This letter was forwarded to me from Europe, and it speaks volumes. The author's name, Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, means nothing to me - perhaps one of my readers can tell me about him - but it is obvious that he speaks on behalf of the Self-Chosen.
Here's what he has to say:
When people argue about "correct" language, the stakes can be high. Words frame thoughts, promote prejudices, conceal guilt under a veil of euphemisms. Verbal imperialism and linguistic cleansing are potent weapons in international conflicts.
Take the supposedly "scientific" meeting organised last month in the precincts of the former Buchenwald concentration camp, where 50 scholars and others, chosen by the German Chancellery's historical adviser, Professor Lutz Niethammer, were to decide whether the sufferings of Holocaust survivors now suing German corporations in the United States should be characterised as "slave labour", or merely "forced labour".
The gathering included historians paid by a range of companies, including Degussa, Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen, which are themselves accused of being implicated in the Holocaust. Given the self-interest of German enterprises in minimising past crimes, it is hardly surprising that the conclave decided that the term slave labour is out for academic purposes. As a concession, it decided that it "would not make sense to try to ban" the term, in view of its use in the "Jewish and Anglo-American world". Nevertheless, the correct term is to be forced labour.
More surprising is the ingenuity demonstrated in arriving at the comforting conclusion desired by the conclave's benefactors and by the German authorities. The term "slave" refers narrowly - argued two sponsored historians - to workers held in conditions similar to those in the old American South (which the historians dubiously interpreted as comparatively mild). When it comes to Nazi victims, slave must therefore be rejected as a euphemism. Moreover, Hitler's foreign workers were employed under a variety of conditions. Therefore, the conference records, the term forced labour should be accepted as the desired "generic term".
This twisted reasoning represents an act of verbal cleansing. It rejects the language used by Allied prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials in favour of the terminology preferred by the German companies implicated in Nazi terror. Sanitised terminology leads to sanitised history. German industry in general, concluded the conferees, "could not be blamed" for the systematic "extermination through work".
The Buchenwald meeting was designed to influence compensation negotiations in Washington and Bonn. (For decades, Germany has refused to compensate the work of the millions who were dragged from their homes to toil for little or no pay in the concentration camps and labour commandos.)
As the negotiations have dragged on and class action suits against German firms have begun in the American courts, the language and the arguments of the German side have become increasingly strident. Its legal representatives have claimed, for example, that German corporations were forced by the Nazi regime to accept slave labourers; in fact, the Nuremberg records prove that some of the most prominent enterprises actively recruited concentration camp workers as slave labourers from the SS.
Equally, German claims that postwar compensation was provided without Allied pressure and was comprehensive fly in the face of the documents.
Falsehood has been accompanied by insult. The Chancellery's Professor Niethammer told the newspaper "Die Welt" that many Jewish survivors are alive today "thanks to the circumstance that they were forced labourers and were not directly killed by the SS". In an internal Chancellery planning document, later leaked, he wrote that today's Germans "are tired of philosemitic overcompensation in the media and of sterile grief rituals by politicians and long for remembrance without negative nationalism".
Accordingly, he proposed a programme of historical research involving "cultural engineering". In essence, "remembrance" should consist of innocent projects such as town twinnings, youth exchanges, meals on wheels for the elderly; anything but a frank appraisal of the recent past.
If reconciliation no longer engages the imagination of the German Government, the revision of history does. If one can change the vocabulary of history, one can alter gradually its perception. While there remains unfinished business from the Nazi era, Europe cannot be reconstructed on solid foundations. By opening up corporate archives and by meeting the just claims of the elderly slave labourers (most of them non-Jews), German society could reap great moral benefits and German industry could clear its name.
Instead, the Schröder Government and German big business seem gripped by the twin demons of denial and defiance. <end>
A few additional points to ponder:
* If self-interest on the part of the Germans dictates that "forced labour" be used as a term of convenience, how does self-interest not dictate that "slave labour" be used by those who would benefit from the harsher word?
* During World War II, there was "forced labour" inside and outside of the concentration camp for Germans and others, not just for Jews. My mother had to work. My grandmother had to work. Even children in grammar school had to put in their hours - as I well remember, having to go collect herbs as a first-grader on a very cold and rain-sogged day.
* What's this about the Nuremberg Trials as criterion? Do we need to send this fellow Pinto-Duschinsky to the Carlos Porter website to start reading? <www.cwporter.com>
* If verbal ethnic cleansing is to be employed, I would propose that the words "Six million" be cleansed from our vocabulary with the biggest broom of truth on earth
* Why shouldn't the German Chancellery decide how negotiations are to be conducted? Is Tel Aviv more impartial when dealing and negotiating with Palestinians? How did Israel settle the compensation cases of German Christian Templars' villages, factories, properties, after they helped the British exile them to the interior of Australia? After years of negotiations, those Palestine-born Germans who had lived there for generations, got the equivalent of $1.35 for every $100 in value stolen by Israel.
There's more, but I am saving it for later - like for a rainy day!
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"I see the Jews want compensation from the Arabs a la Holocaust. The only thing that surprises me at this point is that they have not started legal proceedings against the Egyptians in claiming to have been forced to work as slaves on the pyramids."
(Letter to the Zundelsite)
Back to Table of Contents of the Aug. 1999 ZGrams