Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence

9. From the Holocaust to Group Rights: Minorities in a Majority World

« 9 » From the Holocaust to Group Rights Minorities in a Majority World This chapter has two aims: first, to outline the development during the second half of the twentieth century in reaction to the atrocity of the Holocaust of the idea and practice of “group rights”: rights that belong to groups as groups and only on that basis to the groups’ individual members. Then, secondly and building on the results of the first, to show how that 140 the presence as future development represents not only a display of history in its course, but a valuable addition to our thinking about justice and moral judgment in our present and, almost certainly, our future society. The conceptualization and public awareness of genocide and group rights thus add significantly to the reach of moral consciousness and imagination in contemporary ethical and political discourse. And to a deeper understanding of the structure of the Holocaust. The historical development referred to unfolded in what can be characterized as three stages. The first of these was the Holocaust itself�in the Nazis’ euphemistic and coded phrase, the Endlösung, the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”�their campaign, again in Himmler’s infamous words, to make the Jews as a group “disappear from the face of the earth.” The second stage of the process came in reaction to the first; this was the identification of the general concept (and then, too, of the term) of genocide , a theoretical turn that itself served as the basis for a body of international legislation and judicial review marking genocide as a distinctive crime. The third stage, implicit in the first two and, like the second, still evolving, is the concept or principle of “group rights” that has come to be recognized as applying not only to genocide (as violating one such right), but also to other rights entailed if the primary right to group-existence is to be realized. This sequence, condensed and simplified as it is, seems nonetheless an accurate representation of a historical sequence. With the dots causally connected among its parts, moreover, it provides a fuller understanding of the three “moments” it singles out than would be possible if those moments were viewed separately: Holocaust, genocide, group rights. I do not mean to suggest that the causal line thus asserted was exclusive or sufficient; there had been earlier gestures in the twentieth and even the nineteenth centuries, for example, to a role for group rights (I elaborate on these below). And it is clear that substantial issues remain unresolved relative to the concepts of genocide and group rights, beginning with the claims made of their distinctiveness for each of them (and indeed, for the Holocaust as well). But the genealogy cited is fully grounded historically, a contention independent of any judgment of conceptual or moral value ascribed to the several stages, whether by advocates or critics. That then turns into my second purpose, as evaluative and in the end commendatory, arguing that the historical development noted has been From the Holocaust to Group Rights 141 not only consequential but valuable in what it has added to contemporary moral and political discourse; in this respect, it also has made explicit some of what had been omissions or gaps in earlier appearances of that discourse . The principal addition identified here is that of group rights in its supplement to the longer-standing tradition and analysis of rights as such, which had focused almost exclusively on individual rights, with group rights, when mentioned at all, held to be reducible to the other. But that is precisely what group rights, in the sequence outlined here, are not. In relation to their “bearer,” in other words, group rights are as autonomous and irreducible for the contexts in which they apply as individual rights are in their contexts. Before elaborating on these two claims, however, it will be well to consider a peripheral issue that might easily usurp the discussion. For it might be inferred from what has been said that I am suggesting that even as horrific an event as the Holocaust turns out to have had some good emerging from it, since it did lead to the formulation of such new ethical and legal principles as the concepts of genocide and group rights. This conclusion would be an ethical variation on the cliché that “Every cloud has a silver lining,” arguing that somehow the “post-Holocaust” period...