>If I in any way miscontrued or misunderstood your position or confused with
with Barkley's I sincerely apologize.>
No problem.
>I do not believe that in my response to either you or Barkley I was hurling
invective as I tried to present my position with supporting evidence and/or
reasoning and/or supporting opinion free of invective.>
Rather than rake over that, let me suggest
a potential benefit in putting ourselves
in the other guys' shoes for a moment.
I'm no doctor of psychoanalysis, but I
never thought much of them anyway.
You describe your adversaries as Holocaust
deniers for their indifference to the fate
of non-jews during WWII or any other time.
For most, I would say, the issue is not
a lack of knowledge of the facts, especially
regarding the European holocaust. They may
not know beans about Indians or Armenians.
What's in question is their emotional scope,
not their intellectual understanding;
what they care about and how they
relate to other people. By contrast,
among deniers of the Nazi sort, the
issue is either a disbelief that
mass murder ever occurred, or a
desire to deny it for perverse
political reasons. This sort of
denial is somewhat different from
those Jews who don't want to hear
about the suffering of other groups.
I think that's really what's operating.
Not, "I don't believe you," but "I don't
want to listen to you." The political
corrollary is, our fates have nothing
in common.
Isn't this exactly part and parcel
of racism in the overarching historical
sense? The isolation of a group for
victimization is aimed at inducing
the victims to isolate themselves,
as in divide and conquer, 101.
Isolation is expressed as desperate
efforts of self-defense ('we have to
save ourselves first'), in betrayal
of one's own for the sake of an
individual or narrow sub-group, and,
after the fact, in a denial of the
suffering of others. In other words,
what you call holocaust denial, which
in a certain literal sense is an apt
description, is also an artifact of
victimization, and perhaps better
understood in the latter respect.
Victimization in this sense is obviously
much more attenuated for some than for
others. Nobody borne after WWII could
have known anyone who fell victim to
the Nazis. The transmission of pain
from elder to younger would obviously
vary among families and according to
individual sensitivity. Some with
virtually no experience of such grief
are probably among the leading deniers
of non-Jewish victimization, but I think
the general point holds. It's hard to
determine who is who in this vein from
e-mail.
Denial can derive from evil politics,
from callousness towards others, or from
willful refusal to admit to the truth of
facts about mass murder.
Alternatively, it could stem from the
predictable emotional self-centeredness
that follows from a searing experience
of victimization, perhaps transmitted
from parent to offspring.
I think the distinction is worth keeping
in mind.
The ability of anyone so victimized to
keep their mind open to the universality
of such suffering is testimony to their
individual qualities, but everybody will
not qualify for sainthood. For those with
little or no direct experience, such as
myself, seeing the plurality of genocides
is no great feat of imagination.
Regards,
Max
A side point:
>. . . (If one is a such a Zionist, why isn't he/she living in Israel
putting body and lifestyle on the line?) >
Because we can't all be heroes. We
often espouse ideals that we do not
fully live up to, for one reason or
another. It's not evil.
