The Cherry Orchard

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?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s new campaign of disinformation regarding the European Jewish genocide of half a century ago has had a positive effect for me: it’s inspired me to do a lot of thinking on this subject. Since writing this article, I’ve been studying up on the actual histories of the Jewish holocaust and several other holocausts of the 20th century, and learning some surprising things.

I wrote in the article linked above that, contrary to popular perception, genocide is anything but rare in the world today. I’ve been gathering more information (though my knowledge of the subject is still sparse), and I’m continuing to find many surprising patterns and similarities between what appear to be isolated histories. Here are some of the more well-known cases of genocide on our planet in the last hundred years, listed chronologically:

1. Turkish Armenians, 1915-1918

2. Russian Peasantry, 1932-33

3. Eastern European Jews, 1939-1945

4. Chinese Peasantry, 1958-1961

5. Cambodian Peasantry, 1975-1979

6. Iraqi Kurds, 1988

7. Rwandan Tutsis, 1994

8. Bosnians, 1992-1995

9. Sudanese, now

We are accustomed to examining these incidents in isolation, but what can we learn by comparing them, and why is that most popular treatments (books, movies) of genocide focus so tightly on specific incidents but draw back from any attempts at universal conclusions?

I believe this is a natural result of the intensely private experience we each have when apprehending the ugly facts of our own history. It is very difficult for me, as a Jew, not to see Hitler’s Jewish holocaust as a searingly unique event, despite the fact that a wider look reveals it was nothing of the sort. Historians with personal connections to any of the other ethnic groups or economic classes above will likewise tend to individuate, and if we stop our inquiries there we are likely to miss the obvious fact that genocide follows clear and distinct universal patterns. In fact, once we separate ourselves from our emotional reactions of victimhood and take a close look, a shocking truth quickly emerges: genocides happen because they serve a functional purpose.

This contradicts the prevailing idea of genocide as the work of madmen. I’m sorry to report that no such easy excuse can survive close examination. I only wish we could blame this horrible phenomenon on human insanity, but this explanation does not hold.

Today is Martin Luther King Day, which seems like an appropriate time to announce the beginning of a new inquiry that I will conduct here at the ol’ Cherry Orchard Blog, Fruit Stand and Political Theme Park. I am going to attempt a field guide — a broad, fact-rich overview — of the worst known incidents of man’s inhumanity to man (as we like to call it) in modern history. Please visit again during the next few weeks as I prepare my first summaries on this topic.

Despite a weekend of worldwide protests and the ongoing flow of weak, ambivalent press releases about the situation in Sudan, it’s very difficult to discern what’s going on at all from news sources around the world.

I have been trying for days to write an informative article about the Sudan situation, and after much reading I am still mystified. Why is the African Union peacekeeping force leaving on September 30, and why is the United Nations waiting for the Sudanese government — the force, apparently, that hundreds of thousands of refugees need protection from — to give them permission to take the African Union’s place? Wikipedia’s not much help, and neither is the New York Times, which regularly devotes only a moderate amount of space to this growing crisis.

Despite the famous ineffectiveness of the United Nations, their email press releases have been more enlightening than other sources, and one cannot fault Security General Kofi Annan for failing to yell loudly enough. One can, however, fault various governments, media outlets and organizations around the world for not picking up the call.

Those who remember the Nazi holocaust used to repeat the phrase “Never again”, and I remember a time in my life when I was naive enough to take comfort in that thought. The problem is, never again always seems to start after the holocaust is over. I read Philip Gourevitch’s history of Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and gained a crystal-clear understanding of how that disaster was allowed to happen in 1994. Similarly, it’s easy in retrospect to look back and comprehend the incredible massacres carried out by Pol Pot in Cambodia. But what do we do when the head of the United Nations tells the world “it’s happening again, right now” — and you look for a way to help and find none? It cannot be that we must wait for the atrocities to lapse into past tense before we can wrap our brains around them.

It’s happening again. Everybody knows it, and nobody knows how to help. Over in Iran, where the government pretends to care about humanitarian crises whenever Israel is to blame, a major conference is being planned to examine whether or not the Jewish Holocaust of the 20th Century was a fraud. The past is a comfortable place to dwell. Is anybody out there concerned with the present?

I’m not giving up on my wish to become knowledgable about the situation in Sudan, but I need to find better sources of information so I can hopefully say something better than “it’s bad” sometime soon.