A. Clare BRANDABUR
Review of Ward Churchill's A Little Matter
of Genocide
Steven TOTOSY de ZEPETNEK
Memories of Hungary:
A Review Article of New Books by Suleiman and Teleky
Review of Ward Churchill <http://www.neutral.com/11p/polabuse/0147.html>, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present. San Francisco: City Lights Books <http://www.citylights.com>, 1997.
1. Ward Churchill is a Keetoowah Cherokee and Professor of American Indian Studies with the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and has been a leader of the Colorado Chapter of the American Indian Movement since 1972. A Little Matter of Genocide is an achievement of staggering scholarship. The book is dedicated to Polish-American jurist Raphael Lemkin, whose comprehensive definition of genocide, ultimately incorporated into the UN Resolution on Genocide, was rejected (in part at least because he was Jewish and spoke with a foreign accent, I believe) by Democrat and Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in their deliberations in 1948. The title of the book is taken from a statement by Russell Means <http://www.russellmeans.com/med.html>, leader of the American Indian Movement, who spoke of "a little matter of genocide right here at home," by which he meant the ongoing genocide against all the Native peoples of the Western hemisphere including the American Indians which is still in progress.
2. The purpose of this book is to achieve an understanding of genocide which will enable the global human community to call past genocides by their right names, to stop genocides now in progress and to prevent future genocides. Starting from the staggering facts of the genocide, still in progress, against his own Native American people, Churchill relates the history of genocide and the struggle for a definition of the term sufficiently accurate and comprehensive, to prevent the watering down of the concept, and to cut through the misleading rhetoric which now obfuscates debate, thereby permitting this and other genocides to continue:
"During the four centuries spanning the time between 1492, when Christopher Columbus first set foot on the 'New World' of a Caribbean beach and 1892, when the U.S. Census Bureau concluded that there were fewer than a quarter-million indigenous people surviving within the country's boundaries, a hemispheric population estimated to have been as great as 125 million was reduced by something over 90 percent. The people had died in their millions of being hacked apart with axes and swords, buried alive and trampled under horses, hunted as game and fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped for bounty, hanged on meathooks and thrown over the sides of ships at sea, worked to death as slave labourers, intentionally starved and frozen to death during a multitude of forced marches and internments, and, in an unknown number of instances, deliberately infected with epidemic diseases." (1)
2. Later he concludes, "All told, it is probable that more than one hundred million native people were 'eliminated' in the course of Europe's ongoing 'civilization' of the western hemisphere" (86). Yet this ghastly history is denied, suppressed, minimized, or even celebrated by deniers of what Ward Churchill calls the American holocaust. The director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, in collaboration with the US Senate, during preparations for the 1992 celebration of Columbus Day, refused to fund any film production which proposed to use the word "genocide" to explain the liquidation of Native Americans. Charles Krauthamer used one of his Time Magazine columns (27 May 1991) to claim that the extermination of Native Americans was entirely justified because it wiped out "barbarisms" like the Inca community (notwithstanding that pre-Colombian Inca art has been compared favourably with the achievements of classical Greece), e.g., by Malcolm Billings in a recent BBC Heritage episode on Central America). Arthur Schlesinger, Churchill continues, is paraphrased by David Stannard as asserting that without the European conquests and slaughter, at least some New World societies today would be sufficiently unpleasant places to live so as to make acceptable the centuries of genocide that were carried out against the Native peoples of the entire Western Hemisphere (4).
3. From denials of the American holocaust, Churchill moves to a consideration of the Nazi program against Poles, Jews, Gypsies, Slovenes, and Serbs: "Between 1938 and 1945, Poland, the first Slavic nation to fall to the Germans, suffered 6,028,000 nonmilitary deaths, about 22 percent population reduction. (Three million of the Polish dead were Jews, and another 200,000 or so Gypsies, so the Slavic reduction would come to about 14 percent). ... Virtually every member of the Polish intelligentsia was murdered" (47-49). More horrendous statistics are cited by the author, for instance, the USSR suffered terrible losses:
"by May 10, 1943, the Germans had taken 5,405,616 Soviet military prisoners; of these, around 3.5 million were starved, frozen, shot, gassed, hanged, killed by unchecked epidemics, or simply worked to death [the pre-war population of the Ukraine, Churchill says, was reduced by the time the Germans were finally driven out in 1944, by about 14.5 million, of these at least 7 million were dead]. The Soviet Union lost a minimum of 11 million civilians to Nazi extermination measures, perhaps as many as 15 million, plus another 3.5. million exterminated as prisoners of war, in addition to perhaps a million troops executed by Wehrmacht and Waffen SS units rather than being taken prisoners." (48)
4. In spite of the exhaustive documentation for mass extermination in the American holocaust and the obvious inclusion of Slavs, Gypsies, Ukrainians and others besides Jews in the German extermination program, there are still those who deny that the term "genocide" applies to Native Americans, and they are the same in some instances as those who deny that the term "genocide" can be applied to any group other than the European Jews. Churchill explains this as follows: "But preposterous as some of the argumentation has become, all of it is outstripped by a substantial component of Zionism which contends not only that the American holocaust never happened, but that no "true" genocide has ever occurred, other than the Holocaust suffered by the Jews at the hands of the Nazis during the first half of the 1940s" (7). In a very closely reasoned discussion, Churchill shows that there is a close relationship between those who deny the historicity of genocide against the Jews under Hitler's Germany -- a fact of history which Churchill, like Edward Said for instance, regards as established -- and those who claim that atrocity was and remains the only holocaust to which the term applies: these two positions are two sides of the same coin in Churchill's view. Both positions falsify the whole subject and make objective discussion impossible. Reviewing the public statements of "deniers" and "exclusivists," Churchill asks what motive lies behind these patently false positions. The exclusivists, he says, have an agenda of establishing a "truth" which serves to compel permanent maintenance of the privileged political status of Israel, "the Jewish state established on Arab land in 1947 as an act of international atonement for the Holocaust. ... and to construct a conceptual screen behind which to hide the realities of Israel's ongoing genocide against the Palestinian population whose right and property were usurped in its very creation" (74). But why, Churchill asks, do intellectuals and public figures in the rest of the world buy into such a "thoroughly dishonest enterprise?" He analyses the confluence of interest which he believes explains at least some of this collusion: by seeming to accept "exclusivism", i.e., by seeming to believe that only the Jewish people have ever been the victims of genocide, these other interests gain automatic exemption from coming to grips with various unpleasant skeletons in their own closets. Turkey and Israel, for example, have an unholy alliance: Turkey will piously agree that only the Jewish people have suffered true genocide, in return for Israel's looking the other way from genocide in the past -- against the Armenians -- and genocide in the present against the Kurds. The US can entertain itself with Hollywood dramatizations of the Diary of Anne Frank and repeated screenings of the Shoah -- their importance and horror nothwithstanding -- yet and while carrying on with the nuclear pollution of Native American lands and the continuing impoverishment and deracination of the Indian people, meanwhile avoiding the genocidal character of its Korean and Viet Nam adventures. Germany can piously distance itself from its Hitlerian past, paying reparations to Jewish survivors, while continuing the active persecution and ghettoization of its Gypsy population without the unpleasant admission that they too are Holocaust survivors. Churchill throws light on the American Revolution and on the Cold War as he pursues the subject of genocide: the colonists opposed England in the years leading up to 1776, he points out, not just over the issue of taxation without representation as we have been taught, but because the Mother Country, engaged in conflicts in Europe, was trying to sign peace treaties with local Indian tribes and cut its losses, while the settlers still wished to expand into "free land" just like the Jewish/American settlers greedy for the "free land" in the West Bank and Gaza today. And US refusal to accept the "communistic" plan of a world-wide structure designed to settle international conflict in non-violent ways, sought instead to impose a "world order" through the attainment of the very kind of unassailable military ascendancy -- and consequent global politico-economic dominance -- for the US that Hitler had earlier desired for Germany. Contrary to what now passes as "responsible" analysis in US scholarship, Churchill concludes, this bellicosity was not an "outgrowth" of the Cold War. Rather, as Noam Chomsky has argued, it was the cause of it . In his penultimate chapter, Churchill provides a review of the literature on genocide and traces the history of the UN Convention on Genocide, showing how Raphael Lemkin fought for a comprehensive definition which was repeatedly gutted by the great powers. Initially, Lemkin's formulation served as a basis for the Nuremberg Trials of 1946, but when it was submitted to the Council on the Progressive Development and Codification of International Law in June 1947, it immediately stalled, member states "backsliding" into older positions (408), much as Israel and the US recently resisted the attempt in Rome to form a World Court which would declare settlements on occupied land to be a war crime.
5. In his final chapter, Churchill offers an amended Genocide Convention which refines and elaborates that pioneered by Raphael Lemkin who had left Poland in 1939 and was working out of Yale and Duke University in the US and who developed an admirably comprehensive description of genocide in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944). Unlike many of the narrower definitions which restrict the idea of genocide to the physical annihilation of an entire group, Lemkin conceived of genocide as any "coordinated and planned annihilation of a national, religious, or racial group by a variety of actions aimed at undermining the foundations essential to the survival of the group as a group." This idea of genocide included attacks on political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of the group. Even non-lethal acts that undermined the liberty, dignity, and personal security of members of a group constituted genocide, if they contributed to weakening the viability of the group, Churchill explains (407-08). Churchill presents this definition under the following title: "Proposed Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide," fully elaborated in the format used for legal instruments in the United Nations, in the hope that it may serve as the basis for serious discussion of this crime which stands like a dark shadow at the heart of human history and without an understanding of which the human race may be unable to achieve a peaceful and stable future.
6. The book contains an extensive bibliography and an index. The latter should be improved if a future edition is planned: several entries for individual authors are incomplete, e.g., only four citations are listed for Chomsky, whereas I have counted at least nine others in the text.
Reviewer's Profile: A. Clare Brandabur works in archetypal criticism and mythology, contemporary Arabic literature, post-colonial criticism, feminism, and human rights issues, Department of English, Yarmouk University, Jordan. Her recent work includes studies on images of women in postcolonial novels, George Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Yeats, and Yasar Kemal. She has published her work in English and Arabic.
Memories of Hungary: A Review Article of New Books by Suleiman and Teleky
1. Memoir writing of the most varied types and persuasions have become a prominent genre in Central and East Central Europe after the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989, attracting a large and varied readership. While many if not all of these memoirs are personal recollections as the genre demands, there are some which are more than descriptions of lives and views. Especially those texts which are published in translation or written and published by authors who are residing outside Hungary, are of a nature that takes into account the reader's unfamiliarity with matters Hungarian. Thus, these types of memoirs serve the purpose of cultural reading. Memoir writing of such cultural reading is, for example, where the rediscovery of the author's cultural heritage is connected with personal history. Owing to its language as well as history, Hungary is one of the quintessential "Other" cultures of Europe and this Otherness is stereotypical and historically and linguistically determined. It is in this context of cultural reading, personal history, and Otherness that I have read Susan Rubin Suleiman's Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Hardcover, 232 pages) and Richard Teleky's Hungarian Rhapsodies: Essays on Ethnicity, Identity and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997. Softcover, 217 pages).
2. Both Suleiman and Teleky describe their re-discovery of their "roots," familial and cultural, one Jewish Hungarian, the other Protestant Hungarian; both are intellectuals: the former a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Harvard, the latter an editor and director of York University's Writing Program in Toronto. What binds them together, apart from the personal and familial, is their emotional as well as intellectual interest in Hungarian culture. Memoirs by exile and refugee Hungarians have been a frequent type of writing in Hungarian letters, obviously owing to the frequent exodus from a country habitually undergoing foreign invasions. Examples are many, from Prince Rákóczi's (rebel against the Habsburgs) or Count Benyovszky's (king of Madagascar) to the numerous memoirs of refugees after the 1848 Revolution against Habsburg domination and Tsarist intervention and the memoirs by refugees from the White Terror and Admiral Horthy's semi-fascist regime between the two World Wars. The largest exodus of Hungarians occurred after the Second World War and after the 1956 Revolution against Soviet and Communist domination of the country. The memoirs of this more recent period of Hungarian history are particularly important because these texts published abroad -- mainly in English, German, and French -- in most cases are of a structure combining personal experiences with cultural descriptions and explanations, explicitly or implicitly and obviously in response to the problem of "Otherness" of Hungarians in Western cultures and languages. Perhaps the most important of these memoirs is George Faludy's My Happy Days in Hell (1962). Faludy described his experiences in a Hungarian Communist concentration camp and it is as good as Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago published later. Among English-language memoirs describing the double and/or consecutive rape of Hungary, George Gabori's When Evils Were Most Free (1982) is notable, although there are of course also many fictionalized autobiographies such as Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women: The Amorous Recollections of András Vajda (1965) or Béla Szabados's In Light of Chaos (1990). However, these memoirs about the post-IInd World War period and others describing the semi-fascist Interwar period eventually culminating in the mass killing of Hungarian Jews upon the German invasion of Hungary in 1944 and the memoirs about the Soviet Communist oppression up to 1956 (or 1968, depending on one's political sensitivities), Suleiman's and Teleky's memoirs are exceptional because they are written by "second-generation Hungarians." Both authors are "Hungarian" in the sense that they severed for decades any interest in matters Hungarian, language or culture. Suleiman fled Hungary in 1949 as a ten year old and returned there first in the 1980s for shorter visits and for an extended period after the 1989 Changes and Teleky, although not born in Hungary, learned Hungarian as an adult. Both authors intended to re-discover their Hungarian background as adults: thus the designation of "second-generation Hungarians."
3. Suleiman's book title is intriguing: Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook and it is similar to Tibor Fischer's (another second-generation Hungarian) Under the Frog (1992, Betty Trask Award of 1992 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993), in that it contains a translation from the Hungarian. Fischer's un-English Under the Frog is a translation of the Hungarian phrase describing when one is in bad circumstances (as in quality of life): a béka segge alatt ("under the arse of a frog"). Suleiman's Motherbook is a translation of anyakönyv, the official name of one's birth certificate in Hungary and a term laden with references of nostalgia and patriotism in Hungarian literature and even in general discourse. Thus, the title of the book sets the scene, the author's search and re-discovery of her Hungarian background and history. In the first chapter, "Prologue: Forgetting Budapest," Suleiman describes her escape from Hungary as a ten year old, in the last months when the border was still open to Czechoslovakia. After stops in Košice and Bratislava -- Kassa and Pozsony, respectively; Hungarian cities before 1919 -- the Rubin family of three arrived in Vienna, free. The author then earned a profession and her life with clear distance to her ethnic background in the American melting pot. Although with a brief interest in Hungary during the 1956 Revolution and its aftermath of Hungarian refugees in the United States, it is only in the early 1980s -- upon the illness of her mother, her own divorce and raising of two sons -- that Zsuzsa (the Hungarian version of her name) again takes to Hungary and her unresolved past. After the 1989 Changes, she is invited to Budapest as a guest professor and she spends an extended period in Hungary. In Budapest -- and it is in these chapters where the cultural reading I am interested in is written -- Suleiman immerses herself in the intellectual life of scholars, writers, and artists and makes many interesting observations. Her descriptions of life and letters in Budapest is valuable for the North American reader because it is the description of something that does not exist in North America and even in Western European cities it is at best only somewhat similar: it is specifically an East Central European situation. In her descriptions, Suleiman changed names but there are some personalities described who are easily recognizable. Among the many interesting aspects of East Central European and, within that, specifically Hungarian scenes, situations, and cultural specifics, some may be of particular interest to the North American reader. For example, descriptions and references to the situation of feminism and women runs throughout the book and it reminds me of a situation I was in when giving a paper using feminist criticism at a Hungarian Studies conference in 1991 and where both men and women in the audience attacked my paper saying that feminism is nonsense and inappropriate for the situation in Hungary. Evidently, not much changed in the few years since: Hungary is and remains a profoundly patriarchal society. Another theme in the book is the situation of Jews in Hungary. Suleiman describes the situation with some accuracy and when I was a guest professor in Hungary in 1995 I too found that in Hungary one is either a "Jew-friend" or one is an anti-Semite, there is no inbetween. Interestingly, there is one instance where Suleiman falls prey to that most Hungarian feature, cultural nationalism. In Suleiman's case this could perhaps be better described in terms of enthusiasm and over-valuation of things Hungarian: "I felt elated by the beauty of the city. 'It really is a great capital; it really can be compared to Paris.' I told myself as the cable car rose above the river." Well, yes, Budapest is a beautiful city, indeed, but in my opinion and despite the often repeated comparison to Paris it was never like Paris or Vienna and it is not comparable to them today either. Overall, the book is a good read for anyone interested in an "Other" culture and for those who know Hungary and Hungarians, the book is serious pleasure!
4. Richard Teleky's book -- in the context of my proposed cultural reading -- contains a wider range of matter than that of Susan Suleiman. Perhaps the larger range explains some of the mistakes the author incurred in the book. For example, I hate to disappoint the author but his surname or family are in no manner connected to one of Hungary's most prominent aristocratic families, the Count Teleki-s. There are a good number of Teleki as well as Teleky families who are either originally of such surname or have changed their name during various periods of "magyarization" -- when foreign nationals and Hungarian Jews were forced or "encouraged" to take a Hungarian surname -- in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Teleky's book covers a good and digestible chunk of matters Hungarian culture. What is novel and interesting in his book is that he obviously aimed at and achieved focus on such cultural matter which either has some connection to outside Hungary (meaning Western Europe and North America) or has become in some ways general cultural property such as the photograph André Kertész, "Central European Literature in Translation," Hollywood's Joe Eszterhas, or the contemporary "postmodern" Péter Esterházy or Péter Nádas whose books are available in English. Similarly to Suleiman, Teleky begins his book with a personal account of his Hungarian background and how he came to be interested in the language of his parents to the point of taking lessons and learning it as an adult. The second part of the book consists of Teleky's experiences over several visits to Hungary after the Changes in 1989. In his descriptions, Teleky at times demonstrates curious unfamiliarity with Hungarian culture and history. For example, he writes that he was puzzled that a Jewish man he meets bears the surname "Tóth" ("Slovak" in Hungarian translation, thus a common name reflecting on the ethnic background of its bearer) despite the fact that it is not a Jewish name (why, practically all Hungarian Jews have Hungarian names!). Dissimilar to Suleiman, it appears that Teleky came into contact with a larger segment of Hungarian life in Budapest than Suleiman and thus his descriptions and analyses are more complete and culturally wider ranging. Teleky, of Protestant cultural background and for obvious reasons when compared with the trauma Suleiman experienced, has less to say about the Jewish question in Hungary. On the other hand, he touches on new territory in Hungary, such as ethnicity in Hungary, the problem of Hungarian ethnicity in exile and his personal stand on these issues.
5. Both books are valuable, even indispensable, texts in any North American library, public or college, because they present personalized history and because they present contemporary Hungary in such a way that the country's culture becomes alive and less "foreign."
Reviewer's Profile: Steven Totosy de Zepetnek <http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/totosycv.html> works in comparative literature and culture and has published articles and books widely on both sides of the Atlantic. His work also appeared in translation in German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish, Greek, and Mandarin. His most recent book is Comparative Literature: Theory, Method, Application (Rodopi <http://www.rodopi.nl>, 1998) and he is now working on new projects icluding contemporary Central European culture, a theoretical framework for comparative cultural studies, etc. E-mail: <clcweb@purdue.edu>.
Note: A previous version of this review is published in Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies 44.2 (1998): 455-59.