In its belated observance of a first Holocaust Memorial Day in January, the British Government were at pains to acknowledge some of the other genocides of recent history - Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia. Looking further back, one could add the millions who died in the slave trade, or the decimation of the populations of central and south America.
Freud, whose four elderly sisters died in concentration camps, might have agreed with this aim to generalise the Jewish experience. Not only because his tendency was to generalise and make connections, but because he felt that the Jewish sense of 'specialness' was a dangerous illusion.
In Moses and Monotheism (1937) Freud argues that the idea of a single God, taken over from an earlier Pharaoic religion, was "preserved by them as a precious possession and, in turn, itself kept them alive by giving them pride in being a chosen people". In modern psychoanalytic parlance we would say that the ideology served as a 'good internal object' that nurtured and sustained the people who adhered to it.
He goes on to explain how the Jewish people "enraptured by the possession of the truth, overwhelmed by the consciousness of being chosen, came to have a high opinion of what is intellectual and to lay stress on what is moral; and how their melancholy destinies and their disappointments in reality served only to intensify all these trends." Thus Freud would have been wary to identify the Holocaust as a unique experience.
Had Freud lived through the war I think he might have changed his mind. There was something unique about the Holocaust which was identified by the early psychoanalytic investigators after the war, but is perhaps still difficult to acknowledge. Cambodia was not a 'genocide', any more than Stalin's purges. The slave trade was a business. The Aztec and other populations were slaughtered by a conquering army. Rwanda still seems like a crowd run amok, stirred to a frenzy by political leaders. All these things make a perverted 'sense'.
The Holocaust was different. It happened in the most advanced and cultured society in Europe, it required the participation of millions of people in an organised bureaucratic machine, it was pursued vigorously when it made no economic, political or military sense, and it was directed to a specific group of people identified as a 'race'. The Holocaust is unique because it could have been you or I as one of the millions of ordinary Germans who became the 'willing executioners', committing these atrocities or simply standing by and letting it happen. In 'Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego' Freud used the church and army as two examples of how a group mind is formed which blindly follows the dictates of a leader or 'leading idea'. How easy it must have been to fall in with the crowd, to believe the propaganda, to keep your head down. How difficult to retain what we like to call our 'humanity'.
| That is why today, as I write this,
I feel it appropriate when I read the headline
ISRAELI ARMY DESERTED BY SOLDIERS WITH A CONSCIENCE. It highlights the news that the Israeli army has been hit by an unprecedented wave of disobedience. Many are refusing to go to the West Bank and the Gaza strip; more are dodging military service. "I don't want to be in a position where I might have to shoot and kill people who are throwing stones" said one soldier simply. What better memorial to the Holocaust could there be than the actions of these Israeli soldiers? By refusing to shoot on command they sound the death knell to the casual excuse for moral bankruptcy which has been used to justify barbarity and bureaucracy in equal measure. The seductive lie: 'I WAS ONLY FOLLOWING ORDERS'. |
 |
Holocaust Memorial Day 2003 http://www.holocaustmemorialday.gov.uk