Seizing the Day: Why Britain Will Benefit from Holocaust Memorial Day

In his rejoinder to Dan Stone, Cesarani attempts to answer the objections raised by the latter against the establishment of a Holocaust memorial day in Britain. Using the public response (so far) to the recent opening of the Imperial War Museum's permanent Holocaust exhibition as a test case, he argues that, contrary to Stone's worry that no one would register the existence of a memorial day, the British public shows every sign of being far from indifferent to the events being 'commemorated'. Cesarani characterizes Stone's other concerns as a counsel of despair. It is up to those who dissent from a safely distanced, homogenized or reductive view of the Jewish tragedy-or from a view of the British government as being anything but blameless in the commission of international human rights abuses and genocides, both historical and contemporary-to make sure that the 'plurality of memory' that Stone advocates is not traduced by the events of the day.     

The Dreyfus affair in the British press

Stone argues that, although German anthropologists were relatively liberal thinkers before 1900, they nevertheless advocated an understanding of race that encouraged hierarchical thinking. Such thinking saw colonized peoples as primitive and culturally inferior. When, around 1900, anthropologists became increasingly reactionary and drawn to social Darwinist and racist ideas, their work served as a scientific legitimation for colonial atrocity, as the case of the Herero genocide in German South West Africa (1904-5) demonstrates. At this point anthropologists, along with the colonial military, were more sanguine about the disappearance of 'backward races'.     

Britain’s holocaust memorial day: A case of post-cold war wish-fulfillment, or brazen hypocristy?

This article considers why institutionalized commemoration of the Holocaust in the United Kingdom developed in the 1990s. It finds that the answer may have less to do with Jewish lobbies, or the influence of a “Holocaust Industry” and much, more to do with state political objectives in the ebb of the Cold War. It argues that by repackaging and ritualizing the Holocaust into a “sacred” event in which Western states themselves were absolved of responsibility but also sought to come to Jewish rescue, it became an invaluable prop with which to promulgate Western values while at the same time acting as a moral alibi for interventions against anti-Western regimes. By focusing on the example of specifically British relations with Iraq, it is demonstrated that the moral high ground which Western states have attempted to milk from a Holocaust association is meretricious cant. Appalling and inhuman acts of genocide changed the course of history in the twentieth century. Millions of people perished or had their lives hideously damaged. This is an opportunity for us to recognize and act upon the lessons of the past. Our aim in the twenty-first century must be to work towards a tolerant and diverse, society which is based upon the notions of universal dignity and equal rights and responsibilities for all citizens. The Holocaust Memorial Day is a symbol of this. I would like to thank Prof. Dave Cesarani and two other unknown readers for extremely assiduous and helpful comments on the original draft of this article.     

Stories from No Land: The Women of Srebrenica Speak Out

It is argued that the stories of the survivors of the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 have been neglected by the memorial culture of Bosnia and by the various national reports that investigated how the massacre could have taken place. The author argues that a satisfactory history of the genocide has to include the voices of the survivors, in this case, the women. These are stories of trauma that are hard to listen to. She compares listening to them to the difficulty historians experience in listening to the stories of other genocides like the Shoah/Holocaust, they are stories based on silence about what cannot be told. The argument relies on the oral history literature on listening to trauma as personal and subjective accounts of survival. They are not straightforward referential narratives. One narrative, the narrative of Sabaheta who lost her child and husband, is central to the piece. She is one of the women interviewed by the author. The interview expresses sorrow about loss and rage about the international community; these stories are interwoven. The narrative also describes through the eyes of the victim what she felt happened. The author is Dutch, so is part of the one nation – more than any other – that is accused of “doing nothing.” It was the Dutch army that was supposed to protect the civilian population of Srebrenica. The government of The Netherlands has halted any negotiation on financial support for the research as “the project does not help to overcome trauma.” She argues that giving a voice to the victim is a necessary step toward closure.     

Reviews

Stone accepts the genuine motives of those promoting the Holocaust memorial day in Britain, but criticizes the proposal on three counts: first, the day will probably be ignored by large sections of the population, causing sorrow to the survivors and others concerned; second, the working of collective memory means that the efforts that have been made over the last decades to bring the Holocaust to the centre of British culture may come under threat if a single day were to encourage people, as it possibly might, to forget the Holocaust during the rest of the year; and third, the day will act as a convenient opportunity for the government to present itself as morally upright, thereby occluding involvement in contemporary ethnic, religious or other forms of discrimination. Stone argues for a plurality of forms of Holocaust remembrance-in which memory work does not become reduced to homogenized rituals (wreath-laying) or automatically uttered mantras ('never again')-that challenge people to think about just what it is that they are     

Innocent denials of known genocides: A further contribution to a psychology of denial of genocide

Conclusion The problem of revisionism, or efforts to deny and censor the incontrovertible history of known genocides, is a growing one. It is now clear that denial is inevitably a phase of the genocidal process, extending far beyond the immediate politically expedient denials of governments who are currently engaging in genocidal massacre or have just recently done so—i.e., the Chinese government's abject denials of the killings of some 5,000 in Tiananmen Square, or the Sri Lanka government's denials of the state-organized massacre of 5,000 Tamil. Denials of genocide continue long after the event by a variety of groups and people, including successor governments or successor enemies of the victim people, such as anti-Semites against Jews, Turks against Armenians, and bigots and celebrants of violence and murder of all sorts. But such denials also occur—and this is the most perplexing fact—among a variety of not obviously malevolent people, including intellectuals who, in the process of calling for a better world, effectively exonerate, support, encourage, and participate in denials of a known genocide, implicitly condoning and even celebrating its occurrence, meanings, and portents for the future. This article is an effort to study and analyze this latter phenomenon, which has been little recognized. Together with previous essays on the psychology of more explicit malevolent denials of genocide, the intention is to generate a broader psychological theory of denials of genocide and revisionism by proposing that there are also a variety of “innocent denials” of the factual reality or significance of known cases of genocide, and a variety of “innocent disavowals of violence” which in truth celebrate the violence. These “innocent denials” join with the well-known explicit bigots in creating a vast panorama of dangerous denials of genocides and implicit calls to new genocides in our world. The basic thesis of this article has been under development since its first presentation in a plenary address at the Soviet Academy of sciences in Yerevan, Armenia in 1990 on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.     

Colonial governmentality and the ‘economy’

Using Foucault's notion of governmentality, this paper argues that colonial governmentality in India sought to effect a new relationship between resources, population, and discipline. Drawing theoretical insights from the 'critical accounting literature' to bear on the regulation of economic activity in colonial India, the paper shows how the discursive practices of colonial governance, in particular the modalities of measurement, accounting, and classification, enabled the constitution of the 'economy'. Such statistical data generated as part of colonial administration opened up the possibility of a nationalist accounting of the exploitation of India by the colonial power.     

Introuduction to Deleuze

Modernity has faced many criticisms but none more disturbing than Bauman's claim that the potential for a Holocaust exists in all modern societies. Though essentially a sociological work, Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust centers on political phenomena: bureaucracy, the State's monopoly of coercion and political democracy. This claimed relationship between modernity and the Holocaust is examined critically, drawing particularly on the classic analyses of totalitarianism. The findings show that there is no inherent potential for a Holocaust in modern, rational, society. Rather, ‘common and ordinary’ aspects of modern society serve not to promote but to prevent modern genocide and chosen policies play the largest part in explaining the horrors not only of Nazi Germany but also of Stalinist Russia.     

Guest editor's introduction

In 1933 the army of the nascent Iraqi state launched an exterminatory attack on members of the Assyrian community who had fled to Iraq during the First World War. 'The Assyrian affair' which at the time sent shock-waves around the world has now been largely forgotten. But an examination of its origins and causation reveals much about the nature and pattern of modern genocide. Levene argues that typecasting genocide as the outcome of prejudice, racism or even xenophobia, while these may be significant ingredients, proves to be insufficient as a comprehensive explanation. Rather, these factors need to be analysed within the context of an emerging international system of nation-states. This itself may be a factor in helping to catalyse the most extreme and radically ideological responses, especially from new and untried national elites seeking to overcome perceived obstacles to their state's development and genuine independence.     

Europe,the Final Solution and the dynamics of intent

ABSTRACT

The scale and scope of the ‘final solution’ of the ‘Jewish question’ were extreme even in the horrific annals of genocide. Bloxham attempts to shed light on the pattern of mass murder in its expansion and contraction by viewing the Holocaust in a set of temporally and culturally specific contexts. It places the Holocaust into a broader European framework of violent ethnopolitics and geopolitics from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The Holocaust is depicted as an only partially discrete part of a continental process of traumatic flux, and a part, furthermore, that can itself be partially disaggregated into national and regional components. Bloxham moves from a general consideration of patterns of ethnic violence in the period to a closer causal explanation that shows the different valences of Nazi policy towards Jews in the lands directly ruled by Germany and those of Germany's allies respectively. He shows that the peculiarly extensive ambitions of the ‘final solution’ at its most expansive can only be explained when wider geopolitical and strategic contextual terms are factored in along with consideration of Nazi ideology and the internal dynamics of some of the key institutions of the perpetrator state.     

In The Thick of It: ‘high politics’ and the Holocaust in millennial Britain

ABSTRACT

Over the past twenty years, state-sponsored activities related to the Holocaust have been numerous in Britain. Beginning with the creation of Holocaust Memorial Day at the turn of the millennium, successive governments have followed a policy trajectory that has brought forth a slew of new initiatives and projects related to the Holocaust and its memory. Most recently, this has included the creation of a new national memorial and learning centre, to be housed adjacent to the Palace of Westminster. With cross-party support and the pledge of £50 million of public funds, this lieu de memoire is due to open in January 2020. Conceiving of these activities as exercises in ‘high’ Holocaust politics, Pearce’s article examines the various memory-projects of recent decades and argues they reveal much about millennial Britain and its Holocaust culture. He contends that the nature of these and other initiatives means high Holocaust politics must be subject to continued scrutiny and interrogation.     

British open source intelligence (OSINT) and the Holocaust in the Soviet Union: persecution,extermination and partisan warfare

Where does British open source intelligence (OSINT) fit into the intelligence debate surrounding Allied knowledge of the Holocaust? In particular what can this source of intelligence tell us in regards to the opening of the extermination phase of the Holocaust in the Soviet Union? Were the Allies conclusions being falsely influenced by their own OSINT analysts? Or conversely did OSINT provide further evidence (alongside SIGINT decodes) that the Nazis were now committing mass genocide. This article explores these questions by examining the FRPS/FORD OSINT reports from the civilian ruled territories of (and those intended for) the Reichskommissariate Ostland and Ukraine.     

The human resources crisis in Fiji's public sector: trouble in paradise?

Skills shortages characterize the public and indeed private sectors of most South Pacific countries. In Fiji, the shortages have been exacerbated by political events that have led to the emigration of large numbers of professionals and managers, particularly of Indian extraction. Tensions between indigenous Fijians and Indian Fijians, which have persisted since the arrival of the first Indians in Fiji in 1879, have heightened since Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka assumed Government by military coups in 1987. Under Rabuka's leadership, the Constitution was amended to ensure that no less than 50 per cent of all public service positions at all levels of the bureaucracy were filled by indigenous Fijians, and no less than 40 per cent by people of other races. This requirement makes the Fijian public service an interesting example of affirmative action, and as such, has important implications in terms of the quality of public administration in Fiji. This article seeks to explore the causes of the crisis in human resources in Fiji's public sector and to suggest means of addressing the problem. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Domestication of Violence: Forging a Collective Memory of the Holocaust in Britain, 1945-6

Stone engages with his subject on two levels, the theoretical and the empirical. On the theoretical side, he argues for the meaningfulness of the term 'collective memory' by showing how the response to the Holocaust in Britain served certain communal needs. 'Collective memory' here is the way in which a group produces narratives of the past which enable it to perpetuate itself, to take account of the past without disturbing its own self-definition. On the empirical level, Stone shows that this response was one which domesticated the horror of what had occurred in order to make its narration bearable. The process was by no means a deliberate whitewashing of the murders; it demonstrates how, in the construction of collective memory, the most painful episodes are unconsciously written out or integrated into more uplifting stories. For example, the murder of the Jews of Europe was frequently tied into a narrative of catastrophe and redemption in which the Zionist cause signalled the Jews' ultimate triumph over adversity. Looking at well-known texts and figures such as James Parkes, as well as lesser-known ones, Stone shows that 'collective memory' is a useful term for understanding the way in which texts and rituals combine to construct (whether consciously or otherwise) a certain understanding of the past. In the case of the British response to the Holocaust in the immediate post-war period, this meant a failure to recognize the full enormity of what had taken place, and the incorporation of the murders into culturally familiar narratives.     

Recognition as if sovereigns? A procedural understanding of indigenous self-determination

In the last two decades we have witnessed a growing global acknowledgement of indigenous rights – manifested in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – challenging the traditional nation-state-centred understanding of political rights and democracy. In this paper, the author argues that indigenous self-determination is to be understood as a way to level the balance of power between indigenous peoples and the nation-states in which they live. Without a solid legal foundation for indigenous peoples to define self-determination in their own languages and to negotiate the conditions of their relation with the nation-states on their own terms, the colonial past (and present) of violent conquest and domination might continue. Indigenous peoples' right to self-determination ought in this perspective to imply recognition of indigenous peoples as having a standing equal to nation-states, i.e. as if they were sovereigns. What self-determination means in political practice would thus be the outcome of negotiations between two (or more) equal political entities. In this way, the right to self-determination has to be interpreted procedurally rather than substantially.     

Indigenization of the Holocaust and the Tehran Holocaust Conference: Iranian Aberration or Third World Trend?

It is understandable that Iran’s December 2006 hosting of an international conference casting doubts on the historicity of the Holocaust would raise questions about treatments of the Shoah elsewhere in the Third World. In fact, indigenization the Holocaust—the manifold ways in which serious scholars, activists, and writers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have come to incorporate the Holocaust in their intellectual work—has been positive overall. Within the framework of intellectual globalization, much of the Third World intelligentsia has come to include this most Western of human rights violations within the framework of their own cultures and histories. Although some of the indigenization of the Holocaust is political and instrumental, the deviant variant expressed at the Tehran Holocaust conference is atypical. Governmental respect for the memory of victims of genocide should be considered as an emerging human right.     

The Dual Use of an Historical Event: ‘Rwanda 1994’, the Justification and Critique of Liberal Interventionism

This essay places the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in the context of the academic and political rise of liberal interventionism since 1990. It argues that this historical event is important for the debate about ‘humanitarian interventions’ in two different ways: on the one hand, as a signifier, ‘Rwanda 1994’ has been used (or, for that matter, misused) in order to justify an almost unlimited international agenda of liberal interventionism and social engineering; on the other, the genocide that could arguably have been prevented represents the exceptional case where military intervention can indeed be justified—but precisely because it is not in need of a specifically liberal justification. What would have made a military-based prevention of genocide justifiable in this particular case is precisely the aim to prevent something that is universally agreed to be unacceptable (genocide). The liberal twist in the justification narrative, in contrast, tends to emphasize the difference between the (liberal) ‘us’ and the non-liberal ‘them’, consequently claiming the legitimate right for the ‘us’ to decide about the use of force exclusively, that is, without the ‘them’. The continuation of the narrative into answering the post-intervention question ‘what now?’ then leads consequently into the necessity of imposing one's own system of rule as a general norm without due attention to the specifics of the situation ‘on the ground’. The exceptional features of ‘Rwanda 1994’ (the empirical event) thus point in a critical way to all those cases where ‘Rwanda 1994’ (the signifier) has been used to make the case for an ever-expanding agenda of liberal (‘just’) war.     

Explaining Fascism and Ethnic Cleansing: The Three Dimensions of Charisma and the Four Dark Sides of Nationalism

Ideas and leaders matter. Fascism's syncretic ideology is crucial to understanding its rise and support. So too is the coterie charisma exerted by leaders like Hitler over an inner core even in the wilderness years; his centripetal charisma went on to help attract the masses to the 'Führer party' for very diverse reasons; and the cultic charisma leaders developed especially when in power further helps explain their appeal. The four dark sides of nationalism – namely, its ethnic , religious , scientific and economic dimensions – are also crucial to understanding genocide. So too is leadership: no Hitler, no Holocaust. Genocide also points to the importance of lower levels of leaders, who were sometimes influenced by the charisma of the 'great' leader, although in other cases, such as Milosevic's Serbia, the charismatisation of the national idea was more influential.     

Stages in the Evolution of Holocaust Studies: From the Nuremberg Trials to the Present

Measuring genocide is an effort to treat the Holocaust within the framework of the history of ideas, specifically, how an event of enormous magnitude in terms of life and death issues as such embodied within a political system called National Socialism has an intellectual afterlife of some consequence. The article attempts to develop a four-stage post-Holocaust accounting of events that took place between 1933 and 1945. The first stage is biographical and autobiographical, followed by a second stage of ethnographies of survivors and victimizers. The third stage is dominated by historians and social scientific efforts to examine the “logic” of mass murder. The fourth and current stage is microanalysis, in which sharp and clear distinctions are made between differential treatment of victims in a variety of regions, states, nations, and even concentration camps. It should be understood that these four stages do not negate one another but co-exist in the lasting if uneasy effort to understand the Holocaust.     

A Deeper Durkheimian Society for Haidt’s Righteous Minds

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is an advance in the empirical study of morality. He argues that liberals lose elections because they only appeal to the moral foundations of Care and Fairness, whereas conservatives can appeal to additional things that most people value - Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. Haidt’s argument gets a bit muddled when he tries to incorporate the libertarians’ concern with Liberty into his scheme of moral foundations. This muddle can be resolved by seeing that all groups need Loyalty, Authority, and Fairness (re-described). Politics today is a debate about what is truly Sacred for society - the conservatives’ traditional sacred realm of family, religion, and nation-state, the libertarians’ sacred individual liberty, or the liberals’ sacred care for those who are harmed by society.