Chris Hedges, in Coveting the Holocaust, discusses the use of victimhood that, manpulated as it sometimes has been, can convey unique moral stature on the victims, allowing them cover for horrendous crimes. Hedges dares to speak out, which will undoubtedly get him on certain blacklists and lead to the inevitable accusations of antisemitism:
he communists, not the Jews, were the Nazis’ first victims, and the handicapped were the first to be gassed in the German death factories. This is not to minimize the suffering of the Jews, but these victims too deserve attention. And what about Gypsies, homosexuals, prisoners of war and German political dissidents? What, on a wider scale, about the Cambodians, the Rwandans, and the millions more who have been slaughtered by utopian idealists who believe the eradication of other human beings will cleanse the world?
When I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington I looked in vain for these other victims. I did not see explained in detail the awful reality that Jewish officials in the ghettos—Judenrat—worked closely with the Nazis to herd their own off to the death camps. And was the happy resolution of the Holocaust, as we saw in images at the end of the exhibits, the disembarking of European Jews on the shores of Palestine? What about the Palestinians who lived in Palestine and were soon to be pushed off their land? And, as importantly, what about African-Americans and Native Americans? Why is the Nazi genocide, which we did not perpetrate, displayed on the Mall in Washington and the brutal extermination of Native Americans ignored? Why should billions in reparations be paid to Jewish slave laborers and not a dime to those enslaved by our own country?
These questions circle back to the dangerous sanctification of any genocide, the belief that one ethnic group can represent goodness, solely because its members are the victims, and another evil because from its ranks come the thugs who carry out mass slaughter. Once these demented killing machines begin their work the only thing unique is the method of murder. The lesson of any genocide is not that one group of human beings is better than another, but that in the intoxication of the moment, gripped by the mass hypnosis of state propaganda and the lust for violence, we can all become killers. All the victims must be heard. None are unique. And all of us have to be on guard lest we be seduced. We carry within us—German, Jew, Armenian or Christian—dark and dangerous lusts that must be held in check. I applaud the French. I hope the French action pushes the Turks toward contrition and honesty. But I do not wish for the Armenians to covet the Holocaust, to begin the process of sanctifying their own suffering. When we sanctify ourselves we do so at the expense of others.
Hedges, who is not a pacifist and supports humanitarian interventions, such as those in Bosnia and Kosovo designed to stop campaigns of genocide, nevertheless describes war as “the most potent narcotic invented by humankind.” He argues that violence has a dark fascination, something the Bible calls “the lust of the eye.” He writes that war is the pornography of violence, that “it has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque.” “War,” he writes, “gives us a distorted sense of self. It gives us meaning. It creates a feeling of comradeship that obliterates our alienation and makes us feel, for perhaps the first time in our lives, that we belong.” War, Hedges wrote, exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us. We are all culpable. War is about worshipping the death instinct, which Hedges, quoting Freud, refers to as Thanatos, the Greek God of death. War, he argues, starts out looking and feling like love, the chief emotion war destroys, leads to the annihilation of the other and finally to self-annihilation. War, he writes, is as close as we come to attaining a state of almost pure sin with its goals of hatred and destruction. His book draws heavily from his own experience and the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr.
In response to my post Music for peace this morning, Daily Kos diarist Valtin commented [see comments to that post]:
How ironic that Furtwangler should be chosen to promote peace, as he was a prominent conductor in Germany during the Nazi years. To prove I’m not a hypocite (or perhaps that I am), I own some recordings of Furtwangler conducting Wagner, and they are wonderful, with Furtwangler’s interpretations bringing out more the weirdness in Wagner than his bombast.
There are many of these German musicians and composers (or conductors — von Karajan is another) who were compromised by their work under the Nazi regime, or by association with them. (Wagner carries the stigma of the latter, although he died before Hitler was even born.) Richard Strauss also stayed in Germany through the Nazi and war years. I listen to and enjoy Strauss immensely, but I can understand if there were others who found the associations of these individuals to preempt any enjoyment of their work.
I sent this comment to Robert Rivard, the pianist who performed Furtwangler. He responded as follows:
Furtwangler is still a controversial figure after all these years. He was not a Nazi and used his position as conductor of both the Berlin Philharmonic and Vienna Philharmonic in helping Jewish musicians leave Germany. He wrote letters of recommendation for many Jewish musicians that he didn’t know well or at all so that they could get work once they escaped. He asked to be paid in cash when he was guest conductor outside of Germany so that he could use those monies to help others. He never gave the Nazi salute at any concert, avoiding that by carrying the baton in that hand. He was about to be arrested by the Gestapo in late January of 1945 when he escaped to Switzerland. He was cleared by the US Nazi Tribunal in 1947. He remained in Germany during the war thinking he was doing the right thing at the time. He made mistakes and made errors in judgment trying to walk the tight-rope.
His concerts were a source of great comfort to those who fought in the underground. The great Jewish violinist and humanitarian Yehudi Menuin personally investigated all the accusations against Furtwangler right after the war and found them without merit. He made this plain to the musical world when he appeared with Furtwangler in concert in Germany.
When I ask his permission to post his comments, Robert graciously gave it and also stated:
The main source for my information is the book “The Devil’s Music Master” by Sam Shirakawa whom I met at a Furtwangler symposium in San Francisco in 1992. There is an infamous photo of Furtwangler shaking Hitler’s hand after a performance. Hitler rushes up to the podium, catching Furtwangler off-guard. What is not seen in the photo but shows up in the film footage is the expression of extreme displeasure on Furtwangler’s face a second after the handshake. It speaks volumes. If he were the detective Adrien Monk, I’m sure he would have asked for a case of hand-wipes and still not felt clean.
You may post on the blog my email in response, in part or in whole, but also add that I recommend the Shirakawa book for a detailed and balanced discussion of this period of Furtwangler’s life….
I’m passionate about Furtwangler but he is not without flaws. Who among us is? To me he was courageous at a time when it was fatal to speak out. He could have left Germany but he felt he had to stay to preserve German musical culture. Others who stayed joined the Nazi party and co-operated. Furtwangler did his best not to do so and he never joined the Nazi party.
I fully understand and accept that there will always be those who are unable to see Furtwangler in a positive light. Furtwangler himself knew and understood this. My teacher at FSU was a piano student of Ernst von Dohnanyi, who stayed in Europe during the war. A fervent anti-Nazi, he was not accepted by some after the war either. He was shamefully treated when he first came to the US to teach at FSU in the late 1940’s. When I play publicly here there is someone who always tells me afterwards that I studied with a student of a Nazi. It bothered me at first, but over the years I’ve learned to accept the remarks with grace and try to appreciate where they are coming from. It’s taken me a lifetime to learn how not to judge others.
This case presents one of those complex moral dilemmas. I wonder what other readers think?
I want to call attention to the wonderful web site of classical pianist Robert Rivard: Concerts for Peace. There you can, for a modest fee, download his wonderful performances of The Music of Wilhelm Furtwangler: Selected Piano Compositions. I’m listening to his Fantasie II right now. The last three piano sonatas of Beethoven will be released soon. As Robert says:
In these times of war with its terrorism and senseless violence and in these times of unbelievable natural disasters, we need now more than ever to gather together as a community to listen to Beethoven’s message of hope, consolation, and peace. A message he has so selflessly given us. All we need do is sit quietly together and accept with open hearts his timeless gift of peace.
This has been the longest time I have been away from blogging. There were several reasons for my disappearance the major one being the fact that every time I felt the urge to write about Iraq, about the situation, I’d be filled with a certain hopelessness that can’t be put into words and that I suspect other Iraqis feel also.
It’s very difficult at this point to connect to the internet and try to read the articles written by so-called specialists and analysts and politicians. They write about and discuss Iraq as I might write about the Ivory Coast or Cambodia- with a detachment and lack of sentiment that- I suppose- is meant to be impartial. Hearing American politicians is even worse. They fall between idiots like Bush- constantly and totally in denial, and opportunists who want to use the war and ensuing chaos to promote themselves.
The latest horror is the study published in the Lancet Journal concluding that over 600,000 Iraqis have been killed since the war. Reading about it left me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it sounded like a reasonable figure. It wasn’t at all surprising. On the other hand, I so wanted it to be wrong. But… who to believe? Who to believe….? American politicians… or highly reputable scientists using a reliable scientific survey technique?
The responses were typical- war supporters said the number was nonsense because, of course, who would want to admit that an action they so heartily supported led to the deaths of 600,000 people (even if they were just crazy Iraqis…)? Admitting a number like that would be the equivalent of admitting they had endorsed, say, a tsunami, or an earthquake with a magnitude of 9 on the Richter scale, or the occupation of a developing country by a ruthless superpower… oh wait- that one actually happened. Is the number really that preposterous? Thousands of Iraqis are dying every month- that is undeniable. And yes, they are dying as a direct result of the war and occupation (very few of them are actually dying of bliss, as war-supporters and Puppets would have you believe).
For American politicians and military personnel, playing dumb and talking about numbers of bodies in morgues and official statistics, etc, seems to be the latest tactic. But as any Iraqi knows, not every death is being reported. As for getting reliable numbers from the Ministry of Health or any other official Iraqi institution, that’s about as probable as getting a coherent, grammatically correct sentence from George Bush- especially after the ministry was banned from giving out correct mortality numbers. So far, the only Iraqis I know pretending this number is outrageous are either out-of-touch Iraqis abroad who supported the war, or Iraqis inside of the country who are directly benefiting from the occupation ($) and likely living in the Green Zone.
The chaos and lack of proper facilities is resulting in people being buried without a trip to the morgue or the hospital. During American military attacks on cities like Samarra and Fallujah, victims were buried in their gardens or in mass graves in football fields. Or has that been forgotten already?
We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons – with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?
There are Iraqi women who have not shed their black mourning robes since 2003 because each time the end of the proper mourning period comes around, some other relative dies and the countdown begins once again.
Let’s pretend the 600,000+ number is all wrong and that the minimum is the correct number: nearly 400,000. Is that better? Prior to the war, the Bush administration kept claiming that Saddam killed 300,000 Iraqis over 24 years. After this latest report published in The Lancet, 300,000 is looking quite modest and tame. Congratulations Bush et al.
Everyone knows the ‘official numbers’ about Iraqi deaths as a direct result of the war and occupation are far less than reality (yes- even you war hawks know this, in your minuscule heart of hearts). This latest report is probably closer to the truth than anything that’s been published yet. And what about American military deaths? When will someone do a study on the actual number of those? If the Bush administration is lying so vehemently about the number of dead Iraqis, one can only imagine the extent of lying about dead Americans…
GuardianFilms and BBC Newsnight present a short [eight minute] film that clearly conveys the futility of the American occupatio in Iraq. It shows the relations between one American army division and the Iraqi Army (IA) and police who are supposed to replace them. THe IA throw hand grenades at the Americans and the police sit by while the Americans are attacked. It seems to never occur to these pooor American troops that they are hated because they are occupying another people’s country.
Here is the Guardian’s description:
Sean Smith, the Guardian’s award-winning war photographer, spent nearly six weeks with the 101st Division of the US army in Iraq. Watch his haunting observational film that explodes the myth around the claims that the Iraqis are preparing to take control of their own country.
According to this report, Le Monde is reporting that the Iraqi government has ordered the Ministry of Health to not release further figures:
Iraq ‘hiding true casualty figures’
THE Iraqi Government has told medical authorities not to reveal to the UN the true extent of civilian casualties in the country’s conflict, French newspaper Le Monde said today.
The daily quoted a telegram sent by the head of the UN mission in Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, to headquarters in New York, in which he said: “This development risks damaging the capacity of the UN’s Assistance Mission to report the number of civilians killed or injured.”
Since July 2005 the UN has used data provided by Baghdad’s Forensic Institute and the Iraqi health ministry to form an estimate. The estimate “was certainly imperfect but an indicator nonetheless of the growing number of civilian victims”, the telegram said.
The latest report said that 3590 civilians died a violent death in July and 3009 in August, figures which it said were “unprecedented”.
But the telegram quoted by Le Monde said that on September 21, one day after publication of the report, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki wrote to the health ministry with instructions not to disclose more figures.
In an investigation published in British medical weekly The Lancet earlier this month, US and Iraq specialists estimated that more than 600,000 civilians died a violent death between March 2003 and July 2006.
Of course, this wouldn’t automatically invalidate earlier figures. But reports have frequently referredd to political manipulation of these figures, as in this May 25, 2006 article by the Christian Science Monitor’s dan Murphy:
What until late 2005 used to be a routine reporting visit to the morgue - the best way to figure out the level of violent death in Baghdad - has now become a minefield of frustration and implied threat.
After a person picks up a permission letter from the bureaucrat at the ministry public affairs office, he presents it to the morgue director’s secretary. But now, she immediately directs the person to go to the compound’s security office. “The director is in, but you have to talk to Major Kassem first.” Why? “You just have to.”
Going back outside, Major Kassem is tracked down inside a small air-conditioned trailer. He has a broad smile, and no uniform or badge.
Asked what his role is he explains: “I work for the Interior Ministry, but I’ve been assigned here to help coordinate the FPS.”
He then explains that there’s no need to speak to ministry officials, that he will provide all available information. He gives the monthly murder totals from the beginning of the year, though UN officials and Sunni Arab politicians say the ministry has taken to under-reporting the numbers, under pressure from Shiite militias.”
I, further, see no reason to believe that, under these conditions, the correct nation-wide data is even being carefully collected and sent into Baghdad. As one who has worked extensively with these government datasets in this country [we call them "administrative data sets"], I know how inaccurate and incomplete they can be, even under the best circumstances. Collecting and transmitting data is usually the last priority in human service settings. In times of stress, such as civil war, it is virtually unimaginable to believe that these data systems would work. Thus, I don’t find a large discrepancy between the Iraq Body Count numbers and other mortality figures to be at all surprising.
This applies to all the data systems in Iraq. Without extensive evidence that they are in fact working decently, I see no reason to believe that they are. Thus, discrepancies between survey-based mortality figures and official morgue and hospital figures are not only not surprising, but to be expected. This is a large part of why I think the IBC critique of the Lancet study is largely bunk. Its arguments rely to a gerat degree on the ptoper functioning of the countries information infrastructure. When electricity is down to under 3 hours a day in Baghdad, information systems are certainly not a priority in the best of times. These are near the worst of times.
If IBC has good, credible evidence that these information systems are functioning, they should present it. Otherwise, most of thie arguments can be reasonably interpreted as evidence that these systems are not, in fact functioning.
Of course, the weakness of IBC’s critique does not mean that the Lancet mortality study is necessarily correct. I’m still waiting for the main street bias issue to be sorted out. that seems to be to be a potentially greater threat to the validity. [Please note, I said "potentially greater threat to the validity." I am not endorsing this critique, only saying it should be sorted out.]
Here is a note I posted on the Media Lens Message Board in response to heated controversy around the claims of several British scientists to have found a flaw in the sampling methodology in the new Lancet Iraq mortality study [I've posted the piece describing those scientists' ideas below my comments]:
Folks,
I’m not known as a defender of IBC. And I think their recent citique of the Lancet study is weak. But I think the issue raised here of “main street bias” is a serious one and should be taken seriously. I had not wanted to write anything till I could write a comprehensive article, but am disturbed by the tone here.
IBC is right in (at least) one respect. Studies that result in surprising findings should be subject to careful scrutiny. Of course, it’s especially difficult in the present situation where major policy implications flow from one’s critique. It’s also difficult in the gotcha environment where Josh D. jumps on every statement to essentially accuse Lancet defenders of bad faith and its authors of fraud while those who support the study jump on IBC.
While I personally find certain things that IBC has done to be despicable [not making a much greater effort to correct media misreporting of their numbers; likening critics to terrorists; the tone of the Lancet critique), that is irerlevant to the question of the quality of the Lancet study.
The Lancet numbers are surprising. I think the study is of high quality. Yet, that doesn't mean one shouldn't look for flaws. Most of the one's mentioned, such as too few clusters are silly. As many noted, the number of clusters affects the size of the confidence intervals. Also, the relatively low design effect (1.6) suggests this isn't a problem. Of course more clusters are better. But, when designing and conducting a survey, one always balances costs and benefits. The balance in the study is reasonable.
But the possibility of a subtle bias in the sampling design is the crucial issue. If the sample is unbiased, it is hard to come up with an explanation of how such a mortality rate could arise without fraud, which I doubt. [I thought carefully about this last night and think there's enough evidence in the study to rule out [CORERCTED 10-20-2006 1:23EDT] explicit fraud by interviewers at all likely.]
I have seen speculation about some bias introduced regarding these procedures. I’m not at all sure that these authors are correct. But I do think their point needs to be answered. If the sampling strongly over-included main streets, I could imagine it biasing the study.
Unfortunately, I will be out of town for the weekend and away from computer. But I did want to weigh in and say “Cool it folks.” I’m an antiwar activist, but I’m also a scientist. If the study is right, I want to know it. But, if its wrong, I also want to know that.
I also agree with IBC that the number of casualties in Iraq is too high, whether 100,000 [IBC numbers times 2 for nonreporting bias that they admit, andJon Pederson's: estimate] ] or 655,000. I believe the magnitude makes a difference. But I also want to find the truth, whatever it is. I hope others will join in that.
****** Lancet Critique *****
Lancet study fundamentally flawed: death toll too high
October 19, 2006 – 1 page – For immediate release:
Researchers at Oxford University and Royal Holloway, University of London have
found serious flaws in the survey of Iraqi deaths published last week in the Lancet.
Sean Gourley and Professor Neil Johnson of the physics department at Oxford University and Professor Michael Spagat of the economics department of Royal Holloway, University of London contend that the study’s methodology is fundamentally flawed and will result in an over-estimation of the death toll in Iraq.
• The study suffers from “main street bias” by only surveying houses that are
located on cross streets next to main roads or on the main road itself. However
many Iraqi households do not satisfy this strict criterion and had no chance of
being surveyed.
• Main street bias inflates casualty estimates since conflict events such as car
bombs, drive-by shootings artillery strikes on insurgent positions, and market
place explosions gravitate toward the same neighborhood types that the
researchers surveyed.
• This obvious selection bias would not matter if you were conducting a simple
survey on immunisation rates for which the methodology was designed.
• In short, the closer you are to a main road, the more likely you are to die in violent activity. So if researchers only count people living close to a main road then it comes as no surprise they will over count the dead.
During email discussions between the Oxford-Royal Holloway team and the Johns
Hopkins team conducted through a reporter for Science, for an article to be published October 20, it became clear that the authors of the study had not implemented a clear, well-defined and justifiable methodology. The Oxford-Royal Holloway team therefore believes that the scientific community should now re-analyze this study in depth.
The team can be reached for comment at;
Gourley: s.gourley1@physics.ox.ac.uk
Johnson: n.johnson@physics.ox.ac.uk
Spagat: M.Spagat@rhul.ac.uk
This is simply too good to pass up. here a reporter actually asks his question over and over and Tom Keane, Jr., NJ Republican Senatorial candidate avoids answering over and over and over. I haven’t checked the “23 times” cliam [I've got too much else to do], but wouldn’t be surprised: