The Memory of Genocide
While genocide comes up frequently in modern texts, news sources, the media in general, finding details of it can be tricky. As much as news outlets capitalize on the negative, stories of death and dying, stories of tragedy, there are some things that are considered just too negative to get more than lip service, a token nod or brief mention in the body text. Comparing modern events to the Holocaust, therefore, is doubly tricky: first, there is the aspect that comparing anything to the horrors of the Holocaust is like comparing a broken leg to a plane crash, then there is the fact that you must track down and find something to compare the Holocaust to.
In class now two weeks ago, we watched a pair of films. The first was a Frontline piece on a vaulted film narrated by Hitchcock, an unfinished documentary shot almost immediately after the end of the war… so immediately that the Allied soldiers liberating the camp were met with thousands of bodies, still recognizable, in various stages of decomposition. As the film, “Memory of the Camps,” continued over its fifty-three minute run, more and more horrors were unveiled, more and more corpses were buried. The graphic imagery, grainy black and white shots of the dead and suffering, combined with the chilling silence of the unedited sections, creates a psycological feeling of horror and revolsion, a knot in the pit of your stomach, an interesting combination between desensitized detachment and compelling urge to escape the cramped, dark, oppressively hot classroom to go somewhere, anywhere, to escape arguably the most close-up and hands-on account of the Holocaust ever to be filmed.
How the hell can you compare anything to this? I thought.
Thus I stalled.
It’s one thing to watch a polished Hollywood movie like “Hotel Rwanda,” not “glamorized” but maybe “abridged,” softened and watered down for the common movie-going audience. Seeing reel after reel of shrunked bodies with distended stomachs and glazed, lifeless eyes dumped uncerimoniously into a pit… that is the raw gut-renching imagery captured as history, as truth.
I had to dig back through my RSS feeds several years before I could manage a good, direct connection, as flimsy as it is in comparison. In 2006, the BBC made a lengthy article during Saddam’s trial regarding the genocide committed against the Kurdish Iraqis:
The deposed leader and six others are on trial over their role in a campaign against the Kurds in the 1980s in which over 180,000 are alleged to have died.
A defence lawyer claims a foreigner gave him a list of witnesses to call.
Correspondents say the court hopes to complete the case before Saddam Hussein is executed following his conviction.
The former leader was found guilty of crimes against humanity for the killing of 148 people in the mainly Shia town of Dujail following an assassination attempt on him in 1982.
[…]
The first witness of the day, Taimor Abdallah Rokhza, described how Kurdish villagers were killed.
“There was a trench there and we were lined up and a soldier was shooting at us,” the French news agency AFP quoted him as saying.
“Then suddenly it stopped and it was quiet. I was waiting to die and my whole body was covered with blood, and the soldiers went away.”
It’s no big stretch to say that Saddam Hussein was a brutal, oppressive dictator; after all, he killed and disemplaced his own citizens, gassed Kurds in the north, drained the marshes in the south to destroy the mash arabs’ way of life. I imagine this is the Holocaust on a micro-managed scale; Holocaust documentaries have a habit of showing how a shtetl, whole villages, were wiped out by the Nazis in systematic order, the German ordered punctuality we now look for in the making of Mercedes, Volkswagons, and BMWs. In a similar way, the Iraqi genocides were small and quick, going after a village to exterminate any “enemies of the state” found within. What makes these killings more horrible is not the sheer weight of numbers, but the fact an entire community, a group of people who knew one another, was wiped off the map forever.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/6186958.stm
Published: 2006/11/27 15:20:33 GMT
© BBC MMIX
War and Peace 
I agree that the comparison between Saddam Hussein and Adolph Hitler is a hard one to make. I think that the way the Holocaust was carried out is what makes it the most brutal and horrific event in human history, regardless of other tyrannical dictators that committed similar genocides over the last one hundred years.
I do think that Hitler was very organized at the beginning of his “Final Solution” which only started to become unorganized when he knew that the Allies were closing in. If Hitler had thought that he was winning, no one knows who may have survived and who may have been killed. In Hitler’s scramble to rid the world of Jews, he became crazed and caused his own downfall (not that that was a bad thing).
Hitchcock’s documentary is moving because he captures the reaction of the villagers as they see what had been taking place in their “backyard.” No other documentary that I have seen has captured this and they usually leave the viewer wanting for more actual footage rather than the overly dramatic music and dramatic pauses. Less is sometimes more in these situations, especially when addressing something as horrific as the Holocaust.
I think that there are very few people in history that you can compare Hitler too, maybe Stalin in terms of suffering inflicted, but I don’t think Saddam was at that level, despite his dictatorship–using chemical weapons on his own people, human rights abuses ect… but in terms of scale there is no comparison… also I don’t think there were so much racial as political and religious motivations behind Saddam’s acts. The Kurds have and did wish for a separate state, and I think that Saddam thought this was a threat. This of course does not excuse the actions; however I think genocide normally includes some element of racial motivation in its definition
I do think that the genocide in Rwanda is perhaps the most effective recent event that can be compared to the holocaust. I terms of scale it still pales in comparison to what Hitler did, but it was certainly racially motivated mass murder, still the comparison of Hitler to Saddam does make one think about what could have happened if we did not have the international pressure that organizations like the UN provide. Also it makes me personally glad Saddam’s reign is over.
[…] 1st comment […]
Comments « Love and Napalm said this on October 29, 2009 at 6:44 am |
It is no doubt that Saddam Hussein was a dictator who never should have been, and who committed terrible crimes against his own people. Though I am not well-versed in the past thirty or so years of Iraqi history, I have paid close enough attention to know that it was necessary to remove him from power, no matter the motivation behind it. Similarly, with the situation in Rwanda, though the United States has little to no vested economic interest in the area, I feel that more effort should be made to bring the decades long genocide to an end. As my fellow classmates have already stated, neither situation is quite comparable to that of the Nazi regime and system of torture and killing, if left unchecked, who knows where the current situations can go? The genocides in Rwanda have been continuing for over twenty years, and have only recently begun to gain international attention. It is time someone stepped up and made an effort to pacify the situation and end the mass murder.
[…] Comment 3 […]
The comment post « We make war that we may live in peace. said this on November 2, 2009 at 2:13 am |
[…] 1st comment […]
Final Comments « Love and Napalm said this on November 28, 2009 at 7:15 pm |