing bulwark against bestiality, were put to work to expedite the mass slaughters, to ease the consciences of the slaughterers and even to attempt to rationalize and to justify the evil...

...These remarks were delivered at a meeting of B'nai B'rilh International in Washington, DC, May 7, 1980...

...Thus, thousands of refugees were turned away from our shores, and countless thousands of lives were lost that otherwise could have been saved...

...It is in that spirit that I speak for the integrity of our remembrance of the Holocaust...

...In forming the Holocaust Memorial Council, President Carter noted the reasons that the Holocaust is of fundamental significance to Americans, and why there should be an American commemoration of its victims...

...It was American troops who liberated many of the death camps and exposed the horrible truth of what had been done there...

...In a sense, the insistence of referring to six million Jews as an indistinguishable part of eleven million civilians is a similar effort—if not of conversion, then of posthumous assimilation...

...Moreover, what of the civilians on the other side...

...As the universalist view has been expressed, rhetorically, are Jewish lives more precious, or more deserving of commemoration, than are those of other civilian victims of Nazism...

...Further, Americans are a humane people, concerned with the human rights of all peoples...

...Nor have I fabricated an argument ad absurdum to make the point...

...That suggests no lack of compassion, much less disrespect, for others who have suffered...

...Of course not...

...That is, the Holocaust, it is suggested, should be universalized, not only in its implications, but also in such a way as to deny that it was, fundamentally, the policy and execution of genocide against the Jewish people...

...Whether black civil rights, the anti-war movement, the rights of indigent criminal defendants, prisoners' rights, women's liberation, affirmative action, homosexuals' rights, the handicapped, union democracy, institutionalized children—even the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie—each was a particular cause...

...For the reasons stated earlier, it is clear to me that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust are entitled to particular recognition...

...And, as I have already emphasized, other victims of Nazi atrocities will, unquestionably, be a significant part of any United States Holocaust Memorial...

...Although I admire much of what Mr...

...Just as it would be illogical, unhistorical, and immoral to commemorate the Holocaust unrelated to historical precedent and context, and without regard to the continuing confrontation with genocide, so too would it defy logic, history, and morality to deny what the Holocaust itself was...

...Let me state as a fact, without expressing either pride or apology, that I rarely have been involved previously with particular Jewish causes, although I have always been involved with a sense of Jewish identity and obligation...

...Are we to deny, for example, the humanity of those who perished so horribly in the destruction of Dresden...

...It occurred, however, in a historical context of suffering of millions of others, who cannot, who should not, be ignored...

...Nowhere on that entire page does the word "Jew" appear, even once...

...Surely, however, that observation does not denigrate in the least the sufferings of other peoples...

...To say that is to emphasize, not to deny, our common humanity...

...The President noted further that Americans must bear responsibility for not being willing to acknowledge 40 years ago that the tragedy was occurring...

...The present body, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, was established by a second Executive Order to seek legislation to carry out the Commission's recommendations...

...As recognized in literature, philosophy, and theology (and even on television), the Holocaust was the annihilation of six million Jews as a formal, systematic act of state, pursuant to what the Nazis referred to as the Final Solution of the Jewish question...

...I am offended, therefore, by efforts to strip them of their Jewishness...

...of genocidal threats against any national or ethnic group...

...Funding is to be primarily through private contributions...

...He was formerly Dean of the Law School, Hofstra University...

...In addition, the earlier annihilation of one and one-half million Armenians is a relevant, significant precedent for genocide unrestrained by a community of nations claiming to be civilized...

...And its implications are, awesomely, frighteningly universal...

...If we are to have a philosophical objection to commemorating the Jews of the Holocaust, then I am afraid we must also rethink other particularist causes, such as our support of Soviet Jewry...

...What, for example, if one were to argue as follows: People say to me, "We must help the Jews in the Soviet Union," and I reply, "You can't improve the lot of Jews in the Soviet Union until you improve the lot of the whole (Soviet) population...

...That quotation is from a statement by Simon Wiesenthal...