How much of the West has been taught to think about the atrocities of history has left a large swath of the population ill equipped to appropriately analyze the severity of present (and impending) ones as well as the actors involved. Public memory, imagination, action and political will has been restricted by an overemphasis on (1) the individual, (2) the numbers, and (3) the methods of death, destruction or displacement not as a way to understand a system or worldview but as a means to indict 1 (the individual) and explain 2 (the numbers). Let’s go through them.
(1)
that atrocities are understood through, and ascribed to, a singularly evil individual has reduced the average person’s ability to understand the constellation of systems, actors, ideologies and inventions which produce atrocities. As such, it has also reduced the general public’s ability to assess just how horrifically despotic present individuals are in real time (and just how many of them there are).
Because of the way students learn about Hitler or King Leopold II (if they do) for example, not only do colonialism, industrialization, the state and capitalism get treated as asides, but men such as these end up getting positioned as either specters relegated to the past or as complete aberrations outside of history. They become characters so uniquely evil they transcend their context. Even the use of the word “evil” assumes a supernatural quality which comes from beyond our world or the normative bounds therein.
This produces the inability to indict systems as we’ve established (or provides the narrative ground to indict individuals in order to save systems), but also an inability to understand individuals as conterminous products/producers of those systems. As such, it has made it that much more difficult for many people to understand just how despotic people like Trump, Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir and Putin are (such a historical emphasis allows us to say things like “Trump’s ICE” and “Netanyahu’s Israel” in the present).
(2)
The second major problem is how many students learn about atrocities of history through too great a focus on the end result (numbers of deaths). The result is that atrocities happening in real time are not treated with the appropriate urgency because it has been engrained that severity can only be truly assessed retrospectively once the dead have been counted. Even the other day, MO Congressman Wesley Bell argued (even now) that Gaza can’t be a genocide because of Israel’s capacity as a nuclear power for total annihilation vs. the timeline of counted deaths. Bad faith as it is, this argument has survived because of Western history’s obsessions with numbers. By this point the majority of the world knows it’s a genocide, but the majority of the world should have known it was a genocide by the end of 2023 if not by the end of October 2023.
Not only does the emphasis on the final count erase genocides such as The Parsley Massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic (around 20,000 people) from much of present public memory, but it also ultimately sanctions present and future atrocities with death counts in the thousands rather than the millions.
(3)
The overemphasis and sensationalizing of methods (as opposed to processes) of how someone is killed ultimately creates a hierarchy of tragedy. To be sure, the method is important if we use the methods as a guide to learn what it these methods says about systems, a regime or society’s worldview, and the antecedents and future implications each. If not, we end up creating hierarchies of tragedies which creates a gradient of “acceptability.”
For example, because of the overemphasis on Auschwitz within the teaching of the Holocaust (indeed Auschwitz as a metonym for the Holocaust), the gas chambers are viewed as quintessentially worse than mass executions, starvation and exterminationist labor. Asserting that it’s worse to be gassed to death than to be starved or shot into a pit ultimately asserts a hierarchy of tragedy which ends up also asserting differing values on the lives of victims.
Because the vast majority of Jews from Western Europe killed in the Holocaust were gassed at Auschwitz, both Auschwitz and Western European Jews have an outsized place in Western memory. The majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust were Eastern European (nearly all killed in the Holocaust as an even which took place within the context of the Second World War were Eastern European, half of whom were not Jews).
As many Jews were executed by firing squad, labor and starvation as were killed by gas across all six death camps. Within this memory of the Holocaust, not only does this place a higher value on the bodies of Western Europeans than Eastern Europeans, it creates a higher threshold for atrocities carried out by traditional weapons (or by methods which can exist within the capitalist market or through natural tragedies: labor, starvation and sickness) than by those which are comprehended as only used for mass slaughter.
It is for this very reason why Hitler is remembered and known in a way King Leopold the II is not. Obviously, a driving force (the driving force) of this disparate knowledge/memory is racism in that Leopold’s victims were Black and Hitler’s (though not considered so at the time) were European (now remembered as White). However, the racist memory (and forgetting) of Leopold’s genocide relies on a hierarchy of methods in which exterminationist labor, famine and disease within the context of capital accumulation and colonial extraction are deemed less severe than gas. Less severe ultimately comes to mean acceptable/accepted.
In this regard the overemphasis doesn’t simply arrange methods along a gradient of “acceptability” but also produces an obsession with intention. We are told the Holocaust is worse than the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Africa colonialism because the intention of the former was mass murder (the intention was far greater than that and Jews were not the only victims but that’s for another day) whereas the intention of the latter was capital accumulation. The discourse and thus responses becomes trapped by an individual’s intention (irrelevant) rather than what is happening, and what the mechanism are by which the “what” is being carried out. As such, the nefarious term “collateral damage” enters history, public discourse and drives atrocity.
The immediate and most urgent action is to disrupt and dismantle the mechanisms (systems, actors, states, ideologies) by which present atrocities are being carried out. Simultaneously, however, we have to shift how we teach, learn and talk about atrocities of history.
(1) We need emphasis on a constellations of systems, both as they exist, and the transnational historical process by which they have been produced, (2) we need to emphasize processes which examine both a how and why which can be approached backward looking and forward facing, (3) where methods are concerned they need to illuminate a path by which those methods were reached and what those methods tell us about the people, and the worldview of the people, who used them, (4) where individuals are concerned, we need to examine them as actors within, producers and products of, systems and ideologies. We must stop treating individuals as vessels which are intended to both hold and explain the entirety of the crimes of a group(s) or government(s).
The way atrocities have been and continue to be taught, and intentionally so, have not reduced their likelihood of repeat but in fact assisted in their unlimited reproduction and an increasing inability for many to accurately assess present atrocities as they are forming and as they unfold.
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