In the wake of the COVID19 outbreak, we are confronted with a globally massive threat to our health, where unparalleled measures are being proposed and enacted to counter it. We are chronicling in real-time the heroic actions of those in the field who are putting their lives on the line to make a difference coupled with heartbreaking stories of loss, separation, and suffering.

Medical personnel on the frontlines of this pandemic in my home country Spain are succumbing to illness at an astonishing rate. Currently, Spain is hobbled with the highest COVID19 caseload in all of Europe and reportedly ranks only behind the United States worldwide in terms of sheer numbers of those infected. 

The legendary Nobel laureate Albert Camus had extensively researched the “Black Death” and other diseases that had ravaged nations and empires throughout history. He looked at examples in Europe and China. However, his research was also intimately informed by the typhus outbreaks in his own Algeria. His masterpiece The Plague, in his biographer Alice Kaplan’s words, “was inspired by the 1940s—i.e., by the Nazi Occupation. The Plague used the story of a city beset by disease to express a vision beyond the absurd: the possibility of solidarity in the struggle against evil, the power of friendship and community.”

The text serves as a reminder of what is at stake and how our democracies might be altered when we emerge from this crisis. Camus’ novel was above all a response to how European societies reacted when suddenly faced with such a seemingly unstoppable force at their doorstep. The story has been read as an allegory about the reactions of the French people during WWII, ranging from those who collaborated with the Nazi regime to those that courageously decided to resist.

Camus’ underlying message is always relevant but even more so at a time of a global emergency when populations’ fears and anxieties are exploited by leaders who seize the opportunity to weaken democratic institutions that serve as a check to their power. That liberty violations occur in the face of security threats (whether real or imagined) is not new and the German Reichstag (Parliament) fire of 1933 should serve as an unmistakable lesson drawn from the past. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, is now governing by decree, without a predictable deadline to the state’s declared state of emergency. Orban’s party was also able to get a law approved in the Parliament under the guise of combating misinformation, opening the door to the persecution of dissenting journalists. Over the last few weeks, Vladimir Putin has planted Russian cities with thousands of new surveillance cameras. Will these be removed once the pandemic is defeated?  

It goes without saying that not only fragile and emerging democracies, such as those in Eastern Europe, are destabilized by the added threat of an authoritarian drift in the wake of the COVID19 crisis. A recent survey showed that a sizable number of US citizens are willing to consider truncating core civil liberties if it serves to fight this health emergency. For instance, more than 85% polled would consent to ban noncitizens from entering the country and 78% to conscripting health-care professionals to work despite risks to their health.  

Camus understood that unchecked, unquestioned power would spiral out of control like a vicious plague leaving people with no defenses to fight against it. Reading Camus in the times of the present global pandemic teaches us a precious lesson: to be alert and prepared to stand with and up for scientists looking for a cure, for our medical professionals treating the sick, and for the well-being of every person. We should also not lose sight of our support for democratic principles based on compassion and reason over narrow national divisions, xenophobia, and the temptation of authoritarian solutions.

In Spain, a popular tune from the 80s is being revived by confined residents who sing it from apartment balconies and windows: Resistiré (I will resist). It captures the mood of a nation besieged.

Please stay healthy, informed, and engaged.

Alejandro Baer, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology and the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Several years ago, I transitioned my high school Holocaust and genocide studies elective course from an in-person class to a virtual one. At the time, I had many questions and concerns about teaching such difficult subject matter in a virtual environment. While there were certainly challenges, the switch pushed me to examine my teaching praxis more deeply, explore a flipped model of learning, and find new resources and technologies to engage both synchronously and asynchronously. 

While certainly sometimes the technology seems to be more of a barrier and actual physical distance between us seems insurmountable, rich texts, robust discussions, and a common purpose inevitably bridge the gaps and bring us together as a class. In the end, I am always reminded of the resilience of my students and my own resilience as an educator. While April is going to be a difficult month for both students and educators in Minnesota and across the country, I know that we will find a way to adjust and adapt to the new and uncertain times ahead. The outpouring of support I have received from colleagues, families, and friends, gives me tremendous hope and lets me know that I am not alone. 

I’m also reflecting on the fact that April is Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month. I know that many educators, myself included, use April as a time to educate students about past and current genocides. Despite the recent uncertainties and challenges for teachers and students, I’m resolved to continue this important work raising awareness of genocide and mass violence with my students. Having recently discussed the Cambodian genocide with my students, their incredulous reaction – “Why haven’t we learned about this before?” – reminds me of the importance of my commitment to educate students about past and current atrocities. 

In addition to my role as a high school teacher, I also serve as the educational outreach coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) at the University of Minnesota. CHGS has a robust collection of online resources to support you and your students this April. 

If you are planning to teach about the Holocaust this spring, we have links to 60 full-length video-recorded Minnesota Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, which were recorded in 1984 and are now housed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We also have videos of several local Holocaust survivor testimonies that were collected in collaboration with Spanish painter Felix de la Concha for CHGS’s Portraying Memories Project, in which Concha painted survivors’ portraits as they shared their stories. These testimonies are typically under 30 minutes in length and would be perfect for middle and high school students. 

If you are planning to teach about the Armenian genocide, we have a robust collection of materials in our digital archive, including Relief Posters and Articles from Minnesota Newspapers (1915-1922). These primary resources shed light on how Minnesotans may have understood the events of the genocide as they were unfolding. Our community partners at St. Sahag Armenian Church have created an online exhibit, Treasures of Memory and Hope, featuring the stories of local survivors and their families. These resources would be ideal for both middle and high school students. 

In addition, we also have many educator resource guides covering a number of different case studies of genocide, including newly published guides on Holodomor and Genocide by the Islamic State/Daesh in Iraq and Syria. We also have sample lesson plans on the Rwandan genocide, Cambodian genocide, and the U.S.-Dakota War. In addition, a recording of a recent educator workshop, “Teaching Students About Nativism and White Supremacy and their Relationship to Racism and Antisemitism,” can also be accessed online. While these resources can support what you are already doing in your virtual classrooms, we’d love to hear about how we can support you and your students within the contexts and constraints in which you teach, 

At CHGS, we do our best work when we are able to connect and engage with educators and students directly. Our Genocide Education Outreach (GEO) program, which connects advanced graduate students studying genocide and related topics with classrooms, has a history of offering virtual lectures, discussions, and activities. We’d love to discuss the possibilities of bringing a virtual guest speaker on a topic related to genocide or mass violence in your classroom. For more information, email George Dalbo at dalbo006@umn.edu. 

At CHGS, we are inspired by the tremendous effort that is being made by educators to support the physical, emotional, and academic needs of their students and communities. Thanks for all you do.

George Dalbo is the Educational Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a Ph.D. student in Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota with research interests in Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education. Previously, he was a middle and high school social studies teacher, having taught every grade from 5th-12th in public, charter, and independent schools in Minnesota, as well as two years at an international school in Vienna, Austria.

Jillian LaBranche was born and raised in southern New Hampshire. She graduated from Rhodes College with a BA in International Studies and a minor in Religious Studies. During this time, she studied abroad in Rwanda and Uganda studying violent conflict and peacebuilding. She received an MA in International Human Rights from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and an MA in Sociology at Brandeis University. She is now a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Jillian serves as a member of the graduate editorial board for The Society Pages and participates in the Genocide Education Outreach (GEO) program. During the 2020-2021 academic year, Jillian hopes to begin her dissertation research.

Jillian’s research interests broadly include violence, knowledge, collective memory, and comparative methods. Her research seeks to understand how societies that recently experienced large-scale political violence teach about this violence to the next generation. More specifically, her dissertation research will analyze how teachers and parents in Sierra Leone and Rwanda relay their respective countries’ violent histories to the next generation, and how the distinct classification of the violence as civil war versus genocide are reflected in these communications. In addition to her dissertation work, Jillian works as a Research Assistant for Alejandro Baer on a project that seeks to understand how education is a form of reparative justice in Minnesota and Manitoba.

Millions upon millions of people have been killed in concentration camps over the last century, and yet I have found myself distracted and angered about recent political debate over semantics: specifically how and when we use the term “concentration camps.”

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to the US government facilities used to hold asylum-seekers as “concentration camps.” Prominent voices publically disagreed with Ocasio-Cortez, saying that only Nazi camps are concentration camps. By using the term for other camps, they said that Ocasio-Cortez dishonored Jewish victims of the Holocaust. 

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum jumped into this debate, too. It implicitly shamed Ocasio-Cortez, writing that one should never analogize contemporary events to the Holocaust; that doing so may offend Holocaust survivors and their families.

There are compelling articles, books, and podcasts which address this issue. Many look at the history of concentration camps across cultures, back to the camps used in the Boer Wars in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, to help us understand that “concentration camps” has consistently been a term that referred to more than the Nazi camps, and that the Nazis themselves adapted the camp technique from other societies, including the United States. You can find a shortlist of relevant links at the bottom of this article.

Understanding this issue by looking across cultures and history is crucial, but the USHMM (and others) specifically invoked Holocaust survivors and their families as potential victims of Ocasio-Cortez. 

They’re referring to me.

The USHMM said that I, a son of a Holocaust survivor, may be hurt by describing US detention facilities as “concentration camps.”

So I’m writing from that lens, as the son of a Holocaust survivor: I disagree with the USHMM, and I believe that the opposite is true: that Jews — and Holocaust survivors specifically — have been hurt precisely by understanding the concepts of the Holocaust and concentration camps to be one and the same.

An Incomplete Story

My father, Victor Vital (ז״ל, 1932-2019, obituary), and his nuclear family escaped into mountain forests where they hid through the duration of the Nazi occupation of Greece. Greek farmers and villagers saved my family from starvation, exposure, and capture. My father survived the Holocaust but never entered a camp, though our large extended family all died in camps.

Following WWII, my family stayed in Greece until the political and social circumstances of the Greek civil war compelled them to get out of Europe. In December 1967, HIAS resettled my parents, my brother and sister, and my grandmother, in Minnesota, where they quickly joined the local Jewish community. My father told the story that at first he didn’t consider himself to be a Holocaust survivor — precisely because he hadn’t been in a concentration camp — until he was at a Holocaust commemoration, and other survivors (and the Jewish community) told him he was also, truly, a survivor.

But I didn’t know that story until I was an adult. Within my memory, Victor always described himself as a Holocaust survivor. I was discussing this with my mother, who confided to me that she, like my father, didn’t think of him as the same kind of a survivor as people who were in camps. The Nazi occupation of Greece was devastating, she (and my father) reasoned: “It was bad for all Greeks.”

“Yes,” I said to my mother, “Greek trauma is real. But the Greek Jewish experience was different. It was real, too.”

My mother, Aglaia Vital (ז״ל ,1939-2012), didn’t become a Jew until her adulthood. She remembered being so blonde as a child that Nazi soldiers would come up on the street and give her candy because she presented such an ideal whiteness. That memory was scary for her, and it was one of the least scary wartime stories she told. I’m not weighing traumatic histories against each other — Greeks suffered, starved, rescued, fought fiercely against the Nazi military, and died at their hands — but it’s clear that a Jewish experience was different from hers. My mother didn’t go into hiding; she wasn’t hunted down by an invading army because of her race. My mother’s family did risk their lives, not by themselves hiding, but because my maternal grandparents hid Jews in their home.

I recited research to my mother that survivors in hiding weren’t any less traumatized than survivors of camps. I tried to convince her of this, because it upset me, frankly, to hear even my own mother unintentionally downplay the Holocaust trauma that permeated my father’s life — and my family. It wasn’t research that brought her around on the subject, however; it was a story: “Anne Frank was in hiding,” I said to my mother, “and her story is maybe the most well-known Holocaust story. Had she not been killed, would being in hiding have made her any less of a survivor?”

That question helped my mother understand my father’s experience as not “less-than.”

Implications

This is more than a family issue. There are negative consequences for the Jewish community when “concentration camps” are understood as synonymous with the Shoah. Less than half of Jewish Holocaust victims were killed in camps. The Nazi camp infrastructure is horrifying. And it need not eclipse the many other ways the Shoah was implemented, like the staggering amount of Jews killed point-blank, in forests, by perpetrators who were not Germans themselves.

To focus on any specific aspect of the Holocaust diminishes awareness of the terrifying whole. Genocide is massive, and genocide is local: a social, human phenomenon, a crime committed up close by regular human beings — not just “evil” ones wearing swastikas. We know that genocide happens with or without camps: the Nazis built over 40,000 camps, but those camps were not required for them to commit genocide: nearly as many Jews were killed in mass shootings as in camps, and we cannot forget that. In the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, it took machetes and radios to kill at a faster rate than during the Holocaust.

If we forget this, we mask how easy it is for anyone of us to be complicit in genocide.

My family was, thankfully, given the privilege to come to this country and live safely — there is no shortage of antisemitism in Europe today. When they landed here, my family did not know that it was a federal crime in the US for Native Americans to practice indigenous religion — until after 1978. A white US government gave a Jewish family from Europe a home, on land that was once Dakota territory while continuing to persecute native people and cultures. To conceive of the mechanisms of the Shoah as remote and historical is to ignore them when we participate in the same, different, atrocities.

Never Forget and Never Again

It is imperative that we make comparisons and connections between past, present, and future, in order to strive to prevent genocide and heal our traumas. We must not allow ownership of semantics to eclipse human experience, to deny the suffering that we perpetrate at our borders and prisons and neighborhoods. 

To allow the memory of Auschwitz to degrade this human experience, weaponizes the memory of the Shoah to harm others today. To use Auschwitz in this way is to demean the victims of the Shoah and those who survived.

Some further reading and listening

• NPR podcast Code Switch has an episode examining the use of the term “concentration camps” in the context of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War 2. This episode spurred me to write this piece.
• Timothy Snyder, Yale University history professor and Holocaust scholar, wrote in opposition to the USHMM stance against “Holocaust analogies.” This article summarizes the current debate with many significant references.
• In this episode, NPR podcast Throughline examined the history of concentration camps, stretching back to the Boer War.

Demetrios Vital is part of the teaching team at the IDEAL Center of the Science Museum of Minnesota. The IDEAL Center’s professional development work is grounded in research on diversity and inclusion, transformative learning, and growing equitable relationships, to work towards a positive vision of our world.  In his current work at the IDEAL Center, Demetrios brings this background forward by examining how we teach and learn in a post-Holocaust society, working to heal relationships and build a more equitable world. Previously, Demetrios worked at CHGS as outreach coordinator and museum associate.

While growing up in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, being evangelisch meant above all that you were not katholisch and therefore had to wait five years longer for your Confirmation presents. This was a little annoying, but in hindsight, it may qualify as my first encounter with the inner-worldly asceticism that Max Weber describes in The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. Delayed gratification aside, the German evangelical church at the time came across as benign, even reasonable, open to critical discussion and staffed with laid-back, progressive pastors. It was the seventies after all. Nobody would have spelled evangelical with a capital “E” back then, at least not in Europe. That Protestantism in the US could take on a very different flavor didn’t occur to me until I moved to California in the early 2000s and it was my daughter’s turn for Confirmation class. There was a lot about Satan in the curriculum and all the things you could go to hell for, like not showing up for class at Bethany Lutheran Church.

Satan, really? Back then, the last time I had heard of him was also in the seventies, in a movie theater watching Rosemary’s Baby. Recently, he has been making more headlines, like earlier this year, when the spiritual advisor to the White House and televangelist Paula White prayed for “all Satanic pregnancies to miscarry right now.” And then earlier this month, when Billy Graham’s son Franklin was barred from speaking in the UK about how “Satan managed to pass gay marriage legislation.”

Max Weber traveled through the US in 1904 to study the sociology of religion. Interestingly, Protestants at the time seemed less obsessed with the underworld and more interested in worldly affairs. Weber praised the progressive dynamics of America’s many “voluntaristic sects.” He was impressed by their independence and self-governance and saw them operating as social and economic networks, which, due to their Protestant work ethic, were thriving in a capitalist society. Protestant revival movements like Christian Science, still new at the time and preaching that sickness was a mental error curable by reading the right books, did strike him as odd. However, always the self-assured German professor, Weber predicted that these spiritual aberrations would be swept away by cultural rationalization, secularization and bureaucratization. This, after all, was based on his theory of modern Western society, where scientific understanding replaces belief systems and mythical explanations.

Maybe Weber loved his theory a little bit too much. He would be surprised to find out that instead of becoming rational, disenchanted or versachlicht, almost a third of the US population today identifies as Evangelical and interprets the Bible as a literally true account of the past and unfailing guide to the future. This gets particularly tricky when it comes to the Book of Revelation, which contains all the Evangelicals’ pet themes. Martin Luther found the Apocalypse of John “neither prophetic nor apostolic” and tried to keep it out of the biblical canon. Thomas Jefferson considered the steaming stories about Satan and the Antichrist “ravings of a maniac.” He was particularly disturbed by the promise of a Golden Age on Earth, lasting one thousand years and reserved for faithful Christians who would be spared the preceding “Great Tribulation” by temporarily escaping into Heaven. I find it disturbing too — the last time somebody in Germany promised one thousand years of Paradise, it turned out to be twelve years of hell and Holocaust.

Where does this knack for escapist belief systems in the United States comes from? I guess probably from the very beginning. Sailing to America in 1620 was perfect timing if you wanted to take with you an untainted love for bizarre theological certainties such as the coming 1000-year reign of Jesus Christ. The Pilgrims boarded the Mayflower when the rest of Europe was about to begin a 30-year massacre over whose faith was the right faith. It left half the population dead and the other half with a soberer attitude towards the benefits of religion and rampant self-righteousness. The early Americans missed out on that experience, and unabashed Puritanism survived through the centuries.

Evangelicalism, as we know it today, took off in the 1950s, and Billy Graham played a big role in it. So did TV and later the Internet. In Minnesota, where I live now, one doesn’t need devices to get the gospel, a car will do. When I first moved here twelve years ago, giant billboards on the roadside were merely insisting that Jesus was alive “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Recently, however, the signs have begun to target evolution by showing quotes from the Book of Genesis plastered over photos of planet Earth and by openly discriminating against primates and their developmental potential. I wish animal rights groups would take GospelBillboards.org to court for that! Every time I am commuting on highway 35 between the University of Minnesota Duluth and Twin Cities campuses, I get reminded that Weber’s theory of unstoppable Enlightenment in Western societies is, well, just a theory. What if pastors of any denomination in the US were required, like in other countries, to study theology at a comprehensive university as opposed to stand-alone, obscure seminaries? Teaching that Earth and all creatures on it were created 6,000 years ago becomes more challenging when your colleague next door is a professor of biology. You’d also think twice as a student before believing it when you are surrounded by a diverse group of people and opinions and not just like-minded followers. For now, however, we have to sadly recognize that to a large swath of people in America, the world remains what Max Weber called “an enchanted garden” from which in the not too distant future they will be lifted off into the clouds. Satan, if he existed, would laugh his tail off.

Henning Schroeder is a former vice provost and dean of graduate education at the University of Minnesota. He’s at schro601@umn.edu. On Twitter: @HenningSchroed1.

In 2019 I attended a summer workshop for teachers held by the CHGS, titled “Teaching About Genocide.” As part of the workshop, we, along with two Native American activists-teachers, toured the Minnesota State Capitol with a docent. Entering the main chamber of the capitol, our guide gestured toward several portraits of white males who colonized Minnesota. She, an employee of the state, noted they were the men “who discovered Minnesota.” Here, in the most prominent institution of Minnesota government, a guide had normalized colonialism, except the normalization was now being heard by a critical audience. The statement seemed bracingly out of step with our appreciation of multiculturalism, the celebration of ethnic and racial diversity, and acknowledgment of the centrality of indigenous peoples to the shared fabric of American history.

Our workshop helped us, as teachers activate new schemas for understanding colonialism in America. In psychology, a schema is a pattern of thinking organizing categories of information. In one workshop presentation, George Dalbo and Joe Eggers discussed “settler colonialism.” They used the concept as a framework for analyzing historical processes, in particular, the colonialization of indigenous people and land in Minnesota. Dalbo and Eggers noted that settler colonialism involves three stages: removing indigenous peoples, replacing them with settlers, and continually renewing and normalizing such colonialization. The workshop helped me develop a new schema. I spent the rest of the summer considering the continual renewal and normalization of colonialization. In particular, I began seeing how settler colonialism is made both visible and invisible in everyday life.

Visiting Duluth later that summer, I went to a prominent city park. There I saw a statue of Leif Erikson, which, an inscription said, was sponsored and erected by the Norwegian American League in 1956. After Erikson’s name was the statement, “discoverer of America.” Although there seemed to be attempts at darkening that phrase to be less legible, I saw both how normalizing such a statement otherwise was, and how transparent it was to anyone knowledgeable of settler colonialism. Yet here, the statue and statement stood in 2019, without any information qualifying or contextualizing it.

As Patrick Wolfe (2006) phrased it, “settler colonialism destroys to replace.” Regarding my focus here on monuments, there have been several recent debates about Civil War monuments as celebrations of slavery and racism, and how some feel those monuments should be either removed or contextualized through other plaques, information, or additional monuments. The monuments I saw over the summer celebrating settler colonialism, though, did not seem to be causing much debate. Instead, they seemed to be evidence of the normalization of colonialism, particularly central in Nebraska. One such bronze statue served to minimize the importance of indigenous histories, instead offering settler replacements and framings.

Returning to my hometown of Kearney, Nebraska, I focused on a prominent bronze statue at the entrance to the Archway Monument, a prominent tourist attraction on Interstate 80. The statue corresponds to a story told on a nearby plaque, titled “the Martin Brothers ‘A Narrow Escape.’” The statue and plaque commemorate an incident—in 1864, two children of white settlers who were riding a horse seven miles from Doniphan, Nebraska, had been “attacked by Indians,” having been “struck with four arrows,” and “left for dead,” but had survived to tell the “true but harrowing tale.” The phrasing on the plaque is noteworthy—besides the use of the term “Indians,” the plaque notes that Sioux and Cheyenne tribes were trying to “secure” their land. The plaque might have a different spin if, say, the word “defend” was to replace “secure.”

Through the schema of settler colonialism, other questions about the statue and plaque might emerge: what peoples here are depicted as being attacked? How does an understanding of colonialists as colonialists seem to grow distorted when a statue emphasizes their children as victims of an unprovoked attack? What is the background of those who created the statue? And what is the background of those donating the statue? The statue was made by Dr. David L. Biehl and commissioned by Fred A. Bosselman, both from farming families in Nebraska. Bronze copies of Biehi’s statue are also prominently displayed in central Nebraska at the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer in Grand Island, and the Hastings Museum in Hastings (Pore 2012). Fred A. Bosselman, whose family donated the statues, is the founder of Bosselman Truck Plaza in Grand Island. Bosselman Enterprises now owns forty-five Pump & Pantry convenience stores across several states (Bosselman Enterprises 2020).

It makes sense that settlers and their descendants want to celebrate their history, endowing museums and public parks with statues depicting legendary stories and heroes. The problem comes when those statues are prominently displayed at state-sponsored institutions at the expense of other accounts and contextualized histories that would allow visitors also to consider settler colonialism. Simple public acknowledgments of settler colonialism alongside such statues, such as those discussed here, would be a seemingly small, but perhaps important, step toward repairing the dominant group’s relations with indigenous Americans. Such public acknowledgments might also help improve and add complexity to the knowledge citizens have of their country. Such acknowledgments might also perhaps address the guilt that surely underlies bald attempts at erasing and replacing the histories of peoples devastated by colonialism.

Kurt Borchard, Ph.D., is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska Kearney, where he teaches a course on the Holocaust.  He has written extensively about cultural studies and homelessness.

Biehl, David L.  2013.  The Martin Brothers.  Lincoln, NE: Prairie Muse Books.

Bosselman Enterprises.  2020.  Company History.  Online.  Available:             https://www.bosselman.com/history/

Pore, Robert.  2012.  Hall County History Comes to Life as Statue Dedicated at Stuhr Museum.  The Independent (Grand Island). 6 July.

Wolfe, Patrick.  2006. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.  Journal of Genocide Research 8(4):387-409.

Max Breger, a doctoral candidate and visiting scholar from the University of Siegen, Germany, was recently hosted by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Breger has been in the United States for the past roughly two months, conducting research on torture committed by U.S. agencies, especially in connection with the larger so-called “War on Terror.” His work is part of a larger comparative research project led by Professor Dr. Katharina Inhetveen. Breger presented on the project and shared initial findings from his work with members of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Mass Violence Studies (HGMV) Interdisciplinary Graduate Group in a talk entitled: “Violent Interrogation, Psychology, and Body Knowledge: Torture in the ‘War on Terror.'” I sat down with Breger for an interview to learn more about the project.*

Dalbo: Could you briefly describe the research project?

Breger: I am working on a sociological research project called “Torture and Body Knowledge,” funded by the German Research Foundation and led by Professor Dr. Katharina Inhetveen at the University of Siegen in central Germany. In the project, we study torture techniques and practices in their political, cultural, and organizational contexts, and compare these across three cases. What I’m doing is focusing on the U.S. case, mainly on torture during the so-called “War on Terror.” But I’m also looking at the historical roots of the torture techniques from the Cold War era and the – mainly psychological – knowledge behind them. The second case is Argentina and Chile and is being researched by another doctoral student, Christina Schütz, who is currently in Chile. The third case – the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia – is researched by Daniel Bultmann, a post-doctoral researcher who has been working on Cambodia for a long time. 

Dalbo: Why were these three cases – Argentina/Chile, Cambodia, and the United States – chosen? What do you hope to get out of a comparative study?

Breger: The idea is that we can learn more about how cultural perceptions of the body affects torture when we compare cases in different political and cultural contexts. The U.S. case and the Latin American cases are particularly interesting to compare because they are connected through U.S. training – mainly by the “U.S. Army School of the Americas” [where Latin American militaries were trained. Since 2001: “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation “]. One question here is, for example, what impact of this training we can find in the torture practices in Chile and Argentina. In contrast, the case of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia is interesting because it is – even though the three cases are all connected in a way – a bigger cultural and political contrast. We have different dimensions that we use to compare our cases, for instance, the image of the enemy.

Dalbo: You mentioned in your talk that there had not been many scholarships around body knowledge and torture in the field of sociology. Could you elaborate on how you understand the connections between body knowledge and torture?

Breger: The concept “body knowledge” combines theories from the sociology of knowledge and sociology of the body. One might argue that sociology had not taken the body seriously enough in social theory for a long time. The concept of “body knowledge” is one attempt to acknowledge the social relevance of the body. Professor Inhetveen’s idea was to connect this concept with the sociology of violence through an empirical study. Body knowledge can be both incorporated knowledge and discursive knowledge. On the one hand, this means embodied knowledge that is non-theoretical and that we cannot easily express verbally, and on the other hand, discursive knowledge concerning the body, such as medical knowledge. Body knowledge is culturally diverse, even though the body’s material reality limits its cultural constructability. Body knowledge can differ in different cultural contexts. For us, this means that perceptions of the body have an impact on the torture practice, how torturers address the body, and how they and the tortured experience their own and each other’s bodies. For example, there might be differing ideas of where a specific person is vulnerable, depending on different images of the enemy that we find in our cases. Torture itself produces body knowledge in the sense that the torturer experiences his own and the victim’s body in new ways and produces knowledge, which, for example, can be shared with colleagues or can be worked into training manuals, such as those created by the CIA during the Cold War era. At the same time, the tortured experiences his or her body in a new way, both in the moment of torture and through the long-term effects. One example of discursive body knowledge is the professional psychological knowledge that I find in many documents concerning the U.S. case.

Dalbo: Could you talk a little bit about the research that you have been doing over the past seven or eight weeks in the United States?

Breger: I have been mainly in New York, Maryland, and Washington D.C. In New York, I talked to NGO lawyers, who are working on cases related to torture during the “War on Terror.” Then, I did some research at the National Archives in College Park and D.C. I was looking for documents from the Cold War-era concerning how military intelligence personnel and psychologists working for the U.S. military were conducting research on ‘enemy communist interrogation’ containing torture. I was especially interested in interviews with returned U.S. Prisoners of War from the Korean and the Vietnam Wars. My question here is: how exactly is this knowledge connected to the torture techniques used in the “War on Terror”? This connection, however, is not a new finding by me. You will find many references in the literature, most prominently in Alfred McCoy’s books. Still, I want to take a closer look at how this knowledge transfer happened – with our specific research questions in mind.

Dalbo: Could you share a few takeaways from the research you have conducted in the United States so far?

Breger: The lawyers I was talking to mentioned how important accountability and acknowledgment were for the torture survivors they were working with. This seems to be important for the healing process. What surprised me was that, according to the lawyers, many survivors still had a kind of trust or at least hope in the legal process and the rule of law in the USA, even though they had been tortured by U.S. officials, and real accountability has been very rare so far. One important exception to this lack of accountability was a lawsuit by the ACLU against the two psychologists working for the CIA, Mitchell and Jessen.

Dalbo: Is there something about conducting this research now, in 2019, in this present moment?

Breger: Yes, for me, it is interesting to work on the U.S. case now, because more and more documents have been declassified in the last few years due to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, most importantly the Senate report [in 2014]. The Mitchell and Jessen lawsuit [settled in 2017] also led to the declassification of relevant documents.

Christina, who is in Chile right now, and before that was in Argentina, has been experiencing the conflicts that have been going on there. She has found many references from the protestors to the past dictatorship that she is studying. Also interesting is that it is currently not possible to reach the SOA Watch [School of Americas Watch] website from Chile. We do not know if it was blocked intentionally. SOA Watch has a list of past graduates from the School of the Americas. Christina was only able to access the website through the VPN client from our university in Germany.

Dalbo: What are the goals for the study?

Breger: The goals for the research are to get a better understanding of the interrelations between cultural body knowledge and torture and the dynamics of torture from a sociological perspective in general. In the long term, our hope is that, through this understanding, we can help to prevent torture.

*Responses have been edited for clarity and length.

George Dalbo is the Educational Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and a Ph.D. student in Social Studies Education at the University of Minnesota with research interests in Holocaust, genocide, and human rights education. Previously, he was a middle and high school social studies teacher, having taught every grade from 5th-12th in public, charter, and independent schools in Minnesota, as well as two years at an international school in Vienna, Austria.

Huether. Heether. Heather. Hoother. Hutter. Huewther.

“Hütter, you’re German, right?”

“No, it’s Huether. Sounds like Heether.”

“Ah, American,” she answers with a slight chuckle.

With the simple change in the pronunciation of my surname, the panel chair was able to identify my nationality, and in so doing, indirectly created a border between us. She was German, and perhaps I could have passed as German as well, if only I had gone along with her pronunciation – the one I knew was the “correct” form of my surname but not my name. Regardless, her comment made me pause and think: how could such a slight pronunciation change signify so much? As soon as I was marked as an American, a corpus of assumptions and stereotypes became accessible. It’s not to say that such a corpus would not be present if I were German; it would be, but it would simply be a different corpus. 

I thought about the aforementioned experience in Munich at the Lessons and Legacies Conference even more after my visit to the Jewish Museum Munich and its current exhibit Say Shibboleth!. Co-curated by the Jewish Museum Munich and the Jewish Museum Hohenems, the exhibit explores visible and invisible borders and is founded on the story of the word “Shibboleth” from the book of Judges in the Hebrew Bible: 

“And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephramite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.” [1]

In the story, the semantics of “Shibboleth” are null, and all that matters is how it sounds when one pronounces it. As the Ephramite leaves out the “h” and instead pronounces Sibboleth, he affirms that he is not a Gileadite, and thus his life is taken. It may seem strange that a simple pronunciation may be what separates one from life or death, and certainly the mispronunciation of my last name held no such implications. What these two examples do share, however, is how pronunciation can construct forms of difference. 

Every society—and yes, I am employing a massive generalization here—cultivates understandings and assumptions of both a society’s insiders and their outsiders. Such stereotyping can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, how one dresses could be a clear indication of an outsider position; yet, on the other hand, it could also be used against an insider, as not being insider enough. 

Why does any of this matter? How we speak, how we dress, how we judge other people? It matters because these factors are what we use to put up invisible borders. Those whom we accept within our friend groups, our group messages, our Facebook and Instagram feeds, etc. Merely wearing headphones on public transportation could be considered as performing a border: one is listening to their music, the border blocks out the rest of the world. Whom one accepts as a Facebook friend compared to those they don’t signify a personal border– a border that extends even further between those friends allowed to appear in one’s feed versus those one “hides.” Social media allows us to border what we see, hear, and read. You don’t like Fox News? Just block it. Did you disagree with that friend’s political post? Just unfriend them. 

We police personal borders in a multiplicity of ways, and in the world of advanced technology and social media, new borders we never even imagined are emerging. Have you ever considered the two-party system as border separating American citizens? And even further, isn’t the voice of an “academic” bracketed off, identified for its particularly dense use of language (only partially serious with this), a certain application of language that only we as academics can understand? Dialectic. Zeitgeist. Adumbrate. Vituperate. Pernicious. Lacuna.

Jargon. 

I’ve been called a snob on more than one occasion for my academics, a background that stands in stark contrast to my Montana upbringing. I grew up in a small town in rural Montana with a graduating class of 23 students. In the past, I’ve resented this association, but thinking through it, I wonder: do I create an invisible border with my “academic talk?” How are we to have a conversation if all we do is speak, and no one listens? Is our work in academia helping if really only a small circle of people can engage with it? 

2020 is an election year, and regardless of your party affiliations, I encourage you to engage in conversation. Does your family insist that Bernie is a socialist? Then discuss and converse about what socialism means, for each person, in a way that each person can understand. 

Stereotypes exist. A multiplicity of invisible borders exists across the United States in a variety of forms ranging from speech, education, dress, religion, etc. But we are all American. Let’s talk to each other again. Listen and learn from our differences. 

Kathryn Agnes Huether is a PhD candidate in Historical Musicology with a graduate minor in Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is currently an Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Her dissertation examines the myriad of Holocaust ‘voices’ specifically for sonic qualities and their resulting effects. 

  [1] Judges 12:6

In the past two decades, we have witnessed a steady expansion of interest, beyond Jewish institutions, by the number of government officials willing to introduce and participate in some form or fashion in public observances of Holocaust Remembrance Day. Commemorations are now held in more than 35 countries on January 27th, the day on which, in 1945, Soviet troops liberated the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

This broader initiative of reflecting on the cataclysmic implications of this singular historical event and the lessons that can be applied for a global audience has generated extraordinary interest. Still, it also poses significant challenges in how this tragedy is recounted. There is both faithfulness to preserving the historical specificity of the Shoah (the destruction that befell European Jewry) and a need to broaden how this tragedy is defined to encompass and acknowledge non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime. Moreover, the commemorations are sometimes organized to pay respect to all those who have suffered genocides or crimes against humanity. 

We often hear that the only proper and “good” use of the past is for purposes that transcend ethnic, religious, or national barriers. It is the “exemplary memory,” which author Tzvetan Todorov wrote about, which is different from a recollection that does not lead beyond itself, of the affected group. While the January 27th commemorations aim to render the Holocaust or its lessons easily relatable to all people, it ignores an irrefutable sociological axiom. Namely, that all collective memory is essentially group-based since the remembered events happened to individuals in specific groups, and those groups endow that past with a particular meaning. The need to package exemplary and abstract memory to appeal to everyone risks diluting facts that are complex, sometimes uncomfortable, and often resist emotional uplift. 

Historian Enzo Traverso pointed out recently that in the 21st century, the Holocaust is presented as a secular theodicy, a grand moral tale that pits almost pure goodness versus absolute evil. Traverso’s critique is somewhat overblown. Still, he pushes us to look beyond the slogans and the hashtags and to rethink the ways to remember the Holocaust meaningfully.

Last year, while I was on sabbatical in Madrid, I attended the International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony that took place in the Spanish Senate. Foreign Minister Josep Borrel recalled in his address that as a child, every Good Friday, he and his friends used to run down the streets of his village in the Catalan Pyrenees with torches and rattles. And they were shouting “a matar jueus!” (kill the Jews). That Easter tradition was nothing other than the theatrical re-enactment of a pogrom. 

Borrel had boldly chosen to bypass the standard watchwords and warnings that typically allows those in attendance to put themselves above it all, at a significant and safe distance from one of the 20th century’s defining tragedies. Instead, he shared his personal memory of a moment where he was closer to the perpetrators than the victims. That lesson cut deep in the audience.

Alejandro Baer, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology and the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

On the morning of August 5th, 2019, 8 million residents of Kashmir awoke to severed cellphone, landline, internet, and cable television services. Days before, 40,000 Indian troops were deployed into Kashmir, in addition to the hundreds of thousands already stationed in the region. Tourists, non-resident students, and Hindu pilgrims were forced to leave. Kashmiris knew that something catastrophic lay in the near future. And something catastrophic did: on August 6th, the BJP, India’s ruling Hindu-nationalist party, revoked Article 370, stripping Kashmir of the autonomous status it had held since 1954[1]. News outlets across the globe rushed to cover the flashpoint crisis, with Aljazeera going so far as to release a page that offered daily updates on the situation[2]. 

In mid-August, the UN Security Council convened over Kashmir, a topic that they had avoided discussing since 1971. The outcome of this long-overdue discussion? Not much. Over 120 days later, the catastrophe continues, yet the media and humanitarian coverage wane. Independent reports find that around 13,000 boys have been detained since August.[3] Schools, colleges, shops, and malls remain largely closed, and those that have opened struggle to operate. The internet blackout stretches on to its fifth month. However, the phrase “normalcy returns to Kashmir” swirls through headlines, replacing alarm bells with apathy. For a brief moment in September, the discourse surrounding India’s aggression in Kashmir featured the question of genocide. Now, pundits would declare the suggestion to be absurd. Indeed, no mass killing occurred. The lack of official and comprehensive figures on arrests and detainments confound claims of forcible transfer and separation. Are Pakistan’s warnings of genocide merely a product of decades of geopolitical rivalry and hostility towards India? Is the Kashmir crisis a bilateral issue? Would intervention violate national sovereignty? More questions circulate than answers. The compass of morality points nowhere. We will take comfort in this alleged return to normalcy. We will shield ourselves from responsibility by wallowing in our doubts. We will tell ourselves that intervention would be unwarranted. 

Furthermore, if history tells us anything, we would be wrong. US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau urged the US government to take action as the Armenian genocide unfolded. The US refused to intervene, citing its desire to respect Turkey’s sovereignty and remain neutral[4]. The US and UK had been comprehensively briefed on Nazi extermination of European Jews as early as 1942, yet took no military action until 1945[5]. In 1994, the US not only refused to assist in humanitarian de-escalation efforts in Rwanda, but instead led efforts to actively remove UN peacekeepers stationed in Rwanda, blocked authorization of UN reinforcements, shied away from the term “genocide,” and allowed radio broadcasts inciting genocide against Tutsis to continue airing while possessing technology that could jam them. 

To be clear, the crisis in Kashmir is not a genocide. Not yet. Nevertheless, it should not need to be for the UN and other international actors to take action. Beyond Rebecca Hamilton’s assertion in the “G Word Paradox” that branding a situation as “genocide” triggers no immediate response, Kashmir’s decades-long profound vulnerability should be enough to compel states to act. The territorial dispute between India and Pakistan has forced the region into an existential limbo that leaves them beholden to the whims of both state powers, each of whom claims Kashmir fully as their own. While the internet blackout imposed this August constitutes the most extensive, Kashmir has experienced 53 internet shutdowns in 2019 alone[6], and more in 2018[7]. Pakistan-administered Kashmir has been functionally integrated into Pakistan (a move that many say is supported by the Kashmiris), while India’s abrogation of Article 370 in India-Administered Kashmir constitutes a flashpoint in a series of gradual tightenings of India’s hold. In fact, since 1989, over 67,000 Kashmiris have been killed.[8] Modi continues to hide behind a framework of interpretive denial, claiming that India’s aggression will promote economic prosperity and curb extremism[9]. The international community may temporarily take solace in these nicely-packaged justifications of human rights violations, yet this present inaction may stretch into another stain on the fabric of modernity. Those who lived during it will say that they wish they had known. Those who will learn about it will call it an aberration. Moreover, the Angel of History will perceive it as a “single catastrophe which keeps piling.” Kashmir has always been vulnerable, but now its vulnerability has reached a flashpoint. We can shield ourselves in doubt and denial, or we can take action before the crisis in Kashmir escalates to the point of no return. 

Tala Alfoqaha is a third-year student at the University of Minnesota double majoring in Mathematics and Global Studies with a regional focus in the Middle East and a thematic focus in human rights and social justice. In 2019, she was awarded the Human Rights Program’s Don Fraser Fellowship, and spent a summer interning at The Advocates for Human Rights in their International Justice program. She currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of The Wake Magazine, a student-run publication, and in her capacity as a student hopes to further pursue studies of mass-violence and ethnic cleansing, with a particular interest in the present-day implications of settler-colonialism on indigenous populations.

  [1] The U.N. Can’t Ignore Kashmir Anymore

[2] Kashmir under lockdown: All the latest updates

[3] Young boys tortured in Kashmir clampdown as new figures show 13,000 teenagers arrested

[4] The Great Crime

[5] Allied forces knew about Holocaust two years before discovery of concentration camps, secret documents reveal

[6] ‘I’m just helpless’: Concern about Kashmir mounts as communication blackout continues

[7] Internet Shutdowns

[8] 13 Killed As Violence Surges in Kashmir

[9] India Is Slowly Easing Its Lockdown in Kashmir. But Life Isn’t Returning to Normal