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Indigenization of the Holocaust and the Tehran Holocaust Conference: Iranian Aberration or Third World Trend?

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Abstract

It is understandable that Iran’s December 2006 hosting of an international conference casting doubts on the historicity of the Holocaust would raise questions about treatments of the Shoah elsewhere in the Third World. In fact, indigenization the Holocaust—the manifold ways in which serious scholars, activists, and writers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have come to incorporate the Holocaust in their intellectual work—has been positive overall. Within the framework of intellectual globalization, much of the Third World intelligentsia has come to include this most Western of human rights violations within the framework of their own cultures and histories. Although some of the indigenization of the Holocaust is political and instrumental, the deviant variant expressed at the Tehran Holocaust conference is atypical. Governmental respect for the memory of victims of genocide should be considered as an emerging human right.

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Notes

  1. The term “Holocaust,” both in the context of the conference and this paper, refers to the Nazi genocide against the Jews during World War II. In other contexts, it may also refer to the genocidal campaigns waged by the Nazis against the Sinta, Roma, Slavs, and other groups.

  2. One of Khomeini’s most important books, The Governance of the Jurist: Islamic Government, begins by describing the “afflict[ion]” of Islam by Jews: “from the very beginning [they] established anti-Islamic progaganda and engaged in various [anti-Muslim] stratagems” (see Litvak 2006, p. 269).

  3. The latter, it should be noted, included ultra-Orthodox Jews from the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect. See Santos 2007.

  4. Polish jurist and Jewish Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in 1944.

  5. Nor is Israel itself above a kind of Holocaust denial: Witness the unsuccessful attempts by Yossi Sarid and others to incorporate teaching about the Armenian genocide within the curriculum. See Auron 2000 and 2003.

  6. For recent recognition of Filipino sanctuary for Holocaust refugees, see Berger 2005.

  7. For an early example, see Qingling (1952). See also Jin (2000).

  8. From an Eastern theological perspective, see also Masao Abe’s dialogue with Jewish scholars on the “karma” of Holocaust evil and purification in Ives (1995). Abe’s attempts to “heal” human rights violations spiritually through a transcendent Zen theology is not easily accepted within a Jewish framework, but it does indicate expanded Eastern incorporation of the Holocaust into its world view.

  9. Qualifying the German origin of the expatriates with the term “Swiss” was an attempt to denationalize their true identity and cast them in a “neutral” way.

  10. With respect to African-Americans, Roy Brooks notes that the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which inspired the “modern redress movement for slavery” embodied in Congressional Bill H.R. 40 of 1989, was itself a reflection of “the growing global concern for human rights since the end of the Holocaust” (Brooks 2007, p. 302).

  11. For a discussion of the problematic nature of the comparison, see Miles 2000.

  12. Hamber (2006, p. 573) cautions that Western consultants to museums and memorials in the Third World, in borrowing from Holocaust memorialization templates, may unwittingly diminish indigenous cultural expressions of reparations. Such, at any rate, has been suggested in the case of memorials to apartheid victims in South Africa.

  13. See Miles 2003 and 2004, pp. 382–387. Zertal (2005) grapples with the political instrumentalization of the Holocaust within Israel itself.

  14. See Miles 2004, pp. 388–389, for elaboration.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    William F. S. Miles

  2. Political Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    William F. S. Miles

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  1. William F. S. Miles
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Correspondence to William F. S. Miles.

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An earlier version of this paper was originally delivered at the conference “Humanitarian Narratives of Inflicted Suffering” at the Foundations of Humanitarianism Program, University of Connecticut, Storrs, October 13–15, 2006. It has been substantially rewritten, thanks to the comments and suggestion of the editors and anonymous reviewers of this journal. I alone remain responsible for errors, omissions, or other defects.

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Miles, W.F.S. Indigenization of the Holocaust and the Tehran Holocaust Conference: Iranian Aberration or Third World Trend?. Hum Rights Rev 10, 505–519 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-008-0092-0

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