Being on the email distribution list maintained by my aunt
Beatrice is like asking your friend Forrest if you can sample
something from that box of chocolates that his mama was forever
going on about.
The other day, Beatrice asked how I would answer some questions
she had received from an unnamed correspondent. She forwarded the
contents of the message, but nothing to identify its original
sender.
Her correspondent is friendly with Hungarian Jews who still have
concentration camp tattoos to show for their wartime experience. He
said so in the preface to his questions. More trusting of Tex-Mex
wisdom than of the feelings of those friends, he wanted Beatrice to
tell him why the Holocaust continues to hold first place in the
annals of human depravity. "How many movies about the 20
million-plus Ukrainians and Russians killed by Stalin do we get
treated to?" he wanted to knowâ€"and "what about
murdered Polish Catholics?" At least 2,500 priests died at Nazi
hands in Dachau alone, as this man probably knows.
Moreover, he opined, "it is perfectly politically correct to
yawn through a discussion of Pol Pot's murder of millions of
Cambodians, but if one even begins to question, not the murders of
Jews, but the reason why they remain in the spotlight, one is
immediately suspect." The probable reason for this, he hinted, is
that there is an unspecified but influential "Jewish agenda" at
work.
"Piensalo," he closed with, which is Spanish for "think about
it."
My aunt's correspondent has company, as writer Tony Horwitz
found out while writing his thoughtful travelogue, Confederates
in the Attic. Arguing unexpectedly with an African-American
school teacher about Louis Farrakhan, Horwitz told her that Jews
had good reason to distrust Farrakhan. The teacher would tolerate
no criticism of a man she had presented as a role model to her
students. "Oh, here we go again" she sputtered. "Jewish suffering!
What about our suffering? Our holocaust? What about the holocaust
of Indians?"
As carnival barkers say, step right up: almost anyone can play a
victim sweepstakes. Neither the teacher who argued with Horwitz nor
my aunt's correspondent even mentioned legalized abortion, another
contender for the genocide label.
The "Jewish agenda" bit in his email does no favors for Mr. X.
He may be a relative, but in presuming a farcical level of
agreement among freedom-loving people of widely varying opinions,
he also sounds like the kind of person who would search for
lifetime members of the National Rifle Association at an Indigo
Girls concert.
Nevertheless, Beatrice did want my take on that aggrieved email,
and the questions in it do seem sincere. Although they touch on
issues of fairness, perception, and personhood, the questions were
narrowly focused, and so my answers to them must be, also. What
follows a is cheat sheet for the next time somebody asks, "Why does
the Holocaust continue to get more press than comparable
atrocities?"
LET ME SAY UP FRONT that I do not think Hitler was uniquely
monstrous. To ascribe unique evil to Hitler would make him more of
a laboratory specimen than a person, and the history of human
cruelty has no shortage of examples.
I should also point out that I am not writing here about support
for Israel. People sympathetic to that cause will have to rethink
arguments about the "only representative democracy in the Middle
East" anyway, if Iraq makes good on its bid to remake itself along
democratic lines with help from Uncle Sam.
It is important that my aunt's correspondent used the word
"Holocaust" the way he did. In lowercase lettering and the original
Hebrew, the term has theological roots that go back to "sacrifice"
at the time of Abraham, which is why most Jews prefer to call the
genocide orchestrated by Hitler the Shoah, or "calamity."
As a reference to what the Nazis called "The Final Solution,"
Holocaust in English with a capital H first appeared in 1942, which
is one reason why people associate the term with the fate of
European Jews of that era rather than other victimized groups
before or since.
Any attempt to explain evil on the scale perpetrated by the
"Third Reich" must tread lightly. Pious quarterbacks protective of
God's reputation usually find themselves scrambling in the end zone
on third and long while they dodge a pass rush from people
determined to sack popular notions of a benevolent deity. Sometimes
a "Hail Mary" pass is the only way forward in Team Theodicy's
contest with Neopaganism.
Jewish and Christian theologians have wrestled with the
paradoxical implications of being God's chosen people for a long
time. In an essay for the Los Angeles Times last year,
crime novelist Andrew Klavan mused that because "virulent anti-Semitism is
such a good indicator of the presence of evil," it might not be
unreasonable to think that God chose the Jews in part to "be a sort
of Villainy Early Detection System for everyone else."
Whether that hypothesis is true is impossible to say this side
of heaven, but it's safe to assume that the man complaining to my
aunt knows Jesus is Jewish. (He gets a lot of press, too.
I hope Mr. X has no problem with that.)
STEPPING FROM THE SUNLIT MEADOW of salvation history into the dark
valley of the secular landscape that we habitually foul, the early
20th century Armenian Genocide, awful as it was, will never be as
well known as what befell the Jews starting about twenty years
afterward. The persecution of Turkish Christians by Turkish Muslims
happened under cover of a cataclysmic world war, and before cameras
gave photojournalism more immediacy by shrinking down to portable
sizes.
Similarly, Nazi crimes are better known than Communist crimes
because Nazis were on the losing side in World War Two. Tough guys
like General George S. Patton vomited when they saw emaciated
corpses stacked like cordwood in the death camps American troops
had liberated, and high-profile camp survivors like Simon
Wiesenthal started hunting former Nazis more than fifteen years
before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn found a Western publisher for The
Gulag Archipelago.
Because the Berlin Wall was pulled down in 1989, the Soviet
Union was dissolved in 1991, and the Venona Transcripts were not
released until 1995, Joseph Stalin and his successors had more time
to suppress evidence of Communist brutality than Adolf Hitler and
the National Socialists ever did.
The Shoah also makes a strong imprint on the world because its
atrocities were more localized than the comparable crimes of the
Communists. While localized does not mean unique, it is easier to
decry inhumanity in Germany and occupied Poland than to catalog
atrocities in what The Black Book of Communism rightly
observes is four times that many countries on four different
continents.
Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia was horrible, but derivative, and
it happened at a time when Communism still appealed strongly to
many opinion makers in the West.
Another reason for recurring emphasis on Jewish suffering is
that it continues. The ravings of Iran's president, the transcripts
of Friday sermons in too many mosques, and the pathological
fondness for suicide bombing among militant Palestinians all throw
the Shoah into stark relief, changing the punctuation on "never
again" so that it ends with a question mark rather than with the
period or exclamation point it should have.
If there are agendas to be found, they're wielded not by Jews,
but by single-minded enemies of Jews.
topics:
Abortion, Movies, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Israel, Africa, Communism
