AZG Armenian Daily #024, 08/02/2008
Armenian Genocide
THE QUESTION OF A POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MENTAL
DISTURBANCE AND DENIALS OF KNOWN GENOCIDES SUCH AS THE
HOLOCAUST AND ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By Professor Israel W. Charny Ph.D, Editor-in-Chief
Encyclopedia of Genocide, Past President,International
Association of Genocide Scholars, Executive Director,
Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide
Israel Charny is the author of Fascism and Democracy
in the Human Mind which has been hailed as one of the
outstanding works of the decade. The Book was
published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2006,
and will be republished in the Spring of 2008 as a
paperback
Perhaps it is because I am also a practicing clinical
psychologist, but I suspect others will also identify
with the observation that at some point, another
question crosses one’s mind as to whether there is any
possibility that some deniers of the Holocaust or
other genocides are, in fact, quite crazy, or in more
polite scientific parlance, mentally ill. For on the
surface of it, the basic claim that a major historical
event of genocide, which the whole world knows took
place, never took place, is madness; let alone that
many of the particularly sloppy kinds of denials and
revisions of history, for example the claim that the
gas chambers in Auschwitz were built only after the
war in order to vilify the hapless Nazis, are
manifestly the ravings of mad men.
In one case where a denier of the Holocaust was
involved in court proceedings which had been initiated
by him, a reporter for a major American newspaper (The
Atlantic Constitution) described the structure of the
denier’s thought processes in the courtroom as
"rambling," and in another instance characterized the
structure of the denier’s argumentation as "bizarre."
In textbooks of abnormal psychology, these are both
characteristic of the thinking of a paranoid.
Is there not room to pause to think about the fact
that classical psychiatry describes various paranoid
conditions as characterized by tortured accusativeness
of someone(s); litigiousness or a need to go to legal
or other kinds of overt conflict with said other(s); a
concealing framework of ostensible and at times even
intricate and impressive logic but in which are
embedded bizarre denials of and breaks with reality,
including delusory fantasies and wild constructions of
a non-existent reality. Thus, in the earlier days of
the 20th century, many self-respecting paranoid
patients would understandably seize on themes of radio
waves speaking to them, penetrating them, or what have
you as civilization grappled with the mystery of the
new-found radio; in subsequent years, chemical and
germ warfare devices became a heady basis for paranoid
ideation; and there is absolutely no reason to think
that denials that masses of human beings were taken in
freight cars to gas chambers and then incinerated in
ovens would not be a delicious invitation for mayhem
in the mind of a paranoid in our times.
But even if there is a possible relationship between
mental illness and denials of genocide, there are
enormous problems in working with the mental health
aspects of denials. For one thing, on a clinical level
it is characteristic that much of the argumentation,
including even persecutory contents, of a
well-organized paranoiac is well reasoned and
presented in coherent and logical forms; and insofar
as this would be true of a denier who is also mad, we
as a community are still required to address the
coherent aspects of presentations of denials and not
simply dismiss them as the ravings of a lunatic, so
that there can be no suggestion of our having walked
away from confronting the issues raised.
Moreover, as we have learned, so many denials are
inherently political strategies in the service of
bigotry and hatred, e.g., antisemitism, and
celebrations of and calls to collective violence; and
so many other denials are also political statements
espousing policies such as realpolitik, even a
decently motivated search for reconciliation and
cessation of conflict, and these and other not-crazy
assertions of deniers cannot be dismissed as the
doings of mad people, but have to be confronted for
their intrinsic immorality, nastiness and self-serving
political agendas at the expense of the integrity of
historical memory and the heartbreak and protests of
decent people against mass murder.
Finally, what is possibly the really deeply
challenging truth in respect of the relationship
between mental illness and denials of the Holocaust,
the Armenian Genocide, or other genocides is that
looking in depth at the thinking of deniers brings us
in touch not simply with the madness of a given
individual, but with a close-to-madness aspect of the
normal human mind which we have all been issued from
the original factory, as well as at a `larger than
life’ grand madness of our human readiness to destroy
so much of life. By the former or close-to-madness
aspect of the normal human mind, I refer to so many
evidences that the human mind inherently is given to
stereotyped thinking, magical thinking, totalistic
thinking, massive projections of one’s weaknesses onto
others, deep difficulties in discerning the difference
between legitimate self-defense and unduly suspicious
paranoid attributions of dangers to others, undue
needs for power, and other attributes which in effect
are found in the minds of all people, and which good
mental health requires us to work at overcoming (see
Greenwald, 1980 on characteristics of the mind as
initially and naturally "totalitarian" – his word).
By the latter or larger than life grand madness of
destructiveness, I refer to the readiness of perfectly
sane human beings, as far as the psychiatric
establishment is concerned, to round up masses of
others, torture them cruelly, and destroy them
unconscionably. Albert Camus (1980, initially 1946)
said following World War II that he discerned that all
human beings have to choose whether they are available
to be executioners, for in the psychological language
I am presently using this is at least a default option
waiting in the natural machinery we have, and Camus
said of himself that he had chosen neither to be a
victim nor an executioner:
…The years…have killed something in us. And that
something is simply the old confidence man had in
himself which led him to believe that he could always
elicit human reactions from another man if he spoke to
him in the language of a common humanity. We have seen
men lie, degrade, kill, deport, torture – and each
time it was not possible to persuade them not to do
these things because they were sure of themselves.
Before anything can be done, two questions must be
put: "Do you or do you not, directly or indirectly,
want to kill or assault?"…
…For my part, I am fairly sure that I have made the
choice. And, having chosen, I think that I must speak
out, that I must state that I will never again be one
of those, whoever they be, who compromise with murder…
(Camus, 1946, p.5)
So whether or not a denier is also mad-and for the fun
of it I may want to publicly tell him to his face that
he is meshugah, I prefer to fight the denier by
discrediting his ideas and argumentation as dangerous
to human life, rather than taking him out on the
grounds that he specifically is psychiatrically
incompetent. On the individual level, there may very
well be in a given denier a bona fide psychiatric
paranoid personality disorder or even a worse
psychotic paranoid condition, but first there is a
diagnostic problem that the mad person is riding the
tail (or broomstick) of an as if accepted madness of
our human society in first committing mass murder and
then in denying the facts, and diagnosis can be
difficult. The really disturbed organism is man the
species, and our human society, and it would set us
back to focus on the individual and not do battle with
denials as an aspect and reflection of the madness of
our human readiness to commit genocide let alone then
to deny it.
Nonetheless, it is interesting to consider the
possibility that some deniers are also mental cases.