A warning of genocide

Editorial

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has issued an unprecedented declaration that genocide is "imminent or is actually happening" in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Violence has claimed between 50,000 and 100,000 members of African ethnic groups at the hands primarily of government-supported Arab militias, though Human Rights Watch warns that the terms "African" and "Arab" do not reflect the nuance of ethnic diversity in the region and the conflict.

Nevertheless, the horrors of Darfur have led the Holocaust Museum to issue a global plea for intervention to prevent the potential of hundreds of thousands more deaths. It is a step the museum has never taken before.

"We don't use the term lightly," said the museum's spokesperson.

What impact this plea from the United States' most prominent monument to genocide will make remains to be seen.

The very purpose of a Holocaust museum – of any museum, really – is to influence current events by illuminating the past. When the Holocaust ended and the world slowly began to comprehend the incomprehensible, commemorations like the Holocaust Museum emerged as tiny bulwarks against future genocides. But the world, sadly, is not a museum and we humans are not very careful curators. The lessons of the Holocaust, despite what we promised ourselves, have not extinguished ethnic hatred from the world.

Since 1945, it has been the Jewish people who have most dedicatedly carried the lessons of genocide's potential to the larger world. Once, maybe, we thought these lessons would prevent future disasters and perhaps they have. But they have also, to some extent, elicited a cynicism and a fatigue that leads some in Canada and elsewhere to suggest that we move beyond the Holocaust, to put it behind us and look to the future. In the worst way, the Holocaust has become wrapped up in the dialogue of the Middle East, where any mention of the Holocaust by Jews is verboten, out of bounds, even as the term is usurped and insulted by its use to describe Israel's treatment of Palestinians. The term has been so debased by overuse that even a cry like that from the Holocaust Museum falls nonchalantly on the North American ear.

That the United States Holocaust Museum, in 2004, would even have to enter the global discourse about a situation it terms genocide is appalling. When will the world learn that ignoring holocausts doesn't prevent them?

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