William F.S. Miles
Northeastern University, Boston and the Watson Institute, Brown University
For better or worse, media coverage of this farcical ÒreviewÓ of the Holocaust was extensive. Implicit in the coverage, it seemed, was the impression that what was happening in Tehran was somehow typical of some broader trend of Holocaust denial throughout the world, and particularly in the Third, or developing, World.
I would argue that the opposite, in fact, is true. First, if you look at the Tehran conference itself, you see that it was mostly composed of the same, sorry lot of notorious First World Holocaust deniers. Second, if you look at the academy and intelligentsia outside the Arab and Persian spheres, you see that accurate learning about the Shoah is gradually taking root in the developing world. This acknowledgment of the Holocaust is, for sure, filtered through local lenses and historical sensitivities. Overall, though, it is a positive trend, one that I refer to as Òindigenization of Holocaust consciousnessÓ Ð the ways in which serious scholars, activists, and writers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have themselves come to indigenize the Holocaust, incorporating this most Western of travesties within the framework of their own culture and history.
But first, IÕd like to make a few more observations about the Tehran Conference, so as to put it in perspective . Of the 18 panelists, 10 were from Europe, the U.S., Canada and Australia. Only 3 were from non-Arab, non-Persian Third World countries. The government of Mexico issued a rejection letter of the Conference through its Foreign Ministry; and Ban Ki-Moon, the new secretary-general of the United Nations, issued a statement to the effect that ÒDenying historical facts, especially as such an important subject as the Holocaust, is just no acceptable."
In short, the Tehran Conference was hardly a gathering that expanded Holocaust denial beyond its usual den of First World malcontents and Middle Eastern anti-Zionists. It was, above all, a pseudo-scholarly media event that united First World with Persian Gulf Holocaust deniers. (There was also the sideshow of religiously devout Jewish anti-Zionists who attended, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion.)
OwnershipÓ of Holocaust History
There is one valid question, however, that even Holocaust deniers raise: To whom does the Holocaust ÒbelongÓ?
Six and a half decades after the end of World War II, one can no longer say Ð if one could ever Ð that the memory of the Shoah ÒbelongsÓ primarily to the Jewish people, or to the nations that perpetrated and witnessed the Holocaust, or to the memory of those who actively combated the so-called Final Solution. Memory of the Shoah belongs to the entire world. The question is: how is that memory preserved; how is it conveyed to new generations; and how is it invested with meaning?
My research is on the extension of Holocaust consciousness beyond the familiar shores of Europe, America and Israel. It examines the activities and writings of African, Asian, and Latin American intellectuals as they have evolved since the 1970s. Globalization of the academy, I argue, has inevitably indigenized the study of the Holocaust. Such indigenization is gradually extending knowledge and teaching of the Shoah from the traditional province of Western scholarship. (By Western I include Israeli as well as European and North American academia.)
This perspective is what Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider in their The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Temple University Press, 2006) refer to as the Òcosmopolitanization of memories: ÒTransnational memory culturesÉ transcending ethnic and national boundaries.Ó John Torpey, in Making Whole What Has Been Smashed (Harvard University Press, 2006) is more sardonic about the global appropriation of the Shoah: the Holocaust, he writes, has become a veritable ÒÔgold standardÕ against which to judge other case of injusticeÓ (p. 37). The subtitle of Professor TorpeyÕs work conveys his skeptical stance: On Reparation Politics.
Professor Torpey is correct to be dubious of exploitation of the Holocaust by entrepreneurs - in both developed and developing nations - of reparation politicians. Still, as long as indigenization of the Holocaust (which by definition excludes denial of it) does not degenerate into simplistic equating of Shoah with Naqba (the Palestinian ÒcatastropheÓ of 1948), the overall trend is a positive one. In any event, the desire to control from afar local interpretations of world history are doomed to failure.
There have been antisemitic at the U.N. conference on racism in Durban in 2001 and anger against Israel for events in the mid-East and in Europe last year. But there are enough counter tendencies that warrant taking noteÐ even within the Arab orbit.
Arab Acknowledgments
Take the case of one Arab who was refused an Iranian visa to attend the December conference in Tehran. Khaled Kasab Mahameed is a commercial lawyer in the city of Nazareth who mounted the first non-belittling Holocaust exhibit in the Arab world. According to Mahameed, ÒIf Arabs could acknowledge and empathize with Jewish sufferingÕ it might neutralize Jewish-Israeli survival anxietiesÉÓ
In like vein should be noted the Arabic programming center at the Holocaust Museum in the Western Galilee. Guided by Israeli Arabs and conducted in Arabic, the center brings Arab students for an optional course of 10 consecutive Sundays culminating in their becoming Holocaust museum docents. Similarly, one should note the 2003 visit of 100 prominent Israeli Arabs to the Auschwitz camp memorial museum. A key organizer of the trip was Nazir Mgally, a journalist from Nazareth.
Robert SatloffÕs Among the Righteous. Lost Stories from the HolocaustÕs Long Reach into Arab Lands (Public Affairs, 2006) provides incontrovertible evidence of Arab rescuers of Sephardic Jews targeted under Vichy, Fascist, and Nazi rŽgimes in North Africa.
Admittedly, these examples of Arab responses to Holocaust victimization are far from representative of Arab and Muslim societies. Fundamentalist responses to the Holocaust are trumpeted more loudly than humanitarian ones. But the Muslim and Arab worlds are hardly monolithic in dismissing the Shoah. Among the nations voting for the first ever commemoration by the United Nations, in January 2005, of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps were Oman, Morocco, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Outside the broader Arab and Muslim orbit, the Third World as a whole is no longer lock-step behind pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish radicalism. For various reasons (partly tied to the end of the Cold War but also a response to Palestinian fragmentation), the Arab bloc no longer commands the allegiance of the Third World intelligentsia that it did once did. Third World intellectuals increasingly avail themselves of their freedom to view the Holocaust undogmatically.
East Asia
Forty years ago there was no Center for Judaic Studies in Nanking, China. The Center was founded by Professor Xu Xin, President of the China Judaic Studies Association, and author of such works, in Chinese, as Antisemitism (1996) and the Encyclopedia Judaica. In Shanghai, Professor Pan Guang Ð whose boyhood neighbors included Russian-Jewish refugees - heads yet another Center of Jewish Studies. Shanghai alone hosted 30,000 Jews during World War II, an indication of the sympathy towards Jews displayed by pre-War statesmen and elites in China.
Pan Guang and Xu Xin exemplify how even such otherwise disparate cultures as the Jewish and Chinese have begun to find common ground through the Holocaust. In particular, Holocaust studies provide a framework for the Chinese to revisit and cope with their lingering pain from the Nanking massacre. (Note Iris ChangÕs subtitle to The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten holocaust of World War II).
Following the War, a Chinese version of the Diary of Anne Frank sold about half a million copies. After NixonÕs visit to China, books and movies about the Shoah began to freely circulate. Some Chinese scholars began to focus on the Holocaust, a tendency that accelerated after normalization of relations with Israel. Television documentaries, a traveling exhibit, a presidential visit to IsraelÕs Yad Vashem Holocaust museum: also these raised consciousness of the Shoah in China. So has the outpouring of scholarly books and articles dealing with Jewish history and Israel.
Study of the Shoah in China is linked to a broader consciousness over human rights. According to Professor Xin, Jewish philosophy and theology counters Buddhist-influenced Chinese thought, according to which Òlife is pain and sufferingÓ and preparation for the next reincarnated life is more important than the present one. In contrast, Xu Xin conveys the Jewish perspective that Òlife is given by GodÓ and therefore must be enjoyed, and respected. Here is an unexpected source for human rights in China Ð Jewish post-Holocaust theology.
Memories of the Nanking massacre still divides its perpetrators. On one side are those Japanese who look to the way Germany faced its past and collectively took responsibility the Shoah - as opposed to Japan, which has not come to terms with its own World War Two crimes. On the other hand are those Japanese who insist Ð instrumentally - on the uniqueness of the Holocaust. In this way, they downplay the large-scale killings committed by Japanese troops, attributing them to the heat of battle, not to any genocidal policy. (Ironically, this group invokes the case of Sughira - the Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who saved Jews by issuing transit visas - as emblematic of the compassion of wartime Japanese authorities.) Both groups are fully aware of how the comparison of JapanÕs war crimes with the Holocaust can exert a powerful influence on the current debate over JapanÕs wartime history.
Latin America
Indigenization of the Holocaust is even more ambiguous in Latin America, a region that offered escape not only for Jewish refugees of Nazi persecution during the War but asylum for Nazi perpetrators after it. The continuous presence there of unprosecuted Nazi fugitives marks Latin America as the theater where post-Holocaust justice has been least rendered, even compared with Germany. Only in 2000 did the president of Argentina apologize for the sanctuary his country has provided for Nazis.
Argentina also is the site of the one Shoah memory institution in South America, the Memorial Foundation of the Holocaust in Buenos Aires. Established in 1994, beside its historical and communitarian activities, its goal is to promote civil rights and combat discrimination in contemporary Argentian society. Recent groups and speakers include those from the Defence Ministry and the Federal Police Academy. Another branch of the Foundations exhibits paintings, drawings and sculpture art to memorialize Holocaust and genocide. Latin American artists meld both World War II-era genocide with post-War recollections and expressions of crimes against humanity. With Eva Peron recently extradited back to Argentina from Spain, memories of the Òdirty warsÓ are naturally stoked. These counterinsurgencies of the 1970s were conducted, as it turns out, by local fascists, some of whom had been trained by Nazis or the children of Nazis. For sure, some prominent Jews were targeted in the Òdirty wars.Ó This pilled over into genocide visited upon indigenous peoples.
It was a chance visit by Dr. Roberto Cabrero to Yad Vashem in Israel that gave rise to a program of post-genocide trauma therapy in his native Guatemala. Trauma therapy in Latin America must cope with a psychological resistance long known to those familiar with Holocaust survivors: a reluctance to recount painful memories.
Caribbean and African Diaspora
Claims for reparations, such as the campaign to have slavery declared a crime against humanity, have taken their cue from post-Holocaust litigation. From the outset, the
reparations movement took upon itself to Òexplore the modalities and strategies of an African campaign of restitution similar to the compensation paid by Germany to Israel and the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust.Ó This reparations movement is pursued vigorously among Americans and Caribbeans of African descent.
It is in this context that I relate what I witnessed on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, populated mostly by descendents of African slaves. An elementary school was group brought to see a touring UNESCO exhibit on AimŽ Cesaire, Martinican founder of the nŽgritude movement of Black consciousness. In explaining nŽgritude to the schoolchildren, the guide read from this poem, displayed in the exhibit, by CŽsaire:
TO LEAVE.
AS THERE ARE HYENA-MEN AND PANTHER-MEN,
I WOULD BE A JEW-MAN
A COLORED-MAN
The exhibit catalogue, in its explanation of nŽgritude, reinforced the parallel: ÒThe Negro is also the Jew, the Foreigner, the Amerindian, the Illiterate, the Untouchable, He who is differentÉ
Clear cross the globe, on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, also once populated by African slaves, there is growing consciousness about the detention camps set up by the British during the Holocaust for over fifteen hundred Jewish refugees deported from off the coast of Palestine: 126 of them died during their incarceration. The Mauritian songwriter Zul Ramiah invokes the Holocaust in his Kreole dirge, ÒZenocide.Ó
Africa
It is on the African continent itself that indigenization of the Holocaust is strongest. This is, unfortunately, a reflection of genocidal reality and legacies of racism. In The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgivenness (Oxford University Press, 1999) Nigerian Nobel-laureate Wole Soyinka several times invokes the Holocaust and criticizes demagogic antissm. In one passage, Soyinka refers to the tireless efforts of Jewish survivors and their heirs Òto recover both their material patrimony and the humanity of which they were brutally deprived.Ó
Indigenization of the Holocaust in Africa takes three main forms: First, educational programs in South Africa deal both with Holocaust and apartheid. The Cape Town Holocaust Centre, for instance, brings members of the South African police force, prison department, judiciary, and military academy to discuss institutional racism prior to and following democratization.
Second, memorial exhibits in both Kigali and Cape Town display evidence of Holocaust. (In the Kigali exhibit, the greater genocidal focus is of course on the Rwandan one; in Cape Town, Holocaust much more prominent in the exhibit than apartheid.)
Third is the pursuit of justice for perpetrators of genocide, ˆ la Nuremberg. Notwithstanding the innovative model of post-genocide trials reputedly modeled after indigenous modalities of dispute resolution in Rwanda (gacaca), prosecution of Class A offenders proceeds along the lines established for the top planners and instigators of the Nazi Holocaust.
A native of Ghana is married to the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who took many risks to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. That West African, who often expressed his connection to, and deep respect for, Wallenberg, is former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan. Speaking at the Durban conference in 2001, Annan publicly acknowledged that the
Jewish people have been victims of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world,
and in Europe they were the target of the Holocaust -- the ultimate abomination.
This fact must never be forgotten, or diminished. It is understandable, therefore,
that many Jews deeply resent any accusation of racism directed against the State
of Israel -- and all the more so when it coincides with indiscriminate and totally
unacceptable attacks on innocent civilians.
Conclusion
Despite what one may infer from the Tehran Conference regarding the extent of Holocaust denial in the Third World, the following counter trends are in evidence:
1. Intellectual globalization includes the Shoah within the emerging universal consciousness of world history.
2. Many Third World peoplesÕ are making reparations claims for historical injustices based on the moral authority and tactical moorings from precedents established for Holocaust victims.
3. Otherwise ignored groups under fire in the developing world utilize the idea and word ÒholocaustÓ as an instrument to gain support and sympathy from the West.
4. Critics of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, from the Third as well as First Worlds, can and do compartmentalize the historical dimension of the Holocaust; there is an emerging consciousness of Jewish post-Shoah existential defensiveness.
5. Denial of genocide is not at all limited to the Holocaust: the Tehran Conference gained notoriety because the genocide in question was the Shoah. Survivors of genocides in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have also had to confront the indignity of denial.
In short, scholars and intellectuals from the Third World are increasingly indigenizing the Holocaust and its legacies in diverse ways. For sure, some of that indigenization is political and instrumental: but whose practice of history is completely objective and apolitical? Overall, indigenization of the Holocaust, a byproduct of intellectual globalization, is positive. The Tehran Conference should not obscure this alternative trend.
AuthorÕs Note: Following the MIGS seminar at which this paper was delivered, The New York Review of Books published a statement from over one hundred Iranian intellectuals and artists condemning the Tehran Conference and its attempts Òto falsify history.Ó Signers of the statement pay Òhomage to the memory of the million of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.Ó