Great post from Café Hayek's Russell Roberts on holocaust denial, constitutional restraints on government and drawing the right lesson:
As a Jew, it never ceases to amaze me that people think the most important lesson of the Holocaust is that anyone, even civilized Germans who love Bach and Beethoven, can become murderers. Or that the most important lesson is that hatred is wrong. Hatred is immortal. People say, "never again" as if saying it is sufficient to prevent future holocausts. But saying it is not sufficient without limiting the power of government to imprison and kill people.
To me, the most important lesson of the Holocaust is that only governments can kill millions of people. Murdering millions requires absolute power. So I want governments to be weaker rather than stronger. That's why I like the First and the Second Amendments. And why I'm glad I don't live in Austria.
[To me, the most important lesson of the Holocaust is that only governments can kill millions of people]
Surely this lesson should have been unlearned now that we have the example of Rwanda?
Posted by: dsquared | February 28, 2006 at 02:07 PM
I don't know if Rwanda qualifies for a full-blooded exception to this proposed rule. It's not like Somalia-style anarchy obtained: there was a Hutu government orchestrating the genocide. And that genocide only ended after the government was overthrown. But certainly, Rwanda shows that you don't need huge camps and gas chambers - machetes can still do the trick with a sufficient number of properly motivated civilian death squads
Posted by: Frank McGahon | February 28, 2006 at 02:35 PM
Well, one thing Rwanda certainly does prove is that an ideology of hate needn't be confined to the hearts of just "a few extremists" on the "fringe" of a large group of people ...
Posted by: Abiola | February 28, 2006 at 02:49 PM
[there was a Hutu government orchestrating the genocide]
I'm not sure I agree with this; the government was certainly responsible for the genocide, but it didn't orchestrate it in the sense in which the Nazi government did; the ruling party didn't make anything like the same use of the arms of the state. There was probably no more state involvement than there is in Darfur. You're probably right to say it's a half-blooded exception.
[one thing Rwanda certainly does prove is that an ideology of hate needn't be confined to the hearts of just "a few extremists" on the "fringe" of a large group of people]
another thing it proves is that there are a lot of serious problems in the undeveloped world that aren't really anything to do with Islam. In fact there are many anecdotes (which admittedly are publicised like hell on Muslim websites, but the original source is the New York Times I see no intrinsic reason to doubt their veracity) of Muslims giving shelter to non-Muslim Tutsis at a time when the Catholics were turning them over to the genocidaires (most of whom were Christians, as were their victims).
As far as I am aware, British Hutus (and Hutus in the developed world generally) did not get caught up in the purely local insanity and I am certainly not aware of any systematic violence carried out by Hutus against Tutsis outside Africa.
Posted by: dsquared | February 28, 2006 at 04:50 PM
"another thing it proves is that there are a lot of serious problems in the undeveloped world that aren't really anything to do with Islam"
I'm the last person to deny this, having spent much time giving examples of precisely such problems, and why standard liberal suggestions for fixing them are doomed to fail. In contrast, you've put a great deal of time and energy into arguing that we either shouldn't pay attention to what mainstream Islam preaches, and how it differs from what other religions teach, or that in any case any such differences don't matter and can be attributed entirely to poverty.
It took more than mere poverty to get Rwandans hacking their neighbors to death en masse, and it takes more than poverty to get men to fly plane-loads of innocents into office buildings, or to strap themselves with suicide belts and ignite them in the subway during rush hour: ideology matters, and Islam is an extremely influential ideology with a highly elaborated and coherent structure whose content you insist on ignoring in favor of favorable personal impressions you've had with individual Muslims.
Posted by: Abiola | February 28, 2006 at 05:15 PM
"I am certainly not aware of any systematic violence carried out by Hutus against Tutsis outside Africa."
It's not as if they were an organized religion with plenty of preachers at hand to keep stoking hatred in their hearts even in exile, is it? Besides, "Hutu power" doesn't have the prospect of an eternity in paradise with 72 virgins to dangle before expats afraid of transgressing the law, and identifying who one ought to kill is much harder without a state offering ethnicity-marked ID cards to accommodate the process.
Posted by: Abiola | February 28, 2006 at 05:19 PM
"ideology matters, and Islam is an extremely influential ideology..."
As is Zionism, why is why Al Nakba has been denied for more than half a century.
Posted by: Stephen Brown | February 28, 2006 at 05:32 PM
Sheesh!
Everyone agrees that Palestinians fled in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. There is even some sort of consensus about why they fled. The dispute is about whether the Palestinian fears of retaliation which inspired this exodus were justified or not. Unlike the holocaust, There is not likely to ever be a historical fact of the matter so "Zionists" (along with non-Zionist Israelis) and Palestinian nationalists are entitled to disagree about this without one side accusing the other of "denial"
Posted by: Frank McGahon | February 28, 2006 at 05:57 PM
Dont ignore that fact that Rwanda illustrates Russel Roberts' points perfectly: The Rwandan crisis, while certainly not State orchestrated to a large degree reflect the extent to which pernicious State influences can create the genocidal conditions that Roberts' refers to. In the case of Africa's colonial States, this influence seems pernicious in perpetuity - and not limiting the powers of the government (or the State) is precisely what caused the Rwandan crisis. As Mahmood Mamdani has explained in many ways; the Rwandan crisis, at heart, was a crisis of citizenship:
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7027.html
The Colonial State is to blame for the horror. State policies in colonial days laid the framework for 1994 and its hard to imagine that those expropriatory policies were crafted by libertarians.
Posted by: Chuckles | March 03, 2006 at 12:41 AM