HOW NOT TO PREVENT A HOLOCAUST: THE LIMITS OF EMPATHY
J.E. Dyer
Jewish Press
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May 6 2009
I was almost inexpressibly saddened to read the comments made week
before last by President Obama at a Holocaust Days of Remembrance
ceremony at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. In a mostly lyrical
and affecting speech, I very nearly missed the significance of the
following key passage:
Today, and every day, we have an opportunity, as well as an obligation,
to confront these scourges – to fight the impulse to turn the channel
when we see images that disturb us, or wrap ourselves in the false
comfort that others’ sufferings are not our own. Instead we have the
opportunity to make a habit of empathy; to recognize ourselves in
each other; to commit ourselves to resisting injustice and intolerance
and indifference in whatever forms they may take . [emphasis added]
The sadness here comes not from there being anything wrong with
urging people to empathy, to recognize ourselves in each other,
and to commit ourselves to resisting injustice, intolerance, and
indifference. Rather, the melancholy derives from the focus on these
habits of mind as the bulwarks against genocide.
The only genocide in history that was ever stopped in its tracks was
the Holocaust of the Jews – and that was done by armed force, applied
for the purpose of defeating Germany when it was waging war on Europe
and the United States. The original "genocide" – that of Armenians
by the erstwhile Ottoman Empire – was not stopped by intervention or
anything other than the death or flight of the victims.
The same can be said of the starvation and slaughter of some 60-80
million peasants and ethnic minorities in the Communist revolutions
in Russia and China, as well as the murderous career of Pol Pot
in Cambodia, the slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda, and the
slaughter of non-Muslims in Darfur by the Bashir government of Sudan
(the latter, indeed, has yet to end).
Contrary to the premise posed by Obama’s speech, "silence" did not
reign during the course of those genocides; indeed, in each case there
was deep concern for, and tremendous empathy with, the victims. The
horrific acts were very much in the news in Western nations at the
time of their occurrence and were denounced by politicians and pundits
in the free countries of the world.
Advertisement Obama spoke of how General Eisenhower required local
Germans to tour Buchenwald after it was liberated – and how Eisenhower
required his own soldiers to tour it and invited reporters and
politicians to come and observe what had been going on there. These
were wise and necessary measures, and Eisenhower is to be commended
for taking them as a means of ensuring that the reality of Hitler’s
Final Solution might never be forgotten or dismissed.
But it was not Eisenhower’s "speaking out" campaign on the ghastly
death camps that ended the genocide – it was the military defeat
of Germany after years of aerial bombardment in which the Allies
took towering losses; years of a bloody and terrible defense and
counterattack by Soviet forces from the East; years of a grueling,
two-pronged frontal land assault by the Allies from the West.
Empathy and resistance inspired individuals to sneak thousands of
European Jews to safety, outside the reach of the Reich; but millions
of Jews were slain before force of arms finally brought the genocide
to an end by decapitating its source.
No such outside force intervened in the slaughter of Ukrainian kulaks
by the revolutionary Soviets in the 1920s. Yet there was much empathy,
and the West was well aware it was happening. Tibetans, Uighurs,
Mongols, and millions of rural peasants in China had empathizers and
political champions during the Communist slaughters that characterized
many of the Mao years – but no armed intervention to deliver them.
The eyes of the world focused quite accurately on the homicidal
brutality of the Khmer Rouge in the killing fields of Cambodia,
and I remember in the late 1970s the same Western demonstrations
on behalf of Cambodian victims that we have seen for the Tutsis in
Rwanda and the people of Darfur; the same courageous efforts of private
charities, of missionaries and doctors, to get help to them; the same
denunciations and demands for intervention and for an accounting by
Western politicians and pundits.
But the only thing that has actually worked to stop an act or a policy
of genocide before its perpetrators simply wore themselves out –
or all the victims were dead and gone – has been armed force. We
would do well to remember that. It is an unpopular reality, perhaps,
but incontrovertible.
Obama made a brief acknowledgment of the World War II veterans who
were present at the Holocaust Remembrance ceremony. But too few people
today, including the president himself, really understand that an
idea of summary, effective armed force – one that many now regard
as increasingly outmoded – executed by these old soldiers as a civic
duty rather than an act of empathy or resistance, saved more Jewish
lives from Hitler’s death machine than all the charity, empathy and
resistance mounted against all the world’s genocides combined.
Obama is right to praise the ordinary citizens of Europe who
risked their lives to hide Jews and help them flee – but, superb
as their example is and admirable as they are, they only managed
to get individual Jews away from the Holocaust. They did not stop
the Holocaust itself – it was, it bears repeating, armed force that
did. We seem to be living in a world in which our leaders don’t even
think of acknowledging this fact, which should give us pause and cause
us to wonder if we could do it again – if we would even understand
how to go about it.
* * * * *
Obama’s speech also formed a poignant juxtaposition with his
administration’s release of legal memos written for George W. Bush
on enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) used on terrorist
detainees. Obama appeared at the CIA to assure employees there that
he did not intend to seek prosecution of anyone for actions taken in
accordance with that legal guidance. But he reversed himself the next
day, telling the media he would keep the door open on the possibility
of prosecutions, if not of CIA interrogators then of more senior Bush
administration officials. Attorney General Eric Holder also affirmed
before Congress that prosecutions would not be ruled out.
The salient point in all this is that there is not, in fact, a
prosecutable offense being either alleged or demonstrated. Whether we
agree or disagree with the use of EITs, and whether we call some or
all of them torture or not, the central fact is that if anything Bush
or his officials did was punishable under law, they would already be
indicted. Nothing they did is defined as a crime in the United States
Code; and there is, therefore, no basis on which to prefer charges,
place evidence, indict them, or bring them to trial.
Supposing that this is acknowledged by the critics of the Bush
administration’s interrogation practices, and assuming they do want
to prohibit such actions in the future, the "rule of law" way forward
is obvious: change the law. If they are serious about accountably
prohibiting something, the honest method is to define it in law and
make it a crime.
Of course, our Constitution does not permit ex post facto use of the
law to punish people for things that were not crimes when they did
them. So this accountable method of putting their money where their
mouths are is not a means for his critics of punishing George W. Bush
or members of his administration.
Instead of seeking to change the law, or acknowledging that there
is no basis for prosecution, Holder and Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi,
and other senior Democrats have spoken in vague but threatening terms
of "investigations" and "truth commissions" – the purpose of which
cannot be anything other than to parade before the public revelations
that are useful for demagoguery and mob incitement, but that cannot,
by the rule of law, result in prosecutions for actual crimes.
If, like the independent counsel investigation of the Valerie Plame
affair, they were to produce years of backbreaking legal fees for
Bush administration officials, and perhaps an indictment – even a
conviction or two – for "perjury," manufactured from conflicting
memories of events by different witnesses, that might well satisfy
the urge of Bush’s political enemies to harass, embarrass, impoverish,
and inconvenience his associates.
But a polity that tolerates inflicting this kind of damage to the
lives and livelihoods of citizens, when they are not guilty of any
crimes that are defined in law, is precisely the kind of polity
that fosters actionable anti-Semitism, that sits still for fellow
citizens being demonized for anything from a stereotypical idea of
their facial characteristics to mythological theories about their
penchant for conspiracies against the public weal.
A polity in which the national leader is prepared to harass his
political opponents for things that were not, and are still not,
actual crimes, is a polity that is already prepared to post signs
on park benches telling Jews to keep off, and to force Jews to wear
Stars of David on their clothing. Indeed, a polity that is ready to
confiscate the lawfully-contracted compensation of employees because
they work in finance, on Wall Street, is a polity that has no further
mental adjustments to make, to approve pillaging the businesses and
bank accounts of fellow citizens because they are Jews.
How many Americans remember the major themes Hitler employed in his
bid for political power for the Nazi Party? Two of the key concepts he
harped on were that a cabal of Jews had "stabbed Germany in the back"
to inflict an unfair and needless humiliation on it at the end of
World War I and that Jews worked through the Socialist or Communist
International – whichever one was currently seen by the public as
most culpable in keeping Germany disorderly, disunited, and weak.
The face of blunt reality changes hardly at all over time: these
demonizing, unprovable, non-crime "criminal" allegations were no more
absurd, in the context of public knowledge and common sense in Germany
in 1932, than similar wild and overheated allegations against the Bush
administration are in America in 2009. Hitler sought political power
by exploiting exactly the same kind of exaggerated, groundless fear
of conspiracy, and of vices darkly imputed to whole segments of the
population, that characterizes so much of Bush’s left-wing opposition.
* * * * *
Like respect for the efficacy of armed force, insistence on the rule
of law and rejection of the torch-and-pitchfork mob mentality behind
political lynchings and "truth commissions" are old-fashioned virtues
of Western political rationalism. A complacent society, unmolested
– at least from without – for decades, can come to take the rule
of law lightly and imagine that it can be infringed and subverted
without putting all our civil liberties in peril. But this is a
fool’s hallucination – the experimental supposition of the youthful
zealot. It also, however, seems to occupy a place in the political
thinking of our current president.
The rule of law was conspicuously non-functional in Hitler’s long
campaign to use the force of the state to attack Jews. No citizen
should be subject to any sanction of the state on the basis of
allegations about him that do not even relate to defined and
prosecutable crimes – but the Jews of Hitler’s Germany were.
This vicious pattern did not differ in principle from the idea behind
subjecting George W. Bush or Dick Cheney to theatrical mob fury with
"truth commissions" – it differed only in intensity and detail. In both
cases, it is a matter of using the force and resources of the state
against citizens who cannot, by empirical evidence or the substance
of the law, be honestly and accountably indicted for any crime.
President Obama’s moral ground is shaky when he urges us not to
demonize each other in order to avert future genocides. The process of
political demonization to which his recent actions have opened the door
is the same one by which Hitler incited Germans against the Jews, and
by which other socialist revolutionaries of the last century incited
populations against classes, minorities, and even simply individuals.
Obama urged us in this speech to cultivate a habit of empathy. But
empathy has not nearly the power to protect minorities that the
rule of law does, when we all have the same respect for it. My God
instructs me to do more than have empathy for Jews – or Muslims,
Buddhists, Confucianists, Taoists, Baha’is, agnostics or atheists:
His command is that I love them as I love myself. But it is not the
state’s job to inquire into that. The state’s job is to protect them,
and me, equally, no matter how we feel about each other.
We may or may not ever have a world in which everyone has empathy for
his fellows. But we can affirm, through our law and our observance of
it, that regardless of any condition of empathy or lack thereof, no
one should be subjected to the consequences of criminal prosecution –
including loss of property, loss of life, incarceration, the costs
of defending against agents of the government, and identification
to the public as a miscreant – unless he is actually, by due and
constitutional process of law, determined to be a criminal.
Failure to enforce this very basic concept of the rule of law was a key
enabler of the appalling, tacit approval of the Holocaust by the polity
of the Third Reich. If Barack Obama would ensure against another one,
he should start by insisting, carefully and accountably, and by deeds
even more than words, on the rule of law under his own administration.
The door to using the state’s power to harass citizens instead of
protecting them is very easy to open, and very hard to close. Obama’s
shoulder has so far seemed to be pushing it from the wrong side –
and there is no more important time than when Holocaust remembrance
is in the news to point that out.