Natan Sznaider, Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo

This is the second half of Natan Sznaider’s critique of Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust. You can find the first half here. 

Multiple Modernities and the Memory of the Holocaust

We do need to talk about modernity (the concept as such makes sociologically no sense), but about multiple modernities and multiple Enlightenments.  One of the clues is Arendt’s book “On Revolution” where she compares and contrasts the French and the Anglo-Saxon traditions of Enlightenment

When we look at the Scottish Enlightenment, for instance, it is grounded on the sentiments or a moral or common sense as a kind of intuitive judgment. Capacity to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil, exercising power of judgment, anchored in religion and balancing between morality and utility in the basis of a liberty seen as granted to all. Look at Adam Smith’s exploration of virtues like compassion and benevolence. Arendt was working in this tradition when she in her “On Revolution” takes side with the legacy of the American Revolution and the Scottish Enlightenment against its French contender. Thus, in the French tradition (and we are talking caricatures) there is a strong opposition between reason and religion, while the Scots tried to reconcile reason and faith. I think these distinctions are important even though they do not play much or a role in Bauman’s text.

Bauman characterizes modernity as an overwhelming urge to replace spontaneity seen as meaningless by an order drawn by reason and constructed through a legislative and controlling effort. Does this mean that spontaneity is pre-modern or even pre-social as Bauman wants it to be? I’m not sure about that. This is a rather romantic point of view which refuses to see how “spontaneity” grew out of social structure. Then there is the bureaucratic argument and it is never actually clear with Bauman if he thinks that the Holocaust is inherent to bureaucratic culture or does it to its job prescribed by others. Don’t we have to take into account the Nazi’s fantastic vision or the ecstasy (as the historian Saul Friedlander has done in his work on Nazi Germany) of their doings?  Does the use of technology contradict the fact that the killing was done with passion?

Surely, there must be more than a cost-benefit analysis involved here. That is not Weber, but rather a caricature of Weber. There is no dialectic involved here, but a line heading directly from rationalization to genocide. Clearly, the setting was modern, but was modernity really the driving force? Yes, the Holocaust occurred in the modern age, but what does this actually tells us? If he tells us that the Holocaust was a possibility rooted in essential aspects of modernity itself, then he must allow for other possibilities of modernity.

Thus against the two principles which Bauman proposes: modernity as civilizing and modernity as barbarism, I would like to suggest a third option: the project of modernity is being defined as such as long that modernity can become conscious of its own potential of barbarity and tries to overcome it through a civilization process. In short, modernity is modern the moment it becomes self-reflexive.

What does that mean: if we look at phenomena which are, nasty, brutish and violent, we need a moral baseline to argue that and recognize it as such. We need an ideal of civility, and this ideal is the product of a historical and social process. The civilization process contains self-criticism – the self-criticism of modernity. Thus, we do not need to accept the equation that modernity equals barbarity, but that modernity is able to recognize barbarity in a self-reflexive process (human rights, for example). Thus, we should ask Bauman, what the origins of his own moral sensibilities are. I assume that as a sociologist he would be suspicious of thinking that he is a saint standing outside the social order.

Look at the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people…

Now, we can dismiss this as ideological mumble jumble or as discourse of power, but we can also take this seriously as Bauman’s own Minima Moralia.

A society that is able to identify barbarity in its midst is a true modern society.

Finally, this brings me to my last point, which is Bauman’s sociology of morality.

Bauman looks at the individual as outside of society, even as opposed to society. This view is not only a-historical, overlooking the historical and structural pre-conditions for the emergence of individualism (as was done by Elias). This abstract relation to other is being confused by Bauman with an a-sociological point of view. Simmel, Mead and Elias knew otherwise.

To conclude, this despairing farewell to modernity doesn’t have to be the last word on the matter.  Present-day European pessimism forgets the break with the past that lies at the bottom of the post war European project.  In doing so, it produces an anti-modernism. It is in this elevation of pessimism to permanent despair that post-modernity joins hands with nationalistic Europe. Both deny the possibility of struggling against the horror of history by radicalizing the idea of modernity.  Nevertheless, Bauman has awakened us from our illusion that mass murder and racism can be conveniently outsourced to an “alien” nation.  This is his true challenge.

Natan Sznaider is professor of sociology at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo in Israel. His books include Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order(2011), Human Rights and Memory (with Daniel Levy) (2010), The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (with Daniel Levy) (2005). His forthcoming book is titled Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era. The Ethics of Never Again (co-authored with Alejandro Baer) (Routledge, 2017).

Natan Sznaider, Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo

Many of us were deeply impressed when Zygmunt Bauman published his “Modernity and the Holocaust” almost a quarter century ago. When I studied sociology in the 1970s there was not much sociological thinking going around about the Holocaust.

When the book came out we weren’t very aware of the consequences. The book came out when the Berlin Wall fell and one year later, Germany was reunified and I would argue that these things are connected. Bauman himself was much more aware of the context.  In his Amalfi Prize lecture Bauman was very clear about the context of his book and I quote him: “The ideas that went into the book knew of no divide; they knew only of our common European experience, of our shared history whose unity may be belied, even temporarily suppressed, but not broken. It is our joint, all European, fate that my book is addressing“ (p.208 of the second edition of Modernity and the Holocaust).

Now, almost 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, “The German problem is no more,” seems to be the current dominant sound.  Many Europeans still feel a bit uncomfortable with that statement, but it takes hold. Germany has turned into the almost unchallenged leader of the European Union. Now, this process is also accompanied by social theory, and I think that we may have to draw some connections between memory and the social theory of the Holocaust. I think this might be the wider context of Bauman’s book.

When I was younger, the Holocaust and the rise of the Nazis were explained in terms of Germany’s exceptional national development – the so-called Sonderweg thesis. There was not much need for sociology of the Holocaust.

I remember reading an essay by Parsons from 1942 “Democracy and Social Structure in Pre-Nazi Germany.” (This essay, like others, were part of Parson’s radio addresses during the war. They have been collected in a reader edited by Ute Gerhardt called Talcott Parsons on National Socialism.) I think they are still worthy of our attention.  In it, Parsons draws a line between Anglo-Saxon democracies and Germany where feudal, militaristic, bureaucratic and authoritarian are interdependent. Norbert Elias was also influenced by Parsons (Bauman criticizes Elias for that in the book, but I think he bends him a bit). Goldhagen would add some sensational account to this in 1996, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, but that book mostly made sense to those who believed that it were the Germans who killed the Jews. Clearly, there was an argument made that “blamed” Germany and Germans for what has happened.

Now, this seems to be turned on its head.  Globalized memory of the Holocaust takes it out of the framework of the German nation and resets it into the context of modernity.

In Bauman’s theory, and I would argue also in the new politics of memory in Europe, Germany ceases to be the exception to the standard path of European national development and becomes instead the exemplification of a common modernity.  WWII was not a disaster suffered by Germany alone.  It was a disaster suffered by all of Europe, and one which was created by all of Europe in the war before.  Germany was simply its epicenter, as it was the epicenter of accelerating industrial development and efficiency and the stress they placed on society. The memorial in Berlin is a good case in point, which argues in its aesthetic way for the generalization of the Holocaust.

As for the “After period,” it was also not simply the aftermath for Germany, but a new phase for all of Europe.  It was the beginning of the European Union, which marked a new beginning of a new phase in modernity, a cosmopolitan rather than nation-state modernity.  Germany apparently was ahead of the others in its incorporation into transnational organizations.  It was the most committed to building an international law to replace the law of the jungle that had previously regulated the interaction between states. It was the most eager nation to submit to this new and transformative second-order social contract. And not only was it eager to submit to this order, but it took on a leading role in it and tried to submit other Europeans to this view. Just look at Germany’s response to the refugee crisis. It is the special path theory of Germany put into action to do “good” and Germany’s surprise when other nations do not follow suit.

So what is wrong with this picture?

Well, to start with, fascism and the Holocaust can only exemplify modernity if Germany exemplifies modernity.  But is that true?  The conventional picture has been that Germany and Italy and Japan were all exceptions to the normal path of modern development, and all deviated in similar ways.  They all developed late, both as nations and as national economies.  The conventional wisdom has been that this accelerated development caused more stresses than if it had happened more slowly; national pride was aggrieved by what was perceived as a disadvantaged position about to be set in stone; and democratic institutions and political culture never had time to set in the national character before they were washed away in a flood of nationalism.

That is of course a huge simplification of a huge debate.  However, the fact remains that Germany is not generally considered the rule of modernity, but rather its exception. So how can this be inverted and make Germany modernity’s focal point?  If we identify the most nationalist states as the most modern, then not only do the exceptions become the rule, but the rules become the exception.  Under this view, the two countries generally considered to exemplify modernity become transformed into weird outliers.  Because it is an immigrant nation, the USA has had one of the least ethnic conceptions of its national identity.  And Britain, on the eve of WWII was, the world’s largest empire; a state of multiple nationalities even on its home islands.  So looked at closely, neither can be said to exemplify the ethnically homogenous nation state.  Does that mean they are the ones that exemplified modernity the least? Thus, to speak in the language of Bauman, in their garden there are lots of parts which do not seem to fit. Something seems clearly wrong here.  I’m not saying you can’t understand the world in these terms; many have done this. But you can’t call what you are describing modernity.  This is not deepening a framework, this is turning it inside out and calling black white.  Bauman challenges these views, but I didn’t find really anything in the book that actually challenges seriously the Sonderweg thesis. In my opinion, his views are informed by mis-readings of Elias (especially his study on “The Civilizational Process”). He bends Elias a bit to fit the theory. There’s nothing wrong with that – we all do this once in a while. He produces his own convenient Elias as a theorist of uni-linear evolutionism towards a violent-free world. However, there is more at stake here. I think that Bauman’s views of sociology and theories of socialization are rather weak as well. Even when he talks about moral judgment he almost purposely misreads Arendt’s views on judgment as being a-social. One should be a bit more careful when Bauman tries to be in the company of Arendt. We should not forget that she emphasized the point of unprecedentedness when she talked about the Holocaust and that her views were much too existential to give modernity such a deterministic role. There is a lot of theoretical thinking going around showing how morality is deeply connected to socialization. Bauman just dismisses those out of hand.

Bauman, in his 2000 postscript, relates himself to Agamben and this is, of course, no coincidence. There is a problem of distinctions here. To them, the totalitarian state and the liberal state of law are too similar to justify making a distinction. Thus, in my opinion very important distinction drawn by Arendt and also by Jaspers between criminal states and states which commit crimes gets lost in theory. The result is a banalization: Auschwitz is everywhere. The camp undifferentiated like everything else in his theory becomes the central metaphor for modernity altogether. The West Bank Separation Fence is then quickly transformed to the walls of the Warsaw ghetto as Bauman recently argued in a Polish magazine. In this respect, you are in the same league as those who argue that the Iranians are Nazis, that the Palestinians are Nazis, that it is Munich all over again and your answer is, and that Israelis are actually Nazis and that “Nazi” becomes a catch all metaphor for being a bad person. In many ways, these are games which children like to play accusing each other to have destroyed each other’s’ toys.  I am not saying that Bauman does that, but he also doesn’t not do it. When you think that the technologies of genocide and those of occupation and other historical injustices can be productively compared, you leave social theory and become a polemicist. As such, Bauman is playing this to high art. However, even it may make sense in the game of scoring some political points, in terms of both social theory and history it makes no sense at all. There is no new enlightenment behind that, only contempt for modernity. Anti-modernism is no critique of modernity.

Note: You can find the second part of Natan Sznaider’s critique here. 

Natan Sznaider is professor of sociology at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo in Israel. His books include Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order (2011), Human Rights and Memory (with Daniel Levy) (2010), The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (with Daniel Levy) (2005). His forthcoming book is titled Memory and Forgetting in the Post-Holocaust Era. The Ethics of Never Again (co-authored with Alejandro Baer) (Routledge, 2017).

This month, Jodi Elowitz shares five selections that explore recent Holocaust fiction and documentaries from a variety of perspectives.

Now Streaming on Netflix

What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy (2015) is a documentary based on the article My Father, the Good Nazi (2013) written by British Lawyer, Phillipe Sands in the Financial Times Magazine. The article discusses the relation of Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank, Governor General of occupied Poland (General government) and Horst von Wächter, son of Otto von Wächter, District Governor of Krakow, Poland and later District Governor of Galicia during World War II. Both men were responsible for overseeing the extermination of Jews and charged with war crimes. Frank stood trial at Nuremberg and was found guilty on counts three and four (war crimes and crimes against humanity), sentenced to death, and executed on October 16, 1946. Wächter escaped prosecution and died while hiding in Rome in 1949.

Whereas Niklas Frank has spent his life highlighting the crimes of his father, Horst Wächter has denied that his father did anything wrong and that he was caught up in a system and times he had no control over. Filmmaker Sands lost much of his extended family in the Holocaust in the occupied territory overseen by Frank and Wächter. The film is a brief examination of Frank and Wächter’s unlikely friendship and the confrontation of Sands and Frank on Wächter to convince him of his father’s role in the Holocaust.

Run Boy Run (Lauf Jugen Lauf) (2014) Based on the novel of the same name by Jewish writer, Uri Orlev, who wrote the very popular Young Adult novel, The Island on Bird Street. This is an accessible narrative, based on a true story, of a young boy’s struggle to hide, by pretending to be a Pole during the Holocaust. Along the way he is both betrayed and aided by various individuals. The film is one of many of the current crop of Holocaust films that focus on resistance and resilience. It breaks no new ground in terms of storytelling or technique, but is well acted and engaging.

HBO on Demand (HBO GO)

Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah (2015) is an Academy Award nominated, short documentary film by British journalist and filmmaker, Adam Benzine. The film is an interview with Lanzmann on the making of his 1985 nine hour documentary Shoah. If you are interested in a behind-the-scenes look at Lanzmann’s fears and motivations about making the film and would like a brief glimpse of his relationships with Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and have not read Lanzmann’s autobiography The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir from 2011, then this is a good place to start. Most powerful is his recollection of his search for Abraham Bomba, the Holocaust survivor who Lanzmann was heavily criticized for making him relive his memories by placing him in a barbershop, as he testifies about his experiences of cutting women’s hair before they were gassed at Treblinka.

There is no denying that Lanzmann is a character worthy of a film, or biographical account, and this film will leave you wanting much more. Shoah is available on DVD as of the Criterion Collection, which also includes three additional Lanzmann films and other bonus features. His most recent film, Last of the Unjust (2013), is available on various streaming services. Outtakes from Shoah can be found in the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the USHMM.

The Criterion discs, available in High Definition and Blue Ray, include a new English subtitle translation, conversations with the director Christian Petzold and actress Nina Hoss, as well as an interview with cinematographer Hans Fromm and a documentary on the making of the film.

Criterion Collection

Phoenix (2014), highly recommended film dealing with the struggle to finds one’s identity and voice amongst the ruins of Berlin in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The film that takes cues from Hitchcock’s Vertigo to tell the fictional story about an Auschwitz Survivor’s struggle to return to life. Directed by German filmmaker Christian Petzold, who made the notable film Barbara (2012) about a doctor in East Germany in the 1980’s brings us a study on post-war Germany and its reaction to welcoming those who survived the Holocaust back into society.

 Jodi Elowitz is an adjunct professor of the Humanities at Gateway Community College in Phoenix, Arizona and Content Consultant for the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) at the University of Minnesota.

In early March, 10-year-old Ariana Mangolamara committed suicide in the Aboriginal community of Looma in Western Australia.  Her death wasn’t unique: she wasn’t the first in her community or even her family to commit suicide.  However, her story gripped international headlines and prompted a soul-searching analysis of why the plight of Australia’s indigenous peoples is worse than ever, despite formal political recognition and efforts to help.  Many of these efforts seem designed to destabilize Aboriginal communities through systematic neglect, the breaking of families through child removal and a callous disregard for culturally viable strategies.

The fact is that Australia has a staggering 15,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care, making them nine times more likely to be removed from their homes than non-indigenous children.  By contrast the Stolen Generations, who were removed and forcibly assimilated into settler society from the 1930’s to the 1960’s, only claimed around 10,500 children.  Historically, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have been subjected to genocide and many groups have been completely destroyed, including the entire native population of Tasmania.  Activists have had good reason to advocate that the genocide continues through child removal and systematic neglect of indigenous communities.

While the child’s safety is often a legitimate concern, lack of cultural sensitivity and outright racism also play a role.  Child removal is often the first action taken when a problem is discovered and families rarely receive other help or a chance to regain custody.  Radically different cultural practices in child-rearing are often misinterpreted as neglectful by western criteria. Indigenous Australians were among the most dehumanized and persecuted ethnic groups in the British Empire.  Open racism is still prevalent today, especially in rural areas where Aboriginal populations are most concentrated.  As late as the 1980’s, prominent Australians were on TV promoting mass sterilization of Aborigines who refused to be assimilated into mainstream society.

Although Ariana had been removed from her home, she was one of the 67% of children who were placed with relatives or in other Aboriginal homes.  The initiative to keep removed children as close to their family and culture as possible was spear-headed by Grandmothers Against Removals, an activist group made up of survivors of the Stolen Generations dedicated to keeping the current ‘stolen generation’ from happening.  Keeping removed children within context of their culture has been shown to improve their ability to recover from the trauma of dislocation, but their new communities often lack even basic mental health services.  Even though Ariana displayed symptoms of depression and it was known that her 12-year-old sister had committed suicide before she was removed, no professional help was given to her.  The remoteness and lack of infrastructure in many Aboriginal communities is a prime reason for the sharp rise in suicides among young people in the last 20 years.  Suicide rates have corresponded with the spike in child removals which has itself inhibited efforts to resolve prevalent social problems within indigenous communities.

A survey of Ariana’s community found that 17% of the men were convicted sex offenders.  Her father had been incarcerated for domestic assault on her mother.  Aboriginal women are 35 times more likely to be hospitalized for assault than non-Aboriginal women and 11 times more likely to be killed.  Alcohol and other chemical substitutes for hope ran rampant through her community.  Kids have been seen playing with nooses and heard talking about death and suicide, and there is no wonder that the adult suicide rate is 4 to 5 times higher than among non-Aborigines.  Despite lower rates of sexual abuse, Aboriginal children are twice as likely to contract an STD due to lack of access to healthcare.  Although Ariana found a safe home with relatives, the accumulated harm of years of abuse, neglect and universal despair was not adequately addressed.

These issues have not been completely ignored by the government, though.  After Prime Minister Kevin Rudd became the first leader to acknowledge and apologize to the Stolen Generation, he launched a “Closing the Gap” initiative in an effort to reduce inequality between Aboriginal and larger Australian populations.  Goals such as reducing infant mortality and increasing literacy are currently on track, but employment and life expectancy gaps remain wide.  A parallel “Close the Gap” public awareness campaign was launched by Aboriginal communities to voice their opinions and concerns on how the initiative should proceed. Despite this, cultural norms and differences between Aboriginal and Western societies have often been a hindrance to government initiatives.  Indigenous communities rarely have a stake in proposed programs and local leaders are often over-ruled or ignored.  A long and continuing trend of abuse and frustration have left many Aborigines mistrustful of government assistance.

Prejudice against native Australians remains strong, especially in the communities who have the closest and most direct impact on Aborigines.  The devastation of their lifestyles and communities are as likely to be viewed with contempt as compassion.  Until these attitudes are changed, efforts to “Close the Gap”, protect children and restore vitality to communities will continue to fall short.

Jamie Anderson is a senior at the University of Minnesota, majoring in Global Studies. 

On July 13, 2016, after more than 23 years of its enactment, the “General Amnesty Act for the Consolidation of Peace” was declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice of El Salvador. In what has become a landmark ruling for the victims of the armed conflict, the highest court of justice has opened up the possibility to try those people from both warring parties who perpetrated the most egregious international crimes during one of the bloodiest wars that took place in Latin America in the twentieth century.

But the declaration of incompatibility of the “General Amnesty Act for the Consolidation of Peace” with the national and international corpus of law is not the only achievement in the quest of justice for the victims of the armed conflict. In that same judgment, El Salvador aligns itself with the current tradition in international law which establishes that war crimes and crimes against humanity are not bound by statutes of limitations. This decision also constitutes a breaking point with the national jurisprudence that had declared so far that the time to judge the international crimes committed during the civil war had passed by.

All these past years, this perverse law has been a monument to impunity erected and supported by the governmental authorities in turn, despite their supposedly antagonistic ideological inclinations. As a consequence of its adoption in March 22,1993, in El Salvador none one has been tried for gross violations to international human rights law and for serious violations to international humanitarian law. That is how, with the passing of time, the perpetrators within the country have remain victorious and unchallenged.

In the aftermath of the civil war two values came into tension in El Salvador: justice and peace. Since there was not a clear victor among the warring parties, both agreed that one of those two values had to be completely sacrificed in order to fully achieve the other. Thus, within the country, justice was relinquished in honor of peace. Nevertheless, as this recent judgment has taught us, justice must not be seen as the sacrificial lamb during the negotiation of peace agreements. Peace, in its positive conception, cannot be built upon the pillars of impunity. Believing otherwise would be like the parable of the wise and the foolish builders. Positive peace is built on rock. The rain will come, the streams will rise and the winds will blow, yet it will not fall, because it will have its foundation on the rock. Negative peace is built on sand. The rain will come, the streams will rise and the winds will blow, and it will fall with a great crash.

And it is with a great crash that both warring parties have received the decision of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice of El Salvador. Despite the multiples and persistent claims for justice made by the victims of the armed conflict over time, the two main political parties in El Salvador that emerged as a result of the civil war have vehemently and adamantly opposed the decision reached in these past days by the highest court, arguing that such a decision will open the wounds that were closed by that law a long time ago. But to the victims, whose wounds have not healed just with the passing of time, this judgment may indeed constitute a balsam that helps to start soothing those wounds.

Paula received an LL.B. Degree from the Central American University José Simeón Cañas, and a Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Education for Peace from the University of El Salvador. She also holds an LL.M. degree in International Human Rights Law from Notre Dame and a Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Democratization Processes from the University of Chile. Paula is currently pursuing a degree in History at the U of M. During the 2014-15 academic year, Paula was the Bernard and Fern Badzin Graduate Fellow at the Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies. 

In her research as part of Alejandro Baer’s course, SOC 4315 “Never Again! Memory & Politics after Genocide,” Alana Erickson reviewed media coverage of violence against Yazidi women in territory controlled by the Islamic State (IS). Below is a reflection of her work.

Looking at the repeated recounting of women’s traumatic experiences in the gory detailed articles across my news log, I find the descriptions of the crimes often gratuitous. I am critical of the use of descriptive stories and recounts of sexual violence perpetrated against Yazidi women by Daesh / the Islamic State (IS). Why are the writers choosing to use these descriptions or leaving them out completely? I am aware that these are real atrocities which happened, and part of reporting on them may include telling things that horrify any sensible reader. However I found myself avoiding logging the more horrible articles in my research, and instead writing them off as pointlessly evocative. I believe that there is something very powerful at play under the surface of these representations of the trafficking and sexual violence of Yazidi women in the news.

I read many articles: large publications, regional, religious, both far right and left political writers, opinion columns and articles that generally filed in the World section of these online publications. A common thread I have noticed in the coverage of the Sinjar Massacre — from 2015 to the present — is the sensationalistic representations of violence and genocide. It is worth being critical of any gratuitous description of horrific events, specifically when the events concern a primary “enemy” of the West, like ISIS, because the effect of horrific language in that context reinforces the West’s moral dichotomy of the “barbaric” Muslims and the “civil, democratic, benevolent” West. It only serves the narrative of protecting Western civility and modernity to emphasize the evil nature of their crimes — and by extension the evil nature of their selves.

Actions that horrify are presented in all media outlets not only to sell papers but also to reinforce the legitimacy of military involvement in the Middle East. The news serves as a warning and a call to arms. In one Newsweek article, I note an especially evocative headline, “Yazidi Teenager Describes Being Islamic State Sex Slave.” This headline is filled with loaded words that elicit intense feelings instantly in the reader. The article continues to center around fear and includes a quote from an IS propaganda video in which the man who held the teenager captive explicitly makes threats to take Western nations: threats that they are going to “spill your blood…erase your history…convert your children.”

The narrative of the war states that it is necessary, untouchable in its necessity lest we find our golden cities surrounded by the black cloud of Daesh forces. I find it interesting that this IS propaganda video is combined with the detailed account of the terrible crimes that Nihad Barakat was subjected to while in captivity. We must look at the cultural meanings invoked in representations of Daesh and its genocidal crimes against Yazidis in the media and how those meanings are used to cause societal action.

There is a more hidden tactic in the articles I read, especially the loud, horror invoking pieces such as one from the Independent (British online newspaper) published in mid-March with the headline “Yazidi Woman Held as ISIS Sex Slave ‘Abused Every Day’ for Seven Months.” In these articles the special use of the term “sex slave” is not only upsetting, but it also carries a cultural weight left over from old Orientalist tropes of Arab sex slavery and the exotified ‘harem girl.’ Not only is the narrative of ‘evil by nature’ invoked (the article opens with noting that the interviewee described her captors as “not like humans”) but there is also an increased level of sexual brutality described which has been used to code people of Arab descent as predatory, barbaric, not like people, and, most importantly, as the radical “Other.” Noting and describing these actions are easy clickbait when they are described in terms that instantly trigger Orientalist fantasies combined with horror in the Western reader. There was usage of a descriptive dramatic narrative style and triggering words or horrific words in some articles on the Yazidi genocide crisis from all forms of news media. For example I did not note the use of more horror words in right wing media comparatively. The article is written with mind to imagery that the Western reader can understand, coded from centuries of representation and fantasy in Western culture. The usefulness of the evocativeness in these articles is varied: Articles with language that triggers and reinforces Western identity sell news and they also demand emotional attention in a way that unbiased factual reporting cannot.

As survivors of trafficking and the Sinjar massacre are finally escaping captors many months later, several are choosing to tell the world what happened to them and demand that the global community pay attention. Nadia Murad Basee Taha, whose interviews and testimony at the United Nations is widely cited, gave details on her sexual assault explaining what happened to her and when, how she felt and how she escaped. In addition to the stories of her harrowing experience she also has made pleas for the global community to take action to help the Yazidi recover from genocide. Among these calls for action are requests to establish facts, offer monetary support for rebuilding, and to open borders for Yazidis, respecting their dignity and acknowledge their victimization by genocide. Lastly, and probably the most commonly cited demand by news media, is her request that the world  “Get rid of Daesh completely… all those who committed these crimes must be brought to justice so that women and children may live in peace.” The decision to use details of the experience is calculated for the purpose of furthering awareness of the plight of the Yazidi.

There is no question that the world must know the stories of survivors of genocide but we must be critical of how the stories are relayed. Does the level of fear and hatred for Daesh amongst the West (manifested through Islamophobia and racialized Orientalist attitudes) and in the news, which precipitates and reinforces that fear, assist the Yazidi’s struggle? Or do the stories simply pile more harmful incendiary rhetoric on top of an already very culturally problematic mindset towards violence in the Middle East?

Alana is an undergraduate student working on her Global Studies Major (with Concentrations in Cultural Analysis, Mideast Region) and an Arabic Minor. She transferred to the University of Minnesota from MCTC in Fall 2015 and was recently awarded a 2016-17 Foreign Language & Area Studies Academic Year Fellowship. In her other life she is a performance artist and musician.

This is the first in a series of articles highlighting the work of University of Minnesota students associated with the Center. Our first student Miray Philips, was recently awarded Bernard and Fern Badzin Fellow in Genocide and Holocaust Studies for the 2016-2017 Academic Year.

Miray was born in Egypt, raised in Kuwait, and moved to Michigan to pursue a college education. She graduated from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with a BS in Psychology and Sociology. She then moved to Minnesota to begin her PhD in Sociology, with a focus on violence, collective memory, and the Middle East and North Africa. She is broadly interested in the experiences of ethnic and religious minority groups within the Middle East and North Africa, specifically as it pertains to persecution, discrimination and violence.

Miray Philips’s current research is focused on understanding how the Coptic Christian community in Egypt and the diaspora makes sense of their present day experiences in light of a long history of suffering and persecution, and in turn how that history informs their present-day experiences. While Copts in Egypt face persecution and discrimination at the hands of the state and civil society, Copts in Kuwait are at the difficult intersection of being a religious minority and also expats. Copts in the US, however, experience relative privilege in a predominantly Christian country. During the fellowship year she will be completing course work and interviewing Copts in Egypt, Kuwait and the US.

On the occasion of the 40^th anniversary of the end of World War II, on May 8^th 1985, German President Richard von Weiszäcker addressed the country’s parliament with the following words: “All of us, whether guilty or not, whether young or old, must accept the past. We are all affected by the consequences and liable for it. We Germans must look truth straight in the eye – without embellishment and without distortion.”

Weiszäcker’s speech became a milestone in  the distinctively German process known as Vergangenheitsbewältigung (a composite German word which can be best rendered in English as the struggle to overcome or confront the [criminal] past.) Acknowledging the Holocaust and other atrocities committed by Germany during WWII was not an easy process. Weizäcker’s speech challenged persisting idealized or self-victimized national narratives, and it undermined citizens’ identification with their history.

Will a Turkish statesman ever deliver a similarly courageous pronouncement about the  country’s horrific past vis-à-vis the Armenian and other Christian minorities?

The German Parliament’s recent declaration recognizing the genocide by its name might actually bring that moment a bit closer. This declaration was not fingerpointing nor blaming. It was, again, an example of self-reflection: it recognizes the German Reich’s complicity in the 1915-1918 events. “This is not a matter between Armenians and Turks,” said the President of the Bundestag in an interview after the historic declaration, “it concerns us in Germany as well.”

It is also important to understand that Germany’s declaration is about more than acknowledging the crime itself. The passage of time (more than a century) removes the actual victims, perpetrators and bystanders. The question, now, is how their descendants will deal with this divided history. In too many instances, we see that victim identities are passed on to subsequent generations while others will be condemned with the perpetrator stigma. In this respect, the German example is valuable for all, as it distinguishes clearly between guilt and responsibility. In listening to the statements of the German members of Parliament, I was reminded of how political theorist Hannah Arendt elucidated that distinction: “We are always held responsible for the sins of our fathers as we reap the rewards of their merits, but we are not guilty of their misdeeds.”

Germany’s declaration this week in the spirit of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, provides guidance for a process through which societies can move from a divided past to a shared future. It also teaches that one can only step out of the dark shadow of the past by ceasing to deny the undeniable.

Alejandro Baer is the Stephen Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He joined the University of Minnesota in 2012 and is an Associate Professor of Sociology.