Auschwitz
While the system
of concentration camps characterized Nazi-occupied Europe, even dating back several
years before the start of 2nd World War (Oranienburg near Berlin was
set up as early as 1933), Auschwitz-Birkenau was among 6 extermination camps,
all in Poland (the other five being Belzek, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno and
Majdanek). Liberated in January 1945 by the Soviets.
Auschwitz has
since become the ultimate symbol of human suffering, and grotesquely enough, a yardstick.
I say grotesque because the “uniqueness” of the Jewish Holocaust has itself been
a subject of much debate, and some consider even having such a debate on the
“ranking of human suffering” to be a “moral abomination”1.
However it is not
my intent here to broach that subject of uniqueness. It will suffice to note
though, Auschwitz falls into the category of human depravity that is not
debatable.
“There are certain issues, for example,
Auschwitz, such that by consenting to discuss them one degrades oneself and to
some degree loses one’s humanity, and I think that’s true. Nevertheless I can
easily imagine circumstances in which I would have been glad to debate
Auschwitz, for example if there were some chance that by debating Auschwitz it
might have been possible to eliminate it, or to at least mitigate the horror of
what was going on.”
Those were the
words of Noam Chomsky as he explained the moral anguish of even starting to
debate Vietnam in a now classic debate2 with William F. Buckley in
1969.
What I wanted to
ask though is, what level of human suffering is necessary, to render the agent
of that suffering, undebatable.
I will look at
the following two examples:
Hiroshima:
For some unfathomable
reason, the debate exists. The August 2015 issue of BBC History magazine
carried this subject as the cover article. Not only was it debated, 4 out of 7
scholars considered the act justifiable, including best-selling military
historian Anthony Beevor, and a social science professor here in Boston. Two of
the three that swayed to the other side, cited reasons such as the bombs having little
to do with Japan’s surrender, better alternatives being discarded, and so on.
The article even carries a picture of an unrelated atrocity (the relation being
WWII of course) of the Bataan death march in the Philippines and mentions how
certain historians “cite Japanese atrocities such as these when discussing the decision
to drop the bomb”.
Not only could I not locate the moral imperative anywhere in this article, but the idea that one
depravity could be seen as a justification for the other was lost on me.
Few months later
in the same magazine, there was a letter from an American woman that compared
such debates after the fact as “Monday-morning quarterbacking.”
Now consider the
following snippet, from an account of various types of neuroses observed by Nobel
Laureate Kenzaburo Oe (whose own son had been born with a severe head
abnormality) in “Hiroshima Notes” –
“A young mother,..,
gave birth to a stillborn, deformed child. The young mother was an A-bomb
victim who had suffered burns and consequent keloid scars; she had prepared
herself for misfortune, but wanted to have a look at her baby. When the doctor
refused to permit it, she asked her husband to look at it. He went to see the
baby, only to find that it had already been disposed of.”3
Torture:
A book came out recently titled “Does Torture
Work?” (author John Schiemann); here is an excerpt from the preface -
“It may be that we would reject interrogational
torture even if it did work, as un-American or on other moral grounds. In other
words, demonstrating that interrogational torture is effective may not be a
sufficient condition to justify its use, but it is surely a necessary
condition: If it does not work, then it cannot be justified as an interrogation
technique.”
The author proceeds to work on the second part
(necessary condition) as that seems the only relevant thing worth establishing
–
“There are many decent and reasonable people who
do not like the idea of torture but think it is necessary to protect America
and Americans from terrorism. If this describes you, then I hope I can convince
you that it is worth examining through reason and logic the assumption that
torture works. If you are someone already opposes torture, I hope I am able to
convince you why it is necessary not to treat proponents as “moral monsters”
but instead to examine the effectiveness claims of torture proponents.”
And he does so using the complex mathematical
approach of game theory, which must be revolutionary in this area.
The moral problem is acknowledged,
“For many, of course, the question of torture’s
effectiveness is irrelevant: Torture is unjustified whether or not it is
effective. Call this rights-focused group Kantians..” (Chapter 1 –
“Interrogating Torture”)
but sidestepped; proving the effectiveness of torture is the only aim of the
text.
As Chomsky reminds moments later in that debate,
there were people who debated in favor of Auschwitz. And that’s important to
note, because the status of Auschwitz in public discourse was never a given
axiom, it attained that status through a collective understanding.
Now consider the following text -
“It is impossible to read without a shudder the
words left behind by Jean Amery, the Austrian philosopher tortured by the
Gestapo for his activity in the Belgian resistance, and later deported to
Auschwitz as a Jew.
‘Whoever was tortured, stays tortured…Whoever
has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of
destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in
part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be
regained.’
Torture was for Amery an endless death.”4
We could go on with examples.
To the victim, there’s no debate, no
equivocation. Words of pain themselves are the indictment of torture. The irony
is that these words are Jean Amery and Primo Levi’s – who actually went through
Auschwitz.
Quotations:
- “Now intellectually that (uniqueness) doctrine is vacuous; morally it’s an abomination. This notion of ranking human suffering. How can you prove that somebody who’s been napalmed, a child who’s been napalmed, has suffered less than the child who’s been dispatched to a gas chamber?.. And why would you even wanna go there?” – Norman Finkelstein (author of “The Holocaust Industry”), in an interview, available on Youtube
- Transcript of the interview available on http://buckley-chomsky.weebly.com/
- From “Hiroshima Notes” – “The Moralists of Hiroshima”, by Kenzaburo Oe.
- From “The Drowned and the Saved” – Ch.1 “The Memory of the Offense”, by Primo Levi.
