“PROFITING” FROM THE HOLOCAUST

      There is [in Holocaust Studies] a distinct danger of escaping from the reality of the Nazi regime and its consequences into a nebulous general humanism, where all persecutions become holocausts, and where a general and meaningless condemnation of evil helps to establish a curtain between oneself and the real world. This escapism must of course be fought.

      —Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective

      PRELIMINARIES

      My second example of antisemitism operating as a type of pseudo-explanatory political fantasy moves from European polls and Islamist rodomontade to the groves of American academe. It concerns the long-running dispute over the question of whether the Holocaust was a “unique” event. This has divided academic opinion since roughly the start of the 1990s. An excellent account that surveys its various stages and its main contributors can be found in an outstanding new book by Gavriel Rosenfeld.¹ My concern in this chapter will not be to contribute to this debate but rather to question the intellectual and moral solidity of some of the assumptions underlying it.

      Several features of the uniqueness debate mark it out from the general run of academic or scholarly controversies. There is, for instance, the unusual degree of acrimony with which it has frequently been conducted. Another curious feature of the debate is its power to unite academic solemnity at one extreme with political scurrility at the other. The academic end of this spectrum of opinion has for almost twenty years found rich expression in Alan S. Rosenbaum’s voluminous anthology, Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives in Comparative Genocide, which has now run into three editions, the first in 1996, the most recent in 2009.² The other, scurrilous extreme can be encountered in the spatter of openly antisemitic and Holocaust-denying websites that can be located by typing the words Was the Holocaust Unique? into a search engine.

      As putatively academic debates go, this one has proven unusually free, even in the present age of “culture wars,” from the disinterested objectivity popularly associated with the academy. On the contrary, it has been remarkable from the outset for the incessant and resolute grinding of political axes that has accompanied its various phases. In addition, it has been widely characterized, by journalistic and academic observers alike, as a dialogue of the deaf, or more accurately a collection of such dialogues, in which participants characteristically argue, not so much against one another, as past one another.

      QUESTIONS OF MEANING

      At its most abstract level, the dispute turns on the question of whether the terms Holocaust and genocide are general terms like horse or proper names like Aristotle or Bismarck: whether, in short, given the nature of the thing named, there can be in principle more than one such thing.

      When such abstruse philosophical issues become the focus of high emotions and pitched battles among nonphilosophers, there is generally a reason. In this case, the reason is itself philosophical. One of my teachers at the University of Michigan in the late 1950s was the late C. L. Stevenson. Stevenson was, and remains, famous for his book Ethics and Language, a monument of American Pragmatism that is still read, though not as widely as it ought to be. Chapter 9 concerns what he calls persuasive definitions. For Stevenson, the meaning of a moral term—for example, freedom—has two components. First, there is a factual description, a statement of what constitutes a free society. Then, second, there is the emotional aura that surrounds the word; in the case of murder, say, a negative, disapproving one; in the case of freedom, a positive, approving one.

      Stevenson takes from Hume the thought that these two components of meaning can be made, on occasion, to shift independently of each other. A term like freedom or murder thus becomes an instrument of political or moral persuasion to the extent that one can get people to accept a shift in the descriptive meaning of the term, while leaving its emotional aura unchanged. If one can persuade people, for instance, that abortion counts descriptively as murder, then the bleakly negative emotional aura surrounding the term murder can be successfully displaced onto the term abortion. If one can persuade people to accept that part of being free, descriptively speaking, is to possess a legally enforceable right to demand that the state provide one with medical care, then with luck, the warm emotional aura surrounding the term freedom can be displaced onto the idea of state provision of medical care. As Stevenson puts it, “our language abounds with words which, like ‘culture,’ have both a vague descriptive meaning and a rich emotive meaning. The descriptive meaning of them all is subject to constant redefinition. The words are prizes which each man seeks to bestow on the qualities of his own choice.”³

      THE CONTESTED POSITIONS

      An understanding of Stevenson’s distinction, it seems to me, is essential to making sense of the uniqueness debate. The debate exists only because the intense emotive auras surrounding the words Holocaust and genocide have become covetable enough for the words themselves to become “prizes” in exactly the sense that Stevenson here exposes.⁴ What turns a word into a prize for political debate, he suggests, are the evaluative and associative structures that constitute its “emotive meaning.” In the case of Holocaust and genocide, these include horror and revulsion against the perpetrators, on the one hand, and on the other, sympathy and fellow feeling for the victims.

      These, of course, are responses of a kind that all of us would wish acts of mass murder to evoke. And recent history offers many episodes of mass murder, including many felt, by the