The horrors and human toll of the Holocaust re-emerged in recent days, as my colleagues at the staff of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland revealed the discovery of a cup containing jewelry, hidden in a false bottom to keep family valuables from being discovered by guards at the notorious death camp. The owner, no doubt someone who met their end as a victim of genocide, managed to keep their items out of the hands of those who routinely looted prisoners’ possessions before sending them to their death.
While the term “genocide” came into being only in 1944, its reality is not a modern phenomenon. Human history has been replete with cases of mass destruction. In the 20th century alone, some argue that close to 170 million civilians were victims of genocide, most often done to death by the very government entrusted with their protection. Even for those who survive, genocide is a collective trauma, a redefining destruction that shatters their assumptive world and transforms societies for generations.
As we recall the atrocities of the past, we must not overlook the fact that genocide continues to claim lives and make headlines, in 2016. Today – as atrocities impact hundreds of thousands of civilians in Syria, Iraq, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Sudan, South Sudan, Burma and elsewhere – we remain faced with the urgency of a world intent on tearing itself apart.
The world as it is now, though, is not the world as it has to be.
As ubiquitous as genocide seems, it is a human problem and, as such, has a human solution. This is not a quixotic utopian statement about human perfectibility. It simply is a statement that we can, at least in large part, undo a problem that we have created. At its root, genocide happens because we choose to see a people rather than individual people and then we choose to kill those people in large numbers and over an extended period of time.
In the midst of that bad news, the good news is that we can make another choice; we can find constructive, rather than destructive, ways to live with our diverse social identities. Preventing genocide is an achievable goal. Indeed, there is increasing interest and a growing literature outlining the ways in which we can prevent genocide in the belief that such knowledge will help shape our will do to so.
As a teacher, writer and researcher, my goal is to present an analysis of genocide in the modern world that draws out the lessons to be learned in preventing genocide from ever taking place, preventing further atrocities once genocide has begun, and preventing future atrocities once a society has begun to rebuild after genocide.
My own college, Keene State College, is home to one of the nation’s oldest Holocaust resource centers – and also offers the first-and-only undergraduate major in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the United States. Other colleges and universities are offering new programs, classes and dedicating resources to better understand how genocide happens and how it can be prevented. This reflects the fact that most genocide scholars are in agreement that the potential, and ongoing, mass atrocities facing the world today can be stopped if we develop the collective will to do so.
This year, toward that end, Keene State is hosting an international institute to help higher-education institutions establish early warning systems to identify and stop violence before it becomes genocide. Educators from across the country and around the world are gathering this week at this first biennial Summer Institute for Genocide Studies and Prevention.
The institute, the first of its kind, will focus on teaching genocide prevention, paying particular attention to analyzing those aspects of political, historical, economic and societal factors that increase the risk of genocide and other mass atrocities and effective ways concerned citizens can mitigate those factors.
Through such initiatives, we can encourage all citizens, scholars, experts and non-specialists alike to understand the need to be engaged, well informed and involved, when necessary – and to understand the difference between being a bystander and being an upstander in the face of genocide. That’s because it is important for all of us to think more deeply and more broadly about a human rights issue for which there are no sidelines, only sides.
We must consider our role, and responsibility, as citizens in a world in which far too many civilians around the world still live in fear of being done to death.
(Dr. James Waller is the Cohen Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College, and author of a new book, “Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide,” published May 24 by Oxford University Press.)