Holocaust Envy

An acquaintance of mine, Geoffrey F., who lives in Köln, Germany, once suckered me into a long argument about the Holocaust — not about the event itself, but mostly about how many Jews seemed to have a proprietary relationship to the word, an unwillingness to share it with groups who’d undergone different but terrible catastrophes and wanted to apply that term to those other present and past historical events.

Geoffrey, like so many glib and articulate semi-literates today, didn’t have the faintest idea what the word actually meant until I sent him to the dictionary to look it up. He thought it meant something along the lines of “a bad thing that happened to a lot of people.” As Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary reminds us, however, it comes from Greek roots combining whole and burnt:

1: a sacrifice consumed by fire 2: a thorough destruction, especially by fire.

The central image, clearly, is devastation by fire. It doesn’t imply death by fire, though in fact many Jews were burnt alive — in the ovens, in barns, in houses and synagogues, in open fields, in the tunnels of the Warsaw Ghetto — by the Nazis. But the abiding icon of the concentration camps is the crematorium, and the chimney thereof, and the burning of Jewish bodies (which, according to Jewish theology, is a desecration), and the rendering of Jews into fat used for soap by the good Germans. So the term holocaust has clear pertinence to that great tragedy.

Before he informed himself of its actual meaning, though, and even thereafter, Geoffrey (who’s neither Black nor gay) insisted that people of the melanin persuasion, and people of the gay persuasion — indeed, anyone who wanted to — should feel perfectly free to use that word to describe any tragedy whatsoever. The Jews didn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t own it in an exclusionary way.

It had never occurred to me before he and I had this discussion, but obviously something I’d have to call Holocaust envy had emerged. I have no problem applying the term holocaust to the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II. Nor to the arson perpetrated by a madman in a store on 125th Street a few years back, in which several people died; that was a holocaust, on a small scale. And watching Slobodan Milosevic’s murderous wolf-packs wilding in Kosovo, home after home put to the torch, often with living people trapped inside, the word again seems appropriate. But Geoffrey — like the Rev. Al Sharpton, Stevie Wonder, and not a few more — wanted it out there as an all-purpose locution signifying big trouble and big grief.

For the sake of argument, I was willing to consider his position. However, I proposed, this can’t be dealt with simply on a one-shot or case-by-case basis. What we need here is a policy. And the key issue to be resolved seems to be whether the names and metaphors we use for major historical events are reserved for them and them alone, or are to be treated as interchangeable, or are simply to be replaced by generic descriptors.

As I understand it, Black people aren’t unhappy per se that the fate of Europe’s Jews is referred to as “the Holocaust”; they’re upset because Jews (and others) won’t refer to the African American experience of forced emigration from their native land and slavery as another “Holocaust.” The fact that the image of destruction in an all-consuming fire doesn’t fit that dreadful historical situation, even metaphorically, apparently has no bearing on this inexplicable craving for Holocaust status. (Curiously, no Black advocate of calling that a Holocaust has proposed the logical corollary — that the Jews’ enslavement by the Egyptians would then also qualify for Holocaust status.)

Similarly, gay people want the term “holocaust” applied not only to the parallel Nazi slaughter of homosexuals and lesbians but also to the AIDS crisis, even though once again no consuming fire is involved and we have two perfectly good, resonant words for that terrible disease and its social consequences: plague and pox.

So how are we to handle this controversy over nomenclature? Here are what seem to me to be the policy options.

Possibility #1: Tragedy-description sharing.
In this scenario, Jews relinquish any exclusionary claim on “holocaust” and even “genocide” (though they hardly behave possessively in regard to the latter). Blacks can then state without contradiction that they were subjected to a holocaust and genocide. So can Native Americans. But so can forcibly imported Chinese coolies, Japanese-Americans interned during World War II, and the Irish who suffered through the Potato Famine. By the same token, the Jews could then claim that in Hitler’s Germany they were “lynched” on a scale that dwarfs any lynching in Black history, and were subjected to a “racism” that makes the treatment of African-Americans seem a piece of cake by comparison.

• Problem to resolve: What if two or more groups want to use the same descriptors at the same time? That gets confusing. So:

Possibility #2: Tragedy-description exchange.
In this scenario, any group desiring to acquire the nomenclature for suffering of any other group would have to surrender its present terminology. So, for example, Blacks who demand the right to use “holocaust” and “genocide” would have to relinquish any claim on “slavery” and “the Middle Passage.”

• Problem(s) to resolve: Does this exchange have to be mutually consensual? If not, how does the group whose nomenclature is preempted find its replacement? Does the surrendered nomenclature of the initiating group transfer automatically to the group whose terminology they prefer for themselves — so that the Jews would have to start using “slavery” and “the Middle Passage” in reference to World War II? Or does the cast-off nomenclature go into a common pot? If so, how is it apportioned? If the Jews could no longer refer to their experience as “the Holocaust,” because someone else had the right to that term, might they instead find themselves obliged to call it “the Crucifixion” or “the death march on Bataan”?
• Also: how often would any group be allowed to exchange nomenclatures? Suppose, ten years from now, Blacks decide that they prefer “Irish Potato Famine” or “ethnic cleansing in the Balkans” to “Holocaust.” Can they go nomenclature-shopping?
• Should all nomenclature of tragedy perhaps go into a common pot and be rotated arbitrarily (on a yearly or biennial basis, say), among all victims of terrible misfortune and their descendants? If so, how — by random lottery? What about matters of proportion and scale, in that case? That is, how do we avoid the crisis that would surely result if a young girl who had to shoot her pony when it broke its leg were required to refer to that event (even if only for twelve months) as “the Inquisition,” while the Jews were mandated to describe the effects on them of Nazism as “the day my daddy ran over my puppy with the station wagon”?

Possibility #3: Neutralizing and de-poeticizing the nomenclature of tragedy (the Forrest technique).
With this system, which Geoffrey proposed, the language of tragedy is rendered unspecific, stripped of imagery, devoid of metaphor. Thus:

• “The Holocaust” = “the worst thing that ever happened to the Jews.”
• “The Middle Passage” = “that awful ocean voyage people from Africa had to take when lots of them got seasick.”
• “The Crucifixion” = “the worst thing that ever happened to the Son of God.”
• “The desaparacidos of Guatemala” = “the Guatemalans with whom the military played hide-and-seek until their friends couldn’t find them anywhere and got very sad.”
• “The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire” = “the time a lot of seamstresses couldn’t get to the stairs fast enough when it got hot.”
• “The Gulag Archipelago” = “cold places where Stalin built homes for people when they weren’t his friends anymore.”
• “The day my daddy ran over my puppy with the station wagon” = “the day my puppy got lots flatter than he was supposed to be.”

I’m not sure that any of those will solve the dilemma; seems to me they all cause more problems than they eliminate. And, given the fact that the only real conflict over this subject appears to be the yearning on the part of Blacks, gays, and other groups to partake of the resonance of the term “Holocaust,” perhaps the best solution would be for Blacks, gays, and other groups with that inclination to take a look at the dictionary definition of holocaust, recognize its inappropriateness to their historical experience, and find their own resonant single-word summation of their victimhood, if they feel they need one. That is why God, in Her infinite wisdom, gave us the thesaurus.

Blacks in the U.S. were interrogated under duress frequently, and forced to convert to Christianity — surely more so than were either burned alive or cremated post-mortem. Yet the term “Inquisition” doesn’t really apply to their history. Similarly, Jews were enslaved by the millions in German factories and Nazi forced-labor camps, and thousands of them met death by hanging; but neither “slavery” nor “lynching” effectively sum up that ghastliness.

As a (genetically) half-Jew myself, and one who grew up very Black-identified, I don’t feel that the concept of the Holocaust in any way diminishes the horrors of slavery, racism based on skin color, the looting of Africa, and the Middle Passage. They are surely distinct enough, different enough crimes against humanity that no single word with any meaningful specificity could apply to both historical situations.

So, in the last analysis, I’m for letting the word “Holocaust” stand as a summation of Nazism’s effect on its victims. If others want a similarly evocative term of their own, it’s up to them to find it. Or to let the proven facts of the matter speak for themselves, eloquently, as they usually do.