CONVERSATION WITH…DR. ISRAEL CHARNY
Connecticut Jewish Ledger
Sept 11 2013
Posted by JudieJacobson on September 11, 2013
By Cindy Mindell
Dr. Israel Charny
A world premiere exhibition on the pioneering work of genocide scholar
and psychotherapist Israel W. Charny will open at the University of
Hartford on Monday, Sept. 23.
Born in Brooklyn in 1931, Charny has lived in Israel since 1973. He
completed his training in clinical psychology in the U.S. at the
University of Rochester in 1957. Over the course of his career, he
has become one of the world’s leading experts on genocide, a pioneer
in the field of genocide studies, and the founder of the Institute
on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, all the while remaining
a practicing psychotherapist and acknowledged expert on marriage
and family therapy in Israel. Charny is now retired professor of
psychology and family therapy at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and
Tel Aviv University.
“Genocide: Israel Charny and the Scourge of the Twentieth Century”
will be on view in the Museum of Jewish Civilization at the University
of Hartford through April 2014. The presentation charts the life and
career of this pathbreaking scholar, while highlighting photography
of sites where three 20th century genocides took place: the 1915
Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust or Shoah of European Jewry, and the
1994 Rwandan Genocide.
A co-founder and past president of the International Association of
Genocide Scholars (IAGS), Charny is editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia
of Genocide, (ABC-Clio Publishers, U.S. and UK, 1999) and author of
Fascism and Democracy in the Human Mind (University of Nebraska Press,
2006), both works selected by the American Library Association as
“Outstanding Academic Book of the Year.”
Charny is executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and
Genocide in Jerusalem, which received the 2011 Armenian President’s
Prize, “in recognition of his decades-long academic work and activities
contributing to international recognition of the Armenian Genocide
and his researches of denials of genocides.”
He is founding editor of GPN Genocide Prevention Now,
(genocidepreventionnow.org).
On the eve of the new exhibition honoring Charny and his career,
he discussed his work with the Ledger via email.
Q: Why did you decide to devote so much of your professional life to
the understanding and prevention of genocide?
A: I had not planned as such to study genocide, but it came to
me, so to speak, and told me that I had to devote myself to this
subject. It was some six years after my PhD in clinical psychology when
I successfully passed the examinations for the highest certification
(the “Boards”) in my profession. I went to sleep happy with my success
and awoke with a dream about the Holocaust, and specifically the
pounding question of how could they have done what they did to us
Jewish fellow human beings – men, women, and children. I realized
with horror that in all of my wonderful training at an outstanding
American university and several psychiatric hospitals, in those
days I had never been trained in any aspect of human violence or
destructiveness, let alone any effort whatsoever to understand the
Holocaust and other genocides. It was then that I resolved that,
along with the practice of psychotherapy, which I love to this day,
I would devote myself to the study of genocide. In time my decision
became two-fold: first, in my own researches to contribute to the
understanding of the psychology of genocide, and second, to seek at
the same time to contribute to the development of an interdisciplinary,
as well as multi-ethnic, discipline of genocide studies.
Q: What has kept you engaged for so many decades?
A: Believe it or not, I have found that my deep devotion to the
subject of genocide studies has added perceptibly to my pleasures of
life and to my very deep commitment to the sacredness of human life.
Some Holocaust/genocide researchers indeed end up bitterly depressed
or burned out, but there are any number who are led to savor life’s
beauties all that much more. When I taught undergraduates a course
on the Holocaust and genocide I would tell them that there will be
nights when they will feel terrible over what they learned and saw
in films that day in class but then suddenly there may come a wave of
hunger for the best hamburger in town or a hunger for their boyfriend
or girlfriend, and my advice to them was to go get it- because that is
the point of our fury and condemnation of those who destroy human life.
Q: What are your professional experiences with and findings regarding
children and grandchildren of Holocaust and genocide survivors?
A: There have been many, many studies of children of Holocaust
survivors in particular; less of the children of other peoples who have
suffered genocide. The main findings make a lot of sense to me and also
fit my clinical experiences as a therapist: The second generation is
unbelievably successful in its achievements, and scared to death of
intimate emotions and especially wary of any kind of anger – including
perfectly normal anger – towards loved ones. It is also a generation
pursued by obligations. I saw one couple in treatment because they
were fighting too much and too strongly and the key turned out to be
that she – a second-generation daughter to two full-blown Auschwitz
survivors – had been so obligated in her childhood and teenage years
to tread softly on the floors of their house so that her nervous and
irritable parents would not be upset that she literally had a need to
explode now that she was free and married – and was she one powerful
and delightful fighter, but obviously too much so.
I am less knowledgeable about research taking place about the third
generation, but what I see in my practice are third generation
offspring who have grown up with parents who could not give them
the full range of emotions. Commitment? You better believe it –
overwhelmingly so. Caring? No doubt whatsoever. But intimacy in
tenderness and loving, including a freedom to allow angry emotions
both in the parents and the child, were not expressed sufficiently.
Q: At what point does behavior described as “civil war” cross the
line into “genocide?”
A: For me, genocide is the purposeful killing of masses of unarmed
civilians without there being a strategic military intention to
the attack. In other words, collateral damage to civilians in the
course of a military operation does not qualify immediately for
a concept of genocide, although if the collateral damage is very
large, the legal definition moves towards a possible definition of
“crimes against humanity.” There have been any number of Holocaust and
genocide scholars who have wanted to insist that genocide has to be
a purposeful effort to destroy a given people entirely – such as the
Nazis’ intention to destroy the Jews. But life is far more complicated
and genocide comes in many different packages. The Cambodians destroyed
one third of their fellow countrymen, the majority of whom had no
significantly different identity – the killers and victims were of
the same people. In Rwanda we are told that the distinction between
Tutsi and Hutu was a very artificial and recent construction by the
Belgian colonizers; moreover, there are a great number of accounts
of Hutu also slaughtering fellow Hutu in the process, let alone an
unbelievable number of accounts of the genociders slaughtering members
of their own extended family.
Some years ago I published a satire in a journal for social science
teachers in which I described several all-too-able genociders like
Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot seeking legal advice to help them continue
their activities because a kind of “heat” was beginning to build up
against genocide in the international system. I sent them to a firm
of international lawyers that was named “Whore, Satan, and Conformist
– Attorneys at Law.” The learned defenders of justice gave several
pieces of advice among which stood out the recommendation that when
the genociders want to kill a specific people – as called for by
the definitional purists – they should henceforth be careful to kill
them in a situation where they are mixed with many other peoples who
are not defined as specific targets of the genocide, and this will
complicate legal charges of genocide against them.
For me, civil war that includes killing of masses of helpless civilian
human beings is very much genocide.
Q: A propos, how would you define the recent use of chemical weapons
in Syria?
A: Yes, what is happening in the civil war in Syria includes a great
deal of out-and-out genocide. That certainly is the proper description
for the indiscriminate poison gassing of many hundreds of people, not
to mention the wildly indiscriminate shelling and shooting killings
of huge civilian populations in many Syrian cities. When the ugly
shebang first began, we at GPN Genocide Prevention Now proceeded
quite promptly to identify the murdering that then numbered in the
single-figure thousands as genocide, and we tracked the progressive
development of what we came to call “unfolding genocide” from issue
to issue. Incidentally, when it all started, one of the too many
virulent antisemites in academia in our times, who is otherwise a
very gifted scholar of many aspects of genocide, insisted publicly
that GPN’s criticisms of the killing in Syria were hardly the issue
in the Middle East, and that the only real source and risk of genocide
in the Middle East is – you better believe it – the State of Israel.
Q: How does the State of Israel define and deal with the Armenian
Genocide?
A: Shamefully. Cowardly. Disgustingly pragmatically. I too have made
decisions not to tell a truth when I felt that the truth could lead
to real harm to human beings. Thus, in 1982 when I launched the First
International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide in Tel Aviv,
the Turkish government objected strenuously to our allowing several
presentations on the Armenian Genocide (six lectures out of a scheduled
300), and enlisted the efforts of the Israeli government to close the
conference down. The Turks made their characteristic wild threats that
sounded like Jewish lives in Istanbul and especially Jews escaping
from Iran through Turkey might really be at risk. For several months
I did not say a word publicly about what was happening, even as my
colleagues and I continued to work adamantly towards continuation of
the conference to include every one of the papers and a film on the
Armenian Genocide (the conference did take place very meaningfully).
When the time came, I told the whole story as it really was to the
world press and it received a good deal of coverage – including in the
New York Times – as a case history of standing up against governments.
Official Israel denies recognition of the Armenian genocide, but thank
God the Israeli people and the Israeli culture very much recognize
the historical validity of the Armenian genocide. One small example
is that to this day, the Forty Days of Musadagh is an inspiring piece
of Zionist education, let alone one heck of a great read.
So much of Israeli government denial of recognition has been
unnecessarily obsequious and downright cowardly and kowtowing even
in situations that hardly involved major security and political
considerations. When my late brother, poet, translator and editor, T.
Carmi (Charny) was editor of a wonderful multi-language magazine called
Ariel that was published by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
there was a touching story about the Armenian Quarter in the Old City
of Jerusalem, in the course of which there was all of a brief reference
to the Armenian genocide and the many orphans of that genocide who
found safety settling in our good old Jerusalem and elsewhere in
Palestine. The issue had already been printed in thousands of copies
in several languages – rare in those days, on expensive glossy paper
– and you wouldn’t believe it, but the Foreign Ministry stopped the
distribution to cut the page out, replace it and rebind the magazine.
The people of Israel, indeed the Knesset of Israel, have shown
themselves entirely ready to recognize the Armenian genocide; it
is the political leadership of Israel – of all political parties to
date – that has continued a realpolitik of currying the mad Turkish
insistence on denial.
Would any of us ever agree to denials of our Holocaust – for
any political or commercial or even less than critical security
considerations?
Q: One common characteristic arising from genocides or “ethnic
cleansing” is the semantic challenge exemplified by Bill Clinton
regarding what was happening in the former Yugoslavia, and the
resultant foot-dragging on the part of the UN countries capable of
helping. How do you explain this reluctance on the part of world
leaders to call a genocide what it is?
A: For quite a while, we believed that once a genocidal event
was labeled as a genocide in the international system, such as by
the United Nations or by the United States as the world’s leading
democracy, there would follow an imperative of intervention to halt
or reduce the ongoing genocide. The delays on such recognition were
unconscionable. At the time of the Cambodian genocide, the United
Nations Human Rights Commission called for a study of the dilemma
that the killers were destroying fellow countrymen and not an “other”
people, so how could it be genocide? They called for a report on the
dilemma to be given no less than a year later – during which hundreds
of thousands more, of course, were killed. In recent years we have
learned the further sad truth that even when proper recognition
of a genocide does take place, such as nowadays in greater Sudan,
the world as a whole does not necessarily take action – even to help
starving uprooted refugees in the Nuba Mountains as winter closes in
at this time.
The huge question is, why in hell has humanity avoided recognizing
the Number One killer of human life – genocide?
Genocide is a massive experience of death, and I think that so much
of our personal human machinery and our societies’ ways of organizing
our lives are devoted to an overwhelming denial of – what we all know
is totally true – the impending death of every one of us. Indeed,
one of the conclusions I have come to about terrifying readiness of
human beings to commit genocide is that it serves, unconsciously,
as a form of sacrificing others to a death we fear for ourselves:
I make you die because I am God-like in my powers and I will prove
it with your death, and since I am God-like I will absolutely ensure
my true goal of staying alive forever.
Q: Do you see signs of hope in our world regarding genocide prevention?
A: NO – and yes. My “NO” is unfortunately stronger than my Yes, but
thank God there is a degree of “Yes.” If we only have the time before
our quite stupid species destroys itself on this planet, then the
facts are that we have been making a great deal of, in fact wonderful,
progress over the last 30 years in identifying the previously unnamed
crime of genocide.
The word-concept “genocide” was first coined by a very special survivor
and escapee from the Holocaust, a Polish jurist, Raphael Lemkin, who
lost virtually all of his family in the Holocaust even as he made his
way first to Sweden and then to the US. After the war, he is credited
virtually singlehandedly with bringing about the United Nations
Convention on Genocide. Ever since there are new developments in the
legal system, including international courts that have functioned
with some meaningfulness in the cases of the former Yugoslavia and
Rwanda, and more recently the development of the International Criminal
Court in the Hague. There are increasing researches and professional
journals of genocide studies in the intellectual and academic world,
and we now have professional organizations of genocide scholars that
number in the hundreds. Back in the early 1980s, the best we could do
at first was to identify three American-Jewish scholars who published
works on the subject of genocide and then a handful more who joined
us in the continuation of that decade.
And if for many years the subjects of discourse in the field were
the definition and identification of genocide and understanding the
characteristics of the genocidal process, in recent years the word
“prevention” has been added to the focus of the genocide scholar. It
is, I suggest, something like a medical-scientific process where first
the phenomena of a disease – say, like cancer – are identified and
described, and then some years later major efforts begin at developing
treatment and prevention.
GPN Genocide Prevention Now is clearly dedicated to furthering our
human society’s very underdeveloped capacities to reduce genocide,
stop genocide, and prevent genocide.
Shana Tova from Jerusalem in our tumultuous conflict-ridden world.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.jewishledger.com/2013/09/conversation-withdr-israel-charny/