Prime-Time Genocide

As with last year’s Roots, some of the criticism of Holocaust smacks of a certain proprietary interest in ethnic oppression. Holocaust, one keeps hearing, is inadequate to what it depicts. Elie Wiesel, for instance, complains that the show “trivializes” the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, “transforms an ontological event into soap-opera.” He proceeds to say that “the Holocaust is unique, not just another event. . . . Whether culmination or aberration of history, the Holocaust transcends history. . . . [It is] the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted.” Not only this dramatization, but by implication any dramatization—even one by a Sophocles—would necessarily be false to it.

The ultimate event? Unique? Surely he overstates what can hardly be overstated: superlatives of horror baffle the mind as much as the bare facts. The slaughter of a whole race is so fearful a thing that one must ask what the quality of its peculiar evil is. Tragedy is tragedy; it knows no multiples. If horror lies in mere scale, then each victim suffered only a fraction of a millionth of the evil, and nobody can be said to have suffered anything like the whole. But that is false to what we mean when we speak of the evil of genocide.

JS

About the Author

Joseph Sobran

As with last year’s Roots, some of the criticism of Holocaust smacks of a certain proprietary interest in ethnic oppression. Holocaust, one keeps hearing, is inadequate to what it depicts. Elie Wiesel, for instance, complains that the show “trivializes” the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, “transforms an ontological event into soap-opera.” He proceeds to say that “the Holocaust is unique, not just another event. . . . Whether culmination or aberration of history, the Holocaust transcends history. . . . [It is] the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted.” Not only this dramatization, but by implication any dramatization—even one by a Sophocles—would necessarily be false to it.

The ultimate event? Unique? Surely he overstates what can hardly be overstated: superlatives of horror baffle the mind as much as the bare facts. The slaughter of a whole race is so fearful a thing that one must ask what the quality of its peculiar evil is. Tragedy is tragedy; it knows no multiples. If horror lies in mere scale, then each victim suffered only a fraction of a millionth of the evil, and nobody can be said to have suffered anything like the whole. But that is false to what we mean when we speak of the evil of genocide.