Genocide & The Shoah (The Holocaust): Intellectual Tools for Education & Public Policy Decision

Abstract

This article begins with an appraisal of a report published by the United States Institute for Peace, titled “Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers,” which is coauthored by the former Secretary of State, Madeleine K. Albright, and former Secretary of Defense, William S. Cohen. This report generated a great deal of interest and reaction from scholars across the globe. The article will introduce the broad outline of this report and will provide a summary of the principal criticisms that it has generated. This would set the stage for approaching the problem that is sensitive to the issue of exploring this phenomenon with a new view and the goal of developing usable insights and data, as well as methods and guidelines, that may be of value to policy makers responsible for acting in response to the problems of genocide and mass atrocity, and to society as well. The article then explores the problem with a specific emphasis on a better understanding of anti-Semitism, genocide, mass atrocity and the unique elements of the Holocaust. It reviews anti-Semitism from a multi-disciplinary perspective by focusing on the influence of American anti-Semitism on the German Nazis, on exploring the endurance of anti-Semitism in Germany via its intellectual and scholastic elite, and on exploring the political psychology of Hitlerism prior to the Second World War. The article then explores the problem that although anti-Semitism may be a necessary condition of genocide, it is not a sufficient one. This required the understanding of the jump from anti-Semitism, that is repressive and dominating, to the decision to exterminate a population of human beings completely. This also required a more carefully exploration of the specific features of the Nazi decision process as well as its framework of social control. With this background, the article focuses on developing the theoretical and methodological intellectual skills that have been developed in the context of the policy sciences in order to provide an approach to the challenges generated by the problems of mass murder and genocide, which would guide policy makers to more realistic, timely, and effective interventions. The article then explores distinctive but interrelated intellectual tasks that are required for research to guide inquiry and policy making and which include a disciplined commitment to the clarification of the value goals implicated by the problems of mass murder and genocide. These intellectual tasks require a careful specification of the trends in past decisions that have sought, in some measure of efficacy, to respond to these problems. They would also require an understanding of the scientific conditions that have shaped the nature of these trends in order to be able to forecast about the prospect of genocide and mass murder, which could be understood as a tentative forecast of an optimistic and a pessimistic nature, and the possibility of constraining it. Finally, theory requires an element of creativity. That creativity would be expressed in terms of the provided interaction between human rights values and the art/aesthetic process, which is suggested as a tool for realizing the never again goal. The creative aspect of this would be the invention of strategies that might direct intervention of a trend in the direction of a more optimistic possible future.