UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

& SOCIAL SCIENCES

First Semester 2001

This course, formerly called POL 340 The Politics of Genocide at Macquarie University and the University of Western Sydney, is open to students from all Sydney universities

Course Co-ordinator: Professor Andrew Jakubowicz

Course Presenter: Professor Colin Tatz

Teaching Team: Panayiotis Diamadis, Meher Grigorian, Winton Higgins, Darren O’Brien, Paul O’Shea, Richard Tidyman

ELIGIBILITY:

Both the 6 and the 8 credit point courses are open to students who have 16 credit points in cognate and relevant courses.

TIME AND FORMAT:

We meet for a three-hour block every Thursday from 10 a.m. to 1 pm, in rooms 424-425, Bon Marche Building, Harris Street, Ultimo, starting 8 March 2001. The format will be lecture-tutorial-lecture, or lecture-tutorial-film, with short breaks.

ATTENDANCE:

The University expects at least 80 per cent attendance at lectures and tutorials. However, since the assignments are a microcosm of the course, missing any lectures will diminish your prospects in the completion of the essays.

IMPORTANT—PRELIMINARY READING:

You MUST read the following during the first week of the course.

• as much as you can of The Holocaust in History by Michael Marrus, paperback edition, available from the Co-Op Bookshop and other retailers;

• the essay ‘Genocide: An Historical Overview’ by Chalk and Jonassohn in the Social Education journal (‘Teaching About Genocide’), issued to you free; and

• the Holocaust chapter from the Encyclopedia Judaica (Closed Reserve).

PRESCRIBED BOOKS

• You must buy Michael Marrus, as above.

• You should read the invaluable short book, Genocide, by Leo Kuper, available in the Library.

• Israel Charny's Encycolpedia of Genocide —on closed reserve, personal copy—is a valuable reference work

• Richard Hovannisian’s Lecture on Denial, issued to you free;

• Colin Tatz’s lecture on Reflections on the Politics of Remembering and Forgetting, issued to you free.

BOOKSHOPS

The Co-Op has several titles in our field. Lesley McKay’s Bookshop in Double Bay has an excellent selection, as does Gleebooks in Glebe Point Road. By the far the largest selection is at Borders Bookshop, Macquarie Shopping Centre, just near the University. The Holocaust materials are listed under Judaica; the other genocides are usually under History, War or Europe. www.amazon.com is a gold mine when it comes to books and their reviews.

COURSE NOTES:

A set of printed notes—mainly articles of importance and documents not readily available—will be available at $80 from the Australian Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. This is your essential learning tool. The total cost to you of the book and course notes is about $100.

MAILING LISTS:

QUERIES:

Can be addressed to Professor Jakubowicz and to Professor Tatz on fax/phone 9439-1994. If Professor Tatz is not available on that number, please try the Australian Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (AIHGS), at the Shalom Institute, University of NSW, on 9931-9628. The email addresses are either: ctatz@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au or aihgs@shalom.edu.au

THE AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE OF HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE STUDIES (AIHGS)

As of January this year, the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, founded in 1993 at Macquarie University, has become the AIHGS, affiliated with the Shalom Institute at Shalom College, on campus at the University of New South Wales. (The entrance is across the way from McDonalds in Barker Road.) While you are doing this course you are all honorary members of the Institute. Most of the important books, war crimes documents, films and videos are held in the Shalom Institute library. You must consult materials there, but only on the days and times when the library is supervised. We will post the days and times during classes.

NATURE OF THE COURSE:

This is a study of the systematic extermination of national, racial, religious, political, ethnic (or tribal) groups. The objectives of the AIHGS are also the objectives of this course. There is no reason why your essays on these topics should not contribute to their fulfilment; earlier students made significant contributions by working on theoretical considerations or empirical case studies. Several have gone on to higher degree work in this difficult and, for the most part, understudied field. Our aims include:

* analysing the motives for, and the ideological bases of, such killings;

* examining the socio-political conditions under which such mass killings can and do occur;

* observing the techniques and technologies used in genocides;

* attempting to pinpoint legal and moral/personal responsibility for their occurrence;

* attempting to understand the indifference of bystanders while these events occur;

* assessing gradations of genocide—from destroying cultural institutions, to forcibly transferring children from one group to another, to the planned, total annihilation of an entire race/group;

* reviewing what guards or safeguards there are against repetitions of genocide.

At the end of the course we should be in a position to produce a more embracing definition of genocide than the one below, and to arrive at a model for classifying what is and what isn't strictly genocide.

Definitions of genocide

Since the 1960s there have been many attempts by historians and social scientists to find better, or less flawed, definitions than that decreed by the United Nations in 1948. Despite enormous effort, the academic input has been to no avail. Not only is the UN definition the only one recognised in national and international law, but that same definition has now been included, verbatim, in the constitution and schedule of crimes of the new International Criminal Court. We can explore its faults and arrive at broader, narrower or better wordings, but in this course we must adhere to the UN wording.

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, defines the term:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’

The UN, however, does not mention the central role of the state, or the state at all. We have to look at centrally planned and organised state murder, at the destruction wrought by state bureaucracies. We also have to look at colonisation processes, at what has befallen indigenous groups in terms of what the originator of the term, Raphael Lemkin, called ‘genocide’: inter alia, synchronised attacks on the political, social, cultural, economic, religious, biologic and moral lives of the ‘captive people’. The UN definition does not cover many groups: city dwellers (as in Pol Pot’s Cambodia), the retarded, homosexuals, or those ‘non-existent’ (yet very dead) groups defined by their destroyers as demonic witches (in western Europe) or ‘enemies of the people’ (in Stalin's Russia). A major aim of this course is to come to terms with the differences between massacre, mass murder, gross colonial oppression, forced assimilation or religious conversion, and total (or attempted total) extermination of a whole genus, as in the case of the Armenians and the Jews this century. They represent the most extreme forms of genocide, and most of the course will be concerned with these two groups.

ESSENTIAL READING FOR ASSIGNMENTS:

There is too much to read in a one semester course, and new books arrive at the rate of at least one a week. We suggest that you attempt at least four or five of the following, using four**** as essential reading, three*** as highly significant, and two** as useful for your second and third assignments.

You must read the two Armenian sources; and, for preference, the two Yehuda Bauer books, the Helen Fein, Christopher Browning and Michael Marrus books.

**** Aly, Gotz, Peter Chroust & Christian Pross, 1994, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene, Johns Hopkins University Press. A must.

*** Avisar, Ilan, 1988, Screening the Holocaust, Indiana University Press. For the last assignment.

**** Bauer, Yehuda, 2001, Rethinking the Holocaust, Yale University Press. (Closed Reserve), especially for essay #12.

*** Bauer, Yehuda, 1982, A History of the Holocaust, NY, Franklin Watts.

**** Browning, Christopher, 1993, Ordinary Men: Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York, HarperCollins.

** Browning, Christopher, 1992, The Path to Genocide, Cambridge, (Closed Reserve).

*** Burleigh, Michael, 2000, The Third Reich: A New History, Macmillan.

Ref Charny, Israel, Sherman and Adalian, 1999, Encyclopedia of Genocide, 2 volumes, ABC-CLIO (Closed Reserve). Use this as your best reference source.

**** Dadrian, Vahakn, 1995, The History of the Armenian Genocide, Oxford, (Closed Reserve).

*** Fein, Helen, 1983, Accounting for Genocide, New York, Free Press 1979 and University of Chicago Press, This is a detailed sociological study of the nature of genocide, country by country, during the Holocaust, as well as an analysis of how differences in national culture and history affected the Final Solution. (Closed Reserve).

**** Fein, Helen, 1993, Genocide—A Sociological Perspective, Sage Publications. This book has an important chapter on comparative studies.

** Finkelstein, Norman, 2000, The Holocaust Industry, Verso, London. This is necessary if you do essay #12.

** Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? The Dispute about the Germans’ Understanding of History, 1993, Humanities Press, (Closed Reserve, personal copy).

**** Friedlander, Henry, 1995, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: from Euthanasia to the Final Solution, University of North Carolina Press.

** Gilbert, Martin, 1986, The Holocaust: the Jewish Tragedy, Collins, (Closed Reserve).

** Goldhagen, Daniel, Christopher Browning and Leon Wieseltier, 1996, The ‘Willing Executioners’/‘Ordinary Men’ Debate, US Holocaust Memorial Museum. (Closed Reserve, personal copy). You need this if you discuss the Goldhagen issue.

*** Goldhagen, Daniel, 1996, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Little, Brown,.

** Gourevitch, Philip, 1998, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow we will be Killed with our Families, Stories from Rwanda, Picador.

** Haebich, Anna, 2000, Broken Circles, : Fragmenting Indigenous families 1800-2000, Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Important Aboriginal text.

* Hayes, Peter (ed), 1991, Lessons and Legacies, Northwestern University Press, (Closed Reserve).

** Hilberg, Raul, 1993, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-45, Limetree.

** Hirschfeld, Gerhard (ed), 1986, The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany. London, Allen & Unwin. Important essays by leading German historians.

**** Holocaust—Chapter in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, pp.832–916. An essential introduction. (Reference section, Library).

** Horowitz, Irving Louis, 1981, Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power, New Brunswick, Transaction Books. On the role of the totalitarian state in organising and administering campaigns of genocide.

**** Hovanissian, Richard (ed.), 1986, The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, New Brunswick, Transaction Books,. An important set of essays on what was, in many respects, the precursor to the Jewish Holocaust. (Closed Reserve).

**** Kershaw, Ian, 2000, Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis, Penguin Press.

** Klee, Ernest, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, 1996,‘Those Were the Days’: the Holocaust as Seen by the Perpetrators and Bystanders. This is about the most unpleasant book you will ever read, but you must read it. (Closed Reserve). (Also titled "The Good Old Days" in the US edition.)

** Kuper, Leo, 1985, The Prevention of Genocide, Yale University Press,. A follow up to his Genocide book—it is important. (Closed Reserve).

*** Lang, David and Christopher Walker, The Armenians, Minority Rights Group, Report No.32, 1987 revised edition. (Closed Reserve).

** Littlell, Franklin, (ed), 1998, Hyping the Holocaust, Merion Westfield Press International, (Closed Reserve). [critiques of Goldhagen]

**** Marrus, Michael, 1988, The Holocaust in History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,. (Closed Reserve).

*** Melson, Robert, 1992, Revolution and Genocide: on the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, University of Chicago Press,.

** Novick, Peter, 2000, The Holocaust in American Life, Houghton Mifflin, NY. A controversial work, only if you do essay #12.

*** Raul Hilberg, 1985, The Destruction of European Jews, Holmes & Meier, , 3 volumes.

*** Stannard, David, 1992, The American Holocaust: Columbus & the Conquest of the New World, Oxford,. (Closed Reserve).

*** Tatz, Colin (ed), 1997, Genocide Perspectives I, AIHGS, Macquarie,. (Closed Reserve). For second essays.

**** Tatz, Colin, 2000, Genocide in Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press. (Closed Reserve) For definitions-, and the Aboriginal experience.

*** Totten, Samuel, W Parsons and I Charney, eds, 1997, Century of Genocide, Garland Publishing, New York. Excellent for second assignment.

*** Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 1992, Assassins of Memory, Columbia University Press. The best work on denialism.

** Walliman, I. and M. Dobkowski (eds.), 1987, Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies in Mass Death, New York, Greenwood Press,.

**** Wistrich, Robert, 1992, Antisemitism: the Longest Hatred, Thames Mandarin.

*** Yad Vashem, Documents on the Holocaust. (Closed Reserve). Many of the important documents are reproduced in your notes.

*** Yahil, Leni, 1990, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-45, Oxford University Press,.

Ref Zentner, Christian & Friedemann Bedurftig, editors, The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, De Capo Press, New York.(Closed Reserve ) Use this as a reference.

RESOURCES:

Macquarie Library has a very extensive set of holdings on Holocaust and genocide. UNSW Library also has excellent resources. A list of all Holocaust and Genocide books held on Closed Reserve (at UTS) will be available to you. Please see your Closed Reserve staff. The journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies is now in the Macquarie University Library, as is the Yad Vashem Studies Annual series. So too is the Journal of Genocide Research. The Macquarie Library has a key source: an 18 volume facsimile edition of original documents on the Holocaust. In the AIHGS at Shalom Institute, there is a 26 volume Archive of the Holocaust, edited by Sybil Milton and Henry Friedlander. The AIHGS holds a large collection of books and pamphlets from the Turkish Government expressing the Turkish version of the Armenian question. The Institute also holds the Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual. The Macquarie Library now holds a 15 volume set of important articles in English on the Holocaust. It also has the Macmillan Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. It also has a 4 volume Bibliography on Antisemitism and the 20 volume set on the Archives of the Holocaust. Some of this material will be available to you on inter-library loan. Some of it has to be consulted at Macquarie.

The audio-visual section of the Macquarie Library holds a 16,000 photo collection on the Holocaust, and the essential videos: Lanzmann's Shoah (9 hours); the BBC’s Genocide; Passage to Ararat; The Hand of Stalin; Night and Fog; The Fatal Attraction of Adolf Hitler; The Warsaw Ghetto:The Revolt; Evidence for All Mankind; The Courage to Care; Past and Present (on Sobibor); The Liberation of Auschwitz; Auschwitz and the Allies and many others including important documentaries on Aborigines, Rwanda, Bosnia. Some of this material will be shown during the three-hour lecture block. The AIHGS at Shalom Institute has a collection of films and videos that you need to view for your third assignment. We will give you a timetable of access to these materials. You need to view as many of these films as possible.

ASSESSMENT:

We suggest you begin choosing, reading and making notes as soon as possible.

50250 6 cp students do TWO pieces of work. The long essay is worth 65%, the shorter essay is worth 35%.

50251 8 cp students do THREE pieces of work. The long essay is worth 50%, the shorter essay is worth 30%, and the film critique is worth 20%.

For both sets of students, the long assignment is on the Jewish Holocaust or Judeocide and the Armenian Genocide; the shorter essay is a case study outside of those two events. Note that the longer essay is to be done first. It is in the major paper that you have to come to terms with these two extreme forms of genocide—and having done that, you will have the yardsticks with which to assess the other cases.

FIRST ESSAY: 3000–3,500 words. The teaching dates for first semester are 8, 15, 22 and 29 March; 5, and 12 April, then a break from 16 April (Easter) through to the week starting 30 April, which means we resume on 3 May, then 10, 17, 24, 31 May, then 7 and 14 June. That makes 13 teaching sessions all told.

This essay is due at the end of the eighth week of the course (that is, on 3 May).

50250 students = 65%

50251 students = 50%

1. Definitions of genocide abound. Your Readings list many of them. There is yet another, namely, the view of Christian Pross that ‘racial hygiene’, developed initially in the 19th century, provided ideological tools for a biological solution to a social problem. In a real sense, that is what modern genocide is—the ideological/political/‘scientific’ justification for killing those who pose a seemingly insoluble problem. But Pross warns that the very same mindset underlies the destruction of malformed babies at birth, or behind well-intentioned euthanasia or mercy-killing societies.

Discuss both the moral and political elements involved in ‘the problem’.

2. "In order to understand a particular genocidal event better, it is imperative that one examine other instances of mass annihilation ... In contrast to the massacres of earlier historical epochs, twentieth-century genocidal phenomena have been conditioned by the ... capabilities of super-nationalist elites, who possess unique instrumentalities of mass extermination. These distinctive features include (1) organisational specificity; (2) planning, programming, and timing; (3) bureaucratic efficiency and comprehensiveness; (4) technological capability; and (5) the ideological imperative."—R. Hrair Dekmejian in The Armenian Genocide in Perspective.

Discuss the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide in his terms. Bear in mind Professor Yehuda Bauer’s five prerequisites for such events, namely: there must be an ancient hatred; a brutal dictatorship; a compliant bureaucracy; the use of technology; and a war setting. (You should consider a brief comment about whether the Rwanda and Burundi cases fit this model.)

3. "What makes the Holocaust unique is the existence of two elements: planned total annihilation of a national or ethnic group, and the quasi-religious, apocalyptic ideology that motivated the murder."—Prof. Yehuda Bauer in ‘Whose Holocaust?’, Midstream, November 1980, p.45.

Bauer argues that the Holocaust was both universal and unique. Discuss that seeming contradiction. At the same time, discuss the implications of universalising genocidal acts, of ‘flattening out’ and ‘normalising’ such events. (Bear in mind the controversies among the German [and now other] historians about the singularity—or otherwise—of the Holocaust. You should also assess Bauer’s three new chapters on comparison in his 2001 text.)

4. In August 1939, while discussing the forthcoming invasion of Poland with his High Command, Hitler—in responding to a suggestion that the Poles and Jews could not be massacred—asked the question: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Discuss world reaction to the Turkish and German killings: who knew what and when, who said what and when, and to what effect. (You will need to read Walter Laqueur’s The Terrible Secret, David Szonyi’s section on ‘The United States, American Jewry and the Holocaust’, and Hovanissian’s The Armenian Holocaust—A Bibliography. (Closed Reserve).

5. "How was the Holocaust humanly possible?"—a question posed by Dr. Ze’ev Mankowitz. One can view the question in several ways: that destructiveness is inherent in mankind; that man has evil impulses, a capacity for evil; that man has fallen from God’s grace; the brutalising effects of war and desensitising, ‘numbing’, as Lifton says, of human emotion; heteronomy—acting under someone’s orders; obedience to authority in a totalitarian system; the nature of bureaucracy in the face of an ideological imperative.

We would like to see your analysis. Read Mankowitz’s lecture on the subject (available from the Genocide Studies centre). Dadrian’s article on Turkish doctors gives us a few glimpses, for example, "My Turkishness prevailed over my medical calling" said the same doctor who wrote "isn't it the duty of a doctor to destroy these [Armenian] microbes?" You must read Christopher Browning’s essay ‘One Day in Jozefow: Initiation to Mass Murder’ in Lessons and Legacies, or preferably, his Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Given the huge public debate about Goldhagen’s 1996 book, which argues that German antisemitism was, uniquely, ‘eliminationist’, this is now a complex issue. See also Bauer’s 2001 chapter ‘Is the Holocaust explicable?’

6. Richard Hovannisian’s 1996 Macquarie Lecture—Denial of the Armenian Genocide—with Some Comparisons to Holocaust Denial—defines ‘revisionists’ as those who deny these events ever happened, those who repudiate the events, those who rationalise them, relativise them, and those who trivialise them.

Analyse and evaluate these categories of ‘revisionists’ (You should consider discussing, briefly, the ‘revisionism’ current in Australian Aboriginal affairs.) An important new book in this context is Roy Brooks, ed, 2000, When Sorry Isn’t Enough: the Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice. (It doesn’t mention the Aboriginal case.) It will be placed in Closed Reserve.

7. Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide presents us with a biomedical vision of the Holocaust: a Nazi ‘biocracy’ that moved from coercive sterilisation, to killing impaired babies, to the ‘euthanasia’ of impaired adults, to euthanasia of camp inmates, to the extermination of the entire racial [Jewish] people. Rudolf Hess said in 1934 that "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology". And so these ‘biological soldiers’ killed in order to cure, to remove the Jew as "gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind".

One critic (Goldhagen, in Commentary, December 1986) says Lifton’s ‘biocratic’ model is flawed: "it is a fundamental mistake to extrapolate from the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews ... and to discuss the resulting model ... as if a biomedical vision were a major source of genocides ... In fact, few if any other genocides ... have conformed to Lifton’s model. Even the Turkish mass murder of the Armenians ... which Lifton adduces as an exemplar of this model, is incompatible with it". Vakahn Dadrian’s major article ‘The Role of Turkish Physicians in the World War I Genocide of Ottoman Armenians’, in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol.1, no. 22, pp.169–192 (Closed Reserve) seems to support Lifton. You MUST also read Robert Proctor’s Racial Hygiene—Medicine Under the Nazis, Benno Muller-Hill’s Murderous Science (Closed Reserve) and Cleansing the Fatherland by Aly, Chroust and Pross. These books discuss the active participation of German doctors in the creation of ‘racial hygiene’ and in its implementation.

Discuss the model of ‘applied biology’ in these two instances (and in Bosnia if you think there is a case to be made).

8. "The trouble with you, Colonel", said Ives heatedly, "is that you’d like to indict the whole country. That might be emotionally satisfying for you, but it’s not exactly practical. And hardly fair." Colonel Lawson looked at Ives ... then spoke quietly: "Hare, hunter, field. Let's be fair." Then, still smiling, he said, "The hare was shot by the hunter in the field. It’s really quite simple." ... Then he bent over [American Judge] Haywood and spoke quietly, sardonically. "There are no Nazis in Germany. Didn’t you know that, Judge? The Eskimos invaded Germany and took over. That’s how all those terrible things happened. It wasn't the fault of the Germans. It was the fault of those damn Eskimos."

—from Abby Mann's novel (and film)Judgment at Nuremberg.

In such events, who was responsible? Only those who, in legal terms, contravened Geneva Conventions, or committed ‘war crimes’, or ‘crimes against humanity’? Can a line be drawn between being a ‘companion’ to such actions and being an ‘accomplice’, a ‘participant’? What of ‘obeying orders’? Must we always search for the ‘microscopic black pinhead of malignancy that caused the whole cancerous condition’? Discuss these issues. You may want to discuss this whole issue though the medium of war crimes trials. If you choose to do so, then evaluate the Nuremberg and the Turkish trials, with a brief reference to the current Yugoslav and Rwandan trials. You could add a note on the Australian WWII war crimes trials.

9. In relation to either (or both) of the two major genocides, do you see any value in the intentionalist versus functionalist analysis? Is there any value in Tatz’s concept of ‘inevitablism’? ‘Intentionalism’ suggests that Hitler and the Nazis (or Enver Pasha and his group) intended the Jewish (or Armenian) destruction from the start, and that consistent dictatorial will made it happen. ‘Functionalism’ sees a ‘twisted path’, a disintegration of normal, substantial systems of government into a maze of ill-conceived and ill co-ordinated task forces, the fragmentation of decision-making, the blurring of political responsibility. In that chaos, that war setting, the ‘true believers’ put into action an exterminatory war against the Jews (or Armenians) which was inconsistent with, and detrimental to, the other war being waged.

10. Discussing the bystanders, Prof. Saul Friedlander says they may have been motivated by self-interest, by pseudo-ideological choices or by traditional antisemitism. But whatever the reason, the result—except perhaps in 9000 instances of ‘righteous gentile’ behaviour—was always ‘a desire in which the Jew was less than whatever other consideration he was weighed against’. How do you see the behaviour of the bystander nations in one (or both) of these genocides? You may care to write this essay specifically on the question of individual (rather than national) compassion, self-sacrifice and help during these genocides. One response to this helping behaviour is to say: how come there were so few; another is: how come there were so many? What do you make of the concept ‘worthy and unworthy victims’?

11. American author Cynthia Ozick has written (in The New Yorker magazine, 6 October 1997):

The story of Anne Frank in the fifty years since "The Diary of a Young Girl" was first published has been bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, traduced, reduced; it has been infantilized, Americanized, homogenized, sentimentalized; falsified, kitschified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied. Among the falsifiers have been dramatists and directors, translators and litigators, Anne Frank’s own father, and even—or especially—the public, both readers and theatregoers, all over the world. A deeply truth-telling work has been turned into an instrument of partial truth, surrogate truth, or anti-truth. The pure has been made impure—sometimes in the name of the reverse. Almost every hand that has approached the diary with the well-meaning intention of publicizing it has contributed to the subversion of history.

What are the lessons to be learned from the Anne Frank "industry"? Why these frenetic efforts to falsify a perfectly clear exposition of a vision of darkness?

12. Peter Novick and Norman Finkelstein have each published sustained attacks on ‘the Holocaust industry’ and its role in American life. Novick alleges that Jews sustained their victim status because it was in their political interests to do so: ‘Jews were intent on permanent possession of the gold medal in the Victimization Olympics’. Finkelstein alleges, among other things, that there has been a crass exploitation of Jewish suffering to ‘shake down’ Swiss banks, and others. The Nazi holocaust was the actual event, he says, but the Holocaust is its ‘ideological representation’, one exploited by Zionists. Both books deplore denialism but point their finger, and anger, at ‘the self-proclaimed guardians of Holocaust memory’. (Much the same has been happening in Australia—not just from Pauline Hanson but from senior journalists and a pair of academics who claim that Aboriginal memory is both false and a method of extracting ‘things’ they are not entitled to.) Analyse their arguments, particularly with Bauer’s new book as a yardstick on some of their contentions.

SECOND ESSAY: 1700 to 2000 words

This essay is due in the 12^th week of the course, namely, on 31 May.

50250 students = 35%

50251 students = 30%: .

Choose ONE case study to illustrate the seven major themes set out on page 2 under ‘Nature of the Course’, namely:

1. The ideological basis for the genocide;

2. The socio-political basis for the genocide;

3. The techniques/technologies used;

4. The question of legal/moral responsibility, especially the role of the state, and which areas of the state, which bureaucracies and which professions were involved;

5. The interest or indifference of neighbours and nations during the events;

6. The nature of the genocide (its ‘classification’, scale, dimension in comparison with the two major genocides);

7. The punishment (if any) for genocide and world reaction to it? It is important that you always bear in mind, at the very least, the UN definition of genocide when discussing your case choice.

NOTE: These points MUST be considered in addressing the topic of your choice. Please write an essay, not seven short notes on each of the above. NOT ALL THEMES MAY BE APPLICABLE: where they are inapplicable, you should say so.

CHOICES are strictly limited to this list:

1. The treatment of Gypsies (the Roma or Romany people) in World War II.

2. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: was this genocide?

3. Mass killings of Communists in Indonesia 1965–66.

4. Mass killings in Cambodia (Kampuchea) 1976–81—a case of ‘autogenocide’?

5. The case of East Timor.

6. Genocide in Rwanda and Burundi (the 1972 and the 1994 events).

7. The treatment of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Central Africa.

8. The position of the Kurds in the Middle East this past decade.

9. The manmade famine in Soviet Ukraine.

10. The ‘wreckers’ and ‘the enemies of the Soviet Union’ during Stalin's purges.

11. The secession of Biafra from Nigeria.

12. The creation of Bangladesh, involving 3 million dead, 1971.

13. The treatment of the Bahai’s in Iran.

14. The near-extermination of the Aché Indians in Paraguay.

15. Genocide in Equatorial Guinea—the trial of dictator Macias.

16. The Chmielnicki pogroms against Jews in 1648: was this genocide?

17. The case of Brazil’s Indians.

18. The black Jews of Ethiopia.

19. Australia’s Aborigines: what aspects of our treatment amount to genocide? If you choose this, be careful not to simply summarise my short monograph. I would prefer it if you concentrated on an aspect of this: such as Australia’s refusal to make apology and restitution for removed children, or the denialism rampant in some major newspapers.

20. The annihilation of Aborigines in Tasmania. (Is this a clear case? Compare the Aborigines’ mainland experience).

21. ‘The genocide that is rife in Algeria’—Fanon, writing in 1959.

22. Russian treatment of Chechens, Ingush and Crimean Tatars in the 1940s.

23. The Nazi genocide against Russian prisoners of war.

24. Tibet under China: a case of what?

25. The annihilation of the people of Melos in 416 BCE.

26. The Roman destruction of Carthage.

27. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ in what was Yugoslavia.

28. The contention that organised rape has been an instrument of genocide in Bosnia.

29. Witches in Europe in the Middle Ages.

30. The fate of the Pontian Greeks in Smyrna in 1923.

THIRD ASSIGNMENT: CRITIQUE 1000-1500 WORDS

Genocide—especially of the Nazi and Turkish kind—is often said to be inexpressible and incommunicable. Several books have talked about ‘the limits of representation’ of these events, suggesting that one cannot make fiction, poetry, art, film or music out of such horrors; further, that if one tries to do so, one is bordering on the blasphemous since depiction or representation can never match reality. Could you or would you teach about genocide through the medium of film? (You may want to concentrate on another genre, such as fiction, poetry, art, or music—in which case, pleased consult your tutor in advance.

Six films will be shown during the classroom sessions. To complete this assignment, you will need to view several more at the AIHGS rooms at the Shalom Institute.

TUTORIAL SYLLABUS:

There will be six one-hour tutorials in the thirteen weeks. All students must attend. The syllabus below is essential for an unravelling of some aspects of the genocide phenomenon. The topics are vital to the longer assignments.

Topic 1: What motivates genocide? Discuss the motivations and ideologies of different genocides. Look at antisemitism/racism, ‘chauvinism’, ‘colonialism’, ancient hatreds, cultural, religious and tribal factors.

Topic 2: The act of genocide is composed of three parts: the perpetrators, the victims and the bystanders. There is possibly a fourth element: the beneficiaries. Discuss the bystanders—the individuals, the communities, the nations—during the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust.

Topic 3: Discuss the complex question of resistance. What does resistance mean in these genocidal contexts? Is it only partisans, the underground, hand-grenades? Are there other forms of resistance and, if so, what forms do they take? Is resistance effective against a state determined on extermination?

Topic 4: Who was responsible? The whole German nation? The maniacal Hitler? The 40 SS élite? The 50,000 specially trained élite? The French, English and German academics? How are we to assess responsibility?

Topic 5: We may come to see how genocide is politically and even technically possible. But how is it HUMANLY possible? How then are we to prevent genocide? Is it ‘inevitable’ or preventable? Through which means?