‘WHEN EVIL COMES LIKE FALLING RAIN’
Ha’aretz
Aug 13 2010
Israel
Both of these books on genocide expose Israeli readers to various
aspects of a subject they previously thought of within a solely Jewish
context By Reuven Miran
“Genocide: Kdei Shelo Eheheyeh Beyn Hashotkim” (“Genocide: So That I
Wouldn’t Be Among the Silent” ) by Yair Auron. Open University Press,
287 pages, NIS 98
“Genocide: Mifgash Ve’eymut, Hashmadat Ha’amim Ha’indianim shel America
Hasefaradit” (“Genocide: Encounter and Conflict, The Extermination
of Indigenous People in Spanish America” ) by Eitan Ginsburg. Open
University Press, 280 pages, NIS 98
“The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered
there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when
a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a
blanket of silence spread. When evil doing comes like falling rain,
nobody calls out ‘stop!’ When crimes begin to pile up they become
invisible. When sufferings become unendurable, the cries are no longer
heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer”
– Bertolt Brecht (English translation from “Poems, 1913-1956,” ed. by
John Willett and Ralph Manheim )
These razor-sharp lines serve as the opening to both these books. With
utter simplicity, they express the reason for the publication of this
Open University series about the mass slaughter of certain human
groups by other human groups. And it is: the opening of a window
in the Israeli consciousness to the issue of genocide as a general
phenomenon in the history of mankind.
In the Jewish state born out of pogroms and the Holocaust, in a society
in which a sense of persecution and victimhood are our middle names,
in the only democratic country in the world that is also an occupying
state specializing in robbing members of another people of its land,
national identity and culture – the publication of these two books
is of immediate and important significance. This is especially so
since both serve as textbooks for a unique academic course, which can
arouse the conscience, teach historical facts, and stimulate profound
thinking about the essence of man and the meaning of human, social,
and perhaps also political, morality in all places and at all times.
Genocides have always occurred “in the name of God,” be it a god
of a religion or a god in combination with a state, or in the name
of economic and financial interests. The Catholic Church and its
missionary commandos eradicated Indian culture and Indian identity
in South America. They negated the Indian at the spiritual and
psychological level, and anyone who resisted, was physically
slaughtered.
In all places and at all times, there was a similar turn of events:
You occupy, and then you cause the occupied to hate himself, his
culture and his ancestors, and you offer him an “opportunity” to
“join” the occupier at the level of a second-class citizen. For there
is nothing new under the sun, and it seems the slaughter of nations
by other nations has existed as long as nations have existed, just
as murder of individuals by other individuals has existed since the
birth of humankind.
The term “genocide” (the combination of a Greek word and a Latin word
) was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer whose
family was killed in the Holocaust, and who himself found refuge in
the United States. Lemkin used the term to define the slaughter of
the Jews by the Germans, but the broader definition encompasses mass
slaughter in a national or religious context, as well as “the gradual
destruction of various basic elements in the life of the group, such
as the forced destruction of national consciousness, the language, the
culture, the freedom of the individual and the economic infrastructure
and many believe it also refers to the murder of members of political
groups with no connection to their personal guilt but rather in order
to harm the entire group and destroy it.”
This broad and comprehensive definition, taken from Auron’s book,
is likely to expand considerably the circle of perpetrators of
genocide and provide a tremendous amount of work for the judges at the
International Court of Justice in The Hague. After all, “the gradual
destruction of various basic elements in the life of the group, such
as the forced destruction of national consciousness, the language, the
culture, the freedom of the individual and the economic infrastructure”
– are actions that, to put it mildly, are not foreign to us from our
history as Israeli Jews. Therefore, the robbery, murder and enslavement
of the Indian inhabitants of South America, which was occupied by the
Spaniards, as well as the slaughter of the Indians of North America
and the abduction of millions of African blacks who were sold like
cattle into slavery in white America over the course of some 400
years – these are to my mind holocaust stories in every respect.
Dehumanization and destruction
Every genocide has characteristics of its own, and each is a chapter
unto itself and also constitutes part of a single, universal, common
denominator woven through the history of humankind.
In South America, this systematic annihilation took place starting
at the beginning of the 16th century – that is, 400 years before
our Holocaust. It occurred in a world in which the white Christian
European was never satisfied in the guise of spreading his culture,
religion and “moral” standards, while he cruelly crushed underfoot
different cultures, and murdered women, children, men and old people
who wanted to keep their land and identity, while robbing them of
their property and land – but not before dehumanizing these victims,
invalidating them and thereby making possible their destruction.
The occupation of South America was done with systematic cunning and
violence, in a deadly cooperative effort of religion (the Church )
and state (the Kingdom of Spain ). It entailed acts of slaughter of
a civilian population for purposes of instilling fear, confiscating
lands, treasures and various assets, and at the end of the process,
total enslavement of those among the occupied people who survived.
In this way, the treasures of the Aztecs and the Incas were looted,
and individuals and cultures were wiped from the face of the earth,
or in the “best” case, became “Christians.” The self-righteousness and
ingenuousness of the justification of the greatest of occupiers, the
conquistador Hernan Cortes, for this destruction was: “I didn’t want
the destruction, but their war left me no choice.” In other words,
it is the victims of the occupation who are responsible for their
own disaster.
Prof. Yair Auron’s book deals with the moral dimension of this
phenomenon. Its subtitle, “So That I Wouldn’t Be Among the Silent,”
testifies with simplicity to its contents and the author’s intention.
This is the last in a series of 10 books on the phenomenon of genocide
and its author, who teaches at the Open University, declares, rightly,
wisely and sensitively, that its aim is “to ask questions, stimulate
thought, ponder the question of whether it is possible to prevent
incidences of genocide or at least reduce their number and ask where
we are when acts of genocide are occurring, ‘so that I wouldn’t be
among the silent.'”
Auron, whose earlier works include “The Banality of Denial: Israel and
the Armenian Genocide” (Transaction Publishers, 2004 , in English),
has also edited a series of short and very powerful texts – both
essays and fiction – by Irene Nemirovsky, Albert Camus, Romain Gary,
Primo Levi, Susan Sontag, Daniel Kahneman and many others. These
deal with genocide in all its various “nuances” and relate to the
phenomenon from the side of both the victims and those limited few
who had decided not to be “among the silent” and who, at the price
of risking their own lives and the lives of those dear to them,
came to the aid of those who were candidates for murder.
The important and interesting question arising from this book
is whether “those who stand and watch have a de facto role in
the responsibility, and perhaps also in the blame, for crimes to
which they were witness but which they did nothing to prevent” This
fundamental and relevant question concerns all people in every era and
relates not only to the worst genocide of all, but also to injustices
like occupation, oppression, blind terror, siege against a civilian
population, environmental punishment and violence of any sort.
According to American psychiatrist Judith Herman, in her book “Trauma
and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to
Political Terror” (Basic Books, 1992 ), “The ordinary response to
atrocities is to banish them from consciousness … Atrocities,
however, refuse to be buried.”
Moreover, she writes, “It is very tempting to take the side of
the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do
nothing … The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share
the burden of pain.” Herman’s words, quoted in the introduction to
the new volume, hold up a mirror in which every one of us is invited
to identify his own face.
In the same introduction, Auron also relates to the teaching – or,
more accurately, to the non-teaching – of the subject of genocide
in Israel. As compared to the wealth of references to the Holocaust
of the Jews, which are a welcome phenomenon in his opinion, he
raises many issues concerning the paucity of instruction, learning,
historical research and knowledge about the destruction of other
peoples. Surveys conducted among students here have found that most
of the respondents knew hardly anything about the genocide against
the Armenians in Turkey and against the Roma in Europe, or even about
the genocides in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, even though the latter
occurred only two or three years prior to the survey.
“For more than 30 years fierce debates have been going on in Israel
about incidents of genocide that have happened to other peoples,”
writes Auron, with the focus of the debate on the uniqueness of our
Holocaust. However, he stresses, “Precisely in Israel, the denial of
the existence of the murder of a people (any people ) and indifference
toward it or the ignoring of it are fatal to us.” For how can we,
who object to any deniers of our Holocaust, morally allow ourselves
not to recognize the holocausts of others? But this is not always
the way things are.
Armenian atrocities
In his earlier book on the Armenian holocaust, Auron cited a memorandum
by Aaron Aharonson, the agronomist who founded the Nili spy network,
submitted to the British Defense Ministry in London on November 16,
1916: “To sit down in peaceful London and write about the Armenian
massacres is a very hard task; no man unless he a Kipling or Masefield
should try it. The massacres were carried out on such a wholesale
scale, with such refinements of atrocity and carried on for such a
length of time in such a systematic way – the only work in which the
Turks seem to be able to be systematic, that no matter how much one
tries to chastise his style, no matter how moderate one tries to be,
one is still liable to be considered as indulging in exaggerations.
“The writer has not been in Armenia proper and has not seen, therefore,
the worst acts of atrocity, but what he has seen, actually seen,
in Syria, in Konya and in Constantinople, what he has learned from
the agents he had sent out to part of the Turkish Empire where these
massacres were carried out on large scale is enough to fill volumes
and make the hair stand on edge.
“The writer is trying here to bring to paper, in a very scrappy way,
some of the things he has seen or learned” from trusted sources,
in order to give a picture of what was happening then “only” on the
margins of the acts of slaughter.
Reuven Miran is the editor of the book “Dancing with the Great Spirit:
Indian Chiefs Speak Out” (2005) and author of the novella “Anna and
the Hunters” (2009), both published by Nahar Books (Hebrew ).
From: A. Papazian
http://www.haaretz.com/magazine/week-s-end/when-evil-comes-like-falling-rain-1.307851