I'm
going to start sidling toward my topic with bragging about a relative
of mine you probably have never heard of. My cousin (of some degree) Joy
Erlichman Miller organized the Holocaust memorial in Peoria, Illinois,
and tried to make the body-count more understandable by collecting
buttons: eleven million of them. The strategy of collecting buttons is
brilliant, and, more to the point I'm slowly moving toward, the number
is correct. Humans aren't wired to understand deaths in even the
thousands, but the sight of millions of buttons can aid our
imaginations. More, having kids collect everyday items like buttons is a
good way to get them to relate to the extraordinary human costs of
slaughters such as the Nazi Holocaust.
The number, though, may also be unfamiliar to you. The Peoria committee
used the figure of approximately eleven million murders, and they were
wise to do so: both truthful to the best estimates, and politically
prudent. Some five to six millions Jews were murdered in the Nazi
extermination programs, plus some five to six million Roma ("Gypsies"),
Communists, homosexuals, unionists, and other "inferiors," or real or
imagined enemies of the Reich. That adds up to eleven million people,
approximately, not the more frequently heard figure of six millions.
Some six million Jews died, and even if the actual figure is "only" five
million, it is a number to remember in itself and is central to the
exterminations: "The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" was the
impetus for large-scale, systematic,
routinized massacres.
Still, if the Shoah is uniquely Jewish and unique in more than just the
technical sense applicable to all historical events — if it's literally
and absolutely
unique, "sui generis," one of a kind — then the
Shoah is of only limited usefulness for historical understanding: There
aren't many lessons to be learned from a literally unique event. If it
is "
The Holocaust," and that is that, there is little to be
learned beyond "Sh*t can really happen to the Jews." Using the eleven
million figure teaches that once a program of genocide gets started, all
sorts of people can be sucked in and destroyed. And that point is
crucial; if the Shoah just happened to Jews, there's no reason non-Jews
today should do much more than sympathize. Fitting the Hitlerian
Holocaust into a larger pattern of massacres, as Hannah Arendt does in
detail in
Origin of Totalitarianism, makes it historically and politically relevant for many people, and aids building "Never Again" coalitions.
Outside of the Peoria Holocaust Memorial and the reference to my cousin
Joy, I expect most of what I've just said will be familiar and, with
most folk who read a column by a Left-leaning Jew, unexceptional. It's
also stuff I've said before (I did once teach a course titled
"Massacres").
What's been getting to me lately is watching the last few episodes of the first season of
The Borgias, listening a couple times each to Neal Stephenson's
BAROQUE CYCLE books and to Steven Pinker's
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
— even going so far as to buy a Pinker's book in paperback — plus
reading and consulting hard-cover hard copy of Matthew White's
The Great Big Book of Horrible Things:
The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities.
As
The Borgias first season moved
toward a final tableaux celebrating traditional family values,
Renaissance aristocratic Machiavellian style, we meet Paulo, a
definitely non-aristocratic stable hand, who's a
nice kid who
gets involved with abused-wife Lucrezia Borgia, eventually aiding
Lucrezia neutralize for a while her brutish warlord husband, and
becoming Lucrezia's lover. Significantly here, even in the more innocent
stages of Paolo's involvement with Lucrezia, he worries aloud about
getting whipped, and by season's end we see and hear him whipped by his
lord and get good indications that he was probably hanged shortly
thereafter.
[CORRECTION (and SPOILER): Paolo was spared as it turned out, to be hanged instructively in the following season.]
Servants
ca. 1500 were whipped, and the servants of an ignoble nobleman might
indeed find themselves hanged for offenses less serious than conspiracy
to cripple and cuckold their masters.
And not just servants had to fear the whip: soldier and (notoriously)
sailors, and to a lesser degree wives and children and, moving toward
but not very far into the Enlightenment, lunatics in places like
London's Bedlam Hospital. One can argue that it's not entirely progress
that we beat children and the insane much less nowadays and drug them
more; one can argue that the "smother love" and constant surveillance
and supervision of privileged children isn't 100% superior to benign
neglect with occasional brutality — but, come on! As Steven Pinker
insists, in these areas we've made serious progress.
What such historical and history-based works as
The Borgias and
Better Angels
make clear is that things have trended toward less violence over human
recorded history. Reading them while thinking of what White calls the 20
th-c. "hemoclysm" — i.e.,
blood deluge,
the warfare and atrocities 1914-1945 — one might conclude however, and
fear, that the trend is indeed toward a decrease of violence but there
can be perverse and sudden "regressions to the norm" (sic) — returns of
barbarism — that can produce immense suffering.
Two points from such cogitations and my occasional fearful twitchings.
First, Stephenson's BAROQUE CYCLE covers, more or less, the period from
the execution of Charles I of England in 1649 to the beginning of the
Hanover dynasty in 1714. Stephenson is very clear that the worst of the
human social pathologies he deals with was slavery, continuing in the
East and, during this period, increasing in the Americas — and with
increasing British involvement. White estimates the suffering in
deaths alone of the
slave trade alone at 18.5 million for the Mideast slave trade from the 7
th through the 19
th
centuries, and some sixteen million for the Atlantic slave trade,
1452-1807. (The two slave trades rank at #8 and #10 of White's ranking
of our species' "One Hundred Deadliest Multicides," edging out, for
instructive examples, the Conquest of the Americas and First World War,
both coming in at 15 million deaths.)
It is clear, however, that state-sanctioned and enforced slavery was
the extreme of a continuum of cruelty, or, changing the image, an
extreme area on a web of cruelty that permeated everyday life. Even as
Jews should put the Shoah into it a larger context of massacres,
African-Americans should put American chattel slavery onto that
continuum, or at the center of a figurative web of oppression,
exploitation, and cruelty.
People can argue, and I do so, that racism developed in part to allow
continued cruelty to Black people (and, later, Jews and Slavs and Roma)
after it became increasingly unfashionable — war excepted — for Moderns
to be cruel to people seen as people and even bad form to brutalize
sympathetic nonhuman animals.
Pinker talks of "The Humanitarian Revolution" (ch. 4) that slowly came
in with the Modern Era and the Enlightenment, increasing humanitarianism
that included, eventually, the elimination of slavery. While slavery
continued and was profitable, however, it needed justification, and it
is no coincidence that racism came along to provide that justification:
it was becoming increasingly "unacceptable," as we so weakly say —
Not Done
— to grossly abuse people (again, war-time enemies excluded); a theory
was necessary that made Blacks less than people, and that theory was
racism.
We need to be clear on "rac
ism":
that's an "-ism," an ideology, a theory, and one with a history.
Bigotry is more or less natural to humans: a subset of the nastier parts
of the "amity/enmity complex" to use
Robert Ardrey's formulation; or "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave Sev-enty-six!" in the formulation of Mel Brook's
2000-Year-Old Man. For seeing the difference between bigotry and racism, and for dating
racism in England, note Thomas Rymer's argument against
"Othello: A Bloody Farce" in his
Short View of Tragedy (1693, ch. VII; reprinted in Frank Kermode's
Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism [1974: 461-69]). In
Othello,
Shakespeare shows ample bigotry against the Moor: that "old black ram,"
"the thick lips." The bigotry, however, is within the world of the
play. Rymer laments that the play remained highly popular with English
audiences into his time in the late 17
th century — popular in spite what Rymer saw as its gross errors and absurdities. To start,
Othello
is not a properly Neoclassic play, but along with that error — Rymer
was a militant neoclassicist — and relating to it, it's hero just isn't,
well,
appropriate. In
Othello, Othello is a general
of the armies of Venice and, apparently, one of the great military
leaders of Christian Europe. Rymer allows that the Venetian Republic
hired foreign mercenaries for their armies,
But shall a Poet thence fancy that they will set a Negro to be their General; or trust a Moor to defend them against the Turk? With us a Black-amoor might rise to be a Trumpeter; but Shakespear would not have him less than a Lieutenant-General. With us a Moor might marry some little drab [= a whore], or Small-coal Wench: Shake-spear,
would provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord, or
Privy-Councellor [Othello' elopes with the daughter of a senator]: And
all the Town should reckon it a very suitable match. […] Nothing is more
odious in Nature than an improbable lye [=lie]; And, certainly, never
was any Play fraught, like this of Othello, with improbabilities. (Kermode volume, page 462).
There
was bigotry aplenty in Shakespeare's real-world England, from prejudice
against to loathing of foreigners and others, but not enough animosity
against Blacks to keep English audiences from sympathizing with "black
Othello"; by the time we get to Rymer, something has changed.
That "Humanitarian Revolution" was getting started, and for screamingly
obvious commercial reasons Blacks from Africa, for the consciences of
many people, had to be excluded for the circle of humanity. There was a
great deal of money to be made from the slave trade and from the stolen
labor of slaves to produce high-profit commodities like tobacco, sugar,
and rum. If we allow sugar as a "food-drug" — and no less an authority
than Sidney W. Mintz says we should do so — then the institution of
Black chattel slavery in the New World came about in large part because
there was a lot of money to be made then, as now, pushing drugs (
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, 1985).
And, of course, before the more northern European competition got into
the tobacco, sugar, and rum rackets, New World enslavement of Indians
and, later, Blacks had served a lust for lucre more directly in Spanish
America in the mining of gold and silver.
Most of our European ancestors most of the time dealt with horrors like
the slave trade the way we Americans today deal with exploited labor
in, say, the manufacturing of our clothing: they ignored it. I don't ask
about how I can order on line sweatpants for six bucks a pair; if you
had high-flown English ancestors ca. 1692, they didn't ask too many
questions about the sugar in their coffee or hot chocolate (or, for that
matter, ask inconvenient questions about the coffee or chocolate).
More important, though — and, finally, my point here — is the one
stressed by Steven Pinker: how much cruelty for how long was
not
actively ignored but seen casually and just accepted as part of the
"warp and woof," deeply woven into, the web of everyday life.
"The wogs begin at Callus," as the stereotypical racist Colonel Blimp's
of Great Britain used to say: i.e., the range of the inferior peoples
of the Earth began as soon as one crossed the English (by God!) Channel
and disembarked at the carefully mispronounced French port of Calais.
That attitude, however — hell, racism for some of them! — was progress:
for most high-born English for most of their history, inferiors started a
whole lot closer to home than France, including in one's home with
one's servants or (if male) wife and (for both parents) children. One
could feel downright righteous birching one's kids bloody, to beat hell
and the devil out of them; and, of course, even the lower orders could
watch for entertainment the torture of animals — bear-baiting, bull
baiting, ratting — or condemned criminals (if you couldn't afford to pay
off the hangman for a longish drop, "hang by the neck until dead" could
take a long time).
So Black African slavery was horrific, but its horrors were tolerated
as long as they were not only because of racism but also because of a
general casualness about cruelty.
If we are to be serious and effective about "Never Again," Jews should
remind all and sundry that the Hitlerian Holocaust was emphatically not
limited to Jews and fits into a larger tradition of massacres: far from
unique, the Shoah is an instructive extreme on a continuum of
atrocities. American Blacks and Africans should remind people that the
Atlantic slave trade was part of a long tradition of murderous
exploitation of Africans and others: including at one time the
enslavement of just about anyone who could be taken prisoner in war or
stolen.
Americans who hear of atrocities and say, "It can't happen here" forget that chattel slavery, for one very big thing,
did
happen here, until 1865, as did the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan into
my lifetime. And this is not frightening so much because we Americans
are particularly evil but because we are well within the normal range of
humanity. As Stephenson, Pinker, White, and the makers of
The Borgias make clear, routine, banal, horrible cruelty is part of the repertoire of human behavior.
So is the capacity for good, those "Better Angels of Our Nature." If
Pinker is right, those Better Angels, our inclinations to the good, have
been trending upward since the Bronze Age; as the reintroduction of
slavery in the Early Modern period indicates and the 20
th-c.
hemoclysm drives home; the tendency is far from inevitable. Indeed,
often it's just "Sh*t happens"; but far too often "sh*t" is done to all
sorts of people, and emphatically not just Jews and Blacks. So, to
repeat a useful cliché, following Pinker: Let us be hopeful, but also
ready to aid the exploited, oppressed, and abused not just out of
decency, but because, always,
any of us can be on the list — and for most of human history, most people were.
