2441Chapter2 16/10/02 8:03 am Page 39 2 Instrumentalising the Holocaust: from universalisation to relativism For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them: e.g. men becoming builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics)1 Where once it was said that the life of Jews would be ‘a light unto nations’ – the bearer of universal lessons – now it is the ‘darkness unto nations’ of the death of Jews that is said to carry universal lessons . Individuals from every point on the political compass can find the lessons they wish in the Holocaust; it has become a moral and ideological Rorschach test. (Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory)2 ARGUE THROUGHOUT this book that negative imagery has been a crucial building-block in Serbian and Croatian national myths. These myths have Ibeen used to legitimate the forced shifting of borders, the ethnic cleansing of populations, and various other violent aspects of state formation. Equally important has been the frequent use of the Jewish Holocaust as a template for restructuring nationalist histories. The Holocaust as the archetypal national Fall of the twentieth century has arguably left a lasting impression on philoso- phers and historians, as well as nationalist leaders. In this chapter, three concepts are of importance: firstly, the universalisation (or trivialisation) of the Holocaust as a series of general symbols and metaphors for national suffer- ing; secondly, a debate among historians comparing the Holocaust to other instances of genocide in the twentieth century and before; and thirdly, the concept of ‘performativity’ – the theory that nations create forms of discourse to advance their own histories of victimisation, even if in some cases an impar- tial view of history might suggest other interpretations.3 During the disintegration of Yugoslavia, ‘acting’ as a victim formed a central part of Serbian and Croatian propaganda, legitimating the violence necessary to create expanded homelands. Seeking to justify a form of national ‘self-help’, these two countries produced a legacy of ethnic cleansing, rape, 39 David Bruce MacDonald - 9781526137258 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/28/2021 09:28:54PM via free access 2441Chapter2 16/10/02 8:03 am Page 40 Balkan holocausts? forced population transfers, and irredentism, as the products of their own feel- ings of victimisation. Also important has been the targeting of specific enemies trying to destroy the nation. As Branimir Anzulovic´ has remarked in his considera- tion of genocide in Yugoslavia: ‘The modern age has added another motive for genocide: the utopian promise of a perfect society through the elimina- tion of the groups accused of preventing its realization.’4 Furthermore, ‘the self-defensive “kill so that you may not be killed”’, is, again according to Anzulovic´, never enough to mobilise one’s national group for conflict. Rather, ‘The victim must be seen as a demon, and his killing as a universally beneficial act.’5 Certainly the quest for racial purity is not a new one – it goes back at least as far as the ancient Aryan invaders of the Indian subcontinent, who introduced a tripartite system of social stratification known as the system of varna (or ‘colours’). They adapted this system to the new condi- tions by adding to it at the bottom end a further fourth and lowest varna, the Shudra, in which the darker-skinned indigenous peoples could be separated off from the lighter-skinned invaders. What has certainly changed however, is the wide variety of means available in the modern state to achieve a racial utopia – means that never existed before the onset of modernity. These means allow ‘demons’ to be killed far more easily than at any other time in history. An analysis of Serbian and Croatian mythologies, with direct reference to their instrumental and often violent consequences, demonstrates some of the practical implications of creating a self-righteous nationalism, based on myths of Fall and Redemption. Sadly, the case of Yugoslavia provides an example of how Jewish victimisation and national renewal unwittingly bred a host of bastard children, seeking to manipulate and abuse the legacy of the Holocaust to advance a variety of geopolitical agendas. Biblical and Jewish ethics: nationalism and Zionism Frye’s analysis of biblical structure demarcated a clear ethical system, where good and evil were at odds with each other, driving history forward. The idea that there was an axiomatic link between Fall and Redemption provided an understanding of how Jewish nationalism would structure its own aspirations for statehood, using the legitimacy of this model to guide it through the nine- teenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, there was little doubt that the Jews had had a series of metaphorically linked ‘Golden Ages’ such as Frye has described, nor was there much doubt as to the persistence of myths of Jews as chosen, and as the elect of God. What did need to be re-created for Jews to again situate themselves in the covenantal cycle, to once again dream of Redemption, was proof of the continued presence of an ahistorical negative 40 David Bruce MacDonald - 9781526137258 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/28/2021 09:28:54PM via free access 2441Chapter2 16/10/02 8:03 am Page 41 Instrumentalising the Holocaust: universalisation to relativism agency, able to bind the Jews together, able to again place them within their historical teleology. For many nineteenth-century Zionists, the dangers posed by anti- Semitism would prove of crucial importance in rallying co-nationals together to dream of a renewed Israel. While the reality of anti-Semitism arguably stemmed from Roman times, the term was first coined by Wilhelm Marr in 1879, and adopted into his Antisemiten-Liga.6 While anti-Semitism was artic- ulated to denote a fear of ‘Jewish Internationalism’, implicating Jews in a conspiracy to overthrow nation-states, Hannah Arendt has argued convinc- ingly that some Zionists began to place it at the centre of their emerging nationalism, along with more positive myths of divine election and Covenant. Anti-Semitism provided the necessary means for the Jews to confront their ‘otherness’ in Europe when they found themselves outsiders in the develop- ment of the nation-state and the industrial revolution.7 While the Jews had for centuries been the victims of religiously inspired aggression, Arendt argued that anti-Semitism only arose as an instrumental term when it was politically expedient to channel Jewish experiences of victimisation towards a concrete objective, in line with Minogue’s three-stage model.8 At first, this was simply the desire to safeguard existence, while later it was used in promoting collective action. Thus: Jews concerned with the survival of their people, would, in a curious and desper- ate misinterpretation, hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism after all might be an excellent means for keeping the people together, so that the assumption of eternal antisemitism would even imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish existence. This superstition, a secularised travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in chosenness and a Messianic hope, has been strengthened through the fact that for many centuries the Jews experienced the Christian brand of hostility which was indeed a powerful agent of preservation, spiritually as well as politically.9 For some Zionist thinkers, the role of anti-Semitism as a constant foil to Jewish aspirations was to figure as a central component of nineteenth-century Jewish national identity. Zionist writers, seeking justification for the creation of a Jewish state, readily used both persecution myths and the covenantal cycle to argue that such a state was both viable and historically necessary. Theodor Herzl placed the Jewish Fall at the centre of his movement for a national homeland. Positing that the Jews of the Diaspora constituted ‘one people’, Herzl advocated a mass exodus from Europe, since: ‘We have sincerely tried everything to merge with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. It is not permitted us.’ Thus did Herzl come to adopt ‘the Jewish tragedy’ as the ‘driving force’ of nationalism.10 The centrality of persecution myths to Zionism before the Second World War led directly both to efforts to create a coherent Jewish ‘nation’ and to the 41 David Bruce MacDonald - 9781526137258 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/28/2021 09:28:54PM via free access 2441Chapter2 16/10/02 8:03 am Page 42 Balkan holocausts? channelling of productive energies towards the establishment of a homeland in Palestine. Using anti-Semitism as a rallying call proved useful in establish- ing a link between the historic victimisation of the Jews as an apatride people, and their future Redemption as a rooted people on historic soil. Zionist writings often explored deep into the ancient past, exposing a continuous and unend- ing stream of anti-Jewish consciousness, similar to the negative force Frye identified in Old Testament narratives. The Nazi Holocaust against the Jews of Europe would have devastating effects, destroying Jewish culture and traditions in literally thousands of cities, towns and villages, from Russia to Holland, while resulting in the death of almost six million Jewish victims.11 For post-Holocaust Zionists, the return to Zion would take on a new and more urgent meaning. For Zionists, the tradi- tional Jewish status in Europe as ‘history’s orphans’ and the ‘universal outsider’ had relegated them to the margins of humanity, making genocide that much easier to accomplish. As Noam Penkower put it: ‘The lack of an independent state doomed those defenceless human beings to the realisation of Adolf Hitler’s diabolic final solution.’12 Anti-Semitism and its ugliest mani- festation, the Holocaust, made it clear that Jews were no longer safe in the Diaspora.