Sunday Business Post
January 10, 2010
Evil tales obscure Goldhagen’s point
Worse Than War Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Little, Brown, 30
You have to steel yourself to read a book by Daniel Goldhagen. It’s
tough going, wading through rivers of blood as he plots the course of
various genocidal episodes around the world. If it’s not easy for the
average reader, consider how much worse it must be for the author,
being the son of a Holocaust survivor.
Goldhagen’s first book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, was like a
journey into the pit of hell, examining how ordinary Germans had
behaved during the Holocaust.
Among other horrific aspects, the details of death marches in the
closing months of World War II were particularly harrowing.
His second book, A Moral Reckoning, turned the spotlight on the role
of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust. The message of this third
volume seems to be: they’re all at it.
But somewhere in the fog of evil, Goldhagen’s thesis becomes blurred.
Does he mean we are all capable of mass murder, or that genocide
happens because ordinary people turn a blind eye? Does he mean that
what he terms ‘eliminationism’ is inherent in the human condition? If
so, how can we cleanse the world of such behaviour? In this latest
book, the author comes across as heavy on the problem but light on the
solution.
In one respect, the author isn’t telling us anything new. He lines up
the usual suspects: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Mehmet Talat
(Turkey’s interior minister at the time of the Armenian genocide,
1915-16). But added to these is a wealth of detail on ”mass
slaughters and eliminations in Indonesia, Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda, the
former Yugoslavia, Sudan and many more”.
Just when you think the list might be coming to an end, Goldhagen
makes further additions to it, writing of Guatemalans killing Maya,
Hutu killing Tutsi in Rwanda, Tutsi killing Hutu in Burundi,
Pakistanis killing opponents in Bangladesh, Ukrainians helping Germans
to exterminate Jews, and Germans killing the Herero and Nama tribes in
South-West Africa (now Namibia).
Few would argue with the author’s point that the ‘dehumanization’ and
‘demonization’ of those targeted for extermination plays a key role in
softening up the perpetrators for their role as mass murderers.
But Irish readers might be a little uneasy at some gaps in an
otherwise detailed study. For instance, Goldhagen cites the British
suppression of the Kikuyu people (during the Mau Mau rebellion of the
early 1950s) as an example of the eliminationist mindset, but there is
no reference to such activities elsewhere in the British sphere of
influence.
At first, I thought this was because the author was focusing solely on
20th century incidents, but he also refers to 19th century events such
as early Belgian rule in the Congo and the fate of the native American
Indians.
It is puzzling therefore why he has chosen to ignore the events of 150
years ago, when the population of Ireland fell from eight to four
million during and after the Famine.
Goldhagen cannot have missed the recent controversy which erupted when
an American college included the Irish Famine in its international
studies on genocide. So how can it be that he fails to mention the
death of one million Irish people in a Famine exacerbated by Britain’s
refusal to unload ships laden with food in Dublin port and elsewhere?
Strangely, there is only one reference to Ireland in the entire book:
a chilling extract from the minutes of the Wannsee conference in
January 1942, which marked down 4,000 Jews in Eire for deportation to
the death camps.
As to why genocide occurs at all, the author lays the blame, in part
at least, at the door of the great colonial powers: ”European
colonizers treated people of color the world over as beings of a
different kind, often as barely human, to be dispensed with, including
as slaves, or production factors, or corpses, according to convenience
and practicality
. . . It may be that in some societies and cultures (or subcultures)
there has been a generalized disregard for human life, save perhaps
people’s own reference group, so killing people has not been the
existentially monumental and morally significant act that, during our
age, it otherwise has been."
So what is Goldhagen’s remedy or recipe for making the world a better
place? He argues that it’s necessary to ”motivate the world’s
democracies to organize themselves to create a more democratic,
secure, and prosperous world."
The author’s vision is for ”A serious international prevention,
intervention, and punishment regime to stop mass-murderous and
eliminationist states and leaders from warring on their peoples and
humanity."
Fair enough, but is he talking about a beefed-up United Nations, a
stronger EU rapid reaction force, or something else entirely? Sadly,
he doesn’t spell this out.
From: Baghdasarian