Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

GOALS OF ANTI-JEWISH ADMINISTRATORS THROUGH THE AGES
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Goals of Anti-Jewish Administrators through the Ages. In his magisterial threevolume
work entitled The Destruction of the Jews, historian Raul Hilberg (b.1926) observes
that
the Nazi destruction process did not come out of a void; it was the culmination of a cyclical trend.
We have observed the trend on the three successive goals of anti-Jewish administrators. The
missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews.
The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The
German Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live. (Hilberg, 1985, p. 9)
Goebbels, (Paul) Joseph (1897–1945). Holder of a doctorate in literature and philosophy
with the intention of becoming a writer, Goebbels joined the Nazi Party in 1924,
and, by 1933 Hitler appointed him German Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda
because of his talents in this area. A virulent antisemite, among Goebbels’s
goals was the physical removal of all Jews, not only from Berlin, but from all of Germany,
and a campaign for German support for the euthanasia campaign. He also hoped to “Nazify”
German art and culture by removing so-called foreign elements (read Jewish), and in
1933 orchestrated the now notorious book burning in Berlin. The primary architect of
the infamous Kristallnacht of November 1938, the initial destruction of Jewish lives and
property, he would, by 1944, be placed in charge of the mobilization of the German people’s
war efforts. Rather than submitting to capture by either the Russians or the Allies,
he and his wife Magda committed suicide in the Fuhrer’s bunker after first poisoning
their six children.
Goldstone, Richard (b. 1938). For many years in the 1990s and early 2000s, Goldstone
served as a justice with the Constitutional Court of South Africa. From August
1994 to September 1996, he also served as the chief prosecutor of the UN International
Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR). He was
selected, in part, for the latter position on the basis of his global reputation for his sterling
work, while directing a South African Commission of Inquiry that disclosed police violence
and abuse against black citizens of South Africa during South Africa’s apartheid
years.
Golkar. An Indonesian political party. Its name is derived from Sekretariat Bersama
Golongan Karya, or Joint Secretariat of Functional Groups. The party evolved as an armybacked
alliance of nearly one hundred anticommunist groups and organizations in the
early 1960s, but it was ineffective so long as Indonesia was ruled by its left-leaning first
president, Ahmed Sukarno (1901–1970). After a military takeover of power led by
Mohamed Suharto (b. 1921) in 1966, Golkar was reorganized by General Ali Murtopo
(1923–1984), head of the army’s Special Operations Service (OPSUS) and Suharto’s
political protégé. The party henceforth became the established party of government, and
remained so for more than three decades. Electoral successes in 1971, 1977, 1982, and
1987 saw Suharto’s rule entrenched. Between 1971 and 1988, Suharto was unopposed in
presidential elections, and Golkar came more and more to resemble a personal political
front organization designed to enable him to retain office. Evolving into a mass mobilizing
party loyal to Suharto, in some senses it moved away from being the political arm of
the Indonesian military alone, though Suharto’s ongoing support of the military in most
areas tended to blur the distinctions. Yet, as the party leadership tried to distance itself
from the army, the military chiefs became increasingly wary of the direction the party was
heading, and in the final years of Suharto’s rule before his departure in 1998, it was unclear