This year
Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day coincide on the
same day: April 24, 2017. The coincidence is especially noteworthy this year.
APRIL 24, 2017
On April 24, 1915 hundreds of Armenian community leaders and
intellectuals were rounded up in Constantinople, arrested, and killed by the
Ottoman government then ruling Turkey. That event marked the beginning of the
government-sponsored massacres of 1.5 million Armenians. It is why April 24 has
officially marked the day of remembrance of the Armenian genocide for nearly a
hundred years.
Holocaust
Remembrance Day, known in Hebrew as Yom HaShoah,
memorializes the 6 million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazi
government during World War II. It is a remembrance based on the twenty-seventh
day of Nisan in the Jewish ecclesiastical calendar. It doesn’t always fall on
the same day by a standard calendar, but variously falls sometime in April or
May.
This year Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day and Holocaust
Remembrance Day coincide on the same day: April 24, 2017. The coincidence is
especially noteworthy this year.
Ignorance of History
Leads to Its Repetition
There has
always been a strong object lesson in the connection between the Armenian
genocide during World War I and the genocide of the Jews during World War II.
It is a lesson inscribed on one of the walls of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum in the form of a statement by Adolph Hitler. He
rationalized mass slaughter and expected people simply to avert their eyes and
forget: “Who, after all, today speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
I think Hitler’s point was that merciless slaughter is never a
public relations disaster as long as you’re in it for the ruthless
consolidation of power. That’s because people forget. All the time. The
powerful also often use propaganda tools to promote such lethal forgetfulness.
Humans are very susceptible to groupthink, ignorance, propaganda,
agitation, and psychological manipulation that weakens their resolve. People
are also often all too eager to blame their own problems on convenient
scapegoats. These human flaws clarify why “Never forget” is the cry associated
with the Holocaust and all crimes against humanity.
This is why everybody must respect the study of history. After
all, studying history is about remembering. It’s about learning from
experience, which is why we must emphatically reject any attempt to water down
the accurate teaching and study of history.
There is a startling déjà vu in the air. Those who study history
can feel history repeating itself in the wholesale persecution and slaughter of
Christians in the Middle East. We can feel it in the intensified challenges to
Israel’s right to exist and in the jihadist terrorist attacks in the name of
Islam that are becoming almost mundane headlines. Elements common to both
genocides also seem to be re-emerging in today’s restless world: new
technologies that potentially deliver greater lethality; realignments of world
powers; great displacements of peoples; and, more than ever before, the pivotal
role of propaganda and information warfare in inciting aggression.
‘Why’ Is the Reoccurring
Question
As the
granddaughter of Armenian genocide survivors, I am keenly tuned in to the
history of genocide. My grandfather left written memoirs describing the horrors
he and his family endured. In observance of the 2015 centennial of the Armenian
genocide, I wrote articles about it in The Federalist and Weekly Standard. For
in-depth documentation of the genocide online, I recommend this website with its map of genocide activity and
chronology.
In the wake of massive tragedies, we hear a wail of “Why?” It happened
after the attacks of September 11, 2001, although it didn’t take long for the
shock to wear off once a semblance of normalcy seemed to return. “Why?” is a
good question as long as we’re truly interested in real answers. Too often
attention spans are fleeting, and tragedy isn’t fun to think about. So when the
answers seem too difficult to process, people tend to fall into a default
position of forgetting, then repeating mistakes. The only real cure is a
disciplined interest in understanding the answers.
So let’s try to consider a few possibilities as we assess why
genocide happens, and how it happens. These possibilities would include
groupthink, propaganda, vilification campaigns, ignorance, and a disregard for
the necessity of virtue in any functioning society.
How Genocide Begins with
Groupthink
Perhaps most important to a genocidal plan is neutralizing any
possible support for the victims. The Ottoman government maintained a
well-coordinated propaganda campaign that vilified the Armenians in the eyes of
their Turkish neighbors. In like manner, the Jews were demonized among their
neighbors in Nazi Germany.
This sort of
thing happens in all mass killings, including those done for reasons other than
ethnicity. For example, in Stalinist Russia, several million peasant farmers in
the Ukraine were deliberately starved to death in the winter of 1932-33 in what
is known as the Holodomor. Soviet
propaganda demonized these people, known as “kulaks,” as enemies of the people
because they resisted the forced collectivization of agriculture, i.e., the
confiscation of their farms. In Rwanda, Hutu propaganda vilified and
scapegoated the Tutsis, often through radio, priming the popular mindset for
the mass slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis during a 100-day period in 1994. The list
of “final solutions” goes on and on.
Information warfare through a centrally controlled media is key to
turning neighbor against neighbor. It plays a huge role in caricaturing
perceived enemies and growing an us-versus-them mindset. In short, propaganda
that psychologically manipulates a population is key to laying the groundwork
for extreme social polarization, and ultimately for genocide.
This sort of propaganda thrives on ignorance and dissipates under
conditions of social trust and general goodwill. This is why free speech and
freedom of expression are not negotiable to any free society.
Propaganda Is a Behavior
Modification Tool
Free speech, the free exchange of ideas in a society that
cherishes virtue, is critical to overcoming the noxious weed of propaganda. Yet
look around and you’ll see some eerie indications that the conditions for
genocide seem to be ripening. They are pervasive in the very institutions that
are supposed to guard against this sort of thing.
Look around and you’ll see some eerie
indications that the conditions for genocide seem to be ripening.
At least in the United States we have institutions intended to
protect us from the dangers of runaway propaganda and vilification campaigns.
These include a free and open press and institutions of higher education that
are supposed to challenge conformity of thought and promote the free exchange
of ideas. But these institutions are now dangerously compromised. Our media’s
bias has been obvious and well-documented for decades.
The
universities are no better, and getting much worse. Whole generations have been
infected with groupthink on college campuses, where they have been conditioned
to shout down speakers because “hate.” They have been intellectually kneecapped
by a corps of radical elites. In a recent National Review Online
article, Stanley Kurtz gave an excellent rundown of the hostile
takeover of higher education that’s been in the works for generations.
There’s a Confluence of
Dangerous Trends
The inability of so many college students to think and to reason
has reached critical mass. It is very dangerous to social stability. What
happens at the university has huge ramifications for society at large. Just
consider this short list of what we are seeing today in academia, the media,
and popular culture to view a rising tide of intolerance to differing
viewpoints.
·
Mob mobilization to promote an anti-speech movement (under the
guise of “anti-hate”).
·
Mob mobilization to shut down local police forces (under the guise
of “Black lives matter”).
·
A call for re-education to enforce conformity of thought, from
agitator Bill Ayers in 1969 to Wellesley College students in 2017 (under the
guise of anti-fascism).
·
A rising tide of “my way or die” jihadism that sees itself engaged
in total war against perceived enemies (under the guise of religion, in this
case Islam).
·
Cult behavior in a society that is woefully
ignorant about how cults operate and unaware of how susceptible we are to coercive thought reform.
·
The cultivation of ignorance in K-12 and higher education that
cuts off information about history and civics (under the guise of
multi-culturalism).
·
The erasure of Western Civilization—i.e., the study of universal human experiences and ideas—from
education.
·
Heightened vilification campaigns (excessive use of epithets such
as “hater,” “bigot,” or “phobic” to demonize perceived political opponents).
·
Forced self-criticism at colleges (under the guise of “white
privilege”).
·
The huge leap in social distrust in the General Social Survey,
indicating higher levels of social polarization than ever.
·
Scapegoating on a grand scale.
·
The corruption of language.
·
Growing contempt for the ideal of a virtuous society.
Obviously, we cannot keep traveling down this road to
self-destruction. These attitudes have been worming their way into society at
large for too long. They feed into the same conditions that laid the groundwork
for deadly disasters in world history.
As we memorialize those who perished in the Armenian genocide, the
Holocaust, and all senseless slaughters, we ought to zero in on the role of
propaganda. Information warfare today has intensified as never before. We ought
to ponder how propaganda-cultivated groupthink has always been key in the
vilification campaigns that have ended in the tragedy of genocide. To enable
such campaigns is to play with fire.
So we have no choice if we hope to remain free. We must push back
hard, and push back smart. That’s because the freedom to express one’s
conscience has always been a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. And history shows
when we lose it, there’s hell to pay.
Stella
Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow Stella on Twitter.
