voluminous anthology, Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives in Comparative Genocide, which has now run into three editions, the first in 1996, the most recent in 2009.2 The other, scurrilous extreme can be encountered in the spatter of openly antisemitic and Holocaust-denying websites that can be located by typing the words Was the Holocaust Unique? into a search engine.
As putatively academic debates go, this one has proven unusually free, even in the present age of “culture wars,” from the disinterested objectivity popularly associated with the academy. On the contrary, it has been remarkable from the outset for the incessant and resolute grinding of political axes that has accompanied its various phases. In addition, it has been widely characterized, by journalistic and academic observers alike, as a dialogue of the deaf, or more accurately a collection of such dialogues, in which participants characteristically argue, not so much against one another, as past one another.
QUESTIONS OF MEANING
At its most abstract level, the dispute turns on the question of whether the terms Holocaust and genocide are general terms like horse or proper names like Aristotle or Bismarck: whether, in short, given the nature of the thing named, there can be in principle more than one such thing.
When such abstruse philosophical issues become the focus of high emotions and pitched battles among nonphilosophers, there is generally a reason. In this case, the reason is itself philosophical. One of my teachers at the University of Michigan in the late 1950s was the late C. L. Stevenson. Stevenson was, and remains, famous for his book Ethics and Language, a monument of American Pragmatism that is still read, though not as widely as it ought to be. Chapter 9 concerns what he calls persuasive definitions. For Stevenson, the meaning of a moral term—for example, freedom—has two components. First, there is a factual description, a statement of what constitutes a free society. Then, second, there is the emotional aura that surrounds the word; in the case of murder, say, a negative, disapproving one; in the case of freedom, a positive, approving one.
Stevenson takes from Hume the thought that these two components of meaning can be made, on occasion, to shift independently of each other. A term like freedom or murder thus becomes an instrument of political or moral persuasion to the extent that one can get people to accept a shift in the descriptive meaning of the term, while leaving its emotional aura unchanged. If one can persuade people, for instance, that abortion counts descriptively as murder, then the bleakly negative emotional aura surrounding the term murder can be successfully displaced onto the term abortion. If one can persuade people to accept that part of being free, descriptively speaking, is to possess a legally enforceable right to demand that the state provide one with medical care, then with luck, the warm emotional aura surrounding the term freedom can be displaced onto the idea of state provision of medical care. As Stevenson puts it, “our language abounds with words which, like ‘culture,’ have both a vague descriptive meaning and a rich emotive meaning. The descriptive meaning of them all is subject to constant redefinition. The words are prizes which each man seeks to bestow on the qualities of his own choice.”3
THE CONTESTED POSITIONS
An understanding of Stevenson’s distinction, it seems to me, is essential to making sense of the uniqueness debate. The debate exists only because the intense emotive auras surrounding the words Holocaust and genocide have become covetable enough for the words themselves to become “prizes” in exactly the sense that Stevenson here exposes.4 What turns a word into a prize for political debate, he suggests, are the evaluative and associative structures that constitute its “emotive meaning.” In the case of Holocaust and genocide, these include horror and revulsion against the perpetrators, on the one hand, and on the other, sympathy and fellow feeling for the victims.
These, of course, are responses of a kind that all of us would wish acts of mass murder to evoke. And recent history offers many episodes of mass murder, including many felt, by the communities involved, to be inadequately recognized or condemned. This has led some to seek redress for that situation in what Charles Stevenson would have called a persuasive redefinition of the terms Holocaust and genocide.
If—such people feel—the descriptive meaning of those terms could only be redefined in such a way as to make them capture descriptively any episode of mass killing, then the emotive meaning of the words, the responses of pity and horror indelibly associated with them, would transfer over to a multitude of eminently deserving cases in exactly the manner described by Stevenson.
The trouble, from the point of view of those who think like this, is that both Holocaust and genocide are uniquely linked in their origins with one specific episode of mass murder. And that episode has generally been supposed to stand in a unique relationship to one particular people—namely, the Jews.
For the emotive connotations of the terms to transfer smoothly to other episodes of mass murder involving other, non-Jewish groups, that link must be broken. To a degree, it has been broken in the case of the term genocide. Significant ambiguities attend the word genocide, as they do all the contested terms in the uniqueness debate. It remains contestable, for instance, whether for an act of genocide to have occurred the people in question must have undergone total extermination or “merely” have endured persecution aiming at total extermination, or at the very least, at extensive loss of life. Equally, people disagree over whether it can be appropriate to speak of “cultural genocide,” where the people of a nation, or some of them, remain extant but where everything that gave their nation its original character, as a special human group, has been systematically extirpated. But on any of these readings of the term, historical instances both Jewish and non-Jewish can be found. Among cases of more or less total extermination (by systematic hunting among other things), one might cite the Tasmanian and Western Australian aboriginals. As survivors of cultural genocide, one might cite the Inca or the inhabitants of a few mountain villages in Portugal of whom I once read, remnants of campaigns of persecution and forced conversion of Jews in earlier centuries, who know that they once were, or were descended from, Jews, but know nothing of Jewish religion or culture.
Genocide, then, has become, for better or worse, a general term. There can be—have been—genocides other than the Holocaust. The term Holocaust, on the other hand, remains obstinately possessed, in common usage, of the logical characteristics of a proper name. A proper name, such as Bismarck or Gandhi, names a single individual; in the case of those names, an individual person; in the case of the term Holocaust, an individual act of mass murder—namely, the Nazi destruction of the bulk of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945.
The uniqueness controversy has concerned, for the most part, the issue of whether that link—the link between the term Holocaust and a specific act of mass murder—can and should also be broken. Some—David E. Stannard, Ward Churchill, Norman Finkelstein, the late Tony Judt in some of his writings, and many others—consider that there is nothing about the murderous events commonly denominated by the term Holocaust that links those events specifically to the Jewishness of their Jewish victims. According to such views, Holocaust becomes to all intents and purposes a synonym for genocide and shares all the ambiguities as well as the resulting subordination to a multitude of political uses that have come to characterize the latter term.
The thought is that what happened to the Jewish victims of the Nazis has also happened to large numbers of non-Jewish victims, whose sufferings, it is then alleged, are diminished and obscured by the concentration in commemorative activities, including museums and educational programs, on the sufferings of the Jews. Should we not, such reasoners suggest, universalize our conception of the Holocaust by recognizing that what made it a crime against humanity was that its victims, irrespective of whether they were Jews or gentile Germans, Poles, or Soviet prisoners of war, were
