Another act of genocide

Reprogramming the genocide deniers

The need for a rigorous process of self-reflection is perhaps more important than ever

Taylor C. Noakes / October 12, 2022 / 5 min read

CANADIAN POLITICSINDIGENOUS POLITICS

A march from Queen’s Park to Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto to demand action on the 215 children found in unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Residential School, June 2021. Photo by Michael Swan/Flickr

At the end of the Second World War, the Allies instigated a broad program of denazification coupled with a wider policy of enforced collective responsibility. In doing so they determined that the German people bore collective responsibility for the actions of Hitler, the Nazi party, and the German military (as well as the SS), including the multiple inter-related genocides they carried out during the Holocaust.

It was a psychological warfare pincer movement, albeit one designed to make the German people productive members of a global society once more, rather than destroying them. All signs and symbols of the Nazi party were immediately destroyed—some spectacularly so—often by German civilians pressed into ‘denazifying’ their environment. It was in effect an enforced collective humiliation designed to erase all evidence of Nazism from Germany. The process also involved prison terms for Nazi officials and a total ban on displaying Nazi symbols of any kind, publicly or privately. Denying the Holocaust was also forbidden, and Germany still carries some of the world’s strictest penalties for doing so.

But it didn’t end there. As many German civilians were claiming they had no knowledge of the Holocaust, the Allies regularly brought German civilians to the death camps and forced them to observe the crematoriums, gas chambers and other irrefutable evidence of industrial murder. Civilians were constantly bombarded by Allied controlled propaganda designed specifically to enforce the notion of collective guilt. It was inescapable: newspapers showed the evidence in gruesome detail; radio broadcasts told the truth of Nazi atrocities; posters and pamphlets ensured not only that everyone saw what had been done, but were further reminded of who was responsible. It was a psychological onslaught of unprecedented proportions, but it was deemed absolutely necessary to break the grasp of Nazism on the German people.

It wasn’t enough to do this just within Germany, either. The world had to know what had happened. The Allies sought out the considerable volume of documentary evidence the Germans had compiled themselves, and then made it widely available. This was then used at the Nuremberg trials, which in turn were filmed and reported on extensively.

The goal was to make genocide denial impossible, and though there are strong arguments suggesting denazification was suspended too early, that too many Nazis made their way into positions of power after the war, and that the culpability of the Allies in allowing Hitler’s rise (and ignoring early evidence of the Holocaust) was never adequately acknowledged, the effort nonetheless had the positive effect of making Nazi genocide and war crimes widely known to the global population. This made denialism a crime in its own right—or at the very least an unpardonable taboo—in most societies around the world.

I mention this not because I believe our society is at an untenable deficit in terms of basic knowledge and education concerning the Holocaust in particular, and the Second World War more broadly (it is, and the consequences of this ignorance are unfortunately becoming more apparent all the time), but because I believe a similar process needs to be applied to the genocide for which Canada as a nation state is collectively responsible.

https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/reprogramming-the-genocide-d...