The Moral and Political Response to the Holocaust

The role of religion in international affairs cannot be considered apart from the European Holocaust of the late 1930s and 1940s— the most important moral and political event of modern times. Since the gates of the death camps opened in 1945, the Holocaust has served an essential symbolic purpose. It is the bottom of every slippery slope, the nightmare that wakes us suddenly to the stakes of politics.

In his masterful book The Years of Extermination, the historian Saul Friedlander deploys page after page of accumulating detail to reveal the scale and horror of this event: the racial purity laws, the economic indignities, the despairing suicides, the liquidation of the disabled, the digging up of Jewish graves in cemeteries, the deportations, the ghettos, the shootings in batch after batch, the pits of corpses, the emptied orphanages, the naked, terrified walk to the gas chamber, the bodies reduced to smoke and ash. One observer called it “the rule of death in all its majesty”—to the tune of six million Jewish victims.

After the 1939 invasion of Poland, the Special Purpose Operation Group of the Germany army was charged with terrorizing the Jewish population. “The choice victims were Orthodox Jews,” Friedlander writes, given their distinctive looks and attire. They were shot at; they were compelled to smear feces on each other; they had to jump, crawl, sing, clean excrement with prayer shawls, dance around the bonfires of burning Torah scrolls. They were whipped, forced to eat pork, or had Jewish stars carved on their foreheads. The “beard game” was the most popular entertainment of all: Beards and sidelocks were shorn, plucked, torn, set afire, hacked off with or without parts of skin, cheeks, or jaws, to the amusement of a usually large audience of cheering soldiers.[1]

It is easy to forget how shocking the events of the Holocaust, whose full extent was revealed only after the end of the war in 1945, were to the conscience of the world. The institutions of the modern state—bureaucracy, mass suasion, military power—had been harnessed to the purposes of sadism and mass murder. The Holocaust indicted a highly sophisticated and educated European society —along with the very idea that higher education and cultural sophistication would act as brakes on evil. It indicted other nations that did little, even after the crimes became obvious. It indicted German Christians who were often indifferent or complicit. For some, it even indicted God, who seemed uncaring on a distant throne.

But in many ways the response to the Holocaust was also hopeful. Following the horrors of World War I, the general reaction had been cynicism and disillusionment. Following the greater horrors of World War II, the general reaction was quite idealistic. The victorious Allies instituted a new order of justice and human rights. The Tokyo Tribunals and the Nuremberg Trials were moral as well as legal enterprises. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Jackson, chief counsel for the prosecution at Nuremberg, said of those on trial that the prosecution would not seek convictions “for mere technical or incidental transgressions of international convention. We charge guilt . . . that involves moral as well as legal wrong . . . it is their abnormal and inhuman conduct that brings them to this bar.”[2]

The moral response to the Holocaust found equally strong expression in the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which spoke of “inherent dignity” and “equal and inalienable rights.” There were many American influences on this document, ranging from the Declaration of Independence to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. But the theory was simple: the Nazis not only lost, they were evil. Their vision of nation, race, and culture would be replaced by an assertion of universal human rights and dignity.

Objections to the Universal Human Rights Declaration

It was, however, more an assertion than an argument. The French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who was involved in the discussions surrounding the Universal Declaration, observed: “We agree on these rights, providing we are not asked why. With the ‘why,’ the dispute begins.”[3] Indeed, even as the Universal Declaration was adopted in 1948, challenges were gathering. Three nations abstained from supporting the document: the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa (which was then run by a white, racist regime). The arguments they made are still heard sixty years later, and for that reason are very much worth considering and answering.

Cultural Objection

There are three main objections to the idea of universal human rights. First, authoritarian regimes often claim a cultural exception. The philosophy of universal human rights, in their view, is merely an expression, and a tool, of Western culture—a form of ideological colonialism. The pursuit of the Soviet “new man,” or of “Asian values,” is just as valid. Many autocratic elites in Africa today make a similar argument, identifying the issue of Western-style human rights with colonial arrogance.

The problem with this objection should be obvious: it is fundamentally self-interested, and designed to protect the guilty. A few years ago, the Interfaith Project on Human Rights concluded, “To date, governmental claims that culture justifies deviating from human-rights standards have been made exclusively by states that have demonstrably bad human-rights records.”[4] Elites who claim to speak for their culture are actually speaking for themselves and their interests—which often stand in stark contrast to the best traditions of their own culture. There was nothing inherently or admirably Chinese about the Cultural Revolution. There is nothing nobly African about Robert Mugabe’s brutal rule.

Indeed, the opposite proposition can be argued—namely, that by deferring to claims of cultural exceptionalism advanced by autocrats, we participate in a kind of colonialism, or what Richard Just of the New Republic has called “internal colonialism.”[5] These elites treat their people very much the same way that colonial elites once did, or worse. “Is it a consolation for the victims,” Just asks, “that their oppression does not come from the West?”[6]

This is an issue on which international institutions themselves are schizophrenic, or worse. The United Nations, for example, was founded on a belief in universal human rights, but also on the principle of state sovereignty and nonintervention. The two are often in tension. The UN asserts the “responsibility to protect”: the duty of member nations to rescue the citizens of other nations from crimes against humanity.

Yet the Security Council and Human Rights Council are dominated by nation-states that make such interventions difficult or impossible. From this contradiction there issues paralysis—punctuated by the gang-up of autocratic members of the (misnamed) Human Rights Council against Western countries and most egregiously against the democratic state of Israel. That other nations, many of them home to barbaric and lawless regimes, obsessively excoriate Israel, one of the most admirable and estimable nations on earth—under the banner of human rights, no less—is a travesty and a moral scandal of the highest order.

Religious Objection

A second objection to universal human rights has come from religion—and in the first instance not only from Muslim-majority countries but also from the then-Calvinists of South Africa. There, the ruling Afrikaners invoked the Old Testament to justify their vision of white rule. Regarding black Africans as the children of Ham and less than human, they resisted the judgment by outsiders of their religious beliefs, which were merged with their view of the state.

The problem here was similar to the problem with autocratic cultural exceptionalism. Claiming to speak for their religious tradition, South Africa’s leaders were actually speaking for a single, distorted version of that tradition. The same can be said of today’s militant Islam. The Taliban may assert that stoning a mother to death for adultery before a cheering crowd at a soccer stadium is an authentic application of Islamic law, but the claim is as easily refuted by serious analysis of the Islamic tradition as apartheid was refuted by serious analysis of Christian tradition. Once again, exceptionalism of this kind is revealed as the view of a self-protective elite.

The Philosophical Relativism Objection

The third objection has come from within the West itself, and specifically from philosophical relativism. Tracing the varieties of relativism is beyond our scope here, but it has become common, particularly in academia, to deny that human beings have natures that can be separated from their cultural circumstances or that are answerable to a source of authority from outside those circumstances. Some, speaking more bluntly, say that we are merely the result of our biochemical processes and our particular environment. That being the case, we have only our own cultural consensus on what constitutes human rights—for us. Not only is it next to impossible to define a universal set of such rights, but we also have no good justification for telling other societies, or for that matter even our own children, why they should hold to our particular consensus.

These trends have opened up a tension at the heart of modern liberalism, whose greatest achievements have lain precisely in the realm of human rights: the Seneca Falls Declaration, which demanded women’s rights; the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery; the Nineteenth Amendment, securing the right to vote; the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation. Yet just as our bloody modern history has made the idea of human rights more essential than ever, academic liberalism has become infected by the doctrines of relativism and multiculturalism that render any moral commitment to human rights unexplainable.

Or at least unexplained. In the words of Thomas Franck of New York University’s School of Law, “Leaders of liberal societies everywhere—political, intellectual, industrial—are being challenged to defend values and clarify distinctions they may have assumed were self-evident.”[7] A few have nevertheless tried. Some academics speak of “common morality” or “the common understanding” or “the standard secular account.” Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago asserts, “It seems to be a mark of the human being to care for others and feel disturbance when bad things happen to them.”[8]

But others, with some justice, call this a species of bluffing. Here is Michael Perry of Northwestern University: “If it were a mark of every human being to care for every other human being . . . the ‘why’ question would be merely academic. But because very many human beings—indeed, perhaps most human beings—have not in the past cared for, nor do they today care for, every human being, the question is both practical and urgent: Why is the good of every human being an end worth pursuing in its own right?”[9]

The Necessity of Religion for Moral Law

Indeed, philosophers have tried for centuries to formulate a firm, secular theory of human rights. None has gained broad, much less universal, assent, and none seems equal to the challenge of Nietzsche: if God is really dead, what is to stop the radical, destructive human will? As for the contemporary academic discussion sketched above, much of it seems hung on a peg in midair. What truly marks human beings is the tendency to care for self, family, clan, tribe, race, religion, nation. To care for every human being would appear to require a moral law. To sacrifice for the rights of other human beings—merely because they are human beings—would appear to require a holy law.

[1] Saul Friedlander, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 27–28.

[2] Chief of Counsel Robert H. Jackson, Opening Statement for the Prosecution, Nuremberg Trials (November 21, 1945), reprinted in II Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal 102 (1947).

[3] Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 1998), 77.

[4] Quoted in Max Stackhouse, “Sources of Basic Human Rights Ideas: A Christian Perspective” (paper presented at the University of Chicago Divinity School, Chicago, Illinois, January 27, 2003), http://pewforum. org/Politics-and-Elections/Sources-of-Basic-Human-Rights-Ideas-A- Christian-Perspective.aspx.

[5] Richard Just, “We Can’t Just Do Nothing: Can a Liberal Be Both Opposed to Imperialism and Devoted to Human Rights?”, New Republic, August 27, 2009, http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/we-cant-just-do- nothing?page=0,3.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Thomas Franck, “Are Human Rights Universal?”, Foreign Affairs (January/February 2001), http://www.foreignaffairs.com/author/thomas-m-franck.

[8] Martha Nussbaum, “Skepticism about Practical Reason in Literature and the Law,” Harvard Law Review 744 (1994).

[9] Michael Perry, The Idea of Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 60.