Holocaust

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HOLOCAUST

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Bioethics is a type of discourse, defined as "any collective activity that orders its concerns through language" (Zito). As members of a discourse community, bioethicists use rhetorical strategies to make arguments, define terms, and influence the direction of the discourse as a whole. One of those strategies is to invoke the Holocaust as a way to warn, cajole, criticize, or silence those who have opposing or divergent views. The use of the Holocaust as a rhetorical instrument raises important ethical and strategic questions for bioethics.

The Holocaust

The Holocaust lies like a specter behind modern bioethics. Contemporary bioethical discourse derives much of its moral legitimacy from the legacy of the Holocaust. The unfathomable cruelty of the Holocaust is paradigmatic of the degree to which the unfettered power of the majority over despised minorities can distort human relationships. The eugenic philosophy that undergirded social engineering and extermination campaigns informs all current debate about genetic engineering and population genetics. The genocidal strategy of the Nazis, coupled with the complicity of large segments of the German public, including medical professionals, showed the depths to which human beings could go in the pursuit of misguided philosophies of science and in-group politics. The atrocities committed in the name of medical research revealed individual subject vulnerability in the hands of investigators so starkly that virtually all modern standards for protecting human research subjects originated in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

The events that occurred in Germany under National Socialism have come to represent evil in pure form, without caveat or ambiguity. The Holocaust thus has come to signify the ultimately evil act; the Nazi enterprise, the ultimately evil political and social movement; and Hitler, the ultimately evil leader. By extension, those who were inactive in the face of evil are invoked as the paradigm of complicity and those who did not speak out are emblems of culpable silence. It thus is not surprising that evoking the Holocaust as a rhetorical strategy has enormous symbolic power.

However, such power cannot be wielded without risk. Drawing on symbols of ultimate evil to buttress arguments about the undesirability of lesser evils may be emotionally satisfying, but it is rarely a persuasive rhetorical strategy. If the analogy is seen as inapt, it tends to weaken rather than strengthen the case being made. Still, the temptation to employ the Holocaust is strong, and it has become a central metaphor for a variety of social movements (Stein), special interests (Novick), and political actors (Lin and Gur-Ze'ev) as well as in popular culture (Hungerford, Mintz, Zelizer).

The use of the Holocaust in bioethics has taken on a particular character. Bioethics is a normative discourse, and the Holocaust is a signifier with great normative power. The Holocaust frequently is invoked in bioethical discourse to draw analogies, suggest threats to vulnerable groups, or warn against perceived slippery slopes. After a brief historical summary, some of those strategies will be examined in this entry to explore their impact on bioethical discourse.

Rhetoric and the Holocaust

The term holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, meaning "burnt whole," which was a derivation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew olah, a biblical term for a burnt sacrifice. Historically, the term was used to denote great destruction of human life, especially through conflagration. For that reason it was employed often by journalists in World War II to refer not only to the destruction perpetrated by the Nazis on Jews and others but also to Allied acts such as the bombing firestorms that destroyed much of Hamburg and Dresden. It is ironic that the German press used the term first to refer to the bombing of German cities.

The use of holocaust in reference to the destruction of the European Jewish community at the hands of the Nazis gained currency by being the preferred English translation of the Hebrew word shoah. The 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence, for example, makes reference to the shoah, which is rendered as "the Nazi holocaust" in official English translations (Novick). However, in the decades after World War II the destruction of European Jewry was rarely part of American public discourse. It was only during the 1960s, particularly with the advent of the trial of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, that the term holocaust began to be used in common discourse to refer to World War II. At first the term often was used to refer to the death of all the millions of people who were killed by the Nazis. By the late 1960s, however, the Holocaust (capitalized and usually preceded with the word the) was defined in dictionaries as the genocidal killing of millions of Jews by the Nazis during World War II.

The lowercased term holocaust, however, still is used commonly to describe great loss of human life at the hands of others, as occurred in Biafra in the 1960s, Cambodia in the late 1970s, Afghanistan in the 1980s, and Rwanda and Serbia/Bosnia in the 1990s. Over 2,000 books in print include the word holocaust in their titles, many of which do not refer to World War II: The Real Holocaust depicts the African slave trade, The Silent Holocaust describes victims of famine, and two books titled The Forgotten Holocaust discuss South American Indians and the rape of Nanking; Holocaust Island is a book of poetry about Australia by an aboriginal poet.

Despite the widespread and diverse use of the term, controversy over its proper usage outside the Nazi context remains. The American Heritage Book of English Usage reports that 99 percent of its Usage Panel, composed of over 180 experts who determine the correct employment of terms, accept the term nuclear holocaust. However, only 60 percent accept its use for the 1 million to 2 million victims of the Khmer Rouge, only 31 percent for the millions of victims of drought in Africa, and a mere 11 percent in reference to the AIDS epidemic.

The use of the term holocaust in other contexts is confounded by the fact that the rhetorical power of the word largely has been taken over by its single exemplar; every use of the term, even in lowercase or in other contexts, inevitably becomes a referent. Another complication is that the penetration of the term into the American consciousness has been astonishing. Ninety-seven percent of the public in one poll knew what the Holocaust was, a higher percentage than could identify Pearl Harbor or knew that the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Japan. The majority in a second poll said that the Holocaust "was the worst tragedy in history" (Novick, p. 232). The casual use of the term outside the Nazi experience can provoke the sensitivities and strong voice of the Jewish community, which was affected singularly by the Nazi campaign of eugenic eradication and for which the Holocaust remains a powerful and personalized event. Such factors complicate the term's use in contexts other than the Nazis' actions in World War II.

The Uniqueness of the Holocaust

The controversy surrounding the use of the Holocaust as a metaphor revolves in part on claims of the Holocaust's uniqueness. The targeting of one ethnic group said to be singularly evil; the use of medical and public health justification for the destruction of that group; the relentless and single-minded searching out and destruction of all men, women, and children in that group as an end in itself; the widespread collaboration of the public in each new country conquered; the dedication of enormous economic, military, and social resources to that end; and the systematic technological extermination of the group are said to set the Holocaust apart from all other cases of genocide in human history.

Lucy Dawidowicz (Hastings Center Report) has argued that the Nazi experience cannot be used to gain insight or help resolve the conflicts of other eras. If the Holocaust is unique and thus is a singular, exceptional, disjunctive moment in the course of human history, it lies outside the flow of normal events and cannot serve as a historical lesson. It therefore cannot be used to understand normal evil or even the periodic emergence of extraordinary evil. Conversely, if the Holocaust is just one, however singularly tragic, example of many historical examples of genocide or hatred, what is to keep its particularities intact when it is used constantly as the referent for the killing of the Armenians, African slaves, or embryos? The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who is known for his advocacy of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, has tried to resolve the dilemma by arguing that the Holocaust was "a unique Jewish tragedy with universal implications" (quoted in Novick, p. 239). However, it is difficult to maintain that an event is both absolutely unique and universally applicable.

Arguments against the use of the Holocaust as an analogy to other cases of suffering take two major forms. One suggests that the Holocaust had a uniquely Jewish context and that to use the term as a referent cheapens and discounts the Jewish experience of suffering and loss. Edward Alexander in an article titled "Stealing the Holocaust" indicts those who use the Holocaust to call attention to other instances of injustice, arguing that they use up something accumulated by Jews through their suffering. A second argument suggests that use of the referent blunts the true horror and extremism of the event. Discussing the related use of the label Nazi in a Hastings Center Report Conference on bioethics and the Holocaust, Milton Himmelfarb lamented the "overly hasty invocation of 'Nazism' and the rather free and easy use of Nazism to brand practices with which we disagree.… By universalizing Nazism, one makes it shallow, and one removes the actual reality of Nazism. If everything is Nazi, then nothing is Nazi, and even Nazism wasn't Nazi" (Hastings Center Report, p. 7).

Insisting that the Holocaust lies outside history and has no role in creating an understanding of other cases of mass killing is also problematic. The argument for the incomparability of the Holocaust trivializes other crimes and can lead to discussions such as the reported argument about whether the Bosnian slaughter was "truly holocaustal or merely genocidal" (Novick, p. 14). Some analogies are clearly apt. The discussion of the Rwandan holocaust in a medical journal, indicating with the lowercase h that the term is used as a noun and not explicitly as a reference to the Jewish Holocaust, seems a proper usage (Decosas). The tragic events in Rwanda are well described as a holocaust.

The Holocaust in Bioethical Discourse

In bioethical contexts the Holocaust often is invoked as a form of moral approbation. The development of the Nuremberg Code in the wake of the Holocaust was the clear precursor to the emergence of modern protection measures for human subjects and therefore often is referenced legitimately (Caplan). However, the Holocaust-Nazi analogy also is invoked regularly to condemn a wide range of practices (e.g., abortion, physician-assisted suicide), healthcare strategies (e.g., managed care, age rationing), and even people (e.g., by opponents of the work of philosopher Peter Singer). Sometimes the analogies are so overblown as to be easily dismissed, for example, when the breast implant controversy was referred to at an Institute of Medicine meeting as the "silicone holocaust" (Ault). However, it is instructive to look at a number of cases in which the use of Holocaust metaphor or imagery is employed to make a bioethical argument in a professional or public forum.

ANIMAL RIGHTS. Animal rights activists have called fur farms Buchenwalds for animals and have likened animal experimentation to the human medical experiments of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. A best-selling book in the animal rights movement called Eternal Treblinka (Patterson) argues that there are many parallels between animal exploitation and the Nazi exploitation of people and points out that the slaughterhouse was the model for the death camps. In 2003 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) mounted a graphic campaign and exhibit called Holocaust on Your Plate, which placed 60-square-foot panels displaying gruesome scenes from Nazi death camps side by side with disturbing photographs from factory farms and slaughterhouses. One exhibit shows a starving man in a concentration camp next to a starving cow. The campaign, which highlighted medical research using animals along with other forms of animal exploitation, used the slogan "To animals, all people are Nazis" (Specter). Jewish leaders, as well as many others, objected strongly to the exhibition.

AIDS. AIDS activists often use the slogan "silence equals death" to liken the purported indifference among bystanders in the face of the epidemic to the inaction of those who let the Holocaust occur. It also has become common for activists to refer to AIDS as the "Gay Holocaust" (Bamforth). At the 2000 AIDS summit in South Africa delegates accused drug companies of a "holocaust against the poor" for refusing to provide Africans with inexpensive AIDS drugs (Smith). Used in tandem with the slogan about silence, that phrase is an implicit rebuke of the claimed unwillingness of the drug companies and others to dedicate the resources and attention to its eradication that the activists believe AIDS deserves.

ABORTION AND EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS. In the abortion debate and more recently in the human embryonic stem cell (hES) debate both sides have made use of Holocaust metaphors to defend their positions. The pro-life and anti-hES movements commonly refer to the destruction of embryos as "the American Holocaust" and use symbols and images from the Holocaust as a primary metaphor in their literature (Neustadter). When he was surgeon general of the United States C. Everett Koop warned of a progression "from liberalized abortion … to active euthanasia … to the very beginnings of the political climate that led to Auschwitz, Dachau, and Belsen" (quoted in Novick, p. 241). At a Senate Labor and Health and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittee meeting in April 2003 Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas likened embryo research to Nazi research on Holocaust victims.

Conversely, the pro-choice side often argues that state control of women's bodies is the first step toward state ownership of people and ultimately toward genocide. The Holocaust thus is also used to argue against state involvement in reproductive freedom. Pro-choice advocates point out that abortion was illegal in Nazi Germany and that the state prominently expressed an interest in controlling women's reproduction through antimiscegenation and compulsory sterilization laws.

END-OF-LIFE ISSUES. Public discussions about end-of-life options, from disconnecting life supports to physician-assisted suicide, inevitably raise comparisons to the euthanasia campaign in World War II, especially in Germany (Kottow, Spannaus et al.). In a Hastings Center Report commentary, the Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff compared Dan Callahan's argument in Setting Limits (in which Callahan argued that some categories of people, notably the elderly, should not be entitled to the same access to healthcare as others) to the Nazi policy of lebensunwertes leben, "life unworthy of life." Hentoff also stated that the Hastings Center's 1987 Guidelines on the Termination of Life-Sustaining Treatment and the Care of the Dying would have been welcomed by defense attorneys for Nazi doctors. Although the respondents, including Callahan, addressed some of Hentoff's arguments against Callahan's points, the responses focused predominantly on the appropriateness of the Nazi analogy. Ironically, the epithet also was hurled from the other side of the issue as Jack Kevorkian assailed doctors who were not willing to help patients die as Nazis (New York Times).

THE HOLOCAUST AS AN IMPEDIMENT TO PROGRESS. Some people argue that the focus on the Holocaust has become an impediment to medical progress. In a keynote speech to molecular biologists in Berlin in 2002 the Nobel laureate James D. Watson, the codiscoverer of the structure of DNA and the first director of the Human Genome Project, told his German audience that the time had come to "put Hitler behind us" and embrace the good that genetic science can do (Koenig).

Rhetorical Strategies

The uses of the Holocaust in bioethical argumentation tend to follow a number of rhetorical strategies. The Holocaust may be used comparatively to suggest that a targeted act or position is morally equivalent: "What is happening here is no different from (or no better than) what was done during the Holocaust." Others use the Holocaust as a referent for a slippery slope argument: "Actions like these, if they continue, will lead to a Holocaust." Some use the term to chastise their colleagues or adversaries: "Your actions are no different from those of the Nazis or those who stood silent in the face of the Nazis." Conversely, the Holocaust can be used to justify an action by arguing that a criticism is misplaced: "After all, this is not like the Holocaust."

Conclusion

The cautions enumerated above are not meant to suggest that there are not appropriate and thoughtful attempts to use the Holocaust in bioethical argumentation. The Holocaust stands as a signal moment in the human encounter with euthanasia, unconscionable medical experimentation, victimization of the marginalized and powerless, relentless bureaucracy, eugenic extremism, and other acts and philosophies that bioethics forgets at its peril. Clearly, the considered use of the Holocaust can illuminate and strengthen a moral position. For example, many antiabortion and anti–embryo research scholars have tried to use the Holocaust as a thoughtful and nonsensational analogy to explore issues of vulnerability and medical justification (Neuhaus).

Bioethics is most effective when it pursues reasoned moral discourse, and the use of hyperbole and rhetorical strategies that depend on shock and insult cheapens the enterprise as a whole. In such cases the Holocaust does not inform bioethical debate but instead erodes it. The lessons of the Holocaust have profound meaning for modern bioethics, and the atrocities committed must stand as a bellwether against moral recidivism. Invoking the Holocaust to score rhetorical points, however, fails as a rhetorical strategy and degrades the genuine lessons that the Holocaust offers to bioethical discourse.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Encyclopedia of Bioethics