Early this week Frank Navarro, a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum trained teacher who has taught at Mountain View High School in California for 40 years, was put on leave after a parent complained about the parallels he was drawing in his world studies class. He was accused of comparing Trump to Hitler, but in actuality he had only pointed out the connections between Trump’s presidential campaign and Hitler’s rise to power.

On September 1 of this year, Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum wrote in the article With gratitude toward Donald Trump, how as an educator, he was grateful to Trump for making it easier for him to explain to his students, how it was possible for the Nazis and Hitler to come to power. In my own classroom, it is my students who have made the connections, as I certainly did not have to spell it out for them.  We all agree that Trump is not Hitler, but certainly the rhetoric and unabashed racism, antisemitism and xenophobia unleashed by his campaign reminds us of the tactics used by Hitler, the Nazis and his followers.

We all spent an enormously long election season shaking our heads in response to the rhetoric used by the Trump campaign and worried about the reappearance of hate groups such as the Klan and White Supremacists who felt emboldened enough to endorse a major presidential candidate and to insert themselves into the mainstream. Many of us ultimately believed we would get to November 9, breathe a sigh a relief and celebrate a return to normal, but instead the very thing we shook off and feared came true.

I am not condemning those who voted for our President elect nor am I assigning all of the world’s evils upon him. What I and so many others are concerned with is the releasing of the hatred, the appointment of Steve Bannon, a known White Supremacist and Antisemite as his chief White House strategist and senior counselor, as well as others who subscribe to the same ideology.  These actions have further empowered the once fringe hate groups and their followers to feel comfortable to spread their hatred and prejudice with a freedom we have not seen in a very long time.

I teach a Holocaust class at a Community College in Phoenix, Arizona that has a diverse population of students of various ethnic groups. The majority of my students are non-white, indigenous or immigrants, Hispanic, Mexican and Muslim and understandably they are concerned about their and their family’s future. Seeing the parallels does not ease their fear, nor mine for that matter, but as an educator it is my job to help them to also see that they can play an active role in preventing and fighting prejudice.

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From the USHMM archives

On the day after the election, we discussed how the US government is structured. We then looked at a film clip from the Nuremberg Trials showing the organizational chart of the government of the Third Reich. The size of the chart is quite large and it is remarked it could be larger still, but it would be too hard to read. What was largely noticeable was who sat at the top of the chart: Hitler, and only Hitler, as everyone answered to him. That is a dictatorship, which of course the United States is not. People may not like the results of the election, and those who did like the results are angered by those who did not, for taking their displeasure to the streets. But it is this ability to disagree, and to be able to protest, that makes us America and not Nazi Germany.

Today we started discussing Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, and my students spent a lot of time discussing Levi’s warning:

“Many people-many nations-can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that every stranger is an enemy. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when it does come about, when unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. … The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm signal.”

Every generation has created the enemy of the stranger-the “other.” For years, hatred and prejudice has laid dormant, in the US and around the world, and now it is out in the open for all to see.  We, as educators, need to help our students understand the similarities and the differences of historic events to our current lives. Historical parallelisms should help us to be more civic minded, to get involved, as we all must band together to fight this epidemic so that it does not end in the result that Levi and so many million others were forced to endure.

Jodi Elowitz is an adjunct professor of the Humanities at Gateway Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, and former Program Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Paper presented by Francisco Ferrandiz (CSIC, Madrid), Alejandro Baer (U.Minnesota) and Natan Sznaider (Academic College of Tel Aviv Jaffo) at the 115th meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Minneapolis.

The advent of forensic discourses and practices for the search for truth in human rights violations and its increasing prestige in popularity has created a new corpocentric epistemology in which the human body has become a crucial agent in the (re)interpretation of violent pasts. In this process, alternative and previously dominant ways of knowing are losing preeminence and give way to forensic protocols and reports, DNA technologies, and other technocratic processes. This has already been characterized as part of a broader forensic or even genetic turn. In this paper, coauthored with Natan Sznaider (Tel Aviv Academic College), we attempt to expand the notion of forensics and challenge commonsensical notions of evidence by comparing different evidentiary regimes of ashes, texts and bones in relation to the Holocaust. Ashes signify the stubborn resistance of corpses to the attempt to throw them into oblivion. The burial and exhumation of texts buried in ghettos testify to the reality of a vanished presence. The recent advent of the Archaeology of the Holocaust and its associated mass graves adds a new twist to the epistemological debates on the physical evidences of the Holocaust. Constituted by the current forensic turn and human remains as major evidence of atrocity, this technique has been confronted by Jewish sacred law, which resists the manipulation of already buried bodies challenging the primacy of historical truth over other regimes of justification. Analyzing these three different forms of materiality, our paper explores crucial transformations in the epistemological status of evidence of the Holocaust.


Panel on: FOSTERING CROSS SUB-DISCIPLINARY CONVERSATION ON THE POLITICS OF FORENSIC PRACTICES. Thursday, November 17, 2016 1:45 PM – 3:30 PM Room 200. Minneapolis Convention Center.

 

Last month marked the 5th anniversary of the 2011 Maspero Massacre. During the first Egyptian revolution, almost 10,000 Copts and allies gathered in Cairo to peacefully protest the demolition of a Coptic Church in Upper Egypt. The army responded to these protests and initial clashes resulted in the death of three soldiers. TV show host, Rasha Magdy, reported that Copts were attacking the army, and that “patriotic people” should take to the streets to protect the military from the “violent crowd of Copts”. Eyewitness accounts claim that alongside mobs, the Egyptian army and security forces used riot gear, batons, live ammunition and armored vehicles to attack the protesters. However, the extent of the involvement of the Egyptian army is still contested. These clashes resulted in nearly 30 deaths, mostly Copts, and almost 300 injuries, marking this incident as the Maspero Massacre. Five years later, only three soldiers were punished with a maximum sentence of three years, and the massacre is not even recognized as one, let alone commemorated.

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“Tank versus Biker” by Ganzeer, with addition made by Winged Elephant after the the Maspero Massacre. Zamalek, Cairo

However, Coptic Solidarity, an organization that runs out of the US, is pushing for the anniversary of the Maspero Massacre to be officially and nationally commemorated by the Egyptian government on October 9th. One of their tactics is asking supporters to encourage their local and national media outlets to publish articles and draw international attention to the conditions of Copts in Egypt. During my conversations with Copts, many dismissed the notion that Egypt would ever commemorate violence against Copts, and declared it unimaginable and impossible.

The Coptic Orthodox Church, however, actively remembers martyrs and saints by mentioning them during liturgy or documenting them in the Coptic Synaxarium, further promoting the narrative of the Church as one of Martyrs. The 21 Copts who were beheaded by ISIS in Libya have been canonized and included in the Synaxarium as martyrs and saints, although the victims of the Maspero Massacre have not. The distinction, is rooted in the idea of will and sacrifice, where those beheaded by ISIS made an intentional decision of dying in the name of religion, whereas the victims of the Massacre were merely political protesters.

Five years later, the burden of remembering the Maspero Massacre is on the people of Egypt. Commemorations serve many functions: they honor the victims, they acknowledge past violence, and they pave the way for reconciliation between perpetrators and victims. Amidst ongoing sectarian violence in Egypt and lack of justice for past violence, the memory of the victims of the Maspero Massacre is yet to be settled. What would it mean for Egypt to acknowledge and commemorate this incident, while also promoting a spirit of unity between Christians and Muslims? Whom does the State and/or the Church label a martyr and why? What are the possibilities and limitations of healing through commemoration?

Miray Philips is a Ph.D. graduate student in Sociology with a focus on violence, collective memory, and the Middle East and North Africa. Miray’s current research is focused on how Copts in Kuwait, Egypt and the US make sense of their present-day experiences and historical memory. She is also the 2016-17 Badzin Fellow. 

CHGS Director Alejandro Baer has written about the analogies drawn between refugees fleeing Nazi Germany in 1938 and the current global refugee crisis. The ease in which comparisons are made between those who fled World War II and those fleeing the atrocities committed by ISIS and other groups is made stronger by the widely circulated images of refugees we see on a near-daily basis.

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Maxine Rude, “UNRRA Czechoslovakian Nurse with Orphans.” 1945. Photograph.

The ways displaced people are presented through visual media can bring awareness to the situations of victims of atrocities. As discussed on this blog recently, picturing a victim in a photograph carries with it a host of important considerations, including whether and how the voice of the subject is taken into account in distributing their image. The voice, as it were, of the photographer may not be apparent when one glimpses a photograph. Photography can mask the intent of the photographer by creating what is a seemingly objective snapshot of real events (unlike the hand of a painter whose brush strokes reveal their subjectivity).

CHGS has in its collections a series of photographs taken in 1945-1946 by Maxine Rude, photographer for the US Army and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). These photos were part of an extensive collection organized by Stephen Feinstein, the Center’s founder, entitled, “Displaced: Europe 1945-1946,” which is available as a catalogue from a previous exhibition.

CHGS is pleased to present a newly curated exhibition, entitled “Displaced: Photos and Remembrances of Maxine Rude, 1945-1946,” selected from this larger series. On display in the Eiger-Zaidenweber Holocaust Resource Center at the Sabes JCC, this exhibition is open and available for visitors.

The more than forty photographs currently on display have been grouped by apparent theme and photographic subject, including photos of politicians visiting DP camps, the camps’ structure and function, and evidence of daily life lived by displaced persons, all as captured by Maxine Rude.

As curators of another person’s body of work, we are intentionally aware that our decisions affect the viewer’s experience. By choosing to arrange works according to the subjects within the images, we are like any visitor to the exhibition, acutely aware that we don’t have the curatorial input of Maxine Rude herself. We are fortunate to have some commentary written by her, and this important contextualizing information is presented online (in the description field of associated photos), as well as being included in exhibition materials onsite in the Eiger-Zaidenweber Holocaust Resource Center.

In related upcoming posts, we’ll delve deeper into some of the subjects in the photos, as well as learn more about the experience of displaced persons following World War II and the Holocaust.

Demetrios Vital is Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.  In this role he is responsible for the care and promotion of CHGS art and object collections, as well as working with the community in the development of programs, activities, and events.

When I checked my departmental mailbox this week there was a postcard from the UMN administration that couldn’t be more timely: it showed two students wearing maroon and gold, hugging — one blonde and Caucasian and the other black and Somali — and a very simple phrase: “You are here. We like that.”

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One might wonder why such an obvious message would be at all necessary at a major American public University. The political reality that has unfolded in this country over the last months — reaching its culmination on Tuesday — has sadly shown that this reminder is more necessary than ever. Basic democratic norms, pluralism and willingness to coexist peacefully with people of different religions, languages and origins, has proven not to be a given for millions of Americans.

This chilling eye-opener comes on a fateful date. The night of November 9th marks the 78th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s state-sponsored riots known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), a turning point in Hitler’s anti-Jewish policy. Before I read about Kristallnacht in books I had heard about that infamous night from my father, who remembers to this day how the police came to his home in Pirmasens, a small town in the Palatinate region, and arrested his father. By fortune, and unlike so many other Jewish families, they were able to leave Germany in time.

The Kristallnacht commemoration teaches that democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained and that a modern society can become numbed to the fate of its minorities. This day reminds us what occurs when a community based on mutual acceptance has been destroyed. This day urges us to be mindful that the path that leads from verbal incitement to discriminatory policy and murderous action can be very short.

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies November/December newsletter is devoted to this historical event and features a number of educational resources (bibliographies, testimonies, artwork, newspaper articles). In this newsletter we ask our readers to teach the lessons of the past to wind back the divisive rhetoric that has been unleashed.

 Alejandro Baer is the Stephen C. Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

“Be as humble as you are curious.”

Few statements could speak so directly to the dynamic of the room as these, when President Paul Kagame addressed the crowd in a talk last month at Yale University. The leader was invited to speak at the university to present the Coca-Cola World Fund Lecture, and the reaction to his arrival was incredibly mixed across the campus. He encouraged the audience to have an open and empathetic perspective on global affairs, one which leaves room for cultural divergence in opinion and policy. During this speech, a group of faculty and students lead a “teach-in” outside of the event, echoing critiques from Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International about human rights concerns within the country. The commentary continued through extensive coverage in various media outlets, both positive and negative. The nation of Rwanda and Kagame’s RPF party are no stranger to controversy, with the academic and policy conversation often taking on quite the polarized tone.

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Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, speaking at Yale University

In these conversations, the voice of the population is often overshadowed by powerful leaders, both from within and outside of the nation’s borders. This couldn’t be clearer than in an example provided in one of the aforementioned pieces, when writer Adam Kyamatare tells of a conversation he had with a rural Rwandan farmer. This man conveyed a sense of pride for how far Rwanda had come in peace and safety throughout his 89-years. Of course, this is only one perspective. But these voices – those of individuals living on the ground, in nations that become muddled down to mere headlines across the globe – these are the perspectives that are absolutely essential to capture. It is key to be aware that Rwanda is still in the infancy of its post-genocide reconstruction, and there are still many more questions than answers about the best way to ensure long-lasting stability in a post-violence region. But the voice of the people living there should be absolutely central in finding those difficult answers.

This dynamic comes to the forefront at an incredibly relevant moment; this difficult balance between internal and external political power is also present in a building controversy around the International Criminal Court. In recent weeks, South Africa, Burundi, and Gambia have begun processes to leave the ICC, citing a disparity in prosecutions. The balance between international legal assistance and the transmission of Western ideology has been a challenging one to establish. While almost every African being prosecuted at the ICC was brought to trial by their own governments, no charges targeting a nation outside of Africa have yet been brought forward.

Whether the case be Kagame and Rwanda, or the nations choosing to leave the ICC, the role of the international and Western communities in the affairs of many African nations is often controversial. It is tempting for outsiders to assess nations, particularly in the Global South, and declare that they know the best path for these nations to take politically, legally, and culturally. Although global dialogue can be incredibly beneficial in developing viable solutions in an increasingly globalized world, that global dialogue must also be genuinely inclusive. The farmer quoted above knows his country more intimately than a foreign scholar or policy maker ever could. In creating a safe and representative future, it’s voices like his that should play a central role in the conversation.

Brooke Chambers is a PhD candidate in the University of Minnesota’s Sociology Department. She is broadly interested in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, bystander dynamics, and understandings of policy and transitional justice in response to genocide and mass atrocity.

On the 6th of October this year, the New York Times published an image of dead African migrants on its front page. Not only was this image on the front page, it was above the fold, meaning that it was the most prominent part of that day’s coverage. The faces of the dead migrants were not blurred out, nor were their semi-nude bodies covered.

The use of images like this to represent human suffering is a topic that I hold near and dear, both through my research,* and also on a much more visceral level.

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A version of the 10/6/2016 New York Times front page. We masked the image for the purposes of representing it here.

When viewing an image like this, I ask why such a stark representation of others’ pain need to be displayed? Some have argued that images of pain and suffering act as a mirror through which we can ask ourselves whether we are allies, or bystanders to the suffering of others. Though this may be true, I suggest here that this is a very simplistic approach to understanding images of pain and suffering.

What are the possible reasons to use of this image in a journalistic context? The migrant crisis is a complex issue, but the photo used by the New York Times did not add anything to our understanding of the situation. It did not, for example, tell us why these migrants risk their lives to make such a dangerous journey. It did not tell us why the island of Lampedusa has become a beacon of hope for those fleeing violence in countries such as Libya and Eritrea. It also did nothing towards helping the reader understand other aspects of the crisis, such as the current debates about whether or not we should call them “refugees” or “migrants,” labels which often have very real consequences on people’s life chances wherever they end up settling. Moreover, the use of that image could easily lead the reader to assume that Africans are all running from Africa to go to Europe, ignoring the fact that one of the largest destinations for those leaving the Horn of Africa is not Europe but South Africa.

What images such as those used by the New York Times do is reaffirm several stereotypes about Africa and Africans. It represents Europe as the last best hope for Africans, thus making it worthwhile—even necessary—for them to risk their lives to get to Europe. Just as the coverage of Ebola in 2014, this image is meant to scare readers of Africans showing on European shores. The migrant crisis represents the ever-reliable fourth horseman of the apocalypse, just as the Ebola crisis did in 2014. At the same time, this image is not actually about the living or dead migrants pictured in it, as much as it about Western guilt. The photographs and article, implicitly and explicitly, present this issue as a European problem and ask what we have done to push for some sort of solution. Even in their suffering and death, these African bodies are only useful in as much as they make us want to ‘do something.’

Though some may argue that this is not the case, I pose these questions to you: When was the last time you saw images of dead Westerners on the front page of the New York Times? This is not an argument for moral equivalence, but rather a request for us to think about how we consume images of pain and suffering. Whose pain are we consuming from the comfort of our homes? Why do we need to see images of dead Africans for us to know that there is a crisis unfolding in the Mediterranean? Perhaps most importantly, what if one of those dead migrants had a relative in the U.S. reading the New York Times on the 6th of October?

* Find Siguru’s recent article on the research on and history of the use of images of the suffering of others here.

Wahutu Siguru is a PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa.

This year, Dr. Hollie Nyseth Brehm (Ohio State)* and Dr. Chris Uggen (UMN) received a Sociology research grant from the National Science Foundation for their project “Enhancing Public Access: Archiving Court Cases to Study Genocide and Transitional Justice.” Wahutu Siguru recently conducted an interview with Professor Nyseth Brehm.

 

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Dr. Hollie Nyseth Brehm, Department of Sociology, Ohio State University

What project/questions led to you applying for the grant?

 

Dr. Nyseth Brehm: Our project asks three interrelated questions: 1) Who participates in mass violence? 2) What influences legal responses to this participation? And 3) How do legal responses to mass violence impact individuals and societies? To answer these questions, we decided to focus on the case of Rwanda. The 1994 genocide left Rwanda with up to a million people dead, millions more displaced, and societal institutions in shambles. Violence had been orchestrated by a group of political leaders who encouraged civilians to participate by forming self-defense groups, spreading propaganda, and instilling fear. In the aftermath of this horror, the government of Rwanda launched an alternative court system known as the gacaca courts to respond to mass public participation in the violence. The case of Rwanda consequently provides an important case study of who participates in genocide, the legal response to genocide, and the impacts of this legal response.

What do you hope to achieve now that you have gotten the grant?

Dr. Nyseth Brehm: The grant will allow us to put resources toward data collection and analysis. First, we are creating databases of all gacaca court trials. Approximately one million people suspected of participating in the genocide were tried, and we can use the information from their trials to better understand who participates in genocide. The databases we are creating from gacaca court records will also allow us to analyze how the courts functioned, as we can analyze the punishments meted out by the courts and the factors that drove patterns in punishments. Finally, we are also interviewing approximately 250 people who participated in the gacaca court system as defendants, witnesses, and judges. These interviews will allow us to gain a different perspective of the court system—one from those who participated within their communities. We are conducting these interviews in Rwanda, and we are discussing how the gacaca courts functioned and the impacts of the courts on the lives of participants as well as on Rwanda today.

What has been the most surprising thing during the course of preparing for the grant application, or while working on this particular project?

Dr. Nyseth Brehm: I’ve been personally surprised by some of the unintended consequences of the gacaca courts. For example, as the gacaca courts were instituted in local communities, each community elected lay judges known as inyangamugayo to preside over them. These lay jurists did not need legal training but rather were elected because they were seen as people of integrity. The interviews we have conducted with these individuals thus far reveal a high degree of professional commitment among inyangamugayo, illustrating that many saw their main duties as promoting reconciliation and accountability. These duties exacted a heavy personal toll, however, due to the demanding nature of the uncompensated work. Unlike judges in many other parts of the world, the inyangamugayo continued to live and work in extremely close proximity to those they sentenced—and almost every one of those neighbors had been deeply touched by the genocide, the justice system response, and their work as judges. This fact, alongside their often marginal economic circumstances, placed the inyangamugayo in an especially vulnerable position, raising questions that must be considered when local courts are used to hold perpetrators of genocide accountable.

* Dr. Nyseth Brehm has recently published an article on how genocide survivors remember and talk about the genocide in Rwanda.

Interview conducted by Wahutu Siguru, PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa.

 

A competent accomplished woman goes up against a populist outsider who has created a reputation built on lies.  Sound familiar? Maybe, but this is not about the 2016 US election: it is the plot of the film Denial (2016), based on the true story of the trial between Jewish Studies and Holocaust scholar Deborah E. Lipstadt and British Holocaust denier David Irving.

There is no denying that Denial is a film for our times. Conceived nine years ago, and filmed in 2015, the parallels between the trial and the President election is not lost on viewers. Frustratingly, we do seem to live in a time in which history is ignored, facts seem like an inconvenience and there is a prevailing ideology – that one’s opinion is more important, regardless if you can back it up with facts or not.  What happens in this scenario is that there can be no debate between anyone because those espousing opinion, cannot rationally articulate their argument against those who cite facts.

denialheaderHow to handle someone who bends the truth for their own purposes and how one needs to combat these individuals is what lies at the heart of the film, which is based on Lipstadt’s book, History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005) about her experience of being sued by the British author, David Irving for libel under English law.  Irving sued in reaction to what Lipstadt wrote about him her 1993 work, Denying the Holocaust, where she referred to him as a dangerous denier of the Holocaust based on his popularity with the public and several prominent historians through his books about the Third Reich and World War II.

Irving (played by Timothy Spall) proudly plays upon of his self-made historian persona, which makes him very popular with right wing and neo-Nazi audiences, who embraced his assertions that equated the allies’ crimes to the crimes of the Third Reich and that Hitler was either unaware of the murder of millions of Jews or was their friend in halting the murders, done by his underlings.

The film portrays Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) and her lawyer Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) not so much as who they are as people, but more as tropes in dealing with the approach to the trial.  Rampton is portrayed symbolically as someone who is able to separate law from history, he silences his emotions to gather the evidence he needs to prove that Irving is a fraud under English law. On the other side is Lipstadt, (representing both her conscience and ours) who is more vocal in regards to the emotional impact that the history of the Holocaust has on the survivors and on us to remember the six million in a respectful way.  Lipstadt wants to testify, and include survivors to be sure they get justice, Rampton and the rest of the team repudiate this strategy, instead insisting she and the survivors remain silent.

By doing this the filmmakers create a tension between the two that drives the film, and is best illustrated by the scenes in Auschwitz.  Once there, we accompany Rampton as he visits the camp’s museum. He is alone, quietly taking photos of the mounds of eye glasses and luggage. As he enters the room with the shoes, the camera tracks around the display cases, disorientating us. It is overwhelming and nauseating, allowing us to sense how Rampton is feeling, giving us his point of view. Next we see him, as if we are looking out of the case, his face is tight, his jaw clenched, as he tries to separate what he feels from the information he must gather.

In the next scene we are introduced to an annoyed Lipstadt as she voices her displeasure at Rampton’s tardiness as they wait for him at Birkenau. Later in the scene she will also have a very emotional reaction to what she perceives as his lack of respect for the sanctity of Auschwitz as memorial, to honor those who were murdered there.  What is discovered and perceived at Auschwitz is central to the narrative of the film over the debate of how the case is being fought.

Once in court Lipstadt is forced to sit silently, as Irving spins his revisionist narrative. Anyone (myself included) who has ever had to sit through a presentation given by a denier or has been attacked by one at a lecture, knows the frustration of having to remain quiet as they ramble off their lies. The real life Lipstadt recently remarked at a discussion about the film, that for her remaining silent is an “unnatural act.” (USHMM September 28, 2016) Even in silence, Lipstadt was still defending history, the survivors and the six million.

The filmmakers reinforce her bravery in accepting the case by linking her to other women who have stood up in the face of adversity.  The first being the Hebrew heroine and prophetess Deborah who leads the Israelites to defeat Canaanites (who Lipstadt is named for), and second, Queen Boudicea of the British tribe the Iceni, who led a revolt against the Romans in 60-61BCE, much to her own personal peril and loss.  The film brings this symbol to the forefront by having Lipstadt run by Boudicea’s statue on her many outings to relieve stress during the trial.  I did wonder if indeed Lipstadt was a jogger, and discovered she was, but the film uses it to remind us that Lipstadt is someone who runs towards a fight not away from it.

In the end the trial is Irving’s downfall, defeated by his own assertions. At a lecture she gave at the Jerusalem Center in June of 2004, Lipstadt recounted that at some points in the trial they were able to expose Irving not only as a falsifier of history but as an irrational and foolish figure. “Defeating him was important. The battle against people like this is to defeat them in a way that does not make them important. One must dress or let them dress themselves in the Jester’s costume, in that way it is he, who survives to give witness to his own powerlessness.”

Jodi Elowitz is an adjunct professor of the Humanities at Gateway Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, and former Program Coordinator for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

October 14, 2016

To: President Barack Obama;

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon;

Prince Zeid, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

The Special Advisors on the Prevention of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity to the UN Secretary General, respectively.

U.S. Senator John Boozman (R-AR); U.S. Senator McGovern (D-MA); and, U.S. House of Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Eliot Engel (D-NY)

From: Scholars of Genocide Studies from Across the Globe, Human Rights Activists, Anti-genocide Activists, and People of the Cloth

Re., Actions That Must Be Taken Immediately in Regard to the Chemical Attacks on Darfur

As most of you are no doubt aware of, this past week Amnesty International issued a report in which it decried and spelled out in great detail how the Government of Sudan has recently carried out chemical attacks against civilians in Darfur. In part, the report asserts that “horrific evidence,” including satellite imagery and more than 200 in-depth interviews with survivors, along with the analysis of dozens of images, suggest “at least 30 chemical attacks between January and September took place in the Jebel Marra region.” AI estimates that between 200 and 250 people were killed as a result of these attacks, “with many or most of them being children.” Whether you deem it a continuation of the genocidal actions against the Darfurians, a case of crimes against humanity, or war crimes, it is an outrage.

And the horror for the civilians of Darfur does not end there. Tellingly, AI cited satellite imagery that indicated that over 170 black villages had been damaged or destroyed between January and September, “the overwhelming majority” of which had no formal relationship with the rebel forces in the region.

What is it going to take to move the international community (the UN, the United States, the European Union, the African Union, etc.) to once and for all quell the violence in Darfur against the civilian population and then guarantee the million plus internal displaced persons and half a million (and rising) refugees are able to safely return to the land and villages from which they were forced off and out of as a result of the GoS’s scorched earth actions between 2003 and today? Can anyone say? Will anyone say?

As you know, on September 9, 2004, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell announced to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “The Government of Sudan had committed genocide, and was possibly still doing so.” As it was allowed to do under the UN Charter, the U.S. Government then referred the matter to the United Nations. The United Nations then chose to carry out its own commission of inquiry (UN Commission of Inquiry into Darfur).  And while tens of thousands of innocent people (women, children, infants, the elderly) were shot and killed, sliced open and left to die where they dropped, not to mention burned to death, the UN took the rest of the month of September and all of October to complete the plans for its inquiry and then took all of November and part of December 2004 and January 2005 to carry it out. In late January, the UN issued a detailed and scathing report in which it declared that the GoS and its militia, the Janjaweed, had carried out crimes against humanity against the people of Darfur. The UN then referred the matter to the International Criminal Court (the ICC). The then ICC carried out its multi-year investigation into the mass destruction and death in Darfur at the hands of the GoS and Janjaweed.

An African Union peacekeeping mission was established in Darfur in 2004, followed by a hybrid AU/UN Mission in July 2007, when the AU found that it did not have the wherewithal to handle the crisis on its own. In light of the large number of civilians either forced from their homes between 2004 and today and/or killed, it is patently obvious that neither mission was effective as some had hoped they would be. And actually, if one could muster the will to place him/herself in the Darfuris’ shoes then one is likely to agree with them that both missions were complete and utter failures. That must change, and it must change now! The time for talk, talk and more talk is not when innocents are crying and dying. The time for handling President Omar al Bashir and his regime with kid gloves should have been over long ago. The time for dithering (or, like Nero, playing the fiddle), while parts of Darfur (like Rome) are being poisoned to death must end   — and now.

All of the eloquent words and promises of “Never Again” ring hollow in the face of what the black Africans of Darfur have been subjected to by both the GoS, theJanjaweed, and, yes, the international community (with the exception of those who have provided humanitarian aid) over the past thirteen plus years (2003-2016). Indeed, all of the promises have yielded nothing but more pain for the Darfuris, more gain for the GoS, and more pathetic examples of hypocrisy by the collective members of the international community. Shame on all bystanders. Shame on all of us!

It is not enough for one official or another, let alone the UN Security Council, to simply, solely, and lamely decry and denounce the latest atrocities perpetrated by the Government of Sudan. Words only go so far. Words have a tendency to evaporate into thin air. What is needed now is action: concrete action that is efficient, effective and sustained.

One has to ask: Where is the impact of the Responsibility to Protect? Why didn’t the UN Special Advisors on Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity to the Secretary General, speak up about the critical need for concrete and effective action to stanch the use of chemical weapons back in January? And when none was coming, why did the Special Advisors continue to not only allow, but to take part in, bureaucratic games? Are they truly serious about stanching crimes against humanity and genocide? People are dying, people! Nice sounding speeches and policy papers don’t do them one bit of good if they are not followed by solid action.

Where has President Obama’s Atrocity Prevention Board been while all of these atrocities have been unfolding? And now that it is surely aware of the chemical attacks against the Darfurians, what is it doing? Or is the APB, to use colloquial phrase, more show than go? That is, is it more cosmetic than anything else?

Where has the UN Security Council been in upholding the UN Charter in this regard? Silence in the face of cases such as this constitutes, in its own and inimitable (and inimical) way, complicity. If organizations, agencies and individuals are not actively involved in attempting to stanch such horrors, then they are bystanders watching it unfold before their very eyes, as if they have nary a worry in the world.

This is not the time for excuses by the international community, individual nations, and politicians   — excuses such as we are over stretched, we are already dealing with a nightmare in Syria, we are dealing with hundreds of thousands of refugees on the front doorstep of Europe, we are dealing with ISIS, etc.! We know all of that! We also know that for all of the promises that have been made to the civilians of Darfur and all of the inept actions that have been carried out at the costs of hundreds of millions of dollars, the people of Dafur are no safer today than they were at the height of the killing back in 2004 and 2005.

The following is what we urge the UN Security Council and individual nation states, including the United States, Australia, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Kenya, Tanzania, and New Zealand, etc., to do immediately, and without fail:

  1. Pass a resolution at the UN Security Council, which thoroughly condemns — and in no uncertain words — the latest round of atrocities perpetrated by the Government of Sudan;
  1. Significantly ratchet up the UN sanctions against Sudan, which Sudan has largely ignored and been breaching on a regular basis;
  1. Significantly ratchet up targeted sanctions against individuals and other entities in Sudan contributing to the conflict in the Darfur region — to the point just before the sanctions begin to cripple the aforementioned groups; and,
  1. Significantly increase the number of AU/UN military forces on the ground, and implement a rigorous evaluation policy to determine whether the individual forces are actually carrying out their duties efficiently, effectively, and consistently.
  1. Provide the latest and best health care for those Darfurians who have been burned and sickened as a result of the chemicals dumped on them by the Government of Sudan.
  1. Once and for all, establish a no-fly zone over Darfur. It need not consist of a constant presence in the sky but rather a presence that makes itself known to the Government of Sudan.

Further, we support the following recommendations/call for actions issued this past week by the Darfur Women Action Group:

  • We urgently call on the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to investigate the use of chemical weapons;
  • We trust that the International Criminal Court (ICC) will also investigate and prosecute the latest crimes committed by the al-Bashir government and forces;
  • We call on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to implement its existing resolutions condemning serious violations of international humanitarian and human rights law by the government of Sudan, and to ensure that the Sudanese Government and its officials are held accountable and brought to justice immediately;
  • We call on President Barack Obama and all world leaders of good conscience to condemn the ongoing genocide in Darfur and to lead the international community in calling for an immediate stop to all violence against civilians in Darfur and to impose more effective sanctions to prevent further atrocities by the Sudanese Government; and,
  • The United States and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) must pressure the Sudanese Government to allow humanitarian aid organizations and the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) to deliver much needed aid and support to all affected communities in Darfur.
We call on all governments and intergovernmental organizations alike to match their resolutions with meaningful action to hold the government of Sudan and its officials accountable and to demand that these cruel acts of horror are immediately stopped and punished.

As the sage Hillel asked, “If not now, when?” Clearly, it is an admonition to postpone no responsibility. If what the civilians of Darfur have been facing and continue to face is not a situation that calls for moral responsibility on the part of the international community then what is? Truly, what is?

We, scholars of genocide studies, human rights activists, anti-crimes against humanity and genocide activists, and religious figures, concerned citizens all from across the globe, beseech you to act and act now on the behalf of the Darfurian civilians.

We would appreciate acknowledgement of this letter/requests. Please email it to samstertotten@gmail.com

Thank you for your attention to these matters.

Signed:

Dr. Samuel Totten
Professor Emeritus
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Author of Genocide by Attrition: Nuba Mountains of Sudan, and compiler/editor of An Oral and Documentary History of the Darfur Genocide

Baroness Caroline Cox
Cross Bench Member of the British House of Lords, and Founder of the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART)
London, England

Professor Ben Kiernan,
Whitney Griswold Professor of History and
Founding Director (1994-2015), Genocide Studies Program,
Yale University
New Haven, CT
Author of Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur

Dr Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
Researcher
Dakar, Sénégal
Author of Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature

Dr. Israel Charny
Professor Emeritus, and Director of the Institute of Holocaust And Genocide Studies
Department of Psychology
Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel
Author of The Genocide Contagion

Dr. Michiel Leezenberg
Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Author of “The Anfal Operations in Iraqi Kurdistan.” In S. Totten & W.S. Parsons (Eds.), Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts.

Dr. Eric Reeves
Senior Fellow
François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA
Author of A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide

Dr. Helen Fein
Institute for the Study of Genocide
New York, NY
Author of Accounting for Genocide

Dr. Colin Tatz
Visiting Fellow, Political and International Relations
Australian National University
Canberra, Australia
Author of With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide

Dr. Herb Hirsch
Department of Political Science
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA
Author of Genocide and the Politics of Memory: Studying Death to Preserve Life, and Co-editor of Genocide Studies International

Dr. Maureen S. Hiebert
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Military, Security & Strategic Studies
University of Calgary
Author of Constructing Genocide and Mass Violence: Society, Crisis, Identity (forthcoming)

Dr. Victoria Sanford
Professor & Chair, and DirectorCenter for Human Rights & Peace Studies
Department of Anthropology
Lehman College
New York, New York
Author of Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala

Ms. Gillian Lusk
Writer on Sudan and South Sudan
London, UK

Dr. Rouben Adalian
Director, Armenian National Institute
Washington, DC
Editor of The Armenian Genocide in the U.S. Archives

Dr. Yair Auron
Historian
Open University
Ra’anana, Israel
Author of The Armenian Genocide: Forgotten and Denied

Dr. Henry C. Theriault
Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department
Worcester State University
Worcester, MA
Co-editor of Genocide Studies International

Dr. Elihu D. Richter, MD MPH
Director and Researcher
Jerusalem Center for Genocide Prevention and Hebrew-University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine
Jerusalem, Israel

Dr. Rubina Peroomian
Research Associate
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
University of California, Los Angeles

Dr. Taner Ackam
Professor of History
Robert Aram, Marianne Kaloosdian and Stephen and Marian Mugar Chair in Armenian Genocide Studies
Department of History
Clark University
Worcester, MA
Author of The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire

Dr. Kimberley Ducey
Associate Professor
Department of Sociology
University of Winnipeg
Winnipeg, MB

Dr. Peter Balakian
Rebar Professor of the Humanities
Colgate University
Hamilton, New York
Author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response

Dr. John H. Weiss
Professor, and Founder, Caceres-Neuffer Genocide Action Group
Department of History
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York

Dr. Rick Halperin
Professor, Director of the Embrey Human Rights Program, and past Chair of the Board of Directors of Amnesty International, US
Southern Methodist University
Dallas, Texas

Dr. Salim Mansur
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Western University
London, Ontario, Canada

Dr. Paul Slovic
University of Oregon
Department of Psychology
Eugene, Oregon
Author of If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act: Psychic Numbing and Genocide.

Professor Michael Bazyler
Professor of Law and The 1939 Society Scholar in Holocaust and Human Rights Studies
Dale E. Fowler School of Law
Chapman University
‪Orange, CA

Dr. Linda M. Woolf
Professor
Psychology and International Human Rights
Webster University
St. Louis, MO

Dr. Waitman Wade Beorn
Lecturer
Corcoran Department of History
University of Virginia
Charlottesville, VA

Dr. Jan Colijn
Professor and Dean Emeritus
Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
Galloway Township, NJ
Author of Ruin’s Wheel: A Father on War, A Son on Genocide

Dr. Jason J. Campbell
Assistant Professor
Departments of Conflict Resolution and Philosophy
Nova Southeastern University
Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Author of Planning a Catastrophe: On the Nature of Genocidal Intent.

Dr. Yael Stein MD
Co-founder, the Jerusalem Center for Genocide Prevention
Jerusalem, Israel

The Rev. Heidi McGinness
Presbyterian Clergy (PC-USA)
Denver, Colorado
(Twelve year witness of Khartoum’s genocide and enslavement of
Sudanese citizens.)

Dr Kevin Simpson
Professor of Psychology
John Brown University
Siloam Springs, AR
Author of Soccer under the Swastika: Stories of Survival and Resistance during the Holocaust

Dr. Robert Skloot
Professor Emeritus
Department of Theatre
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Sister Deirdre Byrne
The Little Workers of the Sacred Heart
Washington, DC

Alexander Ramadan Tarjan
Member
End Nuba Genocide
Nuba Mountains, Sudan

Dr. Paul Mojzes
Professor emeritus
Rosemont College
Rosemont, PA
Author: Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century

Slater Armstrong
Founder/Director
Joining Our Voices & co-leader of End Nuba Genocide
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

John Jefferson
Co-founder
End Nuba Genocide
United States

Dr. Michael Minch
Professor of Philosophy and Peace and Justice Studies
Utah Valley University
Orem, Utah

Dr. C. Louis Perrinjaquet, MD, MPH
Vice President and Medical Director
Doctors to the World
Breckinridge, Colorado

Dr. Dick Bennett
Professor Emeritus, and Founder, OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR
Compiler, Peace Movement Directory

Dr. Gagik Aroutiunian
Associate Professor,
Department of Art, Media & Design,
DePaul University,
Chicago, IL

Dr. John K. Roth
Edward J. Sexton Professor Emeritus of Philosophy
Claremont McKenna College
Claremont, California
Author of The Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities

Dr. Edward Kissi
Associate Professor
University of South Florida
Tampa, FL
Author of “Obligation to Prevent (O2P): Proposal for Enhanced Community Approach to Genocide Prevention in Africa,” African Security Review

Dr. Debórah Dwork
Rose Professor of Holocaust History and Founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Clark University
Worcester, MA
Author of  Flight from the Reich

Dr. Michael Berenbaum
Former Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Research Institute (1993–1997); currently, Director of the Sigi Ziering Institute: Exploring the Ethical and Religious Implications of the Holocaust
American Jewish University
Los Angeles, CA
Author of Witness to the Holocaust, and The World Must Know: The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Dr. Khatchik Der Ghougassian
Professor
Universidad de San Andres
Victoria, Buenos Aires, Argentina
“Genocide and Identity (Geo)Politics: Bridging State Reasoning and Diaspora Activism” in Genocide Studies International

Dr. Alejandro Baer
Stephen C. Feinstein Chair & Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Associate Professor,  Department of Sociology
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN

Dr. Deborah Mayersen
Historian
University of Wollongong
Wollongong NSW
Australia
Author of On the Path to Genocide: Armenia and Rwanda Reexamined

Dr. Norman Naimark
Department of History
Stanford University
Stanford, CA
Author of Stalin’s Genocides

Dr. Yehuda Bauer
Professor Emeritus of History and Holocaust Studies
The Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry
Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel
Author of Rethinking the Holocaust

Dr. Kjell Anderson
University of Amsterdam/NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Author of A Criminology of Genocide: Killing Without Consequence (forthcoming)

Dr. Eric D. Weitz
Distinguished Professor of History
The City College of New York
New York, NY
Author of Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation

Dr. Alex Alvarez
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff, AZ
Author of Genocidal Crimes

Dr. Gregory Stanton
Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention
School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution
George Mason University
Arlington, VA

Ms. Rebecca Tinsley
Journalist and Human Rights Activist
London, England

Dr. Tetsushi Ogata, Ph.D.
Lecturer
Peace and Conflict Studies  — International & Area Studies Academic Program
University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Ervin Staub
Professor Emeritus
Founding Director of the Doctoral program in the Psychology of Peace and Violence
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Author of The Roots of Goodness and Resistance to Evil: Inclusive Caring, Moral Courage, Altruism Born of Suffering, Active Bystandership and Heroism

Dr. Mukesh Kapila CBE
Professor of Global Health and Humanitarian Affairs
University of Manchester
Manchester, England
Author of Against a Tide of Evil: How One Man Became the Whistleblower of the Twenty-First Century.