Menu

Skip to content
  • BREAKING NEWS|
  • POSTS|
  • ABOUT US|
    • OUR LEADERSHIP|
    • ACHIEVEMENTS|
    • INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL OF THE INSTITUTE|
    • GENOCIDE SEMINARS 2017-2019|
    • BOOKS BY YAIR AURON|
    • ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS BY ISRAEL W. CHARNY|
    • BOOKS BY ISRAEL CHARNY|
    • PUBLICATIONS BY MARC I. SHERMAN, M.L.S.|
    • PUBLICATIONS BY SAMUEL TOTTEN|
  • GENOCIDE PREVENTION NOW (GPN)|
    • ARTICLES GENOCIDE PREVENTION NOW (GPN)|
    • DIRECTORY OF ACADEMIC PROGRAMS AND COURSES|
    • DIRECTORY OF ORGANIZATIONS FOR GENOCIDE AWARENESS|
    • GENOCIDE MEMORIALS AND MUSEUMS|
  • GENOCIDE DENIAL|
    • RECOGNITION OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE BY ISRAEL|
  • CONTACT|
    • RELATED LINKS|

Institute on the Holocaust & Genocide in Jerusalem

Taking the side of protecting all human life

You are here: Home / 2019 / February / 13 / Robert Fisk: Every time we witness genocide we say ‘never again’ – but human nature tells us something different

Robert Fisk: Every time we witness genocide we say ‘never again’ – but human nature tells us something different

Published on February 13, 2019 by Editor

by Robert Fisk,  Independent (London)

Holocaust expert Israel Charny’s new book makes uncomfortable reading, as he asks us to examine ‘a truth we haven’t faced fully enough’

September 25, 2018 – Confronted on a warm, soft Jerusalem evening by one of Israel’s venerable Holocaust scholars – and a psychologist to boot – a visitor to Israel Charny’s retirement home should perhaps keep a certain silence, especially if the new arrival is a journalist.

Charny, author of the monumental Encyclopedia of Genocide – and much hated by the Turks who are outraged by his conviction that the 1915 Armenian genocide was a reality – speaks with the low, rather pondering voice of a US east coast academic. Not unlike the great Noam Chomsky, I note injudiciously. The American linguist and philosopher is a hero of mine, but a rather less prestigious figure in Charny’s eyes. “God forbid!” announces the 87-year-old head of Israel’s Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem. “You don’t know this – but I lived at the Chomsky house, as an undergraduate.”

He flourishes his most recent book, The Genocide Contagion, which asked readers to reflect on their own reaction to a future genocide in their own lives. It makes uncomfortable reading.

In today’s world, Charny says – slowly, carefully and with little forgiveness of us humanoids – he can see no “concerted political or culture-wide consciousness to take care of people”. On the contrary, “what I see is another replay of a truth that we haven’t faced fully enough. And this is that the human species – with all of its beauty – is a horrible, uncaring, destructive species that has delighted and excelled in the taking of human life for centuries. And there is no real addressing of this issue in our evolution that I know of.”

Is this an expression of the inevitable, I ask myself? And older man throwing in his hand after the iniquities perpetrated against his own Jewish people? I think not.

“The problem, in my judgement,” he says, “begins with our failing to understand that in the creation of our species and in the very original equipment that we come from, there are two parallel instinctive streams that are operating simultaneously. One is all those beautiful, caring, creative [things] – the art and the music and the philosophical ingenuity and the brilliant creativity – but it’s an utter mistake for us to pretend that that’s the end of the story, [that] that’s what humans really are.

“Because there’s another, no less powerful stream that includes killing off the next guy in self-defence – and self-defence means what you perceive to be self-defence, because that’s a whole big quicksand in its own right. It includes killing off the next guy – your brother – like the Bible begins with Cain and Abel, and it continues with a whole bunch of brothers who can hardly say ‘brother’ to one another, because they are really out in a deeply competitive readiness to overwhelm and even destroy the said brother. And it continues that way through all the identity systems that we have: religion, nationality, ethnic identification.”

Talking to a Holocaust expert, there are two subjects, of course, that cannot be avoided: the destruction of the Jewish people, and death. Charny does not appear to have forgiven Chomsky’s spirited but injudicious defence of the right to free speech of a French Holocaust denier who reprinted an essay on freedom of expression by Chomsky (without the latter’s permission) back in the 1970s. Chomsky, five years Charny’s senior, is no Holocaust denier. I prefer to avoid this elderly debate. Charny will later grumble about Chomsky over dinner.

But Charny’s constant defence of the Armenian people’s right to refer to their own people’s slaughter by the Turks as a genocide – and his repeated condemnation of the Israeli government for failing to use the word about the Christian Armenians of 1915 – is a mark of his uniqueness.

The work of Charny’s organisation covers Rwanda, as well. And Bosnia. And, after years of reporting Armenian scholarship on the genocide and Turkish denial, I am a member of the Jerusalem institute’s international committee. Talk to Charny about death, and his reply covers a host of armageddons. His long, perfectly formed response, deserves an equally long paragraph.

“Because there’s another, no less powerful stream that includes killing off the next guy in self-defence – and self-defence means what you perceive to be self-defence, because that’s a whole big quicksand in its own right. It includes killing off the next guy – your brother – like the Bible begins with Cain and Abel, and it continues with a whole bunch of brothers who can hardly say ‘brother’ to one another, because they are really out in a deeply competitive readiness to overwhelm and even destroy the said brother. And it continues that way through all the identity systems that we have: religion, nationality, ethnic identification.”

Talking to a Holocaust expert, there are two subjects, of course, that cannot be avoided: the destruction of the Jewish people, and death. Charny does not appear to have forgiven Chomsky’s spirited but injudicious defence of the right to free speech of a French Holocaust denier who reprinted an essay on freedom of expression by Chomsky (without the latter’s permission) back in the 1970s. Chomsky, five years Charny’s senior, is no Holocaust denier. I prefer to avoid this elderly debate. Charny will later grumble about Chomsky over dinner.

But Charny’s constant defence of the Armenian people’s right to refer to their own people’s slaughter by the Turks as a genocide – and his repeated condemnation of the Israeli government for failing to use the word about the Christian Armenians of 1915 – is a mark of his uniqueness.

The work of Charny’s organisation covers Rwanda, as well. And Bosnia. And, after years of reporting Armenian scholarship on the genocide and Turkish denial, I am a member of the Jerusalem institute’s international committee. Talk to Charny about death, and his reply covers a host of armageddons. His long, perfectly formed response, deserves an equally long paragraph.

Charny’s constant defence of the Armenian people’s right to refer to their own people’s slaughter by the Turks as a genocide is a mark of his uniqueness (YouTube/Scholarm Armenia).  This photo is taken in the Israel W. Charny Room at the Armenian Genocide Memorial Institute and Museum in Yerevan, Armenia.

If you look at the work of [Israeli-American psychologist] Daniel Kahneman and the works of some others,” he says, “you find endless evidence and analysis of how the human mind is capable of creating any piece of nonsense – imbuing it with authority, establishing it with factuality – when it is all, in the words of a great leader of the whole movement, to disestablish any hold that we might have had on [our] perception of reality and tests of reality, and the use of scientific method in thinking and in observation. For him, whatever his impulses call for, this is what reality becomes. And he then endows that reality with superlative adjectives – ‘is the greatest ever’, ‘there’s never been anything so great as…’ – whatever the heck it is.”

We have moved, of course, into Trump-world. I remark that the US president (Charny agrees he should be in a lunatic asylum) had used the word “beautiful” about weapons he was selling to an Arab Gulf state, and that large numbers of government officials travel to arms fairs around the world. “And sometimes,” Charny says, “you see their eyes looking at it as if it is an erotic object – such an attraction, such an excitement, such a wish to touch and use and express oneself through the Trumpian instrument.”

He asks if I know of Israel’s arms sales. “It sold to Rwanda during the genocide and it sold to Serbia during the genocide of the Bosnians. I have a very dear friend, [Israeli historian] Professor Yair Auron, who together with a wonderful attorney by the name of Etai Mack, have sued the Israeli government for information about both of those arms sales and they sued under a law that calls for release of information by the government when it is demanded.”

The script, as Charny put it, was as follows: “They get to court. The judge asks them to present what they’re after. The judge then calls on the representatives of the [Israeli] government. A government representative says: ‘Your honour, this is a matter of high security – can we see you in chambers?’ The judge takes them into the nearby judge’s chamber. They emerge 20 minutes later, and the judge says: ‘Case dismissed’.” This has happened to them [Auron and Mack] twice. It’s clearly built into the whole system.”

So what should people – us – be ready to do when witnessing the act of genocide? “To do everything they possibly can to save human life – their own and others,” says Charny. But he fears that the persecuted, while they may receive aid, will not receive military help. In the Holocaust, “there was absolutely no help, and even in those cases where there was some degree of cooperation with partisan fighters, it was limited, it was ambivalent, it was short-shrifting, mainly [in] the Soviet Union.” The RAF did not follow Churchill’s wish to attack the Nazi extermination camp rail yards.

“The Americans weren’t much better – not at all. There is a guilty conscience in the [western] relationship to Israel. I’ve never perceived it as being a conscience about ‘what we did not do to help’. I’ve perceived it as a kind of western sympathy with the people who have been so bitterly oppressed and decimated. But let’s test the question of conscience by looking at the world in its responses right now to places where mass murder is taking place – of the extent of intervention, the extent of caring – as reflected in the media. How would you rate it? That’s a rhetorical question.”

Reprinted in California Courier, January 4, 2019

 

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/genocide-holocaust-never-again-armenia-turkey-robert-fisk-israel-charny-noam-chomsky-a8554046.html

Posted in Armenian Genocide and Co-Victims, Genocidal Events and Processes, Genocide Denial, Genocide Education, Genocide Prevention | Tagged The Genocide Contagion

Post navigation

← Armenian Dress Rehearsal: Jerusalem Post Letter to the Editor by Israel Charny The State of Israel and the U.N. International Day of Commemoration of Victims of Genocide and of its Prevention – December 9 →

Recent Posts

  • With great sadness, we announce the passing of Israel W. Charny
  • ‘I Believe That the Zionist Dream Is Not Viable as Long as It Is Based on Wrongs’
  • What is Genocide? Did Israel Commit Genocide in Gaza?
  • A PERSONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REVIEW OF THE ORIGINS AND BEGINNING YEARS OF GENOCIDE STUDIES AND AN OVERVIEW OF THE FIELD TODAY
  • Gaza Fight is Humanly and Legally Just but Deserves Ceasefire If Hostages Freed
  • Israel Does Not Recognize the Armenian Genocide, but Once Again Uses it as a Diplomatic Tool with Turkey
  • New York Times Bret Stephens Decries Genocide Charges Against Israel As Immoral
  • Reports from the Israel-Gaza War Describe Extreme Violence and Cruelty
  • Putting the October 7 Culprits on Trial
  • Hamas Mass Execution in Action… VERY hard to watch
  • How does a person become a bloodthirsty and murderous Hamas member?
  • Israel’s Reactions to the Disaster in Karabakh (Artsakh)
  • Recommended Reading, and a Welcome to the Ariel University Center for the Research and Study of Genocide in Israel
  • Grave Concerns are Being Expressed of a Looming Genocide of Armenian Civilians by Azerbaijan
  • This Kosher Certificate for Azerbaijan Stinks
  • Azeri Massacre of Polish and Jewish Civilians in 1944
  • Israel Is Learning How Quickly Democracy Gives Way to Dictatorship
  • In Memory of Professor Richard G. Hovannisian: Obituary from the University of Southern California
  • The United States Commemorates the Armenian Genocide on April 24, 2023, and we add WHERE IS ISRAEL?
  • Dr. Taner Akçam Presents New Findings on the First Decision to Commit the Armenian Genocide
  • Der Matossian explores genocide denialism in the 21st century
  • An Overwhelming Encounter with the Truth of Genocidal Cruelty
  • Anti-Defamation League and Tel Aviv University Compared Israel’s Radical Right Ideology with those of the Nazis
  • A Holocaust Survivor Who Candidly Reveals the Cruelty Also of Jews in the Holocaust
  • Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Reveals His Basic Machiavellian Thinking
  • Israel’s Massive Supply of Sophisticated Weapons to Azerbaijan
  • Fascist Meter
  • How to Cover Up a Massacre
  • Bill Proposed in Uruguay to Punish Denial of Holocaust and Armenian Genocide
  • Germany Criminalizes Denials of Genocide – Including the Armenian Genocide – and War Crimes

Categories

  • "Worldwide Campaign for Life"
  • Antisemitism
  • Armenian Genocide and Co-Victims
  • Azerbaijan and Armenia
  • Cultural Genocide
  • Democracy
  • Fascism
  • Genocidal Events and Processes
  • Genocide Denial
  • Genocide Early Warning System (GEWS)
  • Genocide Education
  • Genocide Prevention
  • Genocide Studies
  • Hamas
  • Holocaust
  • Holocaust Memorial
  • How Can We Commit The Unthinkable
  • Human Rights
  • Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide Jerusalem
  • Israel and the Armenian Genocide
  • Israel and Turkey
  • Israel Democracy
  • Israel Expulsion of Migrants
  • Israel Hamas War 2023
  • Israel Sale of Arms
  • Israel War of Independence 1948
  • Law
  • Polish Denial of the Holocaust
  • Psychology of Genocide
  • Rescuers and Caring for Life
  • Rwandan Genocide
  • Sale of Arms for Genocide
  • Ukraine Genocide
  • Uncategorized

Copyright © 2025 Institute on the Holocaust & Genocide in Jerusalem.   Accessibility Statement

Powered by WordPress and Cakifo.