american-holocaust

1S2AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTfrom the others that not only is scholarly comparison rejected out of hand,but mere cross-referencing or discussion of other genocidal events withinthe context of their own flatly is prohibited. It is almost as though thepreemptive conclusion that one's own group has suffered more than othersis something of a horrible award of distinction that will be diminished ifthe true extent of another group's suffering is acknowledged.Compounding this secondary tragedy is the fact that such insistence onthe incomparability of one's own historical suffering, by means of whatIrving Louis Horowitz calls "moral bookkeeping," invariably pits one terriblyinjured group against another-as in the all too frequent contemporarydisputes between Jews and African Americans, or the recent controversyover the U.S. Holocaust Memorial. In that particular struggle, involvingthe inclusion or exclusion of Gypsies from the Memorial program, tensionsreached such a pitch that the celebrated Jewish Nazi hunter SimonWiesenthal was driven to write to the Memorial Commission in protestover the omission of Gypsies from the program, arguing that they toodeserved commemorative recognition since "the Gypsies had been murderedin a proportion similar to the Jews, about 80 percent of them in thearea of the countries which were occupied by the Nazis." 10Although Wiesenthal's willingness to extend a hand of public recognitionand commiseration to fellow victims of one of history's most monstrousevents was typical of him (and today support solicitations for theHolocaust Memorial Museum point out that Jehovah's Witnesses, thephysically and mentally handicapped, homosexuals, Gypsies, Soviet prisonersof war, and others also were targets of the Nazi extermination effort)it was an unusual act in the context of these sorts of controversies.Denial of massive death counts is common-and even readily understandable,if contemptible-among those whose forefathers were the perpetratorsof the genocide. Such denials have at least two motives: first, protectionof the moral reputations of those people and that country responsiblefor the genocidal activity (which seems the primary motive of those scholarsand politi~ians who deny that massive genocide campaigns were carriedout against American Indians); and second, on occasion, the desire tocontinue carrying out virulent racist assaults upon those who were thevictims of the genocide in question (as seems to be the major purpose ofthe anti-Semitic so-called historical revisionists who claim that the JewishHolocaust never happened or that its magnitude has been exaggerated).But for those who have themselves been victims of extermination campaignsto proclaim uniqueness for their experiences only as a way of denyingrecognition to others who also have suffered massive genocidal brutalitiesis to play into the hands of the brutalizers.H Rather, as MichaelBerenbaum has wisely put it, "we should let our sufferings, however incommensurate,unite us in condemnation of inhumanity rather than divideus in a calculus of calamity." 12