ISHI, the last surviving Indian of the Yahi tribe of northern California. The photograph on the opposite page shows him, starving and terrified, on 29 August 1911, the day that he emerged from forty-one years of hiding in a remote canyon. Most of his tribe was massacred by white settlers between 1853 and 1870. In 1870 the sixteen survivors of the final massacre went into concealment in the Mount Lassen wilderness and continued to live as hunter-gatherers. In November 1908, when the survivors had dwindled to four, surveyors stumbled upon their camp and took all their tools, clothes, and winter food supplies, with the result that three of the Yahis (Ishi's mother, his sister, and an old man) died. Ishi remained alone for three more years until he could stand it no longer and walked out to white civilization, expecting to be lynched there. In fact, he was employed by the University of California Museum at San Francisco and died of tuberculosis in 1916. The photograph is from the archives of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley.
Our rewriting of American history stems from the aspect of genocide that is of greatest practical importance in preventing it—its psychological effects on killers, victims, and third parties. The most puzzling question involves the effect, or rather the apparent non-effect, on third parties. On first thought, one might expect that no horror could grip public attention as much as the intentional, collective, and savage killing of many people. In reality, genocide rarely grips the public's attention in other countries, and even more rarely are interrupted by foreign intervention. Who among us paid much attention to the slaughter of Zanzibar's Arabs in 1964, or of Paraguay's Ache Indians in the 1970s?
Contrast our lack of response to these and all the other instances of genocide in recent decades with our strong reaction to the sole two cases of modern genocide that remain vivid in our imagination, that of the Nazis against the Jews and (much less vivid for most people) that of the Turks against the Armenians. These cases differ in three crucial respects from the genocide we ignore: the victims were whites, with whom other whites identify; the perpetrators were our war enemies whom we were encouraged to hate as evil (especially the Nazis); and there are articulate survivors in the US, who go to much effort to force us to remember. Thus, it takes a rather special constellation of circumstances to get third parties to focus on genocide. The strange passivity of third parties is exemplified by that of governments, whose actions reflect collective human psychology. While the United Nations in 1948 adopted a Convention on Genocide that declared it a crime, the UN has never taken serious steps to prevent, halt, or punish it, despite complaints lodged before the UN against on-going genocide in Bangladesh, Burundi, Cambodia, Paraguay, and Uganda. To a complaint lodged against Uganda at the height of Idi Amin's terror, the UN Secretary-General responded only by asking Amin himself to investigate. The United States is not even among the nations that ratified the UN Convention on Genocide. Is our puzzling lack of response because we did not know, or could not find out, about on-going genocide? Certainly not: many cases of genocide of the 1960s and 1970s received detailed publicity at the time, including those in Bangladesh, Brazil, Burundi, Cambodia, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Indonesia, Lebanon, Paraguay, Rwanda, Sudan, Uganda, and Zanzibar. (The casualties in Bangladesh and Cambodia each topped a million.) For example, in 1968 the Brazilian government filed criminal charges against 134 of the 700 employees of its Indian Protection Service for their acts in exterminating Amazonian Indian tribes. Among the acts detailed in the 5,115-page Figueiredo Report by Brazil's attorney general, and announced at a press conference by Brazil's minister of the interior, were the following: killing of Indians by dynamite, machine-guns, arsenic-laced sugar, and intentionally introduced smallpox, influenza, tuberculosis, and measles; kidnapping of Indian children as slaves; and the hiring of professional killers of Indians by land development countries. Accounts of the Figueiredo report appeared in the American and British press, but failed to stimulate much reaction.
One might thus conclude that most people simply do not care about injustice done to other people, or regard it as none of their business. This is undoubtedly part of the explanation, but not all of it. Many people care passionately about some injustices, such as apartheid in South Africa; why not also about genocide? This question was addressed poignantly, to the Organization of African States, by Hutu victims of the Tutsi in Burundi, where somewhere between 80,000 and 200,000 Hutu were killed in 1972.
Tutsi apartheid is established more ferociously than the apartheid of Vorster, more inhumanly than Portuguese colonialism. Outside of Hitler's Nazi movement, there is nothing to compete with it in world history. And the peoples of Africa say nothing. African heads of state receive the executioner Micombero [President of Burundi, a Tutsi] and clasp his hand in fraternal greeting. Sirs, heads of state, if you wish to help the African peoples of Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau to liberate themselves from their white oppressors, you have no right to let Africans murder other Africans. . Are you waiting until the entire Hutu ethnic group of Burundi is exterminated before raising your voices?
To understand this lack of reaction of third parties, we need to appreciate the reaction of surviving victims. Psychiatrists who have studied witnesses of genocide, such as Auschwitz survivors, describe the effects on them as 'psychological numbing'. Most of us have experienced the intense and lasting pain that comes when a loved friend or relative dies a natural death, out of sight. It is virtually impossible for us to imagine the multiplied intensity of pain when one is forced to watch at close hand many loved friends and relatives being killed with extreme savagery. For the survivors, there is a shattering of the implicit belief system under which such savagery was forbidden; a sense of stigma that one must indeed be worthless to have been singled out for such cruelty; and a sense of guilt at surviving, when one's companions died. Just as intense physical pain numbs us, so does intense psychological pain—there is no other way to survive and remain sane. For myself, these reactions were personified in a relative who survived two years in Auschwitz, and who remained practically unable to cry for decades afterwards.
As for the reactions of the killers, those killers whose ethical code distinguishes between 'us' and 'them' may be able to feel pride, but those reared under a universal ethical code may share the numbing of their victims, exacerbated by the guilt of perpetration. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who fought in Vietnam suffered this numbing. Even the descendants of practitioners of genocide—descendants who have no individual responsibility—may feel a collective guilt, the mirror image of the collective labelling of victims that defines genocide. To reduce the pain of guilt, the descendants often rewrite history; witness the response of modern Americans, or that of Ms Cobern and many other modern Australians.
We can now begin to understand better the lack of reaction of third parties to genocide. Genocide inflicts crippling and lasting psychological damage on the victims and killers who experience it first-hand. But it also may leave deep scars on those who hear about it only second-hand, such as the children of Auschwitz survivors, or the psychotherapists who treat the survivors and Vietnam veterans. Therapists who have trained professionally to be able to listen to human misery often cannot bear to hear the sickening recollections of those involved in genocide. If paid professionals cannot stand it, who can blame the lay public for refusing to listen?