Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide, by Christopher Powell. 2011. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, London, Ithaca

Holocaust Not Unique. Perceived Holocaust Uniqueness Drives Holocaust Supremacy. Armenian Genocide Fallaciously Belittled

This work emphases the genocides of Third World peoples. In my review, I concentrate on the implications of the Jews’ Holocaust.

MONOPOLIZING THE TERM HOLOCAUST TO REFER EXCLUSIVELY TO JEWS

Christopher Powell comments, “Despite disagreement over whether the Holocaust includes only the Shoah or also includes Nazi mass murders of other groups–Gypsies, Poles, homosexuals, disabled persons, and so on–all genocide scholars are united in affirming that what happened to the Jews of Europe was genocide.” (p. 68). [Because the term Holocaust has largely been monopolized by Jews, I prefer to use the term Polokaust or Polocaust in reference to the Nazi German genocide of Poles.]

HOLOCAUST UNIQUENESS IS FALLACIOUS

Powell writes, “The second problem is that many of the arguments made in favor of uniqueness are not historically sound, even in the narrow claim that the Shoah is unique for being the only case in which a state has ‘set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman, and child belonging to a specific people’; for example, as Ian Hancock (2001) demonstrates, Nazi policies toward Gypsies were just as exterminatory as those toward Jews.” (p. 89).

Powell does not go far enough in his analysis of victimhood competition. In the first place, who said that there any kind of meritocracy of suffering should exist? Who decreed that an inferred total genocide is one iota more significant than “only” a partial genocide? And who decreed that the inferred totality of extermination is the metric that is to be used to create the meritocracy of suffering? Why can’t it be the intensity of suffering before death? [In that case, the Holodomor would be more significant than the Holocaust because, whereas most Jews died quickly from bullets or poison gas, most Ukrainians died slow, agonizing deaths from starvation.]

CLAIMS OF HOLOCAUST UNIQUENESS ARE INTERTWINED WITH ZIONIST POLITICS

In an atypical manifestation of frankness, Powell identifies the main cause of Holocaust supremacy in general and Holocaust uniqueness thinking in particular, “Finally, at least part of the motive for the uniqueness thesis seems to be an uncritical support of the State of Israel and of Jewish-Israeli nationalism.” (p. 90).

PUTTING THE JEWS’ HOLOCAUST ON A PEDESTAL DEVALUES ALL OTHER GENOCIDES

Claims of Holocaust uniqueness unavoidably marginalize all other genocides. Powell recognizes as much, “There are several problems with affirming the particular uniqueness of the Shoah. The most obvious and important of these, for genocide scholars, is that it makes any comparative study of genocide impossible–and in turn, forestalls any contribution that scholarship can make to putting a stop to the ongoing practice of genocide.” (p. 88).

Powell makes his statements even stronger as he comments, “A third problem is that a preoccupation with the uniqueness of the Shoah tends to support collective denial about genocides other than the Shoah, especially about genocides that do not closely resemble it in the manner of implementation.” (p. 89).

THE JEWS’ HOLOCAUST WAS NO MORE SPECIAL THAN THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Powell provides a concrete example of how Holocaust supremacism has been used to minimize other genocides. In doing so, Powell rejects the argument that the genocides of Armenians and Jews were qualitatively different. He comments,

“Katz argues that the Ottoman state did not pursue physical extermination as an end in itself but as the means to a political goal, namely the elimination of perceived threats to Turkish sovereignty. The deportation process, however murderous, aimed at the removal of a community, not an annihilation of a race. However, functionalist analysis of the Shoah reveal that, in its actual implementation (as distinct from the visions of ideologues), the genocide of Europe’s Jews followed a comparable logic. German bureaucrats pursued the goal not of exterminating the Jewish race as such but of making the Third Reich judenrein (‘clean of Jews’). In this respect, deportation to eastern Europe, concentration in ghettoes, and systematic mass slaughter all appeared over time as different expedient solutions to this problem. The combination of deportation and massacre presented a similarly expedient means to the goal of eliminating the Armenian question.” (p. 270).