Israel W Charny - How Can We Commit the Unthinkable?: Genocide: The Human Cancer

Genocide: The Human Cancer

Israel W. Charny
Executive Director, International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide
In Collaboration with Chanan Rapaport

Foreword by Elie Wiesel

First published 1982 by Westview Press

Published 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright 1982 by Israel W. Charny

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Charny, Israel W.
How can we commit the unthinkable?: Genocide, the human cancer.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Genocide. 2. GenocidePsychological aspects. 3. GenocidePrevention. 4.
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945). I. Rapaport, Chanan. II. Title.
HV6542.C47 364.1'51 81-19784
ISBN 0-86531-358-X AACR2

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-01903-7 (hbk)

If we are all innocent, then the mystery of evil, drawing its strength from our very innocence, will crush us in the end. For in order to realize himself, man must fuse all levels of being into one; every man is all men. Every man can and must carry creation on his shoulders; every unit is responsible for the whole.... Created in the image of the One without image, man is so constituted that as he comes close to one extreme, he advances towards the other. It is frightening because in the name of the absolute, he is called upon to do good and evil at the same time, relying on identical gestures and inventing identical forms.

-Elie Wiesel, The Oath

The subject of this book is fear; the subject of this book causes fear. Condemned-if not damned-by a past fraught with terror and shame, is man still capable of recovering his innocence? After Auschwitz, is hope still possible? Since history suffers from cancer, what is left for us to do?

Psychologist by education, moralist by vocation, Israel Charny confronts these questions with a courage no one can dispute. Having diagnosed the evil, he tracks it down and unmasks it. To fight it. Perhaps even to defeat it. Certainly, all is lost; yet all remains to be saved. Evoking the millions of dead becomes part of a humanitarian design for safekeeping: it is because the genocide has taken place that it will never happen again. Provided, of course, that we remember it. The memory of suffering becomes a safeguard against suffering.

And here is the importance of this work: it serves as warning as well as reminder. The past is invoked not to make us weep, but rather to make us reflect. The future, born of the past, must break away in order not to repeat it. But, paradoxically, that very act contains its own share of risk. Bringing about such a break with time and conscience may only lead to ruin and night. How do we go about resolving this contradiction? We cannot, yet we must at least try to confront it.

This is where, at times, Israel Charny and I might find ourselves in disagreement. Not being a scientist or an expert or a clinician, I confine myself to exploring the questions; the answers escape me. Treblinka, for me, is a perplexity. Belsen and Birkenau compel me to put everything back into questions. I still do not comprehend why some men become killers, and others victims.

That said, I understand the victims better and more than their executioners. I could never say "I" in the name or in the place of a killer. Is it because, by killing, he dehumanizes himself? Perhaps. Victims, by giving their life, become more human, while killers, by giving death, become less human. It is a question, then, of two separate categories nothing can reconcile. To say that the victims might have become executioners is unjust. Malraux is right: death transforms certain lives into destiny. Let us accept the dead in their irrevocable "situation." By what right can we suspect them of actions that, under other circumstances and in face of other pressures, they might have committed? No, we cannot look for the murderer among them. Let us look for him where he has perpetrated his crimes-in the eyes and the heart of the killer. In his being; that is, in his difference, in what sets him apart from his victims, apart from humanity in which he is the cancer.

This term seems just to me. The SS system was exactly that-a cancer. It spread to an entire social body, the entire human species. Its noxious, destructive effects can be observed almost anywhere in the world where minorities endure poverty, hunger, fear, humiliation, and death. All those paroxysmal violences that are taking place in Paraguay or in Cambodia, all those mass slaughterings, all those oppressive measures reported almost daily by the press-we must link them to the Holocaust. To be more specific: I am not saying that we should compare them to the Holocaust, but that we must decipher the signs connecting them to it. It is Auschwitz that opened the way to Hiroshima. Does this mean that Hiroshima should be compared to Auschwitz? Not at all. This kind of comparison can only diminish the event. Auschwitz defies every analogy and transcends all forms of description. Auschwitz is the point zero of history, it is the beginning and the end of all that exists. It is the ultimate reference - everything is judged in relation to it. In other words, the massacre of the Cambodians is not Sobibor, but it is because of Sobibor that we must do everything possible to assist the victims in Cambodia. Because we have seen the triumph of night, we must tell of the suffering and the resistance of its victims. Because we have seen evil at work, we must denounce it. Because we have seen the near annihilation of the European Jewish communities by the nazi "cancer," we must fight without ceasing to save the world from its contagion.

Is it possible that we may have a chance to succeed? It is our only chance.