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AT THE THRESHOLD of the modern era, nature was viewed as the major source of uncertainty that haunted human life. Floods and droughts, famines that struck without warning, and contagious diseases that came unannounced, unspeakable dangers lurking in the “wilderness”—spaces yet untouched by humans’ ordering zeal and often starting just a few yards beyond the farm fence—were the main repositories of the fearsome unknown. Even the dangers threatened by other people were seen as side effects of the drawbacks in taming nature. The ill will, malice, and uncouth conduct of the neighbors next door, or on the next street, or beyond the river, that made people fear and tremble in anticipation of imminent disaster, were classified on the side of nature, as distinct from the man-made part of the world. They were viewed as the regrettable results of the warlike instincts, “natural aggression,” and resulting inclination to bellum omnium contra omnes that were seen as the “natural state” of mankind, as the legacy and relics of raw “nature” that needed to be and duly would be eradicated, reformed, or repressed through the patient, laborious, and painstaking effort of the “civilizing process.”
The confidence-building myth of the modern era was the story of humans lifting themselves by their own wits, acumen, determination, and industry, those refined versions of Baron von Münchhausen’s bootstraps, out of the mire of the “natural,” “precivilized” condition. The corollaries of that myth were the unshakeable trust in the human ability to improve on nature and the belief in the superiority of reason over “blind natural forces”—which humans, with reason’s help, can harness to more useful tasks, or shackle in case they prove too obstreperous. By far the most repulsive and intolerable feature of all things natural—that is, objects and states unprocessed by purposeful and reason-guided human labor—was that their haphazard, random conduct defied expectations, evaded human control, and so exploded human designs.
The idea of “civilized order” was a vision of the human condition from which everything that was not allowed to be a part of that order was prohibited and eliminated. Once the civilizing process completed its job, there would be no dark corners left, no black holes of ignorance, no gray areas of ambivalence, no vile dens of vicious uncertainty. Hobbes hoped (memorably, thanks to the generations of his loyal disciples) that society (identified with the state as the carrier of sovereign power) would eventually provide the much needed and universally coveted shelter from uncertainty—by defending its subjects against the fearsome powers of nature and against their own inborn wickedness and base instincts, which they are too weak to conquer on their own. Many years later, in the middle of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt summarized if not the reality, then at least the intention of the modern state by defining “the Sovereign” as he who decides on the state of exception. Commenting on Schmitt’s definition, Giorgio Agamben recently suggested that the constitutive feature of the sovereign state was the “relation of exception,” through which “something is included solely through its exclusion,” and that the rule asserts itself by setting the limits to its application.1 The modern state, indeed, was about managing human affairs through the exclusion of everything unmanageable and thereby undesirable. I might add that uncertainty, and all that caused it and contributed to it (all that was resistant to management, evaded categorization, was underdefined, category-crossing, ambiguous, and ambivalent), was the major, most toxic pollution of the would-be man-made order that had to be excluded. The modern state was about the activity of cleansing and the purpose of purity.
I suggest that this tendency of the modern state culminated in the middle of the past century—after a good part of that century had passed under the aegis of the imminent end of history as known that far: history as a free play of unbridled, discoordinate forces.
In the 1940s, when rumors of the mass murder of Jews throughout Nazi-occupied Europe leaked across the front line, the biblical term “holocaust” was recalled and redeployed to name it. The act had no precedent in recorded history and thus no established dictionary name. A new name had to be coined for the act of “categorial murder”—for the physical annihilation of men, women, and children for reason of their belonging (or having been assigned) to a category of people unfit for the intended order and on whom, for that reason, a death sentence was summarily passed. By the 1950s, the old/new term “holocaust” came to be widely accepted as the proper name of the meant-to-be-total destruction of European Jews perpetrated in the years 1940 through 1945 on the initiative of the Nazi leadership.
In subsequent years, though, the usage of the term has been extended to cover the numerous cases of mass murder aimed against ethnic, racial, or religious groups, and to the cases in which a disempowering or expulsion of the targeted group, rather than its total annihilation, was the proclaimed or tacit objective. Because of the enormous emotional load of the term and an almost universal ethical condemnation of the actions it stood for, naming of a suffered harm as a case of another “holocaust” was widely sought. The kind of damages inflicted by one human group on another that deserve to be branded as one more holocaust have been stretched over the years much beyond their original field. The term “holocaust” has become an “essentially contested” concept, used in numerous ethnic and other violent group conflicts as a charge raised against the conduct or intentions of the adversary to justify one’s own group’s hostility.
In popular speech, “holocaust” tends to be these days interchangeable with “genocide”—another linguistic novelty of the twentieth century. In 1993 Helen Fein noted that between 1960 and 1979 “there were probably at least a dozen genocides and genocidal massacres—cases include the Kurds in Iraq, southerners in the Sudan, Tutsi in Rwanda, Hutus in Burundi, Chinese . . . in Indonesia, Hindus and other Bengalis in East Pakistan, the Ache in Paraguay, many peoples in Uganda . . .”2 Since those words were written, the list has been considerably extended, and as I’m writing these words, it shows no signs of nearing the end. Genocide, in Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn’s definition, “is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrators.”3 In genocide, the power over life intertwines with the power to define (or more precisely, the power to exempt). Before the wholesale extermination of a group comes the classification of groups into categories and the definition of the assignment to a certain category as a capital crime. In many an orthodox war, the number of casualties exceeded many times the numbers of many a genocide’s victims. What sets the genocide apart, however, from even the most violent and gory conflicts is not the number of its victims but its monological nature. In genocide, the prospective targets of violence are unilaterally defined and denied a right to response. The victims’ conduct or the qualities of the condemned category’s individual members are irrelevant to their preordained fate. The sufficient proof of the capital offense, of the charge from which there is no appeal, is the fact of having been accused.
If this is the true nature of genocidal acts, the current meaning of the word “holocaust,” by and large synonymous and so exchangeable with that of the term “genocide,” bears only an oblique relation to the meaning carried by the term appearing in Leviticus, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, from which it has been derived. That ancient term was recalled and invoked as a metaphor for the Nazi extermination of the Jews probably because of its suggestion of the thoroughness of the destruction. The Greek term óλóκανστος was a literal translation of the Hebrew for “wholly burned,” a requirement that the offerings brought to the Temple had to be destroyed by fire in their entirety.
What sets the original and the metaphorical meanings of the term wide apart, however, is the fact that the “wholly burned” referred to by the ancient term was full of religious meaning: it was meant to symbolize the completeness of human surrender to God and the unconditionality of human piety. The objects of sacrifice had to be the most valuable, proud possessions of the faithful: specially chosen young bullocks or male lambs, specimens without blemish, as perfect in every detail as was the human reverence for God and human dedication to the fulfillment of Divine commands. Following this track of metaphorical extension, “sacrifice” came to mean, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the “surrender of something valued or desired for the sake of something having a higher or more pressing claim.”
If this is what sacrifice is about, the Holocaust was anything but a sacrifice. The victims of the Holocaust, and more generally victims of all genocides, are not people “sacrificed” in the name of a greater value. The object of genocide that follows the pattern introduced by the Nazi Holocaust is, in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, homo sacer—one “who may be killed and yet not sacrificed.” The death of homo sacer is devoid of religious significance; homo sacer is not just a person of a lesser value but an entity devoid of any value, be it sacred or profane, divine or mundane. What is annihilated is a “bare life,” stripped of all value. “In the case of homo sacer a person is simply set outside human jurisdiction without being brought into the realm of divine law.” He is an object “of a double exception, both from the ius humanum and from the ius divinum.”4
We may say that before they were rounded up, deported to the death camps, shot, or suffocated, the Jews of Germany and other countries of Nazi-occupied Europe (alongside the Roma and Sinti) had been, so to speak, declared a collective homo sacer—a category whose life was devoid of all positive value and whose murder therefore had no moral significance and commanded no punishment. Theirs was unwertes Leben—life unworthy of living—along with the lives of Gypsies, homosexuals, and the mentally ill and mentally disabled, according to the Nazi vision of the Neue Ordnung; or, in the words of a Swedish government report of 1929, they were people “with regard to whom it is in the interest of society that their numbers are as few as possible.”5 What all those categories had in common was their unfitness for the new and better order that was planned to replace the present messy realities—the social order purified of all undesirable admixtures, blemishes, and imperfections that the sovereign rulers set out to build.
It was the vision of a perfect order that supplied the criteria for setting apart the “fit” from the “unfit”—subjects whose lives deserved to be defended and enhanced from those who could render no conceivable service to the strength of the new order but were bound instead to impair its harmony. The sovereign power (a power exercised over humans reduced to “bare bodies”) enabled the builders of the new order to admit their subjects into the order or to exempt them from it at will. Claiming the right to include or exclude from the realm of legal rights and ethical obligations was the essence of the modern state’s sovereignty—and the Holocaust (alongside the massive purges of “class aliens” in Stalinist Russia) was by common consent the most extreme and radical manifestation of that claim.
Mass murders have accompanied humankind throughout its history. But the peculiar variety of categorial mass murder called the Holocaust would be inconceivable outside the frame of modern society. Systematic murder, conducted over a long period of time, required enormous resources and the frequent adjustment of procedure. It would hardly be possible without such typically modern inventions as industrial technology; bureaucracy, with its meticulous division of labor; the strict hierarchy of command and discipline, as well as the neutralization of personal (and ethical) convictions; and the managerial ambition to subordinate social reality to a rationally designed model of order—innovations that happened to be, as well, the prime causes of the modern era’s spectacular successes. “Consider the numbers,” observed John P. Sabini and Mary Silver:
The German state annihilated approximately six million Jews. At the rate of 100 per day [this was the number of victims of the infamous Kristallnacht, the Nazi-organized pogrom of German Jews] this would have required nearly 200 years. Mob violence rests on the wrong psychological basis, on violent emotion. People can be manipulated into fury, but fury cannot be maintained for 200 years. Emotions, and their biological basis, have a natural time course; lust, even blood lust, is eventually sated. Further, emotions are notoriously fickle, can be turned. A lynch mob is unreliable, it can sometimes be moved by sympathy—say by a child’s suffering. To eradicate a “race” it is essential to kill the children.6
To eradicate a “race” or a “class” that transmits its destructive potential through generations, it is necessary to suppress human emotions and other manifestations of human individuality, and submit human conduct to the uncontested rule of instrumental reason. Modernity made the Holocaust possible, whereas it was the totalitarian rule (that is, a total and absolute sovereignty) that implemented the possibility.
To acclaim that reached far beyond the boundaries of the land he ruled, Hitler announced the arrival of the Thousand Years Reich, which would start with the elimination of the last unwertes Leben. To the joy of his enthusiasts worldwide, Stalin proclaimed the end of injustice, together with the end of class oppression and class wars, to be just around the corner—merely waiting for the unmasking and executing of the last enemy of the society, whose classlessness would assert itself by shooting or starving to death all who stood out and didn’t fit in. Using Schmitt’s concept as popularized by Agamben, we can say that both forms of twentieth-century totalitarianism explored the limits (or limitlessness?) of the sovereign power of exclusion. Auschwitz and Kolyma were laboratories in which the limits of human pliability were researched and, most important, the most effective means of cleansing society of its disorderly, uncertainty-generating contaminations were experimented with and put to practical tests.
In totalitarian regimes the tendency of modern state sovereignty (described at the threshold of the century by Max Weber, and later by Norbert Elias, as a “monopoly of the means of coercion”) was given free rein and allowed to run berserk, with the hope that it would find its own limits (or rather that it would demonstrate its transcend-ability in the face of all extant and future limits). The totalitarian adventure was not an aberration, an “accident of history” that can be explained away and dismissed as a cancerous deformation of the otherwise healthy modern political body, but was a sustained effort to stretch that body’s fitness to its ultimate potential.
During the last century, approximately six million Jews and by some accounts close to a million Gypsies, accompanied by many thousands of homosexuals and mentally disabled persons, were shot, poisoned, and burned by the builders of the Nazi-designed New World Order—because they did not fit the order about to be built.
They were not the only casualties of the innumerable construction sites spattered all over the globe—not by a long shot—even if they have turned out to be the most notorious and most widely spoken-about victims of the building zeal. Before them, a million and a half Armenians were killed for being the wrong people in the wrong place, followed by ten million genuine or alleged kulaks, wealthy farmers, in Ukraine, who were starved to death for being the wrong sort of people to be admitted to the brave new world of classless conformity. After them, millions of Muslims were annihilated for being a blot on a uniformly Hindu landscape, and millions of Hindus lost their lives for soiling the landscape of the Muslims. Millions were destroyed for standing in the way of the Chinese great leap forward or of the tranquil, unperturbed and simple, graveyard-style harmony with which the Khmer Rouge resolved to replace the messy, noisy, and unclean world of raw humanity. All continents of the globe have had their local Hutus who have massacred their Tutsi neighbors, while everywhere native Tutsi have repaid their persecutors in kind. All continents have had their fill of Darfurs, Sudans, Sierra Leones, East Timors, and Bosnias.
Let me repeat: all such and similar slaughters have stood apart from innumerable past explosions of human cruelty, not just (or not even necessarily) for the number of their victims but for being categorial murders. In these cases, men, women, and children were exterminated for having been assigned to a category of beings that was meant to be exterminated.
What made all such cases into categorial murders was, first, the fact that only the acts of their assignment and sentencing, both performed unilaterally by their prospective murderers, sealed the fate of the victims—no other proof of the victims’ “guilt” was called for. The assignment was oblivious to the diversity of personal qualities of the assigned, as well as to the degree of danger that the individual members of the condemned category could individually present. It was therefore irrelevant, from the point of view of the murderous categorial logic, how old or young, strong or weak, genial or malevolent the victims were. Prospective victims did not need to have committed a punishable crime for the verdict to be pronounced and the execution performed. Nor was it relevant to the verdict that their wrongdoing had been proved, let alone measured to permit the matching of the apportioned punishment against the gravity of the assumed wrongdoing. Conversely, nothing of what the victims did or did not do could earn them salvation—nothing could bring exemption from the fate common to the category to which they belonged. As Raul Hilberg famously observed, the fate of the European Jews had been decided and sealed the moment the Nazi officials completed their Jewish registers separate from the rosters of “ordinary” German subjects, and stamped the letter “J” on their passports.
Second, what makes the piling up of corpses an instance of categorial murder is its one-directionality. Categorial murder is the very opposite of combat, of a confrontation between two forces, both bent on destroying the adversary, even if one of them has been prompted by self-defense only, having been provoked, attacked, and drawn into conflict by the hostility of the other side. Categorial murder is from start to finish a one-sided affair. Precautions are taken to make sure that the victims are on and stay on the receiving side of the operation, which is fully designed and administered by the perpetrators. In the course of categorial murder, the lines dividing the subjects from the objects of actions, the right to initiative from bearing its consequences, “doing” from “suffering,” are all clearly drawn, closely guarded, and made impassable. Categorial murder is meant to deprive the appointed human targets of their lives—but also, and a priori, to expropriate them from their humanity, of which the right to subjectivity, to the self-guided action, is an indispensable, indeed a constitutive, ingredient.
For having been committed in the heart of Europe, which deemed itself at the time to be the pinnacle of historical progress and the guiding light for the rest of the human species less civilized or less prone to civilizing; for having been conducted with extraordinary resolve, methodically and consistently over a long period of time; for mustering the help and commanding throughout the cooperation of “the best” in science and technology, that crowning achievement and pride of modern civilization; for spawning a mind-boggling number of corpses, while scattering far and wide an unprecedented moral devastation through transforming most Europeans into silent witnesses of a horror that would go on haunting their conscience for many years to come; for having left behind an inordinately large volume of written and recorded evidence of cruelty, depravity, degradation, and humiliation; for having earned and been given more worldwide publicity and insinuating itself into the world consciousness more deeply than any other case of categorial murder; for all these reasons, and probably for more reasons yet—the Jewish Holocaust has acquired in the awareness of the age an iconic place, a place entirely of its own. One could say that it stands out as the paragon of, or the archetype of, or the shorthand for categorial murder as such. One could go on and say that it has become thereby a generic name for the homicidal tendencies ubiquitously present and repeatedly exploding with awesome regularity in the course of modern history.
It was hoped fifty or sixty years ago that the gruesome knowledge of the Holocaust would shock humanity out of its ethical somnolence and make further genocides impossible. This did not happen. The legacy of the Holocaust proved to be a temptation to try other “final solutions” as much as it inspired repulsion from such solutions. More than half a century later, the problem of making society immune to genocidal temptations remains wide open.
This said, one would have dearly wished to add that, because of its unspeakable horror and the revulsion that followed its revelation, the Jewish Holocaust started off a more civilized and humane era in human history, that it ushered us into a safer and more ethically alert world; that even if the homicidal tendency has not dried up completely, the fuses needed to explode it will from now on be in shorter-than-ever supply, perhaps withdrawn from production altogether. Alas, one cannot say all this. The legacy of the Holocaust has proved much too complicated to allow this to be said with any degree of conviction. The logic of human cohabitation does not follow the precepts of the logic of moral conscience, and the two logics spawn widely different rationalities.
No doubt the Holocaust did change the condition of the world, though not necessarily in the way it was expected and could be hoped that it would. The Holocaust added considerably to our collective knowledge of the world we collectively inhabit, and that new knowledge cannot but change the way we inhabit it and the way we think of and narrate the past experience and the prospects of shared habitation. Before it was undertaken, the Holocaust was unimaginable. To most people, it remained inconceivable when already well under way. Today, it is difficult to conceive of a world that does not contain a possibility of a holocaust, or even a world securely fortified, let alone insured against the implementation of such possibility. We all have been alerted, and the alert has never been called off.
What does it mean, though, to live in a world forever pregnant with the kind of horrors that the Holocaust has come to stand for? Does the memory of the Holocaust make the world a better and safer place, or a worse and more dangerous one?
Martin Heidegger explained that Being (Sein) is tantamount to a process of continuous Wiederholung—recapitulation—of the past. There is no other way for Being to be, and this applies to human groups as much as it does to human individuals. The two aspects of (individual and/or collective) identity distinguished by Paul Ricoeur, l’ipséité (the difference bordering on uniqueness) and la mêmeté (continuity of the self, identity with itself over time), intertwine to the point of being inseparable, neither of the two being able to survive on its own. Once Heidegger’s and Ricoeur’s observations have been put together, the seminal role played by the retention of the past in shaping the individual (or collective) present is evident. It has become by now a commonplace to propose that groups that lose their memory thereby lose their identity—that losing the past leads inextricably to losing the present and the future. If the preservation of a group is at stake, being a value that needs to be defended to be cherished, then the success or failure of the struggle hangs on the effort to keep the memory alive.
This may be true—but this, most certainly, is not the whole truth, because memory is a mixed blessing. More precisely, it is a blessing and a curse rolled into one. It may “keep alive” many things of sharply unequal value for the group and its neighbors. The past is a bagful of events, and memory never retains them all; whatever it retains or recovers from oblivion it never reproduces in its “pristine” and “original” form (whatever that may mean). The “whole past,” the past wie es ist eigentlich gewesen, as it really happened (how, as Ranke suggested, it should be retold by the historians), is never recaptured by memory—and if it were, memory would be a liability rather than an asset to the living. Memory selects and interprets—and what is to be selected and how it needs to be interpreted is moot and a matter of continuous contention. The resurrection of the past, keeping the past alive, can be attained only through the active, choosing, reprocessing, and recycling work of memory. To remember is to interpret the past—or, more correctly, to tell a story meant to stand for the course of past events. The status of the “story of the past” is ambiguous and bound to remain that way.
On the one hand, stories are told. There are not and cannot be stories without storytellers, and the tellers, like all humans, are admittedly given to erring and to flights of fancy. To be human means to err. On the other hand, however, the idea of “the past” stands for a stubborn, once-and-for-all, unalterable, irreversible, and solid “thing,” the very epitome of “reality” that can be neither revoked nor wished away. Storytellers hide their human frailty behind the majestic grandiosity of the past—which, unlike the fickle present and the as-yet-shapeless future, can be (contrary to the facts, as it were) hallowed for admitting no contention. The past tends to be posited (if counterfactually) as the sole solid rock in a whirlwind of brittle, transient, shifty, elusive opinions only supposed to be true. Invoking the authority of their subject matter, the tellers of the story of the past may divert attention from the reprocessing job that had to be performed before the past could turn into a story. Invocation of the past’s authority ensures interpretation against uninvited inquisition, resented as meddle-some and vexing. Truth does not necessarily benefit, but the “feel good”—the comfort from the belief of being in the right—is, for a time at least, saved.
The dead have no power to guide—let alone monitor and correct—the conduct of the living. In a raw state, wie es ist eigentlich gewesen, their own lives could hardly teach; to become lessons, they first have to be made into stories (Shakespeare, unlike many other storytellers and even less their listeners, knew this when he made Hamlet, before dying, instruct his friend Horatio: “Tell my story”). The past does not interfere with the present directly: all interference is mediated by a story. What course that interference will ultimately take is decided on the battlefield of memory, where stories are the troops and storytellers are the shrewd or hapless commanders of the fighting forces. The lessons to be drawn from the past are the prime stakes of the battle.
The contest of interpretations in the course of which the past is reforged into visible contours and in the lived-through significance of the present, and then recycled into designs for the future, is conducted, as Tzvetan Todorov recently pointed out, in the narrow passage between the two traps of sacralization and banalization.7 The degree of danger that each of these traps contains depends on whether the individual or the group memory is at stake.
Todorov concedes that a degree of sacralization (an operation that makes a past event into a unique event, held to be “unlike any event experienced by others,” incomparable with events experienced by others and at other times, and that therefore condemns all such comparisons as sacrilegious) is called for, indeed is unavoidable, if the memory is to fulfill its role in the self-assertion of the individual identity. Indeed, some areas of inwardness resistant to communication, certain irreducible, insoluble, and ineffable core subjective experiences unfit for interpersonal transmission, are indispensable for the sustenance of the ipséité of the self. Without such a core, there would be no chance of genuine individuality. Contrary to the insinuation of innumerable TV chat shows and of the public confessions they inspire, personal experience is indeed personal: as such, it is “nontransferable.” Refusal of communication, or at least a certain degree of communicational reticence, may be a condition sine qua non for individual autonomy.
Groups, however, are not “like individuals, only bigger.” Reasoning by analogy would ignore the crucial distinction: unlike the self-asserting individuals, groups live by communication, dialogue, exchange of experience. Groups are constituted by sharing memories, not by holding them back and barring access to strangers. The true nature of the experience of categorial murder (and so of categorial victimhood) consists in its having been shared, and in its memory’s being meant to be shared and made into common property; in other words, in its being defended against the temptation of sacralization. In the case of shared memory of a shared experience, and particularly the memory of shared victimhood, sacralization effectively staves off the chance of communication, and so of adding to the collective wisdom of those alive. As Todorov put it, “Sacralization obstructs the drawing of generally valid lessons from particular cases, and so the communication between the past and the present.”8
Refusing other groups the benefit they may derive from learning and memorizing the experience of others, sacralization protects, on the face of it, the interests of the sacralizers. But appearances mislead: the ostensible selfishness of sacralization is misconceived, and in the end counterproductive and harmful to the sacralizing group’s own interests. If common lessons contained in the group’s experience and discoverable only in the course of communicative exchange are ignored or not attended to properly, the group’s future conditions will be poorly protected. After all, the group’s survival and well-being depend more on the principles that rule (or do not rule, as the case may be), and on the network of dependencies in which the group is embedded, than on whatever the group may do to itself and the rest of the network on its own.
Banalization ostensibly follows a route directly opposite of that pursued by sacralization, yet it ends up with much the same results: it refutes, even if only obliquely, all originality of the group’s experience and so deprives its message, a priori, of the unique value that may justify the need for intergroup dialogue. As in the case of sacralization, though on the strength of an allegedly opposite reason, such banalization offers no desire or encouragement to invite, or join, a conversation. If the phenomenon known to one group from its experience keeps repeating itself with dull monotony in almost everybody else’s experience, there is little or nothing that one group can learn from another. The cases lose that enlightening potency that rests in their particularity. Among the multitude of similar or identical cases, the peculiarity from which something genuinely general and universally important can be learned, precisely because of its uniqueness, is lost. Worse still, there is nothing that the groups can learn from sharing experiences of their cohabitation, since the ubiquity and repetitiveness of experiences suggest, wrongly, that the causes of each group’s fate (sufficient causes of the fate, or causes sufficient to explain its course) could be explored and revealed while the search is focused solely on the group’s own actions or neglect. Paradoxically, banalization plays into the hands of the sacralizers. It boosts sacralization, corroborates its wisdom and logic, and inspires yet more sacralizing zeal.
Both sacralization and banalization set groups apart and at loggerheads. Both commit them to inwardness, since both play down or deny the survival value of intergroup dialogue and of sharing group experiences that tend to be lived through separately while group members remain irretrievably intertwined. Both make the road to such togetherness as could render the group’s survival secure—and so categorial murder in all its varieties redundant—more rough and forbidding, perhaps impassable.
Sacralization goes hand in hand with banalization. Todorov discusses the case of Richard Holbrooke, representing the U.S. State Department in Yugoslavia, who agreed to talk with the Belgrade authorities already accused of conducting “another holocaust” in Bosnia and cited the precedent of Raul Wallenberg, who, under Nazi rule, put aside his personal well-being in order to save lives. Todorov points out that while Wallenberg risked his life when he resolved to serve the victims and to resist, to achieve that purpose, the all-powerful perpetrators of the crime, Holbrooke, in the name and at the behest of the world’s most formidable hyperpower, went to command and bring to book people being daily showered by that hyperpower with smart missiles and bombs. Clinton justified the military intervention in Bosnia by quoting Churchill’s warning against appeasing Hitler. But what was the worth of such a comparison? asks Todorov. Was Milosevic a threat to Europe comparable to Hitler?
Banalization comes in handy when coercion against a weaker adversary is contemplated and needs to be sold to the public as a noble self-sacrifice rather than an act of power politics. Spreading thinly the horror and revulsion prevents people from spotting in the lost peculiarity of the banalized crime the principles of justice, the ethical rules, and the political ideals that would be salient if it were properly remembered. Without banalization, the peculiarity of the crime would be found to be ethically pregnant. The chance for drawing universally valid ethical principles has been lost if Moshe Landau, who in 1961 presided over Eichmann’s trial, could twenty-six years later chair the commission that legalized the use of torture against “similar” Jew-haters, the Palestinians of the occupied territories.
Banalization substitutes an illusory similarity of the enemy’s treachery (or even more simply, a similarity of enmity: all enemies tend to look “like each other,” and also to act treacherous like each other, once they have been cast as enemies) for the similarity that truly counts if a lesson from past experience is sought: the similarity of power relations and the morality (or immorality) of acts. Whenever and wherever an omnipotent force stifles the voices of the weak and the hapless instead of listening to them, it stays on the wrong side of the ethical divide between good and evil; banalization is a desperate (but successful for a time, so long as the strong stay stronger and the weak stay weaker) attempt to deny that truth. Only on the grounds of ethical universality may one condemn the French general Paul Aussaresses for the atrocities he authorized and encouraged against the Algerian rebels, or Bob Kerrey (former U.S. senator and then university president), who was accused after many years by a former comrade-in-arms of perpetrating hideous mass executions in Vietnam when he was there with the U.S. expeditionary force.9 “Justice that is not equal to all does not deserve its name,” Tzvetan Todorov reminds us.10 And so long as there is no prospect of punishing the slaughterers in Chechnya, or the American inspirers, sponsors, and paymasters of the violations of human rights in Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Chile, or Iraq, or those guilty of the maltreatment of the Palestinians, and indeed those in authority guilty of “an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency,” the right of the state to persecute its own citizens or the residents of dependent territories is confirmed (and seen as confirmed), after apportioning to the victims, for whom no appeal is allowed, the evil intentions that justify and absolve the state for ill deeds committed, but most of all for such as are likely to be committed.11 This is the same right that, when stretched to its limits and squeezed of the last drop by the Nazi rulers, rebounded in the catastrophe of the Holocaust.
Alas—the right of the strong to do whatever they wish to the weak is also a lesson of the age of genocides. A gruesome, frightening lesson to be sure, but no less eagerly learned, appropriated, and applied for that reason. To be ready for adoption, it must be first thoroughly stripped of all ethical connotations, right to the bare bones of a zero-sum game of survival. “The stronger lives.” “Who strikes first, survives.” “So long as you are strong, you may get away, unpunished, with whatever you have done to the weak”—at least so long as they stay weak. The fact that the dehumanization of the victims dehumanizes—morally devastates—their victimizers is dismissed as a minor irritant, if it is recognized at all. What counts is to get on top and stay on top. Surviving, staying alive, is a value untarnished by the inhumanity of life and worth pursuing for its own sake, however high the costs paid by the defeated and however deeply this may deprave and degrade the victors.
This terrifying and most inhuman among the genocide (and genocidal) lessons comes complete with the inventory of pains one may inflict on the weak in order to assert one’s own strength. Rounding up, deporting, locking away in concentration camps or forcing whole populations to submit to a plight close to the concentration camp model, demonstrating the futility of the law through executing suspects on the spot, imprisoning without trial and a set term of confinement, spreading the terror that random and unaccounted for punishment spawns—have all been amply proved to be effective and so “rational.” The list may be, and is, extended as time goes by. “New and improved” expedients are tried and added to the inventory if successfully tested—like razing single homes or whole residential districts, uprooting olive groves, plowing crops under, setting fire to workplaces, cutting a farm off from the house by building a wall and otherwise destroying sources of the farmer’s already miserable livelihood. All such measures display the self-propelling and self-exacerbating propensity to inflict harm and to victimize others. As the list of the committed atrocities grows, so does the need to apply them ever more resolutely to prevent the victims from making their voices not only heard but also listened to. And as old stratagems become routine and the horror they have sown among their targets wears off, new and more painful and horrifying contrivances need to be feverishly sought.
Lessons of the genocide inspired by sacralization and banalization prompt and perpetuate more separation, suspicion, hatred, and hostility, and so make the likelihood of a new catastrophe greater than it otherwise would be. In no way do they diminish the sum total of violence. Nor do they bring any closer the moment of ethical reflection upon the faults and the preferred shape of human cohabitation. Worse still, they divert attention from anything beyond the immediate, current concerns of group survival, in particular the deep sources of categorial murder that could be revealed, understood, and counteracted only if the narrow group-bound horizon were transcended.
The Holocaust was indeed an event of tremendous importance for the future shape of the world—but its significance lies in its role as a laboratory in which certain otherwise diluted and scattered potentials of humankind’s modern, widely shared forms of cohabitation were condensed, brought to the surface and into view. If that significance is not acknowledged, the most important lesson of the Holocaust, revealing the genocidal potential endemic to our forms of life, and the conditions under which that potential may bear its lethal fruits, is bound to remain, to everyone’s peril, unlearned.
The sacralized/banalized readings of the Holocaust’s message are wrong and dangerous for the double reason that they direct our concerns away from genuinely danger-diminishing strategies, while simultaneously making the strategy selected instead counterproductive to the purpose it is supposed and hoped to serve. These readings trigger “schismogenetic” chains (like “force needs to be replied to by force and fought with a yet greater force”) that multiply and magnify the genocidal dangers that set them in motion in the first place.
Gregory Bateson, one of the most perceptive and insightful anthropologists of the past century, pondered the nature of the schismogenetic chain, knotted into a sinister circle of human animosity. Once entangled and locked in that vicious cycle of challenge and response, the antagonists excite, prod, and spur each other into acts of frantic militancy, ever more militancy, and ever more dogged and passionate and, in the end, unscrupulous militancy. Militancy acquires its own momentum and feeds on its own fury, with each successive act of hostility providing all the reason that the next act needs; as time goes on, the original cause of the antagonism counts ever less and may well be forgotten—conflict develops just because it develops.
There are two kinds of schismogenetic chains. One is “complementary.” First, one person or group forces another person or group to do something that they dislike doing and would not do unless coerced. Then, having learned the hard lesson of their wrong-doer’s hostile intentions and also their superior power, the frightened victims manifest their meekness and declare their obedience, hoping to avoid another blow. The sight of their docility, however, only beefs up the arrogance of the oppressor—and the next blow is more painful than the first. That makes the victims even more submissive, and emboldens their tormentors further. You can imagine the rest of the story. Blows and pains will succeed each other with increasing speed, gaining in force each time. Unless the chain is broken, only the total destruction of the victims will bring it to its end.
The other schismogenetic chain is “symmetrical.” Here, both sides play the same game. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, blow for blow. Offense can be repaid only by offending the offender, harm by harming the harmer. Whatever you do, I’ll do as much and more, and with greater passion and severity. The exchange of blows turns into a competition—in ruthlessness, mercilessness, cruelty. Both sides believe that the more hard-hearted and bloodthirsty their acts are, the greater the chance that the adversary will think twice before risking another blow and in the end will throw in the towel. And both sides believe that toning down or weakening their responses (not to mention abstaining from response altogether) will only encourage the adversary to deliver yet more humiliating blows. You can imagine the rest of the story. With two sides sharing this belief, the chances of breaking the chain are virtually nil. Only the mutual destruction of the adversaries or their total exhaustion may bring the contest to its end.
There are no good prospects for humanity so long as these two vicious chains are in operation. One wonders, rather, how come the human species, equipped with such disastrous inclinations, has survived until now? But it has survived. So alongside the dangers, there must be hope. There must be a way of cutting schismogenetic chains short, mustn’t there?
At the very beginning of Europe’s long, convoluted, and turbulent history, that question was asked—in the Oresteian Trilogy by Aeschylus. In one of the plays, encouraged by the chorus (“to shed blood for blood shed,” “evil for evil . . . is no impiety!”), Electra seeks vengeance for her father, murdered by her mother’s lover, and calls her brother Orestes to kill the killers: “Let those who killed taste death for death . . . My curse to match their curse, wickedness for wickedness.” The chorus is delighted: “Let hatred get hatred in turn, let murderous blow meet blow that murdered”; “the gods ordain that blood by murder shed cries from the ground for blood to flow again.” Another massacre follows—closing one account of unrepaid wrongs only to open another. At the end of the play, confused and brokenhearted, the chorus cries: “When shall the ancestral curse relent, and sink to rest, its fury spent?” But, alas, there is no one left to answer. It is only in the next part of the trilogy that the answer is forthcoming, from Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom: “Fair trial, fair judgment, ended in an even vote, which brings to you neither dishonour nor defeat.” “Then quench your anger: let no indignation rain pestilence on our soil, corroding every seed till the whole land is sterile desert.”12
Not that Athena’s verdict was obeyed through more than two millennia of subsequent history. On countless occasions it was disregarded, on many was it blatantly violated. And yet it hovered above Europe’s history as a painful reproach of conscience whenever Athena’s advice was not followed. Slowly, and not without deviations and retreats, the trail from the rule of vengeance to the rule of law and justice, as the way of breaking the shackles of the schismogenetic chains, was blazed. “Fair trial, fair judgment,” one that “brings neither dishonor nor defeat” and so allows the adversaries to put aside their grudges and live together in peace, eventually cuts short the otherwise endless chain of retaliation and revenge.
Ryszard Kapuściński, the indefatigable explorer of the best known, less known, and altogether overlooked sites of gory inflammation and human misery, and an uncannily perceptive researcher of the conflicts that ripped apart the incipient humanity of our fast globalizing world, summed up the challenge that we jointly confront and the gruesome consequences of our failure to respond: “Is not the reductionism that consists in describing each case of genocide separately, as if it was detached from our cruel history and particularly from power deviations in other parts of our planet, a means to evade the questions most brutal and fundamental for our world and the dangers that threaten it? When they are described and fixed on the margins of shared history and memory, genocidal episodes are not lived as collective experience, as a shared test that may unite us.”13
When the successive outbursts of the categorial murder frenzy are sacralized as a private tragedy of the victims, of the victims’ descendants and their exclusively owned heritage, while banalized by all the rest of mankind as a regrettable yet ubiquitous manifestation of human iniquity or irrational folly, shared reflection on the sources of that frenzy and shared action aimed at blocking them turn out to be all but impossible. Following Kapuściński’s advice and warning is a most urgent task, an imperative that can be dismissed solely at our joint peril.
We may start from an attempt to comprehend the many and varied cases of categorial murder as manifestations of two by no means idiosyncratic, but on the contrary common and widespread, indeed typical, varieties of instrumental rationality, that quality of thought and action that our modern world, far from resisting, actively promotes, providing ample means to mobilize human emotions in its service. Their peculiarities notwithstanding, all contemporary cases of categorial murder can be seen as following two kinds of logic, which for lack of better names we may identify deploying Ferdinand Tönnies’s distinction between Gesellschaft (the contractual and impersonal aggregates) and Gemeinschaft (primordial unities) as “societal” and “communal.”
Neither of the two types of totalities distinguished and juxtaposed by Tönnies more than a century ago is nowadays “natural” or simply “given” (though “givenness” was, according to Tönnies, the distinctive feature of Gemeinschaft in opposition to Gesellschaft). In our world of liquid modernity, of fast disintegration of social bonds and their traditional settings, both totalities are first postulated and then need to be built, and their construction is a task that, unless confronted, consciously embraced, and resolutely seen through, would not start, let alone be completed, on its own momentum. In the contemporary world, communities as much as societies can be only achievements: artifices of a productive effort. Categorial murder is nowadays a by-product, side effect, or waste product of their production.
The societal logic of categorial murder is that of the order-building (I tried to describe that logic at length in Modernity and the Holocaust and a number of subsequent studies). In designing the “greater society” meant to replace the aggregate of no more effectively self-reproducing local orders, certain sections of the population are inevitably classified as “leftovers,” for whom no room in the future, rationally constructed order can be found—just as when, in designing a harmonious pattern in a garden, certain plants need to be assigned to the “weeds” category, earmarked for destruction. Categorial murder, like weeding (or, more generally, all and any “cleaning up,” “purifying” activities) is a creative destruction. Through eliminating everything out of place and unfitting (like “aliens” or unwertes Leben), order is created or reproduced. The classless order of a communist society called for the destruction of the carriers of class inequality; the race-clean order of the Thousand Years Reich needed a thorough cleansing from the building site of the racially impure and race-polluting substances. The vocabulary serving genocide might have varied from one place to another, but the basic pattern has been repeated many times over in modern history, whenever the accelerated construction of a “new and improved” order happened to be undertaken by some resourceful and overwhelmingly strong powers of the modern state, and whenever that state exercised full and undivided, unobstructed rule over the population of its sovereign territory (for instance in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mao’s China, or Suharto’s Indonesia).
The communal logic, much like the societal one, is a fully legitimate offspring of the modern condition, even if the family resemblance may be at first difficult to detect. With all the established and familiar frameworks used to underpin the self-confidence of action, the security of social position, and the safety of the body and its extensions fast melting and sent floating, one of the possible and quite probable reactions is a feverish search for a steady point—a shelter from the anxiety fed by the unreliable, erratic setting of life. Amid the cacophony of signals and kaleidoscopic mutability of vistas, with everything around us shifting, drifting, and changing face on short notice or without notice, such a shelter seems to reside in the uniformity of sameness. In the absence of a clear-cut hierarchy of values, which has been replaced by the cut-throat competition of short-lived purposes, the shelter seems to lie in the undivided loyalty making null and void all other taxing and confusingly numerous responsibilities. Once everything else has become blatantly artificial, conspicuously “man-made” (and so admittedly amenable to being “man-unmade”), the shelter seems to dwell in a company “no man can tear apart” because of its “natural,” primordial presence, immune to all human choices and set to survive them. The modern era, and particularly the liquid-modern era, is a time of intense though inconclusive (intense because inconclusive, and all the more desperate and dedicated for that reason) community building. It inspires categorial murders of its own. Their cases proliferate at an accelerating pace, from Bosnia and Kosovo to Rwanda to Sri Lanka.
As argued and convincingly demonstrated by René Girard, there is hardly anything that unites and cements a freshly patched-together “community” more solidly than the sharing of complicity in a crime, and so the categorial murder of the communal type differs in a number of striking features from the societal type.14 In stark opposition to the societal type of categorial murder as exemplified by the Holocaust, the emphasis in genocidal acts inspired by community building is on the “personal” nature of the crime, on killing in broad daylight, with the murderers known by face and name to their victims and the victims being the murderers’ kith and kin, acquaintances and next-door neighbors. When it comes to a categorial murder in the name of community building, “suspension of emotions” is neither required nor approved; the excuse of “acting under orders” is thereby denied. It must be clear to everyone that only the postulated community about to be constructed will stand between the perpetrators and the war-crime tribunal, that solely the continuous solidarity and loyalty to the communal cause may defend the perpetrators from the charge of crime. The appointed victims are but the tools of community building; the genuine and most avidly spied-on and most mercilessly chased enemies are the whistle-blowers, turncoats, or those just lukewarm among the individuals designated (with or without their knowledge and consent) as community brethren.
Societal and communal varieties of categorial murder have been here presented as “pure types,” so to speak. In practice, most cases of categorial murder contain a mixture of the two, in varying proportions, and need to be plotted somewhere between the “ideal-typical” extremes. Ideal types have been deployed here as analytical devices, to assist comprehension of the principal sources of genocidal threats in our liquid-modern society. It is my main contention in this chapter that the need to pay close attention to such sources and take concerted action to block them is the single most important lesson to be drawn from the legacy of the Holocaust. The urgency of this task is indeed the core of that legacy—the ethical obligation bequeathed by the genocide victims to all of us, the living.
Indeed: to all of us. Division, separation, and exclusion have been and remain the paramount instruments of categorial murder and by no stretch of the imagination can they be proposed as the means of its prevention. Cutting the roots of the genocidal tendency calls for the inadmissibility of double standards, differential treatment, and the separation that lays the groundwork for the battle of survival waged as a zero-sum game. Whatever precepts of human cohabitation are drawn from the long record of categorial murders, they can be only universal. They cannot be applied selectively, lest they be transformed into another apology for the right of the stronger (whoever happens to be stronger at the moment the apology is recited).
This seems to be an imperative—though not a comforting one. In the world today, which is undergoing fast yet uncoordinated globalization, mutual dependency has already reached a global extent, which, however, has not been matched, nor is likely to be matched soon, by a similarly worldwide society, or institutions of political control, or law, or binding ethical code. Solidarity of fate has not generated thus far solidarity of sentiment and action, and it is far from clear what needs to be done and can be done to induce it to do so. And so the imperative comes without instructions for use and instruments that such use may require. That sorry circumstance does not make it less essential or urgent, though, and for a moral person, uncertainty about a realistic path of action is not an excuse for doing nothing or for seeking comfort by adopting the posture of a bystander.
We may only (should, rather?) repeat after Kapuściński: “Since there are no mechanisms, no legal, institutional or technical barriers able to repulse effectively new acts of genocide, our sole defense against them rests in the moral elevation of individuals and societies alike. In spiritually vivid conscience, in powerful will to do good, in constant and attentive listening to the commandment: ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’”15
To a skeptical reader who would doubt the efficacy of the commandment as set against modern tanks, helicopters, time bombs, and smart missiles, and the intoxicating temptation they arouse in their proud owners, we may say that one lesson that the story of categorial murder has taught beyond reasonable doubt is that loving one’s neighbor and inducing the neighbor to love you is (apart from its other—for instance, moral—virtues) the only reasonable, effective, and long-lasting service that individuals and groups can render their self-love.
“Fair trial, fair judgment” means the rule of law—an equal law for all, a nonpartisan and uncorrupt law. People tend to live in peace and refrain from resorting to violence when they can address their complaints and grudges to a power whose incorruptibility and fairness they may trust. But on our fast and chaotically globalizing planet, such power is conspicuous only by its absence. Such power is present inside the boundaries of politically sovereign states—but most painful damage, targeted or “collateral,” is delivered nowadays from that “outer space” outside all boundaries, from that no-man’s-land, Wild West–style land, where there is no “right” without “might,” only the stronger sit in judgment, and only the weaker are punished for their deeds. In our globalizing world, power no longer resides with politics. Coercive power—economic and military—has broken its political shackles and roams free over the planetary space, while politics that could bridle its antics (and which did attempt to bridle them, with some success, inside the boundaries of nation-states) stays local, as before.
In such a world, no one, nowhere, feels safe or secure. Once more, schismogenetic chains take hold of human fate. They are global now, they wrap the planet around and render the cutting tools developed over the centuries sorely inadequate for the task. Once more, the Electras today call on their brothers to avenge the wrongs they suffered and redress the injustice done to their near and dear, because they seek—in vain—the powers that could assure fair trials and judgments. The heavenly voice of Athena still waits, hopefully yet in vain, to be heard on the globalized Earth.
Unrestrained competition in violence (ever more exorbitant and outrageous violence) feeds on the same world disorder on which the unrestrained competition for profits (ever more exorbitant and outrageous profits) thrives, adding yet more chaos to the disorderly planet. Allegedly engaged in a war of attrition, the two competitions are close allies; both have a vested interest in the perpetuation of planetary disorder, without which they would not last long, and both resent the prospect of political control and the rule of law, the advent of which they would not survive.
On a globalizing planet, neither of the two planetwide schismogenetic chains can be cut locally. There are no local solutions to globally rooted problems. The causes of survival and justice, often at loggerheads in the past, now point in the same direction, call for similar strategies, and tend to converge into one; and that unified cause cannot be pursued, let alone fulfilled, locally and by local-only efforts. Global problems have only global solutions. On a globalizing planet, human problems can be tackled and resolved only by solidary humanity.