Hidden Genocides

Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, Douglas Irvin-Erickson

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813570457
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why are some genocides prominently remembered while others are ignored, hidden, or denied? Consider the Turkish campaign denying the Armenian genocide, followed by the Armenian movement to recognize the violence. Similar movements are building to acknowledge other genocides that have long remained out of sight in the media, such as those against the Circassians, Greeks, Assyrians, the indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia, and the violence that was the precursor to and the aftermath of the Holocaust.

The contributors to this collection look at these cases and others from a variety of perspectives. These essays cover the extent to which our biases, our ways of knowing, our patterns of definition, our assumptions about truth, and our processes of remembering and forgetting as well as the characteristics of generational transmission, the structures of power and state ideology, and diaspora have played a role in hiding some events and not others. Noteworthy among the collection’s coverage is whether the trade in African slaves was a form of genocide and a discussion not only of Hutus brutalizing Tutsi victims in Rwanda, but of the execution of moderate Hutus as well.

Hidden Genocides is a significant contribution in terms of both descriptive narratives and interpretations to the emerging subfield of critical genocide studies.

Contributors: Daniel Feierstein, Donna-Lee Frieze, Krista Hegburg, Alexander Laban Hinton, Adam Jones, A. Dirk Moses, Chris M. Nunpa, Walter Richmond, Hannibal Travis, and Elisa von Joeden-Forgey

One

Genocide and Ways of Knowing

1

Does the Holocaust Reveal or Conceal Other Genocides?

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and Grievable Suffering

A. Dirk Moses

Whether public memory of the Holocaust reveals or conceals other genocides is a common—and controversial—question. Many take it as given that widespread shock about the Holocaust caused the “human rights revolution,” crowned by the U.N. Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948. By increasing sensitivity about gross violations generally, the Holocaust is said to inspire interest in and research on other genocides. After all, was not the genocide concept itself, coined by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1943, modeled on the wartime persecutions, deportations, and mass murder of Jews?1 The Holocaust’s institutionalization in official memorial days by the United Nations, Great Britain, and other countries is held to show that it has become the bedrock of a new, global, cosmopolitan ethic that is newly sensitive to others’ suffering. In these ways, it is claimed, the Holocaust reveals other genocides.2

Skeptics are not so sure. A close reading of the U.N. debates in the second half of the 1940s shows that its human rights regime cannot be deduced from Holocaust consciousness because no such consciousness then existed. Contemporaries referred broadly to civilian victims of the Nazis rather than only to Jewish ones; Nazi criminality in general rather than the Holocaust in particular was a background context of the U.N. human rights regime.3 What is more, the Holocaust’s later iconic status purveys a false universalism that obscures alternative forms of traumatic violence, let alone other genocides: only that which resembles the Holocaust is a legible transgression—which accounts for the seemingly ubiquitous effort of so many victim groups to affix the term “holocaust” to their suffering.4 Far from constituting a symbolic idiom that empowers non-Jewish victims to win public recognition, the Holocaust occludes their experiences by establishing an unattainable monumental threshold. In these ways, it is claimed, the Holocaust conceals other genocides.

This debate has come to a head in the controversy about the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The bitter, public wrangle about its projected core Holocaust gallery is a textbook case study of hidden genocides at the intersection of power, knowledge, and memory. Enshrining the Nazi genocide of Jews as the unique lens, template, yardstick, paradigm, or prototype—these are the terms of the discussion—with or through which to understand all genocides and human rights violations satisfies Jewish communal leaders who fear that the Holocaust will be hidden when not specially highlighted, as I explain below. By contrast, leaders of some other migrant groups assert that their powerlessness means the genocides and human rights abuses endured by their compatriots have been hidden from memory and research agendas—and often still are—and are therefore inadequately represented in the museum. Arguing, as many do, that the Holocaust is the “best documented” genocide and therefore best suited for the pedagogical purpose of exemplifying human rights violations misses the point, according to these critics. They think that injustice led to the lack of documentation about other genocides in the past and that the CMHR is compounding it by reproducing historic power imbalances in the exhibition’s Holocaust-centric design.

We are left with a standoff in which Jewish communal leaders and their academic supporters maintain that foregrounding the Holocaust “in no way” diminishes other genocides, while the communal leaders who exert proprietary memory rights over those other genocides vehemently dispute this assertion. Indeed, they suggest that dedicating a gallery to the Holocaust while the five genocides recognized by the Canadian state—Armenia, the Holodomor (the Soviet famine genocide against Ukraine in 1932–1933), the Holocaust, Srebrenica (in Bosnia), and Rwanda—are showcased together in the smaller “breaking the silence gallery,” evinces prejudice and racism because it prioritizes the one over the many, thereby violating Canada’s multicultural consensus about equal treatment of migrant communities.5 Moreover, how fair is the Holocaust’s representation in two galleries, complain communal leaders? As might be expected, they in turn are accused of anti-Semitism.6

In a Darwinist zero-sum game, the highlighting of the one group’s genocide is experienced as obscuring another’s. Moreover, the other’s memory also represents a threatening reversion to the dark days of the interwar, war, and immediate postwar years before public recognition of one’s genocide. The other’s memory even stands as an unbearable reminder of one’s former subordinate social status in the country of origin, rekindling traumatic memories of the vulnerability and violence that led to emigration. This constellation inevitably pressures Canada’s multicultural tapestry of Indigenous and migrant communities, which ostensibly support the official policy of equity, inclusivity, and social cohesion.

It is noteworthy that these memory wars were unleashed by the imperative for government recognition of victim status. After all, communally founded and sponsored museums and memorials to past suffering dot the Canadian urban and rural landscape; there is no shortage of memory about traumas that occurred locally and abroad. The campaigns to have them officially validated seems driven by a fear that if their memory is officially recognized, then ours is hidden—again. In trying to understand these fraught interactions, Judith Butler’s notions of grievability, precariousness, and precarity lay bare the grand psychodrama driving the debate. Ideologically loaded public frames screen out certain forms of human suffering and loss while others “become nationally recognized and amplified”: they are grievable, eligible for mourning’s affective investment. The Canadian memory competitions concern the “differential allocation of grievability.”7 The competition is driven by an acute sense of precariousness, which connotes not only vulnerability but the fact that one’s own existence is ultimately socially dependent, that is, in the hands of others.8 Far from this realization leading one group to empathize with another group’s suffering and to concomitant solidarity, as Butler hopes, the evidence suggests the opposite conclusion, namely that consciousness of precariousness and memories of what she calls precarity—exposure to violence from an arbitrary state or inadequate support networks—lead to frantic efforts to win grievable status, because such status might ensure public safety. Fear of precarity drives the Canadian dispute because contemporary events are interpreted as potential repetitions of past traumas, the “terror of history.”9 Thus Jewish Canadian leaders insist on the centrality of Holocaust memory because they think anti-Semitism is on the rise, yet again, and that Israel is, as always, under siege, while Ukrainian Canadian leaders worry about pernicious Russian influence in sabotaging newly won Ukrainian independence. It is a struggle for permanent security.

Not all migrant community leaders feel this way. Some, like the Chinese Canadian community, do not oppose the CHMR configuration so long as its stories are included. Indeed, its leaders do not feel the need to press for a victim framing of their experiences.10 The Armenian leadership seems mollified after initial concern, although Armenian Canadian scholars at the Zoryan Institute remain unconvinced.11 The competitive intersections of specific memories in relation to grievability and precarity need to be carefully identified and explained, for Holocaust memory is plainly experienced in different ways by different community leaders, helping reveal their suffering in some cases while concealing it in others; or so they claim. A related question posed by the participants is whether the Holocaust’s intensifying public commemoration is based on its inherent differences from other genocides or is the result of more successful advocacy, or both. Was the Holocaust discovered after decades in obscurity or made by an upwardly mobile Jewish community?

The power/knowledge/memory nexus and clash of perspectives about the function of Holocaust memory that I analyze below suggests the impossibility of appealing to a supposedly authoritative body of facts as a neutral source of adjudication. The players’ partisan rhetorical strategies also render suspect the universal claims they make. But if an epistemological vantage point for assessing rival frameworks is therefore unavailable, an ethically preferable subject position may be entertained, namely that of some Indigenous Canadian leaders and writers. First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, after all, were the initial object of discourses about humanity in Canada—the notorious trichotomy of savagery, barbarism, and civilization—in whose name they were conquered, dispossessed, massacred, and subject to governmentalities, like residential schools and forced adoptions, designed to culturally destroy them, which had devastating physical and psychological effects.12

As I suggest below, it is with Indigenous Canadians that Butler’s ideal of empathy and solidarity in recognized precariousness is discernible. For in the manner of a critical theory of genocide studies, their experiences call into question the self-congratulatory human rights project itself, because their suffering at the hands of European settler colonialism implicates the category of humanity and the savagery/barbarism/civilization trichotomy that continues to animate Western political culture.13 It was with the aim of elevating Aboriginal children into the full humanity of white civilization that they were taken from their families and placed into residential schools—a policy that persisted into the 1980s. Holocaust memory does not fundamentally challenge this order because, from the outset, the Holocaust was coded as the consequence of Nazi barbarism.14 Indeed, human rights supplanted the Eurocentric language of civilization after World War II while performing the same function of distinguishing between the human and the not-quite or -yet human.15 And before the residential schools lies the Europeans’ foundational violence to gain possession of this portion of the continent, violence that was also justified in civilization’s name. The human rights project narrates the past teleologically to culminate in the omniscient and morally smug humanitarian subject, but it can only extricate itself from this foundational violence and subsequent policies to “civilize the natives” by a willful blindness to powerful discursive continuities. The limits of the humanitarian subject’s reflexivity are its implications in the genocidal moments it has perpetrated against Indigenous people.

In view of the intuition that Indigenous experiences ought to be central in any Canadian museum dedicated to human rights, it is remarkable (though unsurprising) that Indigenous voices were entirely absent in the debates leading up to the CMHR and that the museum integrates their stories of abuse into a progressive, national, human rights narrative. The grievability of Indigenous victims is a relatively recent development, and the attempt to eliminate their cultures is plainly a question that is difficult for a state-run museum to countenance. To be sure, the Canadian government apologized for the residential school catastrophe in 2008, but not for its own existence.16 The sovereignty that enabled these polices, far from being questioned, was strengthened by arrogating to itself the ability to selectively condemn the past and incorporate Indigenous people into a redeemed national project. As a proclaimed “human rights leader,” it is impossible for the state to admit a genocidal foundation. This is a genocide whose name dare not be spoken in the museum; it is a “conceptual blockage” and will remain concealed, impervious to the progressive narrative of Holocaust consciousness that participates in rather than challenges the enduring savagery/barbarism/civilization categories.17 Instead of providing a narrative account of the CMHR controversy, this chapter analyzes the background anxieties about “hidden genocides” in the Canadian debate in order to understand its hidden motor.18

Entangled Grievability before the CMHR

Lo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory
• PART ONE: Genocide and Ways of Knowing
• PART TWO: Power, Resistance, and Edges of the State
• PART THREE: Forgetting, Remembering, and Hidden Genocides
• Contributors
• Index