We should not be surprised by instances of what many would consider to be inappropriate use of academic credentials and skills, since, after all, academics and professionals have contributed in direct ways to genocidal killing projects, including the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust.
They have done so by lending their talents and prestige to racist, victimizing ideologies that are central features of many genocides, by helping to create and administer the policies and technologies of mass killing, and by actually engaging in the killing. [30] If highly educated academics and professionals have been able to repudiate their ethical codes and serve as accomplices and perpetrators of actual genocides, it is likely that they would be even more able to engage in an activity in which no one is killed.
It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate the serious harm caused by denial of genocide, particularly denial wrapped in the guise of legitimate scholarship. In this section, we examine the harm done by pseudo-scholarly denial of known genocides and consider the assertion, put forth by some scholars, that deliberate denial is a form of aggression that ought to be regarded as a contribution to genocidal violence in its own right. Then we briefly address the question of what might motivate academics to make a career out of denial of genocide.
Some of the ways in which denial of genocide causes "violence to others" have identified by Israel W. Charny in his essay on "The Psychology of Denial of Known Genocides," in which he emphasizes that denial conceals the horror of the crimes and exonerates those responsible for it. [31] This point is echoed by Deborah Lipstadt, who, in her recent book on denial of the Holocaust, writes that "Denial aims to reshape history in order to rehabilitate the perpetrators and demonize the victims." [32] Denial also, according to Charny, "attacks the historical spirit and morale" of the survivors and the descendants of those killed and places "further burdens on their recovery." [33] In short, denial prevents healing of the wounds inflicted by genocide. [34] Furthermore, it constitutes an "attack on the collective identity and national cultural continuity of the victim people." [35]
A number of scholars have argued, in fact, that the deliberate denial of a known genocide is a harmful act that deserves to be included in the same moral domain with indirect and direct contributions to the actual genocides. Thus, Charny states that "Denials of genocide make no sense unless one sees in them renewed opportunities for the same passions, meanings, and pleasures that were at work in the genocide itself, now revived in symbolic processes of murdering the dignity of the survivors, rationality, dignity, and even history itself' (emphasis in original). [36] Indeed, denial may be thought of as the last stage of genocide, one that continues into the present. A kind of double killing takes place: first the physical deed, followed by the destruction of remembrance of the deed.
Historian (and Holocaust survivor) Erich Kulka regards the denial of genocide as an offense in its own right, asserting that "Attempts to rewrite Holocaust history on the pretext of 'revisionism,' aided by scholars with academic backgrounds, must be viewed as intellectual aggression," a repetition in thought of what was enacted earlier as physical deed. [37] In his recent book on denial of the Holocaust, Pierre Vidal-Naquet characterizes Robert Faurisson, whose "scholarly" denials of the Holocaust have been widely disseminated, as a "paper Eichmann." [38]
We concur with Charny, Kulka, and Vidal-Naquet in regarding denial of genocide as an egregious offense that warrants being regarded as a form of contribution to genocidal violence. Denial contributes to genocide in at least two ways. First of all, genocide does not end with its last human victim; denial continues the process. But if such denial points to the past and the present, it also has implications for the future. For by absolving the perpetrators of past genocides from responsibility for their actions and by obscuring the reality of genocide as a widely practiced form of state policy in the modern world, denial may increase the risk of future outbreaks of genocidal killing.
Sources:
30. For a survey of the roles of several] professions in the Holocaust and other eases of genocidal killing, see Eric Markusen, "Professions, Professionals, and Genocide," in Charny, ed., Genocide, 2:264-98. With few exceptions, studies of the role of specific professions in genocide focus on the Holocaust; but see the path-breaking article by Vahakn N. Dadrian, "The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of the Ottoman Armenians," Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 1:2 (1986), pp. 169-92. On the involvement of various professions in the Holocaust, see, among others, Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986) and Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Alan D. Beyerehen, Scientists Under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Christopher R. Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A Study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940-1943 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1977) and "Genocide and Public Health: German Doctors and Polish Jews, 1939-41," Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 3:1 (1988), pp. 21-36; Michael H. Kater, Doctors Under Hitler (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: 1. G. Farben in the Nazi Era (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Herbert Hirsch, "Nazi Education: A Case of Political Socialization," Educational Forum, 53:1 (1988), pp. 63-16; Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Ingo Muller, Hitler's Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, trans., Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Benno Muller-Hill, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany 1933-1945 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Gunter W. Remmling, "Discrimination, Persecution, Theft, and Murder Under Color of Law: The Totalitarian Corruption of the German Legal System, 1933-1945," in Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds., Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1987), Ch. 10; Telford Taylor, "The Legal Profession," in Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton, eds., The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide (Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1980), pp. 133-140; and Max Weinreich, Hitler's Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany's Crimes Against the Jewish People (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1946).
31. Israel W. Charny, "The Psychology of Denial of Known Genocides," in Charny, ed., Genocide, 2:23.
32. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: The Free Press, 1993), p. 217.
33. Israel W. Charny, "The Psychology of Denial of Known Genocides," in Charny, ed., Genocide, 2:22.
34. See, for example, Levon Boyajian and Haigaz Grigorian, "Psychological Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide," in Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, Ch. 10, and Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide, Ch. 8.
35. Israel W. Charny, "The Psychology of Denial of Known Genocides," in Charny, ed., Genocide, 2:23.
36. Ibid., p. 18.
31. Erich Kulka, "Denial of the Holocaust," in Charny, ed., Genocide, 2:57.
38. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 57.
Comment and add to the story without registration, but keep the comments meaningful please. Links are not accepted.
