Copyright © Jeffrey C. Alexander 2012 The right of Jeffrey C. Alexander to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. £ Q N X E N XS First published in 2012 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Maiden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4911-5 (hardback) ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4912-2 (paperback) A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Cultural Trauma: A Social Theory 2 Holocaust and Trauma: Moral Universalism in the West 3 Holocaust and Trauma: Moral Restriction in Israel (with Shai M. Dromi) 4 Mass Murder and Trauma: Nanjing and the Silence of Maosim (with Rui Gao) 5 Partition and Trauma: Repairing India and Pakistan 6 Globalization and Trauma: The Dream of Cosmopolitan Peace Wo řes References Index VI 6 31 97 118 136 155 166 207 222 A SOCIAL THEORY years that have elapsed since that time, the memorialization of the "Rape of Nanjing" has never extended beyond the regional confines of China, and, until recently, barely beyond the confines of Nanjing itself. The trauma contributed scarcely at all to the collective identity of the People's Republic of China, let alone to the self-conception of the postwar democratic government of Japan. As the most recent narrator of the massacre puts it, "Even by the standards of history's most destructive war, the Rape of Nanjing represents one of the worst instances of mass extermination" (Chang 1997: 5). Yet, though extraordinarily traumatic for the contemporary residents of Nanjing, it became "the forgotten Holocaust of World War II," and it remains an "obscure incident" today (ibid.: 6), the very existence of which is routinely and successfully denied by some of Japan's most powerful and esteemed public officials. As I have suggested in this introductory chapter, such failures to recognize collective traumas, much less to incorporate their lessons into collective identity, do not result from the intrinsic nature of the original suffering. This is the naturjJistic^aJla.Qy.that follows.from lay trauma theory. TheTallure stems, rather, from an Inability to carry through what I have called a trauma process. In Japan^cTt!rima,~'just as in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Guatemala, claims have certainly been made for the central relevance of such "distant sufferings" (Boltanski 1999).18 But for both social structural and cultural reasons, carrier groups have not emerged with the resources, authority, or interpretive competence to powerfully disseminate these trauma claims. Sufficiently persuasive narratives have not been created, or they have not been successfully broadcast to wider audiences. Because of these failures, the perpetrators of these collective sufferings have not been compelled to accept moral responsibility, and the lessons of these social traumas have been neither memorialized nor ritualized. New definitions of moral responsibility have not been generated. Social solidarities have not been extended. More primordial and more particularistic collective identities have not been changed. However tortuous the trauma process, however, it can allow collectivities to define new forms of moral responsibility and to redirect the course of political action. Collective traumas have no geographical or cultural limitations. They emerge when collectivities experience themselves as having sustained grave injuries, and when they draw, for better and for worse, on the moral lessons that seem to emanate from them. r HOLOCAUST AND TRAUMA: MORAL UNIVERSALISM IN THE WEST How did a specific and situated historical event, an event marked by ethnic and racial hatred, violence, and war, become transformed into a generalized symbol of human suffering and moral evil, a universalized symbol whose very existence has created historically unprecedented opportunities for ethnic, racial, and religious justice, for mutual recognition, and for global conflicts becoming regulated in a more civil way?1 This cultural transformation has been achieved because the originating historical event, traumatic in the extreme for a delimited particular group, has come over the last^slxty years to be redefined as a traumatic event for all of humankii^d^/Now free-,_fjga.tlng_rathex than jituated - universal rather than particular -~thTs traumatic event vividly "lives" in the memories of contemporaries whose parents and grandparents never felt themselves even remotely related to it. In what follows, I explore the social creation of a cultural fact and the effects of this cultural fact on social and moral life. In the beginning, in April 1945, the Holocaust was not the "Holocaust." In the torrent of newspaper, radio, and magazine stories reporting the discovery by American infantrymen of the Nazi concentration camps, the empirical remains of what had transpired were typified as "atrocities." Their obvious awfulness, and indeed their strangeness, placed them for contemporary observers at the borderline of the category of behavior known as "man's inhumanity to man." Nonetheless, qua atrocity, the discoveries were placed side-by-side - metonymically and semantically - with a whole series of other brutalities that were considered to be the natural results of the ill wind of this second, very unnatural, and most inhuman world war. -y—^ 30 31 MORAL UNIVERSALISM IN THE WEST MORAL UNIVERSALISM IN THE WEST The first American reports on "atrocities" during that Second World War had not, in fact, even referred to actions by German Nazis, let alone to their Jewish victims, but to the Japanese army's brutal treatment of American and other allied prisoners of war after the loss of Corregidor in 1943. On January 27, 1944, the United States released sworn statements by military officers who had escaped the so-called Bataan Death March. In the words of contemporary journals and magazines, these officers had related "atrocity stories" revealing "the inhuman treatment and murder of American and Filipino soldiers who were taken prisoner when Bätaan and Corregidor fell." In response to these accounts, the US State Department had lodged protests to the Japanese government about its failure to live up to the provisions of the Geneva Prisoners of War Convention (Current History, March 1944: 249). Atrocities, in other words, were a signifier specifically connected to war. They referred to war-generated events that transgressed the rules circumscribing how national killing could normally be carried out.3 Responding to the same incident, Newsweek, in a section entitled "The Enemy" and under the headline "Nation Replies in Grim Fury to Jap Brutality to Prisoners," reported that "with the first impact of the news, people had shuddered at the story of savage atrocity upon Allied prisoners of war by the Japanese" (February 7, 1944: 19, italics added).4 It is hardly surprising, then, that it was this nationally specific and particular war-related term that was employed to represent the grisly Jewish mass murders discovered by American GIs when they liberated the Nazi camps.5 Through April 1945, as one camp after another was discovered, this collective representation was applied time after time.6 When, toward the end of that month, a well-known Protestant minister explored the moral implications of the discoveries, he declared that, no matter how horrifying and repulsive, "it is important that the full truth be made known so that a clear indication may be had of the nature of the enemy we have been dealing with, as well of as a realization of the sheer brutalities that have become the accompaniment of war." The New York Times reported this sermon under the headline "Bonnell Denounces German Atrocities" (April 23, 1945: 23, italics added). When alarmed members of the US Congress visited Buchenwald, the Times headlined that they had witnessed first hand the "War Camp Horror" (April 26, 1945: 12, italics added). When a few days later the US Army released a report on the extent of the killings in Buchenwald, the Times headlined it an "Atrocity Report" (April 29, 1945: 20). A few days after that, under the headline "Enemy Atrocities in France Bared," the Times 32 wrote that a just-released report had shown that "in France, German brutality was not limited to the French underground or even to the thousands of hostages whom the Germans killed for disorders they had nothing to do with, but was practiced almost systematically against entirely innocent French people" (May 4, 1945: 6). The Nazis' anti-Jewish mass murders had once been only putative atrocities. From the late 1930s on, reports about them had been greeted with widespread public doubt about their authenticity. Analogies to the allegations about German atrocities during the First World War that later had been thoroughly discredited, they were dismissed as a kind of Jewish moral panic. Only three months before the GI's "discovery" of the camps, in introducing a first-hand report on Nazi mass murder from a Soviet-liberated camp in Poland, Collier's magazine acknowledged: "A lot of Americans simply do not believe the stories of Nazi mass executions of Jews and anti-Nazi Gentiles in eastern Europe by means of gas chambers, freight cars partly loaded with lime and other horrifying devices. These stories are so foreign to most Americans' experience of life in this country that they seem incredible. Then, too, some of the atrocity stories of World War I were later proved false" (January 6, 1945: 62).7 From April 3, 1945, however, the date when the GIs first liberated the concentration camps, all such earlier reports were retrospectively accepted as facts, as the realistic signifiers of Peirce rather than the "arbitrary" symbols of Saussure. That systematic efforts at Jewish mass murder had occurred, and that the numerous victims and the few survivors had been severely traumatized, the American and world-wide audi-, ence now had little doubt.8 Their particular and unique fate, however, j even while it was widely recognized as representing the grossest of injustices, did not itself become a traumatic experience for the audience to which the mass media's collective representations were transmitted - that is, for those looking on, either from near or from far. Why this was not so defines my initial explanatory effort here. For an audience to be traumatized by an experience that they themselves do not directly share, symbolic extension and psychological identification are required. This did not occur. For the American infantry who first made contact, for the general officers who supervised the rehabilitation, for the reporters who broadcast the descriptions, for the commissions of Congress and influentials who quickly traveled to Germany to conduct on-site investigations, the starving, depleted, often weird-looking and sometimes weird-acting Jewish camp survivors seemed like a foreign race. They could just as well have been from Mars, or from hell. The identities and characters 33 MORAL UNI VERS ALISM IN THE WEST MORAL UNIVERS ALISM IN THE WEST of these Jewish survivors rarely were personalized through interviews or individualized through biographical sketches; rather, they were presented as a mass, and often as a mess, a petrified, degrading, and smelly one, not only by newspaper reporters but also by some of the most powerful general officers in the Allied High Command. This depersonalization made it more difficult for the survivors' trauma to generate compelling identification. Possibilities for universalizing the trauma were blocked not only by the depersonalization of its victims but also by their historical and sociological specification. As I have indicated, the mass murders semantically were immediately linked to other "horrors" in the bloody history of the century's second great war and to the historically specific national and ethnic conflicts that underlay it. Above all, it was never forgotten that these victims were Jews. In retrospect, it is bitterly ironic, but it is also sociologically understandable, that the American audience's sympathy and feelings of identity flowed much more easily to the non-Jewish survivors, whether German or Polish, who had been kept in better conditions and looked more "normal," more composed, more human. Jewish survivors were kept for weeks and sometimes even for months in the worst areas and under the worst conditions of what had become, temporarily, displaced persons' camps. American and British administrators felt impatient with many Jewish survivors, even personal repugnance for them, sometimes resorting to threats and even to punishing them.9 The depth of this initial failure of identification can be seen in the fact that when American citizens and their leaders expressed opinions and made decisions about national quotas for emergency postwar immigration, displaced German citizens ranked first, Jewish survivors last. How could this have happened? Was it not obvious to any human observer that this mass murder was fundamentally different from the other traumatic and bloody events in a modern history already dripping in blood, that it represented not simply evil but "radical evil," in Kant's remarkable phrase (Kant I960),10 that it was unique? To understand why none of this was obvious, to understand how and why each of these initial understandings and behaviors was radically changed, and how this transformation had vast repercussions for establishing not only new moral standards for social and political behavior but also unprecedented, if still embryonic, regulatory controls, it is important to see the inadequacy of commonsense understandings of traumatic events. There are two kinds of commonsense thinking about trauma, forms of thinking that constitute what I called in Chapter 1 "lay 34 trauma theory." These commonsensical forms of reasoning have deeply informed thinking about the effects of the Holocaust. They are expressed in the following strikingly different conceptualizations of what happened after the revelations of the mass killings of Jews. • The Enlightenment version. The "horror" of onlookers provoked the postwar end of anti-Semitism in the United States. The commonsense assumption here is that because people have a fundamentally "moral" nature - as a result of their rootedness in Enlightenment and religious traditions - they will perceive atrocities for what they are and react to them by attacking the belief systems that provided legitimation. • The psychoanalytic version. When faced with the horror, Jews and non-Jews alike reacted not with criticism and decisive action but with silence and bewilderment. Only after two or even three decades of repression and denial were people finally able to begin talking about what happened and to take actions in response to this knowledge. Enlightenment and psychoanalytic forms of lay trauma thinking have permeated academic efforts at understanding what happened after the death-camp revelations. One or the other version has informed not only every major discussion of the Holocaust but also virtually every contemporary effort to investigate trauma more generally, efforts that are, in fact, largely inspired by Holocaust debates.11 What is wrong with this lay trauma theory is that it is "naturalistic," either in the naively moral or the naively psychological sense. Lay trauma theory fails to see that there is an interpretive grid through which all "facts" about trauma are mediated, emotionally, cognitively, and morally. This grid has a supraindividual, cultural status; it is symbolically structured and sociologically determined. No trauma interprets itself: Before trauma can be experienced at the collective (not individual) level, there are essential questions that must be answered, and answers to these questions change over time. The Cultural Construction of Trauma Coding, Weighting, Narrating Elie Wiesel, in a moving and influential statement in the late 1970s, asserted that the Holocaust represents an "ontological evil." From a 35 MORAL UNIVERSALISM IN THE WEST sociological perspective, however, evil is epistemological, not onto-logical. For a traumatic event to have the status of evil is a matter of its becoming evil. It is a matter of how the trauma is known, how it is coded.12 "At first glance it may appear a paradox," Diner has noted - and certainly it does - but, considered only in and of itself, "Auschwitz has no appropriate narrative, only a set of statistics" (Diner 2000: 178). Becoming evil is a matter, first and foremost, of representation. Depending on the nature of representation, a traumatic event may be regarded as ontologically evil, or its badness, its "evilness," may be conceived as contingent and relative, as something that can be ameliorated and overcome. This distinction is theoretical, but it is also practical. In fact, decisions about the ontological versus contingent status of the Holocaust were of overriding importance in its changing representation. If we can deconstruct this ontological assertion even further, I would like to suggest that the very existence of the category "evil" must be seen not as something that naturally exists but as an arbitrary construction, the product of cultural and sociological work. This contrived binary, which simplifies empirical complexity to two antagonistic forms and reduces every shade of gray between, has been an essential feature of all human societies but especially important in those Eisenstadt (1982) has called the Axial Age civilizations. This rigid opposition between the sacred and profane, which in Western philosophy has typically been constructed as a conflict between nor-mativity and instrumentality, not only defines what people care about but also establishes vital safeguards around the shared normative "good." At the same time it places powerful, often aggressive barriers against anything that is construed as threatening the good, forces defined not merely as things to be avoided but as sources of horror and pollution that must be contained at all costs. The Material "Base": Controlling the Means of Symbolic Production Yet if this grid is a kind of functional necessity, how it is applied very much depends on who is telling the story, and how. This is first of all a matter of cultural power in the most mundane, materialist sense: Who controls the means of symbolic production?13 It was certainly not incidental to the public understanding of the Nazis' policies of mass murder, for example, that for an extended period of time it was the Nazis themselves who were in control of the physical and cultural terrain of their enactment. This fact of brute power made it much more difficult to frame the mass killings in a distinctive way. Nor is it incidental that, once the extermination of the Jews was physically interrupted by Allied armies in 1945, it was America's "imperial republic" - the perspective of the triumphant, forward-looking, mili-tantly and militarily democratic New World warrior - chat directed the organizational and cultural responses to the mass murders and their survivors. The contingency of this knowledge is so powerful that it might well be said that, if the Allies had not won the war, the "Holocaust" would never have been discovered.14 Moreover, if it had been the Soviets and not the Allies who "liberated" most of the camps, and not just those in the Eastern sector, what was discovered in those camps might never have been portrayed in a remotely similar way.15 It was, in other words, precisely and only because the means of symbolic production were not controlled by a victorious postwar Nazi regime, or even by a triumphant communist one, that the mass killings could be called the Holocaust and coded as evil. Creating the Culture Structure Still, even when the means of symbolic production came to be controlled by "our side," even when the association between evil and what would become known as the Holocaust trauma was assured, this was only the beginning, not the end. After a phenomenon is coded as evil, the question that immediately follows is: How evil is it? In theorizing evil, this refers to the problem not of coding but of weighting. For there are degrees of evil, and these degrees have great implications in terms of responsibility, punishment, remedial action, and future behavior. Normal evil and radical evil cannot be the same. Finally, alongside these problems of coding and weighting, the meaning of a trauma cannot be defined unless we determine exactly what the "it" is. This is a question of narrative: What were the evil and traumatizing actions in question? Who was responsible? Who were the victims? What were the immediate and long-term results of the traumatizing actions? What can be done by way of remediation or prevention? What these theoretical considerations suggest is that even after the physical force of the Allied triumph and the physical discovery of the Nazi concentration camps, the nature of what was seen and discovered had to be coded, weighted, and narrated. This complex cultural construction, moreover, had to be achieved immediately. History does not wait; it demands that representations be made, and they will be. Whether or not some newly reported event is startling, 36 37 mural UN1VEKSALISM IN THE WEST Strange, terrible, or inexpressibly weird, it must be "typified," in the sense of Husserl and Schutz - that is, it must be explained as a typical and even anticipated example of some thing or category that was known about before.16 Even the vastly unfamiliar must somehow be made familiar. To the cultural process of coding, weighting, and narrating, in other words, what comes before is all-important. Historical background is critical, both for the first "view" of the traumatic event and, as "history" changes, for later views as well. Once again, these shifting cultural constructions are fatefully affected by the power and identity of the agents in charge, by the competition for symbolic control, and by the structures of power and distribution of resources that condition it. Background Constructions Nazism as the Representation of Absolute Evil What was the historical structure of "good and evil" within which, on April 3, 1945, the "news" of the Nazi concentration camps was first confirmed to the American audience? To answer this question, it is first necessary to describe what came before. In what follows I will venture some observations, which can hardly be considered definitive, about how social evil was coded, weighted, and narrated during the interwar period in Europe and the United States. In the deeply disturbing wake of the First World War, there was a pervasive sense of disillusionment and cynicism among mass and elite members of the Western "audience," a distancing from protagonists and antagonists that, as Paul Fussell has shown, made irony the master trope of that first postwar era.17 This trope transformed "demonology" - the very act of coding and weighting evil - into what many intellectuals and lay persons alike considered to be an act of bad faith. Once the coding and weighting of evil were de-legitimated, however, good and evil became less distinct from one another and relativism became the dominant motif of the time. In such conditions, coherent narration of contemporary events becomes difficult if not impossible. Thus it was that, not only for many intellectuals and artists of this period but for many ordinary people as well, the startling upheavals of these interwar years could not easily be sorted out in a conclusive and satisfying way. It was in the context of this breakdown of representation that racism and revolution, whether fascist or communist, emerged as MORAL UNIVERSALISM IN THE WEST compelling frames, not only in Europe but also in the United States. Against a revolutionary narrative of dogmatic and authoritarian modernism on the Left, there arose the narrative of reactionary modernism, equally revolutionary but fervently opposed to rationality and cosmopolitanism.18 In this context, many democrats in Western Europe and the United States withdrew from the field of representation itself, becoming confused and equivocating advocates of disarmament, nonviolence, and peace "at any price." This formed the cultural frame for isolationist political policy in both Britain and the United States. Eventually the aggressive military ambition of Nazism made such equivocation impossible to sustain. While racialism, relativism, and narrative confusion continued in the United States and Britain until the very beginning of the Second World War, and even continued well into it, these constructions were countered by increasingly forceful and confident representations of good and evil that coded liberal democracy and universalism as unalloyed goods and Nazism, racism, and prejudice as deeply corrosive representations of the polluting and profane. From the late 1930s on, there emerged a strong, and eventually dominant, anti-fascist narrative in Western societies. Nazism was coded, weighted, and narrated in apocalyptic, Old Testament terms as "the dominant evil of our time." Because this radical evil aligned itself with violence and massive death, it not merely justified but also compelled the risking of life in opposing it, a compulsion that motivated and justified massive human sacrifice in what came later to be known as the last "good war."13 That Nazism was an absolute, unmitigated evil, a radical evil that threatened the very future of human civilization, formed the presupposition of America's four-year prosecution of the world war,20 The representation of Nazism as an absolute evil emphasized not only its association with sustained coercion and violence but also, and perhaps even especially, the way Nazism linked violence with ethnic, racial, and religious hatred. In this way, the most conspicuous example of the practice of Nazi evil - its policy of systematic discrimination, coercion, and, eventually, mass violence against the Jews - was initially interpreted as "simply" another horrifying example of the subhumanism of Nazi action. Interpreting Kristallnacht: Nazi Evil as Anti-Semitism The American public's reaction to Kristallnacht demonstrates how important the Nazis' anti-Jewish activities were in crystallizing 38 39 MORAL UNIVERSALISM IN THE WEST MORAL UNIVERSALISM IN THE WEST the polluted status of Nazism in American eyes. It also provides a prototypical example of how such representations of the evils of anti-Semitism were folded into the broader and more encompassing symbolism of Nazism. Kristallnacht refers, of course, to the rhetorically virulent and physically violent expansion of the Nazi repression of Jews that unfolded throughout German towns and cities on November 9 and 10, 1938. These activities were widely recorded. "The morning editions of most American newspapers reported the Kristallnacht in banner headlines," according to one historian of that fateful event, "and the broadcasts of H. V. Kaltenborn and Raymond Gram Swing kept the radio public informed of Germany's latest adventure" (Diamond 1969: 198). Exactly why these events assumed such critical importance in the American public's continuing effort to understand "what Hitlerism stood for" (201) goes beyond the simple fact that violent and repressive activities were, perhaps for the first time, openly, even brazenly, displayed in direct view of the world public sphere. Equally important was the altered cultural framework within which these activities were observed. For Kristallnacht occurred just six weeks after the now infamous Munich agreements, acts of appeasing Hitler's expansion that were understood, not only by isolationists but also by many opponents of Nazism, indeed by the vast majority of the American people, as possibly reasonable accessions to a possibly reasonable man (197). In other words, Kristallnacht initiated a process of understanding fuelled by symbolic contrast, not simply observation. What was interpretively constructed was the cultural difference between Germany's previously apparent cooperativeness and reasonableness - representations of the good in the discourse of American civil society - and its subsequent demonstration of violence and irrationality, which were taken to be representations of anti-civil evil. Central to the ability to draw this contrast was the ethnic and religious hatred Germans demonstrated in their violence against Jews. If one examines the American public's reactions, it clearly is this anti-Jewish violence that is taken to represent the evil of Nazism. It was with reference to this violence that the news stories of the New York Times employed the rhetoric of pollution to further code and weight Nazi evil: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening the name of Germany before the world could outdo the tale of beating, of blackguardly assaults upon defenseless and innocent people, which degraded that country yesterday" (quoted in Diamond 1969: 198). The Times's controversial columnist Anne O'Hare McCormick wrote that "the suffering [the Germans] inflict on others, now that they are 40 on top, passes all understanding and mocks all sympathy," and she went on to label Kristallnacht "the darkest day Germany experienced in the whole post-war period" (quoted in Diamond 1969: 199). The Washington Post identified the Nazi activities as "one of the worst setbacks for mankind since the Massacre of St. Bartholomew" '(quoted in Diamond 1969: 198-9). This broadening identification of Nazism with evil, simultaneously triggered and reinforced by the anti-Jewish violence of Kristallnacht, stimulated influential political figures to make more definitive judgments about the antipathy between American democracy and German Nazism than they had up until that point. Speaking on NBC radio, Al Smith, former New York governor and democratic presidential candidate, observed that the events confirmed that the German people were "incapable of living under a democratic government" (quoted in Diamond 1969: 200). Following Smith on the same program, Thomas E. Dewey, soon to be New York governor and future presidential candidate, expressed the opinion that "the civilized world stands revolted by the bloody pogrom against a defenseless people ... by a nation run by madmen" (quoted in Diamond 1969: 201). Having initially underplayed America's official reaction to the events, four days later President Franklin Roosevelt took advantage of the public outrage by emphasizing the purity of the American nation and its distance from this emerging representation of violence and ethnic hatred: "The news of the past few days from Germany deeply shocked public opinion in the United States ... I myself could scarcely believe that such things could occur in a twentieth century civilization" (quoted in Diamond 1969: 205). Judging from these reactions to the Nazi violence of Kristallnacht, it seems only logical that, as one historian has put it, "most American newspapers or journals" could "no longer ... view Hitler as a pliable and reasonable man, but as an aggressive and contemptible dictator [who] would have to be restrained" (quoted in Diamond 1969: 207). What is equally striking, however, is that in almost none of the American public's statements of horror is there explicit reference to the identity of the victims of Kristallnacht as Jews. Instead they are referred to as a "defenseless and innocent people," as "others," and as a "defenseless people" (quoted in Diamond 1969: 198, 199, 201). In fact, in the public statement just quoted, President Roosevelt goes well out of his way to separate his moral outrage from any link to a specific concern for the fate of the Jews. "Such news from any part of the world," the President insists, "would inevitably produce similar profound reaction among Americans