I am a person who is often infuriated, but probably one of the things that infuriates me most is the use of mythologized history in an inaccurate way which (almost always) supports people in acting out of moral blindness. This infuriates me most about the Holocaust, probably because the version of its history that I was brought up with was so obviously (to me now) deeply mythologized and counter-factual, and yet it's used by Jews and non-Jews alike to argue, for example, that putting non-Jews in concentration camps is somehow vastly different than putting Jews in concentration camps. In the community where I grew up, it was also used to argue that we should all fear certain people (non-Jews), or take a certain stance in the world (always expect the worst), which came with its own kind of damage.

Recently while looking for books about Hannah Arendt, I found the first book I've read that actually talks about the mythologization of the Holocaust-and what the book says is pretty explosive, at least to me.The book is Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil, and the Optics of Thoughtlessness, by Valerie Hartouni. She starts the book off by talking about the fact that there have been four major events that could be termed genocides since WWII (Pol Pot in Cambodia, Saddam Hussein in northern Iraq, the Hutu massacre of the Tutsis in Rwanda, and the Serbian massacre of Bosnian Muslims). In all cases, the international community has gone to great lengths not to use the word "genocide," which would require them to intervene. But those very same authorities continued to use the rhetoric of "never again" when talking about the Holocaust. In America, the US Holocaust Museum was actually opened in 1993, while the massacre of Bosnian Muslims was going on, and while the US government ignored it.  So much for "never again."

Hartouni explains this discrepancy partly by going back to the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem (1961). (I've written a little bit about this trial before, and you can read my previous post here). Eichmann was the head of the Nazi department in charge of deporting and transporting Jews during WWII. He was captured somewhat extra-legally (depending on who you talk to) in Argentina by Israeli intelligence agencies and brought back to Israel for trial. During his trial, Hannah Arendt wrote a series of articles for the New Yorker which later became her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem.

In Visualizing Atrocity, Hartouni describes how Eichmann's trial was framed, not as a trial of him as an individual, but of anti-Semitism throughout history. Quotes from David Ben Gurion, then Prime Minister of the State of Israel, and Gideon Hausner, the Israeli Attorney General who prosecuted during the trial, show that they were open about what they expected this framing to accomplish. They wanted to reframe Jews, both for themselves and for the world, as survivors of a long history of atrocity. They wanted to position the State of Israel as the rightful avenger of all crimes of anti-Semitism on the world stage. Perhaps most importantly, they wanted to create a certain kind of radical solidarity between Jews, particularly those in Israel. Ben Gurion and Hausner wanted Jews to see the Holocaust as something they had survived triumphantly as a group.

In order for these aims to be accomplished, certain parts of the actual history of the Holocaust had to be rewritten or elided during the trial. For one, in order for the Holocaust to be viewed as the culmination of the history of anti-Semitism, it had to be all about the Jews. The Roma, the Communists, the Poles, the "mentally defective," the homosexuals, all those people got left out of the Eichmann trial, although they had also been in the concentration camps. This is the version of Holocaust history I learned as a child, where only the Jews get hurt. Another thing that needed to change (and this was where Hannah Arendt ran afoul of just about everyone) was that Jewish collaboration with the Nazis had to be written out of the story. Hannah Arendt was excoriated far and wide for mentioning this collaboration in her book, but before the trial, it was certainly not a secret that it had happened. In fact, in 1950 Israel had passed the Israel Nazi Collaboration Law (Hartouni 2014: 28), which made such collaborators prosecutable in Israeli courts. Prior to that, survivors had been taking justice into their own hands as they recognized collaborators on Israeli streets or, sometimes, in Israeli government (this actually happened). Any discussion of such collaborators was purposely excluded from the Eichmann trial, in order to further the twin projects of Jewish solidarity and the framing of Jews as eternally innocent.

This is the narrative of the Holocaust that Americans, Israelis, and Jews ended up inheriting. It was a purposely constructed narrative, and whatever good intentions went into constructing it, it was never all of the truth. Yet it's shaped what we recognize as genocide, and what we assume goes into creating genocide.If the Holocaust was the ultimate genocide and genocide was all and entirely about anti-Semitism, maybe killing becomes genocide only when it's about anti-Semitism, or only when it's entirely focused on one race? Those who would like to ignore newer genocides have certainly been given grounds to say or assume so. Likewise, if racial hatred was the defining feature of the Nazi regime, which was the ultimate genocidal regime, is it genocide if a government decides to wipe out a racial group for other reasons (imperial ones, for example)? Again, based on the narrative told at the Eichmann trials, you could certainly say no--in part because the trial eliminated all mention of the Nazi's racially-related but not directly genocidal goals, like taking over Europe. My point is that while the Holocaust was going on, it's not clear to me that people could have recognized it as a genocide if they used the definition posited by State of Israel at the Eichmann trial. That's not to say that the testimony supporting that definition was untrue, but when put together it formed a pretty redacted narrative, which has not served us well as a map for recognizing criminal regimes or genocidal violence.

I recently heard an interview with a guy who was writing about the history of Fascist groups in, I think, Bulgaria, and he was asked how he characterizes a Fascist--how do you know who is one? He replied, basically, that there have been a lot of checklists constructed to define Fascists, but that he didn't find them very useful or consistent. In his work, he considers someone a Fascist if they say they are one. Unfortunately, genocides do not speak, so there's no such shortcut for deciding what counts as a genocide. But it's pretty clear that we need to jettison the part of the checklist that says a genocide must involve or be primarily about anti-Semitism. Saying that just obscures too much that we need to know about how atrocities of this magnitude happen. At its worst, equating genocide with anti-Semitism is just another way of deciding whose life is or isn't expendable, and I'm pretty sure that's the last lesson we should be taking from the Holocaust.