Words and Meaning

One of my correspondents in the language world wrote about a shift underway in the meaning of "Holocaust," in reference to a specific historical event, and to the resistance against that.

The gist of the change is in this short definition:

Today, the term refers to the systematic planned extermination of about six million European Jews and millions of others by the Nazis between 1933-1945.

The longer version is in this "teachers guide" produced by University of South Florida:

Approximately 11 million people were killed because of Nazi genocidal policy. It was the explicit aim of Hitler's regime to create a European world both dominated and populated by the "Aryan" race. The Nazi machinery was dedicated to eradicating millions of people it deemed undesirable. Some people were undesirable by Nazi standards because of who they were,their genetic or cultural origins, or health conditions. These included Jews, Gypsies, Poles and other Slavs, and people with physical or mental disabilities. Others were Nazi victims because of what they did. These victims of the Nazi regime included Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, the dissenting clergy, Communists, Socialists, asocials, and other political enemies.

There's some virtue in inclusiveness. I never knew, until I read that site, about this:

When the Nazis came to power there were hundreds of African-German children living in the Rhineland. They were the offspring of German mothers and African soldiers brought in during the French occupation. In Mein Kampf,Hitler claimed these children were part of a Jewish plot to begin "bastardizing the European continent at its core." Under the Nazi regime, African-German children were labeled "Rhineland Bastards" and forcibly sterilized.

But it seems to me the specific campaign against the Jews by the Nazis deserves some special designation, and had elements that set it apart from the general racial purity policies of the Third Reich. And, as with any debate involving the Holocaust, there is an agenda, or a suspicious smell of one, all around. See here for some of the pushback.

The word is fragmenting, and if this keeps up "Holocaust" in a few years will end up meaning something slightly different to different interested parties and groups, and something vaguely undefined to everyone else (sort of like "torture"), which would be unfortunate but not uncommon. At that point we might have to go back to the original Hebrew Shoah or the German Endlösung to describe the specific campaign to exterminate the Jews.

One of the places you can see this played out is the Wikipedia talk forums, where the editors of that work debate the information to be included in it. I think ultimately these debate archives will be as valuable to historians as the encyclopedia itself, as priceless windows into the certainties and uncertainties of our times. Here's a sample from the debate thread on the definition of the Holocaust:

I'm not getting what is going on here. The lead of the article clearly states, The Holocaust is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II. Yet the article, with what appears to be some POV-warrioring from editors, has just become a huge recounting of Nazi atrocities, with some added crap about what the Soviets have done. There are lots of things I'm beginning to hate about Wikipedia. But this article is disgusting. The Holocaust is simply the murdering of 6 million Jews. As horrible as what the Nazis did to numerous other racial and ethnic groups, they belong in very specific articles about those specific atrocities. What this article has become is just a discussion about what Nazis did to everyone, which is not the Holocaust. That does not follow the academic definition of the Holocaust, and, in fact, I contend can be used by Holocaust Deniers in a whole-hot of unethical ways.

I generally agree with this post. But with the caveat that I don't think decisions of this sort ought to be made with any reference to how someone vile might use the word.

Council Winners

[posted by Callimachus]

Watchers Council winners for the week of March 23 have been posted.

First place within the council went to The Contranomics of Global Jihad by Big Lizards, which comes to a conclusion I have thought for some time is accurate:

Thus, Iran appears to be imploding due to the built-in contradiction of wanting to be a super-power -- and simultaneously wanting to be a closed society run by fanatical religious totalitarians. They will only be able to afford military technological development and serious force projection when they transform themselves into a society that has no interest in military technological development and serious force projection.

It looks more and more like Iran will be defeated, not by military invasion, not even by missile attack, but by the economic realities of Western style capitalism.

Also getting votes were Muslim Cashiers Refuse to Touch Pork by The Colossus of Rhodey (if you're not familiar with this story, check it out); The American Ideon: Its Decay and Restoration by Eternity Road; and Skills, Employment, and Energy Use by The Glittering Eye.

Outside the council, the winner was Four Years In by American Digest. The four-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq adventure inspired about a bazillion bloggers to write their summations of what we did, where we got to, and what we ought to do next. If you don't believe we inhabit separate realities, go read some of them.

The one that was recognized by the council was the work of Gerard Van der Leun, and if you know him, you'll instantly recognize the growling vigor of it:

Four years in and the people of the Perfect World ramble through the avenues of Washington, stamping their feet and holding their breath, having their tantrums, and telling all who cannot avoid listening that "War is bad for children and other living things." They have flowers painted on their cheeks. For emphasis. Just in case you thought that war was good for children and other living things.

There were children and other living things on the planes that flew into the towers. They all went into the fire and the ash just the same. But they, now, are not important. Nor is the message their deaths still send us when we listen. That message is to be silenced. The rising brand new message is "All we are say-ing is give...." And it is always off-key.

Also getting votes were Muslim Violence — Crime or Jihad? by Gates of Vienna; The Iraq Insurgency Has Ended, Which Opens a Path to Peace by Fabius Maximus at Defense and the National Interest; The Quadrant Lecture by Melanie Phillips; and Quote of the Day, and Is CAIR Paying Lawyers to Intimidate Air Travelers? at Power Line.

Also getting votes was A WWII Hero That History Almost Forgot by Webloggin. This is a heartbreaking tale of a Polish woman who helped save Jews from the Warsaw ghetto in World War II. It is a small human triumph wrapped in a vast human failure. It is right to celebrate the hero. But when I read her words, all I can feel is the dead-weight force of the tragedy:

It soon proved imperative to get children out on the so-called Aryan side since inside the ghetto it was hell.

We reached homes to say we could rescue children and lead them outside the ghetto walls. The basic question which then arose was: what guarantee could we give.

We had to admit honestly that we could give no guarantee since we did not even know whether we would succeed in leaving the ghetto today.

That was when we witnessed infernal scenes. Father agreed but mother didn’t. Grandmother cuddled the child most tenderly and, weeping bitterly, said “I won’t give away my grandchild at any price”.

We sometimes had to leave such unfortunate families without taking their children from them. I went there the next day to see what the whole building had come to and often found that everyone had been taken to the Umschlagsplatz railway siding for transport to death camps.

...

Often children would have to be moved. There was no end to the attempt to hunt them down and kill them.

I know of cases when the sole chance of survival was the external window-sill, behind a curtain, keeping the child there as long as necessary, holding on with numb hands so as not to fall, until the Germans left the home of his adopted parents.

The children paid dear for the “price of life”. A child sometimes had to be taken away from one “parents” and placed with others for their safety and that of the child.

I once carried such a tearful, broken-hearted little boy to other guardians when he asked me, crying and sobbing, “Please tell me how many Mums can you have, for this is the third one I’m going to”.

Necessary Blasphemy

Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, opens his defense of offensive free speech with a simple absolutist statement that I wholeheartedly share: "Freedom of speech is important, and it must include the freedom to say what everyone else believes to be false, and even what many people take to be offensive."

His very next sentence is a slam against religion, as a "major obstacle to basic reforms that reduce unnecessary suffering." His list of religion's faults is the usual one for a left-side American secularist: it includes contraception, abortion, stem-cell research, and homosexuality. (It closes with "the treatment of animals" which seems an odd outrider in this posse.) "In each case, somewhere in the world, religious beliefs have been a barrier to changes that would make the world more sustainable, freer, and more humane."

What sustainable means in such a case eludes me; it is a value-neutral word (you can sustain evil as well as good) but when certain people use it it seems to have been pre-packed with a set of meanings (perhaps ecological) like a gag store's spring-loaded "snakes in a can" toy.

Singer and I start at the same mountaintop of ethics and proceed down different paths. But do we end up at the same place?

In this article, yes. The logical next stop, in such a discussion today, is the Jyllands Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. And while we both find the outcome of the controversy tragic, we both agree that this was a valid expression of free speech, though for slightly different reasons.

"In hindsight," Singer writes, "it would have been wiser not to publish the cartoons. The benefits were not worth the costs."

I'm not sure freedom of any sort is the kind of thing you measure on a cost-benefits basis. If there's to be a measure of it, I'd say the one that matters is the personal courage required: Nobody's going to cut your head off for mocking American fundamentalist Christians who oppose physician-assisted suicide. That's hardly a test case for free speech. It's more important to hold up a candle in the demon-haunted darkness than in broad daylight.

But, Singer adds, "To restrict freedom of expression because we fear such consequences would not be the right response. It would only provide an incentive for those who do not want to see their views criticized to engage in violent protests in future." And a hearty hear, hear to that.

And I think he's right in the main thrust of his article, which is not the Muhammad cartoons but the jailed Holocaust-denier David Irving.

I support efforts to prevent any return to Nazism in Austria or anywhere else. But how is the cause of truth served by prohibiting Holocaust denial? If there are still people crazy enough to deny that the Holocaust occurred, will they be persuaded by imprisoning some who express that view? On the contrary, they will be more likely to think that views people are being imprisoned for expressing cannot be refuted by evidence and argument alone.

Exactly. Irving should be freed, not because he's right, but because being wrong in words ought not to be a crime. Singer, before going further, lays out his credentials as a grandson of three Holocaust victims. This is a poignant, but unnecessary, aside. This is not a Jewish issue; it is a freedom issue, and as such it affects every person in a free society.

Irving, 67, is a formidable amateur historian who has worked from primary sources to build up his picture of a Third Reich in which Jews certainly were mistreated and died in large numbers, but not by a methodical genocide ordered by Hitler.

He already has been financially ruined and professionally disgraced by his persistence in Holocaust denial. But he should not be in jail; he should be out in the public arena trying to prove his case and seeing it shreded by the historical record. Like Jefferson, we are willing to “tolerate error as long as reason is free to combat it.”

In history as in all intellectual activities, questioning and probing makes a strong case stronger. The truth need not fear a Devil’s advocate.

There's a flaw in Singer's argument, however: He overlooks the difference between Europe and America in this matter, and he seems inclined to extend American ideas to European realities. Americans have steeled ourselves to an ugly truth: Our commitment to free expression means we must tolerate freedom of expression for people we despise, or else it means nothing. It's a daily battle to maintain that, as the brouhaha over the "South Park" blasphemies revealed. But generally the principal of free speech comes out on top.

But Europe is different. Public Holocaust denial is a crime in 10 European countries, from France to Lithuania. All of them not only suffered under Nazi occupation but were, in some degree, complicit in the deportation and killing of Jews during the war.

After the war, laws were enacted that banned Nazi insignia and the stiff-arm salute. It was not just a question of muzzling Jew-baiters; the European nations remember that fascists came to power within the mechanism of democratic electoral systems and with a great deal of popular enthusiasm. The laws were meant, in part, to prevent the rebirth of a lethal political movement.

As Hajo Funke, a German historian, put it: “We can’t afford the luxury of the Anglo-Saxon freedom of speech argument in this regard. It’s not that I don’t understand it, it’s just not for us. Not yet. Not for a long time.”

Hence the 1992 Austrian law Irving was convicted under, which applies to “whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media.”

It's an unfortunate side-effect of Irving's trial that Islamists around the world have been able to point to it as proof of hypocrisy in the Western commitment to freedom of speech as invoked in the case of the Danish cartoon drawings of Muhammad. That's the point Singer wishes to make, too:

[E]ven while the protests about the cartoons were still underway, a new problem about convincing Muslims of the genuineness of our respect for freedom of expression has arisen because of Austria's conviction and imprisonment of David Irving for denying the existence of the Holocaust. We cannot consistently hold that it should be a criminal offense to deny the existence of the Holocaust and that cartoonists have a right to mock religious figures.

Aside from the curious "we" (perhaps Sinbger is uncomfortable with the idea of being an American hectoring Europeans about freedom) that's a strong argument. Irving’s writings feed the Islamists’ warped ideology, which run a close parallel to Hitler’s. But jailing Irving only adds the martyr’s halo to his sad career. It’s an unfortunate side-effect of Irving’s trial that Islamists around the world have been able to point to it as proof of hypocrisy in the Western commitment to freedom of speech as invoked in the case of the Danish cartoon drawings of Muhammad.

I would not go as far as Singer in saying "In the current climate in Western nations, the suspicion of a particular hostility towards Islam, rather than other religions, is well justified." For one, the Europe-America distinction remains important here. But I understand such suspicion, even if I don't find it "well-justified." And Singer and I agree in this:

Only when David Irving has been freed will it be possible for Europeans to turn to the Islamic protesters and say: "We apply the principle of freedom of expression evenhandedly, whether it offends Muslims, Christians, Jews, or anyone else."