|
Wordsmiths and atrocities against language:
the incendiary use of
the Holocaust and Nazism
against Jews*
By Howard Jacobson
 ne thing is not another thing. What makes a thing
the thing it is and not something else is not just a question for artists
and intellectuals, it is the question. Where all things look the same,
there is no life of the mind.
More committed to the life of the mind than has always been good for them,
the Jewish people came to understand their faith as exceptional, unlike
other faiths. Though it has been wilfully misinterpreted as pride, the
concept of chosenness, of bearing the burden of selection—choosing to be
chosen—was one of the ways they identified this exceptionalness. Centuries
later the Nazis paid them back in kind. For an exceptional people, an
exceptional fate.
Thus when Jews demur from the word ‘holocaust’ each time there is an
instance of man’s inhumanity to man, it is not because they think their
suffering is keener, or somehow more pristine, than anyone else’s. It is
simply that one thing is not another thing. When next there is an attempt
first to slander and then to wipe out a whole people, to burn away every
trace of them and their beliefs from the face of the earth, to make it as
though they never were and to ensure they never will be again, Jews will
accept that ‘holocaust’ is the word.
This is not a species of scholasticism, verbal fastidiousness for its own
sake. If we do not properly describe what a thing is like and not like, we
do not know what it is. It is in the nature of hatred not to know what a
thing is like and not to care. Which is why we say that hatred is blind.
Indeed, one of the signs that hatred is being brewed, in an individual or
a community, is the deliberate wedding of like to unlike. Brutes yoke
unlikes together in haste, enjoying that surge in emotional violence that
blurring all distinctions brings.
This is why intellectuals, philosophers, artists, poets, are so important
to our well-being. By exploring the ways things are different, however
much they may sometimes look the same, by showing us how and why a thing
became the thing it is and not another thing, they help still the
undifferentiated violence of the furious and embittered. Little by little,
they bring the calm of distinctness and individuality back into our lives.
So when the poet Tom Paulin throws himself on the side of those who would
equate Zionism with Nazism, it is his calling as an artist and
intellectual he betrays. He is allowed to think what he likes of Israel.
He is allowed to misread history in the quiet of his Oxford room, if
misreading history is his bag. I am even half inclined to say he is
allowed to indulge himself the dark barbaric satisfaction that comes with
saying the unsayable, in this instance accusing a people who have suffered
a grievous wrong of now being the instigators of it themselves. If he must
get high on this psychic thrill, he must.
But he is not allowed to use the word ‘Nazi’ where nothing remotely
resembling Nazism is afoot.
The systematic defamation leading to the wholesale destruction of another
people who posed no threat, who threw no bombs, who simply were: does he
charge Zionists with that? Gas chambers, euthanasia, experiments on
‘degenerates’, human soap factories: does he accuse Zionists of those?
When they weren’t killing Jews, the Nazis also slaughtered Gypsies and
homosexuals: does Paulin know the number of Gypsies and homosexuals so far
murdered by Zionists?
Let me be clear: I do not charge Paulin with antisemitism. I’m not sure I
even charge him with sensationalism, though I understand why a poet in our
time must grab a headline. What I charge him with is stupidity. He has a
mind and in this instance he has refused to use it. He has chosen to be a
fool.
Nor is he the only one. A. N. Wilson has been vulturously circling the
subject of Israel for a long time. In his column in the Evening Standard
last year, he swooped. I will not fight him for his dinner. Let him
complain that there were no Jews on the pro-Palestinian march in Trafalgar
Square, when in fact there were. A man must eat. But a man must also
think. And when Wilson claims that the activity of Israeli troops around
the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is ‘the equivalent of the Taliban
destroying Buddhist sculpture’,he ceases to be a thinker.
One thing is not another thing. Central to Taliban theology was the
destruction of all other faiths and all monuments to any aesthetic but its
own. There was to be no other doctrine, no other music, no other
conception of beauty. So where is the ‘equivalence’ of which A. N. Wilson
speaks? Does he know of a deliberate Israeli clampdown on Christianity and
Islam? Can he show us that Israeli concert halls play only Jewish music
and that paintings by non-Israeli painters are being ripped off gallery
walls? Or does he simply mean that in the course of prosecuting a war of
which he does not approve Israeli soldiers have caused terrible damage, as
do all armies when they fight? I minimize nothing. But one crime is not
another crime.
There is something incendiary in Wilson’s ‘equivalence’, accusing Jews of
deliberately desecrating Christian sites. I do not know on what
disreputable journey into his own heart of mediaeval darkness Wilson has
embarked, but you can always tell when a civilized man wishes to embrace
barbarism. Things not alike all start to look the same to him.
‘Some kind of Holocaust’
wonder if somebody can help me with this one. What is ‘some kind of
Holocaust’? Combining the Greek for whole with the Greek for fire, the
word ‘holocaust’, used without emotion, free of its recent master-race
associations, means whole burnt offering, a sacrifice wholly consumed by
fire. Anything not wholly consumed by fire is not a holocaust. So it’s
hard to have ‘some kind’ of one. As a description of the fate that was
visited by the Nazis on the Jews, the word does, I grant you, overstate
the case, since the offering was not wholly consumed; but we have come to
accept that it will do for a near miss, a conflagration on an unimaginable
scale that aimed at completeness, even if it narrowly failed of it. So,
once again, ‘some kind of Holocaust’, like ‘some kind of Armageddon’, is a
nonsense. You cannot have approximate annihilation.
We can thank Mona Baker, the Professor of Translation Studies at UMIST,
for this academic example of linguistic imposture, or Paulin-speak as I
think we should now refer to it. Last year, Professor Baker, if you have not kept up with
happenings in the field of language engineering, sacked, or ‘de-appointed’
in her words, two Israeli scholars from the advisory boards of a couple of
academic journals she edits. Allowing that she also owns these journals,
and that there is no law against academics being proprietors of journals
of disinterested scholarship, she is, of course, within her rights to do
whatever she wants with members of her advisory boards. The only problem
is that she has de-appointed the two Israelis for no other reason than
that they are Israelis. Which would be a bit like—since Professor Baker
likes things that are a bit like—her university sacking her because she is
Egyptian.
It was in defence of her action in de-appointing the Israeli scholars for
the crime of being Israeli that Professor Baker delivered herself of her
now notorious ‘some kind of Holocaust’ remark,a solecism for which, as a
language professional (whatever her nationality), she should at the very
least be reprimanded, ignorance being an even greater fault in an academic
than an Israeli passport. But let us, by way of justice, return her phrase
to the swell of thought from which we have extracted it.
Many people in Europe have signed a boycott against Israel. Israel has
gone beyond just war crimes. It is horrific what is going on there. Many
of us would like to talk about it as some kind of Holocaust which the
world will eventually wake up to, much too late, of course, as they did
with the last one.
I like ‘the last one’. Holocausts come and holocausts go, eh, Professor?
And you, as a scholar of language, are trained to make light verbal work
of them all.
Everything Professor Baker says is worthy of our attention by virtue of
its inanity. Take ‘Israel has gone beyond just war crimes’. What does that
mean, exactly? War crimes are a serious matter, which is why they are
called crimes, and it is difficult to imagine any circumstances in which
they could be qualified by a ‘merely’. Leaving us where, politically and
morally, and Israel guilty of precisely what? Rape? Well, that’s just a
war crime. Torture? Well, that’s a just a war crime, too. Cannibalism,
then? Is that it—the horror, the horror! And when we are shaken from our
doze of innocence by Professor Baker and discover that a sort-of, kind-of,
more-or-less Holocaust has been in place, what will we find? Extermination
centres? Gas ovens? Laboratories charged with the extinction of the enemy
gene?
It is important that we know what we mean. We do not serve the present by
misdescribing it, and even worse we obliterate the past. Once everything
is a war crime, nothing is. Turn every abomination into a
whatever-takes-your-fancy holocaust, and there never really was one. This
is the trickle-down effect of continuous verbal and syntactical
diminishment. Little by little, the thing itself is washed away. Thus,
though Professor Baker does not mean to be a Holocaust-denier, that is
what she has effectively become.
The power of language, you see, of which Professor Baker—as someone who
has worked as a professional translator for twenty years and whose current
research interests include ‘pragmatics and intercultural communication’,
the ‘use of corpora as a resource for studying various features of
translation’ and ‘patterning . . . in terms of notions such as
simplification’ —should be particularly mindful. But then that has always
been the problem with academics: they know the science of language but they
are deaf to the thing itself. Nobody with any feeling for the vitality of
English, for example, could ever write ‘in terms of notions such as
simplification’. And as for this professor’s interest in ‘intercultural
communication’ . . . But hold your horses, she has more to say on that
theme . . .
‘Translation studies can and will hopefully’—yes, she employs the
barbarism ‘hopefully’—‘continue to draw on a variety of discourses and
disciplines and to encourage pluralism and heterogeneity’. Provided, that
is, that the discourses and disciplines do not originate in Israel? In the
light of which exclusion, Professor, are you not discouraging that
pluralism to which you hopefully, and may I add mindlessly, refer?
Cant, so much sanctimony and cant. By her actions, Professor Baker has
shown that it is homogeneity not heterogeneity she wants, everyone
believing the same thing, everyone shutting down their intelligences
together, else there is no place for them in the commonwealth of
scholarship as understood by her.
Academies are timid places, and because she has not behaved discourteously
to a favoured group, Mona Baker won’t face official censure. But if I were
a school-leaver wondering where to study language in the autumn, I’d be
thinking twice before going to an institution where at least one professor
has a cloth ear, a closed mind and does not grasp the meaning of simple
terms in frequent use.
The self-righteousness, of course, I’d expect.
Reminiscence and ‘the Nazis’
n his 1985 Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, Milan Kundera mused
Flaubertianly on the obligation of the novelist ‘to disappear behind his
work, that is, to renounce the role of public figure’. A reminder to
novelists not to have opinions or, at least, not to be seduced into
expressing them. A novelist attends to ‘another voice than his personal
convictions’. In garrulous times, this is the novel’s supreme
justification: its wonderful freedom from the banality of opinion, that
‘suprapersonal wisdom’ that helps to explain why ‘great novels are always
a little more intelligent than their authors’.
I recalled these warnings and encouragements while reading writers voicing
their opinions on the relative justice of the Palestinian and Israeli
causes in an issue of the Independent last year. Not with any complacency,
I must say. When papers call, it is hard to resist. You know you will
regret it, but you still say ‘yes’. Maybe this time you will make a
difference. Maybe this time you will plug in to the ‘suprapersonal wisdom’
of art. Or maybe you just want to be seen lining up in the right queue.
Several of the canvassed writers declined the simplicity of the offered
a), b) or c) answers. Others remarked on the absurdity of being asked to
choose and then chose anyway. Some, considering simplicity and absurdity
to be their medium, leapt in, boots and all. ‘I am a Palestinian,’
declared John Byrne, though once, he tells us, he was proud to be mistaken
for a Jew. Right time, right queue.
But if the spectacle of writers expressing ‘opinions’ was depressing, more
depressing still was seeing how commonplace most of those opinions turned
out to be. And by commonplace I don’t only mean of the moment, but
unthinkingly of the moment. Take Louis de Bernières’s observation that
‘Israel has been adopting tactics which are reminiscent of the Nazis’.
How often have we been here recently? Examine what is meant by
‘reminiscent of the Nazis’ and you find no extermination camps, no
master-race eugenics programmes, no extirpation of an entire culture, no
final solution, none of the defining as opposed to the accidental
characteristics of that regime. What the charge means to convey is a
brutal occupation—no small accusation if true, I grant you—but
‘reminiscent of the Nazis’ only in the sense that all brutality is
reminiscent of the Nazis, as it is reminiscent of Stalinism or the reigns
of Caligula or Attila the Hun. So why specifically invoke Nazism?
Here we come to an uncomfortable truth lying at the heart of all this
conventionalism. We have had enough now of the Holocaust. It’s expungement-of-memory
time.
The idea of Israel as a victim state licensed by you-know-what ‘has been
shown’, Philip Hensher writes, ‘to be a cynical and opportunistic
manipulation of history and contemporary realities’. Has it? No
justification whatsoever in the argument that the need for a Jewish
homeland grew steadily out of those pogroms and other systematic
persecutions of the Jews, of which the Holocaust was the culmination? What
other explanation, then, would Philip Hensher offer for the existence of
Israel? A change of scenery for Jews? A chance to win the Eurovision Song
Contest? Pure bloody-mindedness?
Irvine Welsh is reluctant to take sides, but nonetheless keeps his
understanding of difficult events simple. ‘Thus the Israelis were educated
by the Nazis and the Palestinians suffer.’ Cute verb, in the
circumstances, ‘educated’. Turning that victimization, of which some of
our writers have now heard enough, into a sort of preparation for life, a
diabolic favour. For we know how eager the Jews always are to learn.
Who needs the complex unfolding of history when things are as
predetermined as this? The beaten will always be the beater. And
everything is equal. Now close the book.
You wouldn’t expect so gross a flippancy as ‘educated’ from a writer as
good as Blake Morrison, but he, too, in this instance, has lost the
language of enormity. ‘It is the story of the abused child’, he writes,
‘growing up to be an abusive adult’. How much abuse had Lady Macbeth? All
human life will not be reduced to this quid pro quo of ineffective
parenting. Israel has in turn suffered more and caused more suffering than
the word ‘abuse’ is adequate to. So I reject the concept on behalf of both
peoples. But in so far as it trivializes and makes merely incidental the
Jewish catastrophe of the last hundred years or more, I take particular
exception to it. And find no consolation in the promise that what goes
around comes around, that as soon as the Palestinians have their own state
and start abusing someone else—for that must surely follow, if Blake
Morrison’s smacking and politics theory is right—we will automatically
turn on them.
A sentimental view of the ups and downs of history to which Marina Warner
subscribes without embarrassment. ‘The stark answer’, she writes unstarkly,
‘is that the Palestinians have more right on their side because they are
clearly at a huge disadvantage’.
Behold the mother ship, freighted with thoughtlessness, from which all
this banal opinionizing flows. Disadvantage—combined with absolutely
nothing else—confers more right than advantage achieved no matter how, and
driven by no matter what necessity. Slighter is righter. After which we
need trouble ourselves no longer with the rights or wrongs of anything.
Just weigh the balance of advantage and the answer pops up on the
illuminated screen.
But at least we now have a confession for the high-minded tergiversations
of John Byrne and others, loving brave little Israel when its life hangs
in the balance, despising it when it doesn’t. Such moral fickleness is
itself part of the story of modern Israel. When you see yourself admired,
but not necessarily assisted, for being weak but plucky, you learn the
importance of becoming strong. Nazi lesson number one. Nazi lesson number
two: staying alive beats staying loved, for the heart of man is
inconstant. The speed with which Israel has lost the friendship of those
in the imaginative professions—novelists who hanker after the consolations
of plain-speak, for example—proves that irrefutably.
* This essay
is based on articles written by the author and published in the The
Independent newspaper.
About the author
Howard Jacobson is a
writer, critic and television presenter, and a regular columnist for
The Independent and The Sunday Times.
We are
interested in your comments on this essay
please fill our feedback
form.
Read more
essays
© Institute for Jewish
Policy Research 2003
Home/Country
reports/About this
site/ JPR home/
The new
antisemitism/Eurofascism/Media & culture/
Xenophobia, football
and Europe/Online
resources/Contact
us |
|