Polokaust A Genocide Lemkin Updated Confino

Foundational Pasts, by Alon Confino. 2011

Lemkin “Updated” on the Polokaust as Genocide. The Presumed Exceptionality of the Holocaust is Not Self-Evident. It is a Decades-Later Post-WWII Invention!

Author Alon Confino is a professor of history, and a specialist on the Holocaust. My main interest is the justice customarily denied to the multitudes of non-Jewish genocides, and I write my review from that vantage point.

NO VALID DUALISM BETWEEN THE NAZI GERMAN ATTITUDE TO THE JEWS AND THAT TO THE POLES AND OTHER DELEGIMITIZED AND TARGETED GROUPS

Alon Confino writes, “This approach, together with studies on Nazi occupation and resettlement plans in Eastern Europe, as well as the contributions of the race paradigm that highlighted the multiplicity of Nazi victims, show that the Jewish genocide was tied up with a whole set of racial ideas that have produced other genocides. The Nazi genocide was a future-oriented program of German renewal in which Jews were one target among many, if symbolically the most important one…The enmity and extermination of the Jews were part of a Nazi universe of racial enemies and exterminations.” (p. 142).

POLOKAUST WAS GENOCIDE–EVEN THOUGH MOST POLES SURVIVED

Rafal Lemkin, the Polish Jew who coined the term genocide in 1944, was right about the nowadays-called Polokaust a genocide, notwithstanding the Nazi German failure to exterminate most Poles given the time they had. Confino analyzes Lemkin, and concludes that, “Killing members of a social group is only one way of committing genocide. According to the UN Convention, there are four other genocidal acts: preventing births within the group, causing sustained physical harm, intentionally creating conditions of life to destroy the group in whole or in part, or forcibly removing children of the group to another group. In this respect, the Nazi rule in Eastern Europe, viewed in terms of imperial and colonial policies, committed several genocides: against Slavic peoples in occupied Poland and Ukraine, against Russians, as well as against the Jews.” (p. 73).

THE INCREMENTAL RADICALIZATION OF NAZI POLICIES AGAINST JEWS. SO WHY NOT ALSO AGAINST POLES—GIVEN MORE TIME?

Confino writes, “During the war, the Nazis did not have a predetermined goal to annihilate the Jews; at every stage of the way they found themselves doing something that a year ago, a month ago, would have been unimaginable. The removal of inhibitions was a process.” (p. 99).

Why not take this reasoning further in order to appreciate the likely extermination of the Poles in the event that the Third Reich had won WWII? Such an objective was latent in Nazi anti-Slavic racism and specifically in GENERALPLAN OST.

AFFIRMING THE OBVIOUS: HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM RULES OVER WESTERN SOCIETIES

The author contends that, “It is noteworthy that the claim that the Holocaust was unique has lost its intellectual and emotional power, at least among scholars.” (p. 155). Maybe so, but it still hogs the spotlight, at the expense of all other genocides, in academia, media, and the entertainment industry.

In fact, historian Alon Confino tacitly recognizes as much. Using different wording from my title of this section of the review, he writes, “Perhaps it is to be expected that GIVEN THE CENTRALITY OF THE HOLOCAUST IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE it has been placed within a twentieth-century identity narrative of origins and outcome.” (p. 69: Emphasis added). Centrality indeed!

HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM DOES NOT FOLLOW FROM THE HOLOCAUST ITSELF: IT IS LARGELY A POSTWAR INVENTION

In describing what he called “the crisis of identity” of modern thinking, and in which the Holocaust is (supposed) to be the center, Confino comments, “It reads the history of the Holocaust from the present day backward, ignoring that many people did not view the Holocaust as fundamental during its unfolding in the decades immediately following 1945.” (p. 69).