The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

118 essentializing difference
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all this obscuration is that the perpetrators
themselves were careful in how they described their activities, making the most
obscene appear quite harmless. 3 They rarely stated explicitly what they were doing,
and usually used euphemisms to describe what we now know were crimes
against humanity. However, dedicated researchers have found enough corollary
documentation to make an airtight case that anthropologists were deeply enmeshed
in the crimes of the Third Reich. This documentation is found in archives in the
United States and Europe and, increasingly, in books about and compilations of
documents from the period (Lifton 1986; Proctor 1988; Klee et al. 1991; Drechsel
1993; Aly et al. 1994; Friedlander 1995; Klee 1997).
The arguments against bringing up this disastrous chapter of the discipline’s history
are strong. Anthropologists have asked: Why discredit our field so long after
the deeds were done? Why discredit all anthropologists of the era when only a few
were involved? Why should we give German anthropologists of that period so much
attention when American anthropologists never took them seriously anyway?
The answer to these questions is simply that the issues that challenged the anthropologists
of the Nazi era were not so different from the issues that have challenged
anthropologists at other times as well. As a discipline we have had a strong
desire to play a role in the governmental activities of our countries and to inform
policy makers of our learned opinions regarding population groups. Anthropologists
were involved in the administration of England’s colonies; they have been involved
in the conduct of war and have been advisers on racial and educational policy
in the United States. This involvement has had both positive and negative effects
on the people who were subject to the policies that evolved with anthropological
input. Problems arise when the direction a government is taking is in opposition to
the human rights of some of its people or those it has power to command. Does
the anthropologist then abandon the desire to be a player, or does he or she adapt
to the order of the day?
We must remind our critics that one does not discredit a discipline by looking
closely at the mistakes, or crimes, its theoreticians and practitioners have committed,
even when they are of the magnitude of a Holocaust. It is far more dangerous
to ignore an infamous period and to learn nothing from it. Denial of unpleasant
truths makes it easy to turn complicated events into myths by placing them in
a simplistic format (Schafft 1998). When we do that, we fail to see the ways by which
people come to follow the road to genocide. Particularly in our own time, following
the turn of the century, we see no end to impulses to commit atrocities against
ethnic groups. It is absolutely vital that we begin to look at the ways by which otherwise
civilized people embrace the road to genocide, as Scheper-Hughes does in
this book. What roles in society can fan the flames of ethnic violence or, more appropriately,
stop the trend? What policies exacerbate or might be effective in restoring
values that protect human life? Students in a class I teach on the Holocaust always
ask, Why did it happen? Why didn’t anyone stop it? Their questions are