A Larger Consciousness by Howard Zinn

 A Larger Consciousness

By Howard Zinn

ZNet Commentary, Oct 10, 1999

http://www.tokyoprogressive.org/~tpgn/japan/10zinn.htm

Some years ago, when I was teaching at Boston University, I was asked by a
Jewish group to give a talk on the Holocaust. I spoke that evening, but not
about the Holocaust of World War II, not about the genocide of six million
Jews. It was the mid-Eighties, and the United States government was
supporting death squad governments in Central America, so I spoke of the
deaths of hundreds of thousands of peasants in Guatemala and El Salvador,
victims of American policy. My point was that the memory of the Jewish
Holocaust should not be encircled by barbed wire, morally ghettoized, kept
isolated from other genocides in history. It seemed to me that to remember
what happened to Jews served no important purpose unless it aroused
indignation, anger, action against all atrocities, anywhere in the world.

A few days later, in the campus newspaper, there was a letter from a faculty
member who had heard me speak a Jewish refugee who had left Europe for
Argentina, and then the United States. He objected strenuously to my
extending the moral issue from Jews in Europe in the 1940s to people in
other parts of the world, in our time. The Holocaust was a sacred memory. It
was a unique event, not to be compared to other events. He was outraged
that, invited to speak on the Jewish Holocaust, I had chosen to speak about
other matters.

I was reminded of this experience when I recently read a book by Peter
Novick, THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE. Novick's starting point is the
question: why, fifty years after the event, does the Holocaust play a more
prominent role in this country -the Holocaust Museum in Washington, hundreds
of Holocaust programs in schools -than it did in the first decades after the
second World War? Surely at the core of the memory is a horror that should
not be forgotten. But around that core, whose integrity needs no
enhancement, there has grown up an industry of memorialists who have labored
to keep that memory alive for purposes of their own.

Some Jews have used the Holocaust as a way of preserving a unique identity,
which they see threatened by intermarriage and assimilation. Zionists have
used the Holocaust, since the 1967 war, to justify further Israeli expansion
into Palestinian land, and to build support for a beleaguered Israel (more
beleaguered, as David Ben-Gurion had predicted, once it occupied the West
Bank and Gaza). And non-Jewish politicians have used the Holocaust to build
political support among the numerically small but influential Jewish voters
note the solemn pronouncements of Presidents wearing yarmulkas to underline
their anguished sympathy.

I would never have become a historian if I thought that it would become my
professional duty to go into the past and never emerge, to study long-gone
events and remember them only for their uniqueness, not connecting them to
events going on in my time. If the Holocaust was to have any meaning, I
thought, we must transfer our anger to the brutalities of our time. We must
atone for our allowing the Jewish Holocaust to happen by refusing to allow
similar atrocities to take place now yes, to use the Day of Atonement not to
pray for the dead but to act for the living, to rescue those about to die.

When Jews turn inward to concentrate on their own history, and look away
from the ordeal of others, they are, with terrible irony, doing exactly what
the rest of the world did in allowing the genocide to happen. There were
shameful moments, travesties of Jewish humanism, as when Jewish
organizations lobbied against a Congressional recognition of the Armenian
Holocaust of 1915 on the ground that it diluted the memory of the Jewish
Holocaust. Or when the designers of the Holocaust Museum dropped the idea of
mentioning the Armenian genocide after lobbying by the Israeli government.
(Turkey was the only Moslem government with which Israel had diplomatic
relations.) Another such moment came when Elie Wiesel, chair of President
Carter's Commission on the Holocaust, refused to include in a description of
the Holocaust Hitler's killing of millions of non-Jews. That would be, he
said, to "falsify" the reality "in the name of misguided universalism."
Novick quotes Wiesel as saying "They are stealing the Holocaust from us." As
a result the Holocaust Museum gave only passing attention to the five
million or more non-Jews who died in the Nazi camps. To build a wall around
the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust is to abandon the idea that humankind
is all one, that we are all, of whatever color, nationality, religion,
deserving of equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
What happened to the Jews under Hitler is unique in its details but it
shares universal characteristics with many other events in human history:
the Atlantic slave trade, the genocide against native Americans, the
injuries and deaths to millions of working people, victims of the capitalist
ethos that put profit before human life.

In recent years, while paying more and more homage to the Holocaust as a
central symbol of man's cruelty to man, we have, by silence and inaction,
collaborated in an endless chain of cruelties. Hiroshima and My Lai are the
most dramatic symbols and did we hear from Wiesel and other keepers of the
Holocaust flame outrage against those atrocities? Countee Cullen once wrote,
in his poem "Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song" (after the sentencing to
death of the Scottsboro Boys): "Surely, I said/ Now will the poets sing/ But
they have raised no cry/I wonder why."

There have been the massacres of Rwanda, and the starvation in Somalia, with
our government watching and doing nothing. There were the death squads in
Latin America, and the decimation of the population of East Timor, with our
government actively collaborating. Our church-going Christian presidents, so
pious in their references to the genocide against the Jews, kept supplying
the instruments of death to the perpetrators of other genocides.

True there are some horrors which seem beyond our powers. But there is an
ongoing atrocity which is within our power to bring to an end. Novick points
to it, and physician-anthropologist Paul Farmer describes it in detail in
his remarkable new book INFECTIONS AND INEQUALITIES. That is: the deaths of
ten million children all over the world who die every year of malnutrition
and preventable diseases. The World Health Organization estimates three
million people died last year of tuberculosis, which is preventable and
curable, as Farmer has proved in his medical work in Haiti. With a small
portion of our military budget we could wipe out tuberculosis.

The point of all this is not to diminish the experience of the Jewish
Holocaust, but to enlarge it. For Jews it means to reclaim the tradition of
Jewish universal humanism against an Israel-centered nationalism. Or, as
Novick puts it, to go back to "that larger social consciousness that was the
hallmark of the American Jewry of my youth". That larger consciousness was
displayed in recent years by those Israelis who protested the beating of
Palestinians in the Intifada, who demonstrated against the invasion of
Lebanon.

For others -whether Armenians or Native Americans or Africans or Bosnians or
whatever -it means to use their own bloody histories, not to set themselves
against others, but to create a larger solidarity against the holders of
wealth and power, the perpetrators and collaborators of the ongoing horrors
of our time.

The Holocaust might serve a powerful purpose if it led us to think of the
world today as wartime Germany where millions die while the rest of the
population obediently goes about its business. It is a frightening thought
that the Nazis, in defeat, were victorious: today Germany, tomorrow the
world. That is, until we withdraw our obedience.