Events Mon Oct 18 2010

An Education in Humanity

By Ruthie Kott

The Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies' Feinberg Theater audience was pin-drop silent last Thursday during a talk by scholar and writer Daniel Goldhagen. He was speaking on his 2009 book and documentary Worse than War, a product of his nearly 30 years of research on genocide. Goldhagen, who lives in Boston, was in Chicago thanks to Facing History and Ourselves, an organization that educates teachers, and, through them, generations of students, to understand the civic responsibility needed to prevent human-rights violations.

I'd had experience with Facing History -- just after graduating from college, I taught seventh-grade English at a small private school outside of Boston, and we used Facing History resources in our Holocaust unit. We'd brought students to listen to Holocaust survivors speak at local temples, and there were there were students from local schools at Goldhagen's talk, listening rapt as he spoke about our world's history of genocide and the ways we can prevent it from happening in the future. Both Goldhagen and Facing History senior program associate Chuck Meyers made clear that the post-Holocaust mantra, "Never again," has failed. Since World War II, there have been millions killed in Communist China and Cambodia, and hundreds of thousands killed in Darfur and Rwanda.

Goldhagen is not a Holocaust survivor, but his father, retired Harvard historian Erich Goldhagen, is -- and his research on genocide was what inspired the younger Goldhagen to follow his path. Starting with his 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, which claims that ordinary Germans not only knew what Hitler and the Nazis were doing but also that they supported their actions, Daniel Goldhagen has been controversial. That doesn't change with Worse Than War, in which he argues that more people have been murdered by genocidal killers than by regular military operations during war: "And almost no one knows it."

Looking at genocide from our position, he said on Thursday, it's hard to imagine being able to help in Darfur or in Rwanda, where people were murdered with machetes every day. We're struck with "emotional helplessness," and our leaders don't consider it a matter of national interest. But, Goldhagen argued, it is in the interest of humanity, and it's not beyond our control. The decision of one leader or group to eradicate a whole group of people is a political choice, and the international community "can change that decision-making moment." One way to do that: put a bounty on the heads of genocidal leaders, Goldhagen suggested, declaring genocide a "war against humanity." A bounty program for terrorists already exist, and both Democratic and Republican administrations have used it. It may sound radical, he said, but, really, "what's radical is the status quo -- standing by while millions of people are being slaughtered."

You can watch the Worse Than War documentary on PBS.com or on YouTube. And Facing History also recommends many other books on genocide, including David Kherdian's The Road from Home, a collection of poetry about his family's experience with the Armenian genocide; Don Cheadle and John Prendergast's Not on Our Watch: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond, strategies to shape political change regarding genocide policies; and Bernard Gotfryd's Anton the Dove Fancier: and Other Tales of the Holocaust, a collection of autobiographical true stories.