Suffer In Silence
Suffer in silence. So you were removed from your home, and informed you had no right to live there. So you were told that you were an insect, that your family was a family of insects. So you were barred from working where you have always worked, even though you did a good job there and everybody liked you. So you were put in a train. So you were stripped of your clothes in the cold. So they took all your food away. So your family was shot. So they made you march. So they put you in a camp. So you were forced to breathe poison gas. So your kids were killed. Suffer in silence. Shut up and take what you deserve.
This blog hasn’t been very cheerful the last few days. I’ve been immersing myself in the historical records of one atrocity after another, and it’s been screwing with my state of mind. So many facts to learn, so many pictures to look at, so much I still don’t understand.
But here’s one thing I’ve figured out: genocide works because the persecutors manage to shame their victims into silence. Fear and shame are two of the main weapons in the genocidal toolbox, and we need to ask hard questions about why so little is known about the atrocities of our time. Where is the literature of the Ukranian Holodomor (a word I’ve just learned today)? Who is the Primo Levi, or the Cynthia Ozick, or the Steven Spielberg of Cambodia, of Rwanda, of the Ukraine, of China, of Bosnia, of Darfur? Dave Eggers is doing his best, but mostly there is silence.
It happens that silence is what the persecutor wants to hear from his victims. The experts know what they’re doing, and they know how to manipulate and dehumazine their targets into submission and silence. This is why our modern planet cannot stop the threat of genocide, even today. The technique still works, and it’s happening again as we speak.
One of the several books I’m reading is The Holocaust Chronicles, which begins with this line: “It exists alone in history.” Hardly. This is a question I brought up earlier in this series: why is so much known about the Jewish holocaust and so little about all the others? Well, maybe the Jews were the first people to actually speak — loudly, defiantly, and absolutely incessantly — about what happened to them. I’m proud of this. I’m even proud to be continuing to complain about it here today, and I’m not halfway done complaining yet.
How about you — when are you going to complain about it?
January 19th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
I HAVE been complaining. But no one wants to listen. And no one wants to hear. And fatigue has infected anyone who might have listened once.
ACT UP changed things for Americans who lived with AIDS. They chained themselves to Big Pharma’s front door. They dropped corpses off on the Capitol steps. They bitched and yelled. They wrote and they marched.
They got medication.
They did not, however, change the economic dynamics to GENOCIDE. It still costs over fifty grand a year for that medication and who can afford it.
They always get you in the end. America.
You are thinking: AIDS is not genocide, Nasdijj.
Yes. It is.
You are thinking: prove it.
AIDS is a disease. But it is fundamentally a disease that has targeted (does a virus have a brain — maybe — what it has is a genetic DNA designed to reproduce itself at will which can ironically be the purpose behind the human brain) the already culturally and racially and economically marginalized.
We will soon be looking at thirty million dead and where is the cure.
Better yet: where is the will to find a cure.
Antiretrovirals are not a cure and their discoveries came from cancer research not AIDS research. AIDS research has produced researchers and grants. Period.
All the AIDS drugs come from a previous generation of research.
Thirty million dead is a lot of dead.
Thirty million dead of the marginalized is a lot of dead marginalized. There is another analogy here. If their lives never amounted to much (certainly not the drive to find a cure) their deaths have been marginalized as well.
Example: Question: Why is it that federal prisoners cannot receive condoms.
1.) Federal prisoners in America are black; they are there for drug offenses, and they are marginalized.
2.) Answer: Federal prisoners do not have sex.
Question: Then why are 83% of them infected with HIV.
GENOCIDE is INDIFFERENCE.
I live in paris. Do you think my neighbors stood up for the jews who were rounded up and put on trains for Poland. No. They did not. They hid in their apartments.
They were INDIFFERENT and they were AFRAID. And they could have helped stop that genocide. And they didn’t.
Those vacated apartments are now lived in by other famies utterly unrelated to the families who were evicted for the trains and the gas chambers.
To maintain that indifference and fear are not related to genocide is patently absurd.
You cannot define genocide without the context it comes with and that context is economic.
Every genocide has its greed.
The greed of Big Pharma in the States has killed millions.
What Big Pharma has done is a crime against humanity.
I don’t write about AIDS anymore because no one buys those books and we’re more concerned with who a writer’s mother was than we are about what he might have to say or what universal truths he might be speaking to.
Here’s some heresy: No one DARES say this. We don’t give a fuck about AIDS because we think of it as a disease of homosexuals and African-Americans.
In this culture of indifference and greed, they are both expendable. There is an unarticulated agreement that the ruling class could do without them.
No one will speak to that. It is forbidden.
On a booktour all across North America I was only once asked about AIDS.
“Do you see any hope,” a very sad lady inquired.
No.
In the face of genocide, where IS the hope.
People keep telling me it’s in the living of our lives. Hope.
But I’m just too dead to see it anymore.
January 19th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
edgar hilsenrath and antonia arslan have written about armenia. gil courtemanche and veronique tadjo have written about rwanda. those authors come to my mind immediately.
many books have been written about yugoslavia, about the kurds, about the sinti and roma.
who’s reading them? who wants to talk about them? who’s interested in what they have to say?
who’s reading the diaries, the blogs, the letters of those not published, who listens to their unwritten stories?
who shows interest, asks questions, searches for answers and for the truth?
where is the interest, where is the market for those voices?
i think the problem is not that hardly anyone speaks out. i think the problem is that hardly anyone wants to hear.
January 19th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Nasdijj — you’re wrong that I was going to say “AIDS is not genocide”. I know people with AIDS, I saw what happened, and I think AIDS activism as important a cause as any others.
Anemone — thanks for sending these names, and I have to tell you I have never heard of any of these writers. Maybe it’s different (understandably) in Europe. Here in American bookstores, I can find entire shelves of books about the Jewish holocaust, maybe three books about Rwanda, maybe one about Bosnia or about Mao’s famine … nothing about Ukraine, nothing about Kurds, nothing about Armenia (I once ordered a book about it called “Vergeen” but it’s completely unknown despite my blogging about it), nothing about Pol Pot. I guess it’s that big discrepancy of public awareness that I’m talking about. Yeah, the expert historians know their facts. But the average guy on the street knows about Auschwitz, maybe heard about Rwanda, and that’s as far as it goes.
January 19th, 2007 at 2:50 pm
The last novel I wrote is about Armenia, and has as one of it’s basic themes the “never again” aspect of the effects of genocide. It’s fiction, and the people’s caught between superpower America and Jihaddist violence plan to forcibly change US leadership. Apparently though, it’s not an easy sell to literary agents who are needed to market the book.
As for AIDs, that has always seemed like a unique problem to me. I know that it’s killing Africa, but since I’m older, I recall that Africa has always been dying from one thing or another. And as Nasdijj points out, white America has never given a hoot about Black Africa. Again though, I’d re-direct you to the big picture. $10 million/hour spent on the Iraq War could have gone to AIDs research, paralysis research, re-building Africa, re-building American Indian concentration camps (reservations), coulda gone to do some good in a lot of areas.
Part of the big picture is what Anemone calls feindbild. But that is only to say - people are stupid and easily led astray; re-Nietzsche’s sheep, or herd mentality. The hard solution is how to make stupid people wise up. Literature is the key. Nasdijj, you need to never give up, to always keep writing. If your books were Harry Potter, AIDs would’ve been cured by now. If people would read my books (which are all unpublished) they would be wiser.
For example “Summer of the Mets” is a good book. It has important things to say. People should read it. The author should promote it continually, not for self-aggrandizement, but because it has an important message. Literature is the key, we need to use it.
January 19th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
that’s exactly what i’m talking about, levi.
the average guy on the street here isn’t any different than the one in america, and the shelves in our bookstores show tendencies similar to those in yours .
words are spoken, but they are not heard.
there is no market for them, no interest, no ear (or, let’s say there’s just a small market, and little interest, and only a few ears who want to listen; little marketing, few reviews, no movies made from them, etc).
the jewish holocaust is a popular genocide. it happened right within the center of the civilized world, it happened right among us, it happened with us.
it is a first world trauma, and first world people read and write about it.
as for the other genocides - we’d have to listen to their people to hear the voices. search for the voices. ask for them.
then, i am sure, we will hear.
January 21st, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Levi, I haven’t been saying much, but I’ve been reading your ongoing discussion about genocide. Keep it going.
January 21st, 2007 at 10:38 pm
I will, Bill (and everybody) … thanks!
January 26th, 2007 at 9:04 am
You may enjoy (enjoy may not be the right word) Vollmann’s “Rising Up and Rising Down,” which if nothing else is a good taxonomy of violence and its justification. You can probably find cheap versions of the abridged version on the net.
January 27th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
“why is so much known about the Jewish holocaust and so little about all the others? Well, maybe the Jews were the first people to actually speak — loudly, defiantly, and absolutely incessantly — about what happened to them.”
Add to that the whole scenario involved - Der Führer, the Nazi, the ‘twisted cross’, the SS, the black boots, gas chambers, the rockets falling into London… this could have well been a novel of epic proportions and indeed, read like one. It was a spellbinding event that to this day offers up all the ingredients of a story that would make a hit movie, not unlike the ‘Lord of the Rings’ or ‘War of the World’… any huge Hollywood blockbuster that pits ‘real evil’ against ‘true goodness.’
The story of Hitler, a name that will never be passed on to another, rings with evil to this day. There are possibly as many books about Hitler and the Nazis as there are about the Holocaust… the two are inseparable.
The other horrible acts of genocide do not have the storyline, do not have the plots and drama, the extensive evil that Hitler and the Holocaust do. Where are the boot-jack armies, the Nazi flags, the roar of the rockets falling from the skies upon innocent peoples, where are the huge monuments to a supposed greatness of a Race, the Aryans..? The genocides before the Nazis and after pale in comparison to that story.
When Stokely wrote, “Literature is the key,” is in part why the Nazi regime had so many readers, so many attuned to their actions… it was worth every word that was written about it… even if some words were not enjoyed. But that is literature. It is also Theater, and who has not been riveted in disbelief at what Hitler and the Third Reich did? Old b&w films showing Der Führer outfitted in his black uniform shouting at thousands before him while those same thousands held their right arms stiff supporting every word he spoke. This was an unbelievable event… with a background of Nazi flags, pillars stolen from Greek architecture, more powerful an image than Rome, because it had such theater to it. Yes, it was all evil, it was pure evil, and that is precisely what attracted so many people to watch the event unfold.
I agree with Anemone when she wrote, “the Jewish holocaust is a popular genocide. it happened right within the center of the civilized world, it happened right among us, it happened with us. it is a first world trauma, and first world people read and write about it.” Exactly! But add all the other ingredients: the massive military take-over of surrounding countries, the millions of deaths even with one country, Russia. The added slaughter of homosexuals, the retarded and handicapped, the Gypsies by the Nazis…
The other genocides cannot compare. There was enough people killed in other genocides, but they didn’t have the props, the theater, the disciplined evil, the mad-genius quality that Hitler and his Third Reich did. There was enough to the Nazi to last more than a lifetime for people to read and watch in horror… enough to hopefully last mankind’s lifetime for anything of that magnitude to happen again.