“Victim Olympics”: The Collective Psychology of Comparative Genocides

In his new book on the impact of the Holocaust on American Jewish identity, The Holocaust In American Life, historian Peter Novick discusses what he dubs the “Victim Olympics.” This is an unseemly phenomenon of ethnic one-upmanship which pits groups against each other with self-serving interpretations of historical grievances and suffering. The psychological dimension involves how the need to feel ethnic pride has created this mutually antagonistic competition.

I experienced an instance of this on a recent social occasion. While visiting a Jewish immigrant from Holland, one intimately familiar with her parents’ Holocaust-era struggle for survival, I discussed murderous events of more recent vintage. I noted that the only close modern parallel to the Jewish catastrophe of World War II was Rwanda, where as many as 800,000 defenseless Tutsis were butchered during 100 days beginning in April, 1994. I hit a nerve in pointing out that this was a rate of slaughter which may have exceeded Auschwitz at its worst, even though I had not done so to minimize the Holocaust, but rather to emphasize the magnitude of this more recent horror. Still, her angry reaction should not have come as a complete surprise.

As a child of refugees from the Holocaust, who never knew his grandparents and numerous other relatives as a result, I inherited an intense interest in both the legacy of Jewish suffering and the cataclysmic experiences of other peoples. I am pained, personally, when the injustices visited upon others become a source of acrimony against “the Jews” for having so successfully memorialized our bitter encounter with genocide.

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I might find this at work where—a propos of nothing—a usually cheerful black man turns scornful about “the Jews talking about their Holocaust” when African Americans suffered a “holocaust” of their own in the “Middle Passage” of slave ships transporting and killing en route untold numbers of victims. Or, over a decade ago, when I waited in the hospital with my mother for news on my father’s emergency heart surgery alongside an elderly Armenian-American woman and her adult children in the same situation. As almost inevitably with my mother under stress, she mentioned their survival of Hitler. This elicited a diatribe from the old woman, decrying “the Jews” for thinking they are the only ones who have suffered.

Psychiatrist Vamik Volkan applies his psychological and psychoanalytic knowledge to shed light on this issue in Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (1997). Dr. Volkan observes in this study of a variety of contemporary international and inter-ethnic conflicts that “Rarely was there empathy for the suffering of the ‘enemy’ group…; instead there was an inability to identify with the anguish of the other. There was only an isolated concern with one’s own helplessness and losses.”

He quotes Anwar Sadat’s speech in Jerusalem in November, 1977, that “70 percent” of the problem between Egypt and Israel was psychological. Dr. Volkan then illustrates this with an example from an Egyptian-Israeli group dialogue when an Egyptian found it difficult to accept that Israelis have genuine fears about the Arab world. A zero-sum competitive psychology is at work: If the Egyptian acknowledged the Israelis’ fears, “he would be granting Israelis the status of an injured party, thereby compromising the unique, injured status of Egyptians…. […and his reluctance underscored] his belief that Israelis, unlike Egyptians, lacked emotions; they were nonhuman.”

Dr. Volkan employs a mix of psychological insight and metaphor to explain the longevity of ethnic grievances, some—such as the Serbs on Kosovo and “the Turks”—enduring for centuries. Volkan refers to “selectively-chosen trauma” and a collective “unresolved mourning” over historical events which are remembered inexactly or even inaccurately. Together with “selectively-chosen glories” which depict events and eras in idealized terms, these are transmitted through the generations as “psychological DNA.” “The influence of a severe and humiliating calamity that directly affects all or most of a large group forges a link between the psychology of the individual and that of the group.” The trauma is too painful to be mourned to completion. “Because the traumatized self-images passed down by members of the group all refer to the same calamity, they become part of the group identity, an ethnic marker on the canvas of the ethnic tent.”

The psychological aspects of this competitive “sport” of ethnic suffering may also be disguised within, or supplemented by, ideological agendas. An article in the Spring, 1999, issue of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, “The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship” by Garviel D. Rosenfeld of Fairfield University, pinpoints the issues as presented by leftists in indicting mainstream Holocaust scholars as “Jewish exclusivists” or Zionist apologists. One such work, examined independently by Rosenfeld and myself, is a contentious book by Ward Churchill, an Amerindian activist and professor of Native American studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (1997).

Professor Churchill disputes official estimates of the native population of the Americas and the Caribbean at the initial moment of European contact in 1492. He favors a population estimate of about 25 million north of Mexico, about 15 million in the Caribbean Basin, and about 125 million in the Western Hemisphere as a whole. Hence, he argues that the European colonizers brought on a “holocaust” in the Western Hemisphere of far more massive dimension than what the Jews suffered in World War II. Churchill not only indicts Western civilization for its treatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas but also attacks prominent Jewish Holocaust historians—including Deborah Lipstadt, Lucy Dawidowicz, Yehuda Bauer, and Steven T. Katz—for being “Jewish exclusivists” in arguing that the Jewish Holocaust ranks as the world’s worst instance of genocide, or, in the view of Cornell historian Steven Katz, that it was the only “true” genocide.

Prof. Rosenfeld regards Katz’s terminology as unnecessarily inflammatory:

Katz could have … argued that the Nazis’ intent to kill the entire Jewish people made the Holocaust different from all other cases of mass murder, AND referred to these cases (as did Yehuda Bauer) as “genocide.” By failing to do so, his book needlessly

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offended groups extremely sensitive to the neglect of their historical experiences, opening its author to the charge of establishing a “hierarchy of victims.”

Churchill and other leftist scholars attacked Yehuda Bauer of Hebrew University for minimizing the extent of genocide against Gypsies and Slavs, especially Poles, in World War II. Yet Rosenfeld indicates that Gypsy populations were not consistently rounded up for extermination in all countries under Nazi occupation. And, although ten percent of non-Jewish Poles perished, every Pole was not targeted in the same way as every Jew. Indeed, it is this concept—to paraphrase Elie Wiesel, there were many other victims, but every Jew was intended as a victim—which Churchill fails to credit or to understand.

Churchill prefers to see this “interest in Jewish exclusivism” as an ethnocentric Jewish conceit or perhaps a Zionist tactic to win world sympathy. He quotes writer Edward Alexander to the effect that allowing for other’s experiences of genocide “converts to moral capital in the political arena at Jewish expense.” Still, Churchill plays the same zero-sum game he accuses “Zionists” of to advance his own agenda of aboriginal rights. As “demonstrably one of the most victimized groups in the history of humanity, [American Indians] are entitled to every ounce of moral authority we can get,” he writes.

It is sometimes said that suffering ennobles the soul. Indeed, the best of the ethical and compassionate teachings in Judaism, Christianity, and other great religious or philosophical traditions are based upon instances of suffering or persecution. Yet the group- and psycho-dynamics of history suggest that suffering is more likely to embitter than to ennoble, and that the latter is rare—a product of profound human growth and maturity.

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