Halting a succession of evil.

Littell, Franklin H.

One of the most treasured beliefs of Christians is summed up in the concept of "apostolic succession." Memory is set in the context of the covenant of fathers and sons, of mothers and daughters. We are not bounded in a fellowship of faith merely contemporary; rather, the "communion of saints" has vertical as well as horizontal dimensions.

Yet, the "dialogue with the past" - the conversation and fellowship that bridges the generations - is difficult to sustain. The twentieth century especially, the "Age of Genocide," has a landscape with great psychic fissures across which friendly hands can hardly reach, and compassionate voices can scarcely be heard. There is also the problem of denial. After a massive traumatic event such as the genocide of the Armenians or the genocide of the Jews, both the victims and the perpetrators are driven to suppress recollection - the victims in order to get on with life, the perpetrators to deny their full measure of guilt. In both groups there is a noteworthy psychological drive to thrust the event into the storeroom of forgetfulness and lock the door.

How then shall a massive genocide, a caesura in the course of history, be treated? The urge is strong to speak of it as an event safely relegated to the past, a shadowy specter to be drawn from the well of memory only on required occasions. Yet, this approach chokes the communication between the past and the present and muffles the messages to be passed between the generations if the lessons for the present and future are to be mastered. Refusing to deal rationally with the event, individuals in the first generation may plant land mines that explode and damage their children and grandchildren.

Memory and History

Not infrequently, art forms are better able to convey the difficult truths than pedestrian writing. There is a "Monument against Fascism" in Harburg, a suburb of Hamburg, Germany, that superbly puts the ambiguous dialectic between memory, the dialogue with the past, and forgetfulness, the road to exile. Brilliantly conceived and executed by Jochen Gerz and Eti Shalev-Gerz, the monument consisted of a tall shaft upon which the public was invited to scribble graffiti during the moments of recollecting the abuse of human persons during the years of the German Third Reich. The public was thus invited to join actively in the "creation" of the memorial. The engineering feat by which the monument, unveiled in 1986, sank slowly into the ground was remarkable. The concept was powerful. In its construction, the chamber of disappearance is as deep as the monument is high. In the words of the artists, "One clay it will have disappeared completely, and the site of the Harburg monument against fascism will be empty. In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice."(1) The moral challenge to the one who passes by is clear. One must internalize in the present tense the reality of history in the past tense.

Moreover, the way in which human memory commonly works is thus made graphic. However, the moral ambiguity of the symbol - the disappearance of the pylon - is evident. Is the Nazi genocide of the Jews destined to disappear into the forgotten caves of the human psyche? Has the genocide of the Armenians receded, as Adolf Hitler assumed,(2) even deeper into the well of forgetfulness?

Without any religious imperative to remember, and approaching only from the position of the scientific method, a sensitive student of history might feel compelled to hope that these memories will not disappear back into Mother Earth until European civilization itself disappears. For, both the Armenian genocide and the genocide of the Jews spotlight inescapably certain pathological conditions that developed in Western civilization.(3) We are not permitted to desist from analysis of these conditions, nor may we cease to draw the lessons from such analysis.

Genocide is the dark underside of "the Holy Muslim Empire" and "the Holy Christian Empire" in their sundry manifestations. The day will come when the study of genocide will not be solely a highly specialized field: Like pathology in any good medical school, "Holocaust and Genocide" will be an area where every serious student will take at least one course.

There is a another question deeper than the rational, one that concerns the nature of history itself - and our interaction with the events of which we are a part. Our response to this question defines us as human persons. In the words of Ortega:

The most radical division that it is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection.(4)

Are we among those who take burdens on ourselves? Our awareness that we were not called to be balcony-sitters - a position to which unthinking and uncaring academics are prone - brings us to Yerevan, where we realize that an event that occurred eighty years ago is more vivid and a more definitive part of our lives than much that happened a week ago. History is not the dead hand of the past weighing clown the present; history is the covenant of fathers and sons and of mothers and daughters. In the dialogue with the past, we encounter sources of character formation as powerful as our participation in contemporary events, as gripping as our hope of things to come.

No one has expressed this continuum of our history better than a saint of the Latin church, Augustine of Hippo, who wrote in his Confessions:

[Let him see that] in the Eternal nothing passeth away, but that the whole is present; but no time is wholly present; and let him see that all time past is forced on by the future, and that all the future follows from the past, and that all, both past and future, is created and issues from that which is always present . . .

There are three times: a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.(5)

To the person on the street, "history" is a thing of the past - if he or she thinks of such things at all. To the perceptive, however, history is a continuum binding together past, present, and future.

Speaking precisely to the practical point, Archbishop Tarkom Manoogian stated at the sixtieth-anniversary memorial conference in New York City(6) that the Armenian genocide showed that it could be done: There was a policy of genocide by a government that went unchecked by other powers, and in time the possibility of such government policy built up to the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Nor, of course, did the succession stop at Auschwitz. After genocidal actions by governments in Cambodia, the Sudan, Burundi and Rwanda, and "Bosnia," we are coming to speak of this twentieth century, which opened with the genocide of the Armenians, as the "Age of Genocide." The "model," to risk use of a coldly technical term from sociology, of the assault on the Armenians during the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire ("the Holy Muslim Empire") has had many spiritual and political progeny.

Turning Memories into Lessons

Memory enters our present awareness at several levels, two of which should be distinguished here. First, there is the memory, often evoked by religious liturgies, that directs us to meditation, prayer, and self-examination. Second, there is recollection, often reinforced by research and discussion in seminars and conferences, that points toward learning the lessons of an event. Memory of the first order frequently concentrates, as Elie Wiesel and other poets insist, upon the silence of the word.(7) Memory of the second order points toward a science to prevent future genocides, toward an Early Warning System on potentially genocidal situations.

Holding these two orders of memory together is no mean feat, as we learn from the world center of Holocaust memory and study in Jerusalem - Yad Vashem - and as those of us who worked on the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, became painfully aware. The museum dedicated now in Yerevan must serve both as a shrine and as a center of study and publication, serving both levels of memory.

A museum puts to us the question of memory - of our identity in the continuum of history. The sensibilities of the survivors and their descendants must be respected, as must the zeal of the scholars to analyze "Why?" and "How can genocide be prevented?" On the one hand a posture of preciousness in the inner circle must be muted: "Only a Jew [or Armenian] can understand." Just as certainly, on the other hand, those carrying on research must avoid the Eiskalt indifference to the human measure that marked the style of the organizers of the crime itself. Scientists must carry themselves in awareness that they are laying profane hands on sacred material - that one's kind of remembering is an activity that carries its own perils, unless it is accompanied by a pledge to life and serves as an exercise in remembering for the future.

Specifying a Crime

Combining moral passion and intellectual rigor, some lessons are beginning to emerge. An elementary science is appearing for the detection, identification, and timely anticipation of genocidal situations.

Before we press on, let us remind ourselves of the origin and meaning of this word "genocide," invented in 1943 and, since 1951, a section in the law of nations. In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Raphael Lemkin introduced the new word and gave it theoretical grounding. The phenomenon was ancient, and some teachers had condemned it as a sin; Lemkin aimed to give it political and legal definition as a crime. He was dissatisfied with the presuppositions that informed the Hague Conventions, specifically the traditional assumption that "war is directed against sovereigns and armies, not against subjects and civilians."(8) Lemkin understood that modern war - unlike the wars of past history - is directed against peoples. In point of fact, beginning with World War I, civilians have suffered much more extensively than those in uniform.

According to Lemkin, genocide has two phases: "[O]ne, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor."(9) In the Genocide Convention, the crime is spelled out in rather precise detail. Included in the actions to be prevented or punished are the following:

a) killing members of the group;

b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.(10)

Punishable acts include conspiracy, incitement, attempt, and complicity as well as direct performance - the actual accomplishment - of genocidal deeds. No ethnic, cultural, or religious community may be targeted for assault, but, due to Soviet pressure, political groups were excluded from the Genocide Convention when it became a part of international law in 1951.

Although the parameters of "genocide" are still being debated, the general outlines of the concept have emerged. Genocide, in sum, is a wilful crime, performed by criminals, and in a different category from a flood or an earthquake or a side-effect of modern war. A science in combatting it is beginning to emerge, to make timely identification of potentially genocidal movements and moments and to try to punish the criminals if they gain power and act contrary to the laws governing genocide.

Defining a Science

The cornerstone of a science is predictability. An interview published on the first page of the Fall, 1994, Newsletter of the [American] Institute for the Study of Genocide(11) revealed that the concept of prediction is gaining standing. Headed "Genocide in Rwanda Was Foreseen and Could Have Been Deterred," the interview summarized the factors that provide a powerful indication that some specialists are mastering the science of prediction in respect to genocidal situations. Careful reporting alone is no longer enough to fulfill acceptably the academics' vocational and ethical responsibilities. The scientist has an obligation both to act and to teach by acting.

In Rwanda the two chief factors seem to have been irresponsible incitement to murder by the radio station controlled by the government then in power, along with the equipment of spontaneously gathered unofficial militia who were turned loose to kill the targeted minority.(12) Those working to create a reliable Early Warning System will recall immediately that government incitement and the use of criminal elements to staff the killing units were crucial aspects of the genocide of the Armenians.

What other factors are now becoming identified as indicative - even predictive - of a genocidal situation? Are they now in sufficient number, with enough of a consensus among specialists, that study of genocide can be reckoned a science, not only a painful exercise in reporting pathological events?(13) We do not have a science when someone reports, however accurately, the ravages of an epidemic; we have a science when specialists have reached the point where, sitting around a table, they can say that, if things continue as they are, an epidemic will certainly occur.

Early Warning System

In 1969 the present writer published a book(14) that provided a "grid" of predictability - an "Early Warning System" - in reference to genocidal situations. More exactly, there were two "grids" that had been developed during twenty years of field observation in Germany and North America, followed by a decade of graduate seminars. The first "grid" was an attempt to identify the ideological characteristics of totalitarian - potentially genocidal - movements.(15) The second "grid" identified and described the chief characteristics of potentially genocidal movements as expressed in characteristic styles of political action.(16)

The basic concept ("the grid") drew upon the figure of the "kairos," an archetype of the ancient astrologers (before astrology, astronomy, and mathematics became distinct and separate fields): the teaching that when the heavenly bodies are in certain conjunctions, favorable or unfavorable impact is made upon nations and/or rulers. The fifteen points in a "grid" comprise a way of identification, of singling out certain points as more important than others, of relating one identifying characteristic to others. No one "star" (factor) is sufficient for alarm; however, when nine or ten "stars" are moving into conjunction, with a certain relationship to each other, the alarm bells should start ringing and the warning flags be raised.

From study of the diversionary strategy of the Russian tsars in targeting the Jewish stetl for attack by the "Black Legions," by analysis of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, by research in the Nazi genocide of the Jews, and by attention to the contemporary use of genocide as a strategy of some contemporary despots and dictators, we are now in a position to identify a potentially genocidal situation (kairos).

To fix the concept of an Early Warning System securely in group memory, introducing a "memorization device," so to speak, let me again state a basic axiom derived from study of the Nazi genocide of the Jews: The Nazi Party was a terrorist movement for some years before it became a criminal government with the power to commit genocide. It will be helpful to remember that genocide is a crime (not a flood or an earthquake), that the marks of a potentially genocidal movement can be identified in advance of its accession to power, and that such cadres can be rendered impotent in timely fashion if the will exists to differentiate between disloyal and loyal oppositions, between individual acts of violence and actions plotted and executed by terrorist movements.(17)

Our political task as free peoples is two-fold. First, we must unite with others in suppressing potentially genocidal movements, where necessary across national boundaries.(18) There can be no sanctuary for members of potentially genocidal movements. Second, we must unite with others to make certain that where the crime occurs it shall be indemnified and the criminals punished. Punishment for genocidal crimes already committed is clue both for the sake of justice and to inhibit others who might contemplate a like course of political action.

What, then, are major factors that we can identify today, factors that drive genocide forward as a political option? How can prediction be made efficient and official? We are not now referring to the astounding prescience that led the great Zionist leader, Max Nordau, to predict in 1911 that, unless Europe radically changed the direction it was taking, 6,000,000 Jews would die.(19) We are talking about lessons learned by serious students of the Armenian and other genocides in this century. Such scientific study requires the critical, analytical, and comparative approach to evidence - without, however, compromising the religious or philosophical issue of the uniqueness of the Armenian and Jewish experiences. For example, in an earlier study this writer identified no less than thirteen direct parallels between the Armenian and Jewish experiences.(20)

Creating the Genocidal Culture

Rather than discuss the minutiae of the already published "grid," let us turn to a consideration of the factors that create a genocidal culture - the "ocean" within which the potentially genocidal "schools of fish" can swim and feed.

There were, of course, anticipatory assaults upon targeted minorities before the 1915 genocide of the Armenians. One of the most infamous involved the strategy of the advisors to the Russian tsars - men such as Konstantin Pobedonostsev (1827-1907) - to divert the masses' attention from their miseries by incitement against the Jews. From them came the infamous tsarist formula for resolving "the Jewish problem" - one-third would be killed, one-third forced to convert, and one-third driven into exile. It is worth noting that the Russian use of attacks on the Jews as a governmental strategy, a political crime to be distinguished from the venerable sin of preaching contempt, arose in the same decade that Wilhelm Mart (1818-1904) was inventing the word "Antisemitismus" (often wrongly translated "anti-Semitism") and inventing for Jew-baiting an ideological and pseudo-scientific base.

One of the most glaring danger signals, like the use of criminal elements in a regime's police force mentioned above, is the political manipulation of religious slogans to justify the attacks. Here, in a corruptive abuse of religion, we find a major factor in creating a genocidal culture. Religious leaders have been guilty for their failure to resist wickedness, a guilt during the German Third Reich for which the Vatican and several Protestant judicatories have recently expressed remorse. Many were actually accessories, active initiators, not just unworthy and passive spectators. Orthodox priests, as well as the President of the Holy Synod, were guilty in the attacks on the Jews. Muslim mullahs earlier preached hatred of the Christian Armenians and incited mobs, as today they use the Language of Assault against "the Jews." Roman Catholic and Protestant church leaders - and not only in "Greater Germany!" - praised Hitler, saluted him, and justified his murderous policies.

The situation of the Armenian Christians - who for a millennium and a half had kept the faith, an island, as it were, in the midst of a sea of Islam - was vastly different from that of a privileged "Christendom" in Eastern and Western Europe. Nevertheless, there are stunning parallels between the sufferings of the Armenians in the midst of an Islam in spiritual decline and the sufferings of the Jews in the midst of a European Christian establishment in decline.

In the early years of this century, during the slaughter of the Christian Armenians in the midst of Islam, the massacres at Kishinev gave a sign of the impending doom of the Jews in "Christendom." The agony of the Jewish poet Hayyim Nachman Bialik's "In the City of Death" is matched by the Armenian poet Daniel Varuzhan's "The Carnage":

The command! There. In the sermon in Pilal

Rancor thrusts like the horns of a bull;

In the diligent courtyards of the mosques,

Sticks are shaped, whips are weaved

With venomous snakes.

Sabers are sharpened.(21)

The structural parallels between the lot of the Armenians in the Muslim Ottoman Empire and the status of Jews in Imperial Germany - prior to the genocides - have been finely summarized by Robert Melson in Revolution and Genocide.(22)

During the century and a half of Western Christendom's spiritual and ethical decline, the moral failure of church leadership was so patent that from time to time committed and sensitive individual Christians protested. To give but one illustration, note the words of a prominent Philadelphia Christian at the time of the Kishinev massacres (1903, 1905). Judge James G. Gordon referred to the pogrom at Kishinev as follows:

The carnage at Kishineff is Christianity's contribution to the opening history of the twentieth century of the Christian era.(23)

Yes, the slaughter at Kishineff should be met with a protest from America. The protest, however, should not go to the Czar of Russia, but to the Holy Synod, the head of the Greek Church, representing organized Christianity in Russia.

It is Christianity that is on trial, and not the government of the Czar. The Jew comes out of this carnage, as he has always come out of persecution in the past, with a character more Christian than his Christian persecutor.

The Russian barbarities concern the future status of the Jew less than the future status of Christianity.(24)

We hear similar charges levied against the established Christian churches of Germany and its allies for their wickedness during the Nazi genocide of the Jews - by individual German theologians as well as by outsiders.

How did those who verbalize "the Gospel of Love" slide into such compromise and complicity? This question has made the frontier between the Christians and the Jews the confrontation most intensely studied and debated by our theologians today. When the Christian church was a Jewish sect, using the language of one Jewish caucus against another, the religious situation may not have been pleasant - but it was not genocidal in potentiality. When in time the gentile churches began to direct language against "the Jews" that sundry Jewish religious Fraktionen in the first generations had used against each other, the bitter seed of genocidal Antisemitism was planted.(25) The language of intense fraternal debate became at that point the language of external assault.(26)

We Christians often wish, in this world of intense conflict, that we could find Muslim counterparts as ready to discuss past events and to work today for a better future as we have found some Jewish teachers to be. Our primary task within the churches, however, is not to lecture the rabbis or the mullahs about their responsibilities; what they teach and do is written in the Book of Life. Our present task is to correct the Christian preaching and teaching of contempt, especially that directed against the Jewish people and the Jewish state of Israel.

In the free society, however, we also have the obligation to help identify and suppress potentially genocidal movements. In the United Nations, we have the obligation to support the democratic governments in their efforts to suppress terrorism and to thwart regimes that sponsor the criminals.

Religious Establishments in Dissolution

The process of self-examination and correction takes us deep into the past dimension of Christian history. The task calls for a rare quality of Spirit-wrestling and intellectual radicalism.

In some circles it has become fashionable to speak of early Christian "anti-Judaism" rather than "Antisemitism," but to the victim this is a distinction without a difference. It also lifts from the churches the guilt of preaching and teaching theological Antisemitism, the closed system of rejection of the Jews that the midrashim of the church Fathers developed. The final doctrinal formulae of Christian triumphalism carried the genocidal note. In the super-sessionist scheme of the periodization of history, the "New Israel" replaces the "Old" Israel; the church replaces the Jewish people as the carrier of history; the New Covenant supersedes the Old Covenant; God is through with the Jews. A parallel scheme is found in Muslim historiography's supersession of both the Jews and the Christians. Eventually, the affirmative expression of Christian identity through witness to incarnate love was drowned out - from time to time, and especially in European Christendom in dissolution - by the negative expression of Christian identity: "At least we're not Jews!"

The second factor that transmuted the early family quarrel into potential genocide was the transition of Christian apologetic from debate in the churches to coercive civil law, enforced by the emperors' armies. Constantine (ruled 306-37 C.E.) and Justinian (ruled 527-65 C.E.) created the conditions in which heresy and treason were synonymous, the social and political climate in which internal edicts and decrees against "Jews and heretics" were routinized and cruelly enforced. (An ancient Christian church such as the Armenian, which had resisted the controls of both imperial Constantinople and imperial Rome, later suffered greatly from the same kind of prideful hostility from Muslim rulers and religious who confused imperial political power with spiritual authority.)

For a millennium and a half, right through the sixteenth-century Magisterial Reformation, with its continued commitment to political coercion of religion, this "model" for the Good Society went virtually unchanged. The new view of the relations of church and state, carrying the concept of "religious liberty"- of greatest importance to Jews and others out of step with prevailing opinions - came from two sources outside the established Protestant and Roman Catholic churches of Western Europe: the Radical Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The spiritual progeny of the Radical Reformation developed new expressions of Christian faithfulness different from religious conformity coerced by the state. The children of the Enlightenment (haskelah) dissolved "Christendom" in the name of individual freedom and left an empty public square.

By at least the 1840's, European "Christendom" was in dissolution. The established churches still kept up the facade, but they had lost the two most important elements in modern society: the intellectuals, and the proletariat. The devaluation of the union of church and state, a union that had become so subversive of both high religion and sound politics, came in different ways to the West and the East. But, in both areas, as the leaders failed and the peoples fell away from the churches, the old culture-religions often were replaced by substitute-religious loyalties and Weltanschauungen.(27) For example, a fervently energetic Ersatzreligion such as Nazism or an intellectually sophisticated ideology such as Scientific Socialism ("Marxism") was filling a space left empty by disintegrating state churches.

The last great effort to consolidate a mighty "Christendom" by combined religious and political force had been undertaken by Ferdinand and Isabella in the Iberian peninsula in the late fifteenth century. For the first time, religious hostility to the Jews was blended with racist notions of tainted Jewish blood. In the pan-Turkic or pan-Turanian creed, which had such fatal consequences for the Armenians, the dream of "ethnic cleansing" was basic. In such a belief system a "new man" was envisioned, in a vulgar secularization of the religious vision of a transformed humanity. The exponents of the new imperial creeds and programs were able to exploit cultures open to genocide, with the masses spiritually unformed and undisciplined and thus wide open to the evocation of archaic religious visions. The dream of recovering an Age of Heroes from the past - or of creating a modern "Superman" fit for a glorious future - was endemic in both Ittihadist and Nazi eschatology.

Yet, the primary genocides were "modern" - rational, cold-blooded, scientific, and linked to emancipated views of humankind, the nation, and human progress. Neither Islam nor Christendom is thereby excused, but the fact is that those who directed the Armenian genocide and the genocide of the Jews were not fervent Muslims or Christians; almost without exception, from the perspective of the traditional religions, they were case studies in marginality.(28) Talaat Pasha and Behaeddin Shakir, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler were illustrations of genealogical, social, ethnic, religious, and economic marginality. In both situations, the marginals were carriers of fervent substitute-religions that grew up and flourished in the fetid swamps of traditional religious cultures in dissolution. Their political formation for the elite of the movement even takes on the character and atmosphere of a substitute church, a free religious society.(29) Themselves children of an enlightened modernity, they played with cunning upon the ignorance and superstition of the masses. Although they themselves served other gods, they waved with fervor before the multitudes the portrayal of their movement as carrier and restorer of the traditional religion.

A low-grade popular religious situation, uneasily yoked with adventuresome forms of "spirituality" (Geistigkeit, positives Christentum) - "modern" and political - are two additional early warning signals. Although a critical mass may not yet be present, a low-level religious culture - incorporating the teaching of hatred for a minority community - lays a cultural foundation for eventual genocide.

The Authority of "Civil Religion"

In "modern" societies where traditional religious, political, and cultural restraints have disappeared, the center of final authority has shifted from the will of God to the will of the people. Occasionally, vox populi vox Dei(30) is boldly stated, but usually it is merely implicit in the pretentious claims of the rulers. Every dictator in the twentieth century has claimed to "represent . . . the will of the people" - a consideration that an old-fashioned despot ruling by divine right would have thought beneath the dignity of his office. Today, no appeal is possible from the authority of the populist sovereign, a self-made idol by popular consent.

The political misunderstanding is as dangerous to democratic behavior as the common failure to understand the depths of Christian Antisemitism and Muslim Antisemitism cum anti-Christian hatred. In traditional Muslim and Christian understandings of the Good Society, by contrast, there were transcendent norms to which appeal could be made. In the age of popular sovereignty, demagogues and dictators use plebiscites and other parliamentary tricks to confuse the public mind and obscure choices between right and wrong.(31) By idolatry of a false General Will, minorities are pressed among the options of conformity, death, or exile, while justified revolution and even resistance by freedom fighters are undercut.

By failure to distinguish political consensus reached after free, full, and informed discussion from the apparent unanimity of mobs, the difference between true and false democracy is blurred. Even if the adoption of a wrong-headed course of action is procedurally correct, the majority is without legitimacy unless public debate is significant and "loyal oppositions" are protected in the exercise of their liberties. Violations of good faith far less bloody than genocide are forbidden to majorities that honor the clue process of legitimate rule.

Unfortunately, the traditional understandings of what constitutes "legitimate" government have faded, but a replacement political theory has not yet gained general acceptance. According to the received view, a regime is "legitimate" when two conditions are met: authority has been established over a given population and area, and the regime has been recognized by a sufficient number of other governments to have diplomatic, commercial, and military viability.

These standards-set in international law at the time of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and Samuel Pufendorf (1632-94) - suited the generations when royal rulers governed by divine blessing and political continuity was broken only when a coup d'etat or biological failure terminated a royal line. These standards are profoundly dysfunctional in the age of populist movements and proportional representation, in the season of terrorist cadres, demagogic agitators, and totalitarian regimes.

A New Concept of Legitimacy in Government

Another definition of "legitimate" government must be posited by those who wish to distinguish between terrorists and freedom fighters, between legitimate government and regimes that rule by brute violence. It is not sufficient to claim that a certain regime has the support of its people. If the minorities have neither voice nor survival value, no one actually knows what "the people" are really thinking. The question is where a consensus might be found if there were open and free effort to reach an agreement in matters of public policy.(32)

Most students of the Third Reich agree that Hitler's terrorist cadre, once firmly in the saddle, could not have been unhorsed by the German people. At most a coup of military officers was possible, and even that became exceedingly doubtful once the armed forces had been infiltrated and subverted by Nazi activists. The philosopher Karl Jaspers summed up the situation very well: "Germany under the Nazi regime was a prison. The guilt of getting into it is a political guilt. Once the gates were shut, however, a prison break from within was no longer possible."(33)

This thought runs contrary, of course, to classic democratic dogmas. Following the Enlightenment, with the rise of popular sovereignty, it has long been assumed that a people deserved the government that ruled it. Thomas Jefferson's draft of "The Declaration of Independence" and Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" rested on the assumption that a tyrant who grew insufferable could be overthrown. Lenin shared with them the dogma of "the self-determination of peoples," as evident in the 1917 "Declaration of the Rights of Working and Exploited People."(34) Popular sovereignty and self-determination are - in the political thought of the last two centuries - permanently yoked, but they remain in constant tension with each other.(35)

According to the theory, if an unworthy ruler remains in place, the fault lies in the people; their civil courage is deficient. This fundamental democratic dogma - redolent with memories of the English, American, and French Revolutions and still echoing in authorized reports of Marxist revolutions - carries theoretical deficiencies and bad practical consequences. Formal "nonintervention" by the French and the British at the time of the pre-Franco Spanish Republic was justified by the slogan of "self-determination," yoked to the assumption that each regime is to be free of outside interference. In fact, the dogmas condemned the Spanish people to be whipsawed between fascist and communist terrorism. Even today a Ghadaffi or a Hussein can appeal for public sympathy against "outside interference" and claim to represent "the voice of the people" (against which no appeal is possible).

To repeat, with emphasis, a new definition of political legitimacy must be posited, if Christians are still to pray for the ruler and all citizens are to participate loyally in the political order and support a government's policies in good conscience. First, there must be channels to empower the will of the people - whether in the style of a simple democracy, a republic, or a constitutional monarchy. Second, the liberties and dignities of all loyal citizens, including groups and individuals in "the loyal opposition," must be protected. Without the second part of the equation, no regime is "legitimate." As for illegitimate governments (despotisms and dictatorships), the Christian owes only a daily prayer that the Sovereign God may speedily lift the curse of the oppressor's rule (Ps. 28:15-16; Jer. 21:12).

Again, the genocide scholar will try every government, including one's own, by two litmus tests: Is the will of the people rightly reached and applied? Are loyal minorities protected and disloyalists ("terrorists," potentially genocidal) neutered in time? Nor is it enough that citizens merely be aware of the difference between illegitimate regimes and legitimate governments.(36) They must also know that the only way dangerous fifth columns can be reduced with a minimum of violence is to catch them in time. For instance, the time to deal ruthlessly with the NSDAP and suppress it utterly was 1923, when a few hundred traitors followed Hitler and Ludendorff in an attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic. They had already murdered several hundred political opponents. By the time of the Enabling Act - 1933, with terror daily walking the streets - it was too late to stop them. Kristallnacht (November 9-11, 1938), when the Nazi regime flaunted its contempt for world opinion, was much too late. Timing - this, too, is one of the basic lessons from study of past genocides - is of the essence.

A legitimate government, loyal to the reflective will of the people and caring of the liberty, dignity, and integrity of every loyal citizen, is still a relatively rare achievement in this world. Well over half the governments represented in the United Nations Assembly even today are old-fashioned despotisms or modern dictatorships - all too frequently equipped with a low-grade or dissolving traditional religion or armed with some newly fashioned ideology to justify actions that are potentially or actually genocidal. Just as fatal, the will of peoples to resist evil can be broken by the assertion of some offspring of "modernity," some exponent of "civil religion," that a Hitler or a Stalin "speaks for the people" (against which no appeal can be contemplated). Thus, "civil religion" may be as dangerous a trap as the more overt substitute religions.

Breaking the "Apostolic Succession" of Evil

We return to the Christian concept of an "apostolic succession" from the primitive church to the present. The Latin church has come to identify the succession with the laying on of hands. The Eastern churches generally identify the succession with those who expound Orthodox doctrine and cultic practice. The Lutherans and Calvinists identify the succession with the sound preaching of the Word. Members of Free Churches, such as the Mennonites and Baptists, identify the true succession with successive generations of "house churches" "where two or three are gathered together," Mt. 18:20 - since the time of the Apostles.

What has frequently been overlooked, however, is the truth that there is a Satanic "apostolic succession" of Evil, going back to the earliest challenges to the Divine purpose and will. Abdul-Hamid, the first mass murderer of Armenians in the modern period, is said to have admired the tsars' measures to rid themselves of the Jewish "threat." When some of Hitler's advisors were

nervous about his plans for the invasion of Poland in the late summer of 1939, the Fuhrer responded with the now well-known rhetorical flourish: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"(37) This contempt for the victims did not spring suddenly to the mind of the Fuhrer as an accidental literary phrase. Professor Vahakn Dadrian and other scholars have shown that Hitler's wilful genocide of the Jews had clear antecedents in the earlier genocide.(38) Indeed, some of the same men who helped run the Ottoman Turkish armies during World War I were later to hold key positions in the German Third Reich.(39)

There was, of course, an early case in the succession, or perhaps a precedent to the succession, since the scientific aspects of the assaults were not then so well thought out. This type continues to flourish to the present day in several parts of the globe. The ruler who introduced the use of mass murder of the Armenians in 1894-96, in part as a way to divert public attention from the basic corruption in his regime, admired the way the tsar was using the assault on the Jews as a diversionary tactic.

When genocide reached its full tide, however, the policy was no longer a direct expression of religious prejudice (low-grade religion), no longer a simple diversionary strategy (low-grade politics). It was "modern": well-planned, rationalized, and systematically carried out according to the planning, supervision, guidance, and instructions of thinking persons. Once a precedent had been set, the crime could be imitated, improved in detail, and finally openly discussed as an alternative policy option. The latter stage is being played out in the ruins of Yugoslavia today,(40) a posthumous victory for Adolf Hitler.

Even the stages of denial signal the nature of the problems. Denial of the genocide of the Armenians is still vigorous.(41) It has continued even after the collapse of the Sultan's empire, even after the imperial dreams of the Young Turks were replaced by Nationalist regimes, even after some of the major Turkish criminals were punished by military tribunals.(42) Denial, accompanied by political pressure, has crippled any adequate treatment of the genocide of the Armenians by sections and subsidiaries of the United Nations.(43) In 1982 such politics seriously threatened the gathering in Tel Aviv of an International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide.(44) By contrast, overt denial of the genocide of the Jews is now limited to the educationally backward and politically regressive.(45)

Denial of the true character of terrorist, potentially genocidal movements is still widespread, as most of the commentaries on the bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Argentina and the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City clearly demonstrate. Terrorist strikes are still being discussed as individual enterprises rather than a style of warfare chosen by alienated communities, and no distinction is being made between illegitimate regimes (which deserve such acts of resistance) and legitimate governments (which are entitled to suppress them).

Our task as citizens is to help move our governments out of the posture of denial. One of our tasks as intellectuals, using the metaphor of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45), a Christian martyr to Nazism, is to throw a hammer into the spokes of the genocidal wheel when the opportunity presents itself.

A most pressing political and religious task for all of us is to drive forward toward the clay when genocide - always a sin, and now recognized as a crime will be punished predictably and consistently, with penalties proportional to its monstrous wickedness. Alongside this task is the urgent need to develop legal measures and technical skills to suppress potentially genocidal groups according to due process of law - and in time.

A final word: The temptation to claim to be "above politics" is again strong in the old universities, and academics are under constant psychological and economic pressure to stand aside when powerful political and corporate combines assault the weak and defenseless at home or abroad. In the moment of temptation to passivity, let us remember that, before we were professors, researchers, and Ph.D.'s, we were human persons. In the end we shall be called to answer for the humanity (Menschlichkeit) of our responses.

1 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 30.

2 Winfried Baumgart, "Zur Ansprache Hitlers vor den Fuhrern der Wehrmacht am 22. Aug. 1939," in Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte, vol. 16, no. 2 (1968), pp. 120-149; also vol. 19, no. 3 (1971), pp. 294-304.

3 For a fine, recent comparison of the Armenian and the Jewish experiences of genocide, see Rubina Peroomian, Literary Responses to Catastrophe (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1993).

4 Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: New American Library, 1950), p. 10.

5 Augustine, Confessions, tr. John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday, 1960), Book XI, chaps. XI and XX.

6 From an address on April 23, 1975, at a conference in the education building of the cathedral of the Armenian Church of America.

7 See the brilliant essay by Andre Neher, "Silence and Being: Elie Wiesel," in his The Exile of the Word: From the Silence of the Bible to the Silence of Auschwitz, tr. David Baisel (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), pp. 210-226.

8 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. 80.

9 Ibid., p. 79.

10 Paraphrase of sections in the Genocide Convention; see, e.g., "Genocide Convention," in Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1972), vol. 7, col. 410.

11 The Institute for the Study of Genocide was founded at John Jay College of the City University of New York and is led by one of the pioneers in the field, Dr. Helen Fein. In the issue of the Newsletter to which we refer, the editor interviews another of the well-known American students of genocide, Alison Des Forges. At the time of the interview Dr. Des Forges, Adjunct in the History Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo, had made four trips as head of an investigatory commission to Rwanda and Burundi in an investigation supported by Human Rights Watch.

12 Newsletter (ISG), No. 13 (Fall, 1994), pp. 1-2. The newsletter is sent to members of the Institute for the Study of Genocide, John Jay College (City College of New York), 899 Tenth Avenue (#623), New York, NY 10019.

13 A recent article along these lines was my "Essay: Early Warning," published in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 3, no. 4 (1988), pp. 483-490.

14 Franklin H. Littell, Wild Tongues (New York: Macmillan Co., 1969). For a recent elaboration, see my "Creating an Early Warning System: The 20th Century Confrontation with Terrorist Movements," the 1996 Ida E. King Lecture at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey (November 7, 1996), Working Paper 4 in the College's Holocaust Resource Center (24 pp., mimeographed, bound). Also see "Toward a Genocide Early Warning System," in Israel W. Charny and Chanan Rapaport, How Can We Commit the Unthinkable? Genocide: the Human Cancer (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), chap. 13.

15 Littell, Wild Tongues, pp. 72-92.

16 Ibid., pp. 93-112.

17 The distinction between acts of violence attributable to individuals acting at will and acts of violence flowing inexorably from the ideology and discipline of terrorist movements in which the individual foot-soldier is but a pawn has so far escaped the attention of many democratic governments. The initial response to the assault on the Federal Building in Oklahoma City - an attack that occurred while most foreign registrants were en route to the Yerevan Conference - clearly showed the confusion. The instinctive response of the administration in Washington was to treat the problem as a crime by individuals, the solution being to expand greatly the powers and prerogatives of the executive branch in controlling the citizens. What is in fact wanting is action by the legislative branch to enact laws and procedures of due process to confront and inhibit disloyal networks and movements. One illustration of how a democratic government can begin to defend itself and the liberties of loyal citizens from the assaults of terrorists is the Bundeszentrale fur Verfassungsschutz. Set up under the parliament of the German Federal Republic, the center and its staff have developed a process that, with proper safeguards, sharply inhibits the growth of groups disloyal to the constitution (Grundgesetz) and dangerous to the liberties of loyal citizens ("verfassungswidrig").

18 The Genocide Convention permits nations to ignore national boundaries in combatting and suppressing genocidal acts, which is one of the major reasons the U.S. Senate was so slow in ratifying the Convention.

19 Article on Max Nordau (Simon Maximilian Sudfeld, 1849-1923), in Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing, 1972), vol. 12, col. 1213.

20 For thirteen common characteristics of the Armenian and Jewish genocides, see Franklin H. Littell, "Holocaust and Genocide: The Essential Dialectic," Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (1987), pp. 98-99.

21 Cited in Peroomian, Literary Responses, p. 80.

22 Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Part I, pp. 41-135.

23 Cited in Cyrus Adler, ed., The Voice of America on Kishineff (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1904), p. 159.

24 Ibid., p. 161.

25 On Christendom's development of the three levels of Christian Antisemitism (theological, cultural, political), see Franklin H. Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews (Mercer, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986; paper ed. of orig.: Harper & Row, 1975).

26 The difference between the Language of Assault and the Language of Dialogue is so fundamental that only a clever lawyer can blur the distinction. See my essay, "The Language of Assault vs. the Language of Dialogue," Christian Ethics Today 4 (December, 1995): 23-24.

27 See Hans Buchheim, Glaubenskrise im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1953); Uriel Tal, "Nazism as a 'Political Faith,'" The Jerusalem Quarterly 15 (Spring, 1980): 71-89; and idem, "Forms of Pseudo-Religion in the German Kulturbereich prior to the Holocaust," Immanuel, no. 3 (Winter, 1973/74), pp. 68-73.

28 A point well made in Mary Mangigian Tarzian's The Armenian Minority Problem: 1914-1934 - A Nation's Struggle for Security, University of Pennsylvania Armenian Texts and Studies (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1992), pp. 48-49. E.g., Talaat Pasha was descended from the sectarian movement around Shabtai Zvi; Hitler was a Viennese street person who gained German citizenship through a back-door action by the City of Braunschweig. The factor of genealogical, ethnic, social, psychological, and educational marginality in the Pan-Turanist and Nazi elites has been well presented by R. Hrair Dekmejian in "Determinants of Genocide: Armenians and Jews as Case Studies," in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ, and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1986), pp. 92-94.

29 This "spiritual" aspect of the totalitarian "political party" has been well discussed by Florence Mazian in Why Genocide? The Armenian and Jewish Experiences in Perspective (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1990), chaps. 3 and 9.

30 As on the frieze of the City Hall in Jersey City, New Jersey.

31 According to Jacob Talmon, in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1952), the tracks between true democracy and false democracy separated following the French Revolution.

32 On the vital importance of loyal oppositions to achieving a genuine consensus in democratic government, see A. D. Lindsay, The Essentials of Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929), pp. 45-47.

33 Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, tr. E. B. Ashton (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961 [orig.: Die Schuldfrage, 1947]), p. 82.

34 On how Lenin's touching faith in "the self-determination of peoples" actually worked out for the Armenians, see Tarzian, Armenian Minority Problem, pp. 195-197.

35 Ibid., p. 245.

36 To distinguish between terrorists and freedom fighters is also imperative. In the Armenian situation in 1915-21, the distinctions can be made rather precisely. Neither the regime of the old order nor the regime of the Young Turks was legitimate. The action of Soghomon Tehlirian, who killed Talaat Pasha - an escaped but condemned criminal - in Berlin, was not an act of terrorism. See Edward Alexander, A Crime of Vengeance (New York: Free Press, 1991), for the narrative. Whether later assassinations of Turkish officials by Armenian patriots were acts of terrorism or legitimate acts of resistance by freedom fighters depends upon whether or not the later government of Turkey fulfills the definition of a legitimate government.

37 Cited in Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (London: Collier Macmillan Publishers; New York: Free Press, 1979), p. 4, from Louis Lochner, What about Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1942), p. 2.

38 On the linkage of the idea of modern nationality with ethnic homogeneity in Ittihadist thought, see Vahakn N. Dadrian, "Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Armenian Case and Its Contemporary Legal Ramifications," Yale Journal of International Law 14 (Summer, 1989): 252-255.

39 See Littell, "Holocaust and Genocide," pp. 97-98.

40 On the role of debased journalism, see Paul Mojzes, Yugoslavian Inferno (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 54-55; on the component of debased religion, see pp. 125-126; on the populist stance of the politicians, see pp. 156-157.

41 For a recent expose of the politics of the denial of the genocide of the Armenians, see Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert J. Lifton, "Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide," Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 9, no. 1 (1995), pp. 1-22, with substantial footnotes on the documentary evidence in American, British, and German archives, as well as Armenian and Turkish records.

42 John S. Kirakossian, The Armenian Genocide (Madison, CT: Sphinx Press, 1992), tr. Shushan Altunian from the 1983 Russian ed., chap. 9.

43 Richard G. Hovannisian, "The Armenian Genocide and Patterns of Denial," in Hovannisian, Armenian Genocide in Perspective, p. 127. On the patterns of official denial, in addition to this article, see chapters by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, "What Genocide? What Holocaust? News from Turkey, 1915-1923: A Case Study," pp. 97-109; and Vigen Guroian, "Collective Responsibility and Official Excuse Making: The Case of the Turkish Genocide of the Armenians, pp. 135-152. See also Roger W. Smith, "Genocide and Denial: The Armenian Case and Its Implications," Armenian Review, vol. 41, no. 1 (1989), pp. 1-38; on the U.S. government's role in denial, see pp. 20-24.

44 News items were carried in the New York Times in 1982 on June 3 (p. 1), June 4 (p. 10), June 5 (p. 3), and June 22 (p. 4). See especially the narrative published by the convener of the conference, Prof. Israel Charny: Israel W. Charny and Shamai Davidson, eds., The Book of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide (Tel Aviv: The Institute on Holocaust and Genocide, 1983), pp. 270-315.

45 See Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1993). For an early and detailed summary of the political and ecclesiastical network behind denial of the genocide of the Jews, see Franklin H. Littell, "A Report on 'Historical Revisionism,'" in Report of the 1981 International Council Meeting (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1982), pp. 39-58.

Franklin H. Littell (United Methodist) is the Ida E. King Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona, NJ. An Emeritus Professor of Religion at Temple University, he was Adjunct Professor in the Institute of Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1973-93. His B.A. is from Cornell College, Mt. Vernon, IA; his S.T.M. from Union Theological Seminary (New York); and his Ph.D. (1946) from Yale University. He served for nearly a decade in the American occupation of postwar Germany; in 1959, he was awarded the Grosse Verdienstkreuz (1st class) for his contribution to American-German reconciliation. In 1996, he received the annual Buber-Rosenzweig medal from the German Council of Christians and Jews. He co-founded the Annual Scholars' Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches in 1970, and he founded the oldest U.S. interfaith Holocaust education center in 1975 (now the Philadelphia Center on the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights). A founding member of the Association of Genocide Scholars, he was the first Christian appointed by the Israeli cabinet to the International Council of Yad Vashem. From 1978 till the opening of its Museum in 1993, he was a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, by Presidential appointment. A charter associate editor of J.E.S., he is a prolific author of books, book chapters, and journal articles.