The Continuing Holocaust

Corpses at Buchenwald, shortly after liberation.

For better or for worse, Schindler's List occupies a lofty spot in our culture as the film about the Holocaust. When NBC aired the film uninterrupted and nearly unaltered in 1997, it was an unprecedented event, and despite the chaos in which I was watching it, it impacted my sense of humanity. Some 65 million of my fellow Americans are estimated to have viewed it, as well. This is about the same number of human beings, by the way, that were murdered during the war. Only about ten percent of the dead were European Jews.

Chinese civilians being buried
alive by the Japanese in Nanking.

The mass murder of the European Jew, although the most intensively bureaucratic mass murder in history, was only the largest wave in a tsunami of purposeless annihilation. In the course of the war, some 40 to 50 million non-combatants were slaughtered across the world. Hitler's regime alone killed up to 12 million Soviet civilians, 2 million non-Jewish Poles, 500,000 Roma (Gypsies), 275,000 disabled and mentally ill persons, 200,000 Freemasons, 15,000 gay men, and many thousands of Catholic clergy, Jehovah's witnesses, leftists, Communists, etc. The Japanese killed nearly as many Chinese civilians (4-5 million) as the Nazis did the Jews (and often in more horrifying fashion; see the Rape of Nanking). The Americans and British killed tens of thousands of civilians firebombing Dresden and Hamburg, and the Soviets may have killed over a million German civilians in the course of their invasion.

A victim of Truman's decision.
From nucleararmageddon.blogspot.com

And, of course, Harry S Truman personally ordered the deaths of well over two hundred thousand civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This statement is true regardless of one's position on the necessity of this decision.

Schindler's List focuses on a narrow slice of a worldwide conflagration, a conflagration that claimed one out of every forty lives on Earth. And though it clocks in at more than three hours, the film does little to illustrate the scale of destruction of the Shoah, let alone the larger Holocaust. What it does do, it does well, of course. Its hallucinatory violence, its depictions of the pragmatics of a genocidal, antihumanist system, are perhaps unparalleled in film. But it fails to account for its own violence. There is no context to the film, or rather, the context is assumed. It comes off at times as nothing more than a morality play. Yet Schindler, himself, was arguably responsible for as many or more deaths than the number of lives he is credited with saving.

I'd argue that Spielberg's film suffers from the same deficiency as most films about the Jewish experience in the Holocaust: it fails to place this historical violence in relation to the propensity towards violence of the human race as a whole. To consider the campaign against the Jews that occurred under a single regime in a brief blink of human history as exceptional, as motivated by unique and separable factors, as different in kind (rather than degree) from the violence, persecution, dehumanization, and disenfranchisement that continues to this day. . . this just sullies the legacy of the Jews that died such unaccountably senseless deaths. The Holocaust is far too commonly conceived of as an exception; genocides are far too commonly conceived of as distinct from everyday brutality and hatred. A tsunami can kill you, but one can drown in just a few inches of water.

Until human civilization leaves physical force and the confiscation of human liberty in the ashcan of history, the Holocaust will continue. Sometimes it will appear to flicker like a candle; sometimes it will rage across the land. But every murder, every act of violence, every incarceration of a peaceful person, is part and parcel of the same forces which crystallized into the Nazi system. The human race remains badly in need of evolution. Only embracing non-violence as a fundamental human value can save us. We need to recognize that it is our right to live in a peaceful world. We have a right to live in a non-hostile environment.

We need to recognize that all violence is criminal, no matter the colour of law under which it claims its justification.