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Introduction

In January this year, I attended the Holocaust Memorial Commemoration in City Hall. As usual, it was well attended. Also as usual, good people gave powerful talks: they told us about several stories of survival, and of the work being done to ensure that the worst genocide in history is not forgotten.

We must remember. This point was made repeatedly, recognising that the generation of eye witnesses is passing fast; the task of preserving these memories and passing them on now falls to others.

But, despite the good people and the vital message, the whole event seemed blinkered.

On the one hand, we were told we must remember so that such tragedies will not happen again; on the other hand, we were reminded that genocides have continued. This should not be a surprise to anyone who watches the news: it seems that our memory of the Holocaust has not prevented anything.

If we want to prevent future genocide, it seems to me that memory is just the first stage: we also need to understand what happened, and then act to prevent it from happening again – we need to understand the many genocides, with all their varying details, and act as best we can to prevent any genocide, anywhere, for any reason.

What is Needed

Remember

We must remember what happened in each case, because we need to be motivated to do what we can to prevent future genocides. Preventing genocide, or even simply making it happen less often, will take a serious amount of work: we must be prepared to make the effort; and this will not happen unless we remember, and unless we allow ourselves to remember that it happened to people like you and me.

We must also preserve the evidence and tell the stories, pointing people to the sources, showing them how to check for themselves that this story is true. There will always be people who have a vested interest in denying what happened, or in undermining the history through questioning and ‘correcting’ the key details.

Understand

We must work to understand why it happened. What made it possible? What motivated the actors? What inhibited protest and prevention?

And we must work to understand what features of the world may make it possible again now. What beliefs? What stories? What political and social movements?

This attempt to understand pulls us, at times, in the opposite direction from our work in remembering.

The story we tell in remembering inevitably includes at least two groups: the victims and the perpetrators – Jew and Nazi, Hutu and Tutsi, Muslim and Serb. There are the people who were killed, and the people who did the killing; the innocent victims, and the monstrous criminals.

And we understand that the killing was generally made possible because the perpetrators ‘othered’ their victims – often moving from “they are not people like us” to “they are not people”, or from “they don’t deserve to live in comfort while people like us struggle” to “they don’t deserve to live”.

But, in telling these stories, we – the good people seeking to remember genocide and prevent it from happening again – are often clearly saying that these monstrous criminals are not people like us. We care about human life, they only cared about their twisted ideology.  Of course, we are not ‘othering’: we are making a valid distinction for moral reasons.  But that is what many of them thought they were doing.  And, whatever you call it, whatever we are doing in telling these stories, it rarely increases our understanding of the perpetrators.

We cannot prevent what we do not understand. We must remember not only that the victims were people like you and me – the perpetrators were also people like you and me. For my money, the most significant piece of drama which deals with the Holocaust is ‘Good’, the play by Cecil Philip Taylor.

And we cannot prevent what we will not acknowledge. As Wikipedia points out, powerful countries restricted the legal definition in order “to exclude their own actions from being classified as genocide”. We have to examine our own heart, and our own national interest.

Act

This is where it gets difficult.

Once we understand what will make future genocide more likely, we then need to act as best we can to minimise the likelihood – to disrupt the processes which lead to genocide, and to build a world in which violence is not accepted as normal, and not assumed to be necessary.

And every step on this path will be opposed by people – good people, who are only trying to make a living, and who would not dream of supporting or participating in genocide – and the very suggestion that they are somehow enabling genocide is deeply hurtful to them, and obviously scaremongering.

So we need to find ways to help people connect the dots, to understand the various paths which lead to genocide – and the paths which lead away from it.

And we need to help people understand that we are all on multiple paths simultaneously: when a genocide takes place, it does not really matter very much which path was taken. In Rwanda, Hutu and Tutsi lived peacefully alongside one another for generations, but this social integration did not prevent the genocide. Building social cohesion is good but, like remembering, it’s not enough.

See Also...

• Why do bad things happen?  See What Makes the World Worse?