Wasn't the Armenian genocide an extreme event as well?
Remembering the genocides of the 20th century
Op-ed: The commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide and the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II has created an opportunity to cast local and global meanings into the memory of the Holocaust in Israel, beyond the simplistic statement 'never again.'
The 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide,
in which the Ottoman Empire authorities persecuted, expelled, robbed and murdered about a million and a half Armenians during World War I, is being marked around the world this year.
At the same time, the world is also marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945 – the camp which turned into the symbol of evil in Western culture, the mass murder enterprise which slaughtered more than one million people, almost all of them Jews.
The world is also marking 70 years since the end of World War II – the end of its European part in May 1945, with the surrender of Nazi Germany, and its full end in September 1945, after the United States dropped two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan and killed tens of thousands of people.
Undermining Memory
Ben-Dror Yemini
Op-ed: Memorial ceremonies which deny the national lesson because of the universal lesson, or vice versa, are not part of the memory of the Holocaust; they crush the lessons of the Holocaust.
All these processes and events – the two world wars, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and the use of a nuclear weapon – are integral parts of the 20th century. During this century, the great empires – the Russian, the German, the Ottoman, the Habsburg, the British, the French and the Japanese – collapsed, and were replaced with the development of the international system of the nation states.
At the same time, engineers and scientists developed bureaucratic and technological means for population management and mass murder at an unprecedented scale in human history.
The Holocaust did not take place on a different planet, but in the heart of the modern world and as an integral part of the 20th century (Photo: Reuters)
The research which has developed over the past two decades about the Holocaust as part of this history has undermined the idea of the Holocaust as a unique event. Nonetheless, researchers have reached a broad agreement that all the persecutions, expulsions and mass murders gathered under the name "the Holocaust" are an extreme case of genocide. Some researchers see the Holocaust as a paradigmatic case of genocide – in other words, the criterion for mass murder.
In any event, these three depictions – unique, extreme and paradigmatic – create a hierarchy under which even if the Holocaust is not perceived as completely unusual, it receives a separate reference, which is reflected in the use of the concept "Shoah" in Hebrew and "Holocaust" in English.
But if we refer to the Holocaust as an extreme event because of the almost complete destruction of the post-WWII Jewish cultural world in Eastern Europe, why not refer to the Armenian genocide, in which the ancient Armenian communities in eastern Anatolia were destructed, as an extreme event as well?
And if the intention to murder all the Jews in the areas controlled by the Germans makes the Holocaust unique or paradigmatic, why not say that the earlier and more successful attempts to completely annihilate native populations in the areas which turned into the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the colonialist violence processes are the unique or paradigmatic cases?
Such questions, however, preserve the hierarchical way of thinking about genocide – a way of thinking which is built, even if unintentionally, on the problematic attempt to determine who suffered more.
We can, on the other hand, think about the meaning of the memory of the Holocaust in a world in which the memory of the Armenian genocide is still subject to a strong attack of official denial from Turkey, which has grown out of this violence, and the attempt to build an ethno-national state without Armenians and other groups.
We can also inquire about the connection between the memory of the Holocaust in the Western world and the vague memory of destroying entire cultures which were replaced by popular travel spots, like California.
The Holocaust, in other words, did not take place on a different planet, but in the heart of the modern world and as an inseparable part of the 20th century. This year's Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was held at the same time as the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide and the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII, has therefore created an opportunity to cast into the memory of the Holocaust in Israel both local and global meanings, way beyond the simplistic statement "never again."
Dr. Raz Segal is a Thomas Arthur Arnold postdoctoral fellow at the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies at Tel Aviv University.
