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Iain Brash Prize

Constructing Holocaust Consciousness: Early American Political Debates on the Genocide Convention1
Binoy Kampmark
In this paper the interrogation of the Holocaust in United States political debates behind the ratification of United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (the Convention) is examined. The Convention, which was only ratified by the USA in 1988, was significant for criminalising the atrocity of genocide, a Greek-Latin neologism that had been coined by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin during his examination of Nazi rule. This clear reluctance to ratify the Convention, even after forty years of its inception, remains a subject of interest. But the object of this study examines how the field of Holocaust contention was framed in the ratification debates, providing context for how American political discourses approached the Final Solution in the early years of the Cold War. One trend involved a prominent discussion of the Final Solution through graphic images; the other discouraged support for the Convention through criticising the definition of genocide and conjuring up images of a world government overriding US sovereignty. The spectacle of modern man explaining his right to existence is an odd one. Richard H. Rovere, New Yorker, February 11, 1950

The reluctance of the United States to ratify the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (the Convention) has been a source of mystery to scholars and politicians alike. How a nation whose soldiers had liberated the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau refused to participate in a global regime to punish genocide would seem, at first blush, surprising. The Convention, which was only ratified by the United States in 1988, was significant for criminalising the atrocity of genocide, a Greek-Latin neologism that was coined by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin during his examination of Nazi rule in occupied territories.2 In this paper the interrogation of the Holocaust in US political debates behind the ratification of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide is examined.3 This study considers how the official and public discourse framed the Holocaust by looking at the ratification debates in the early years of the Cold War.4 It demonstrates that the intersection between national politics, with an international traumatic event in discourse, is complex and can lead to a representation of its significance specific to that domestic locale.5 In this sense, the memory of the Holocaust was politicised and appropriated in US political and official discourses at an earlier stage than some commentators insist, though not in the extreme form of a mystical victim ideology that has been called a civil religion by some commentators.6 Indeed, there is a general consensus amongst scholars and public commentators in the US that the Holocaust has been Americanized.7 While academics such as Michael Berenbaum have seen this as a positive trend, Yehuda Bauer has lamented it. As Bauer wrote in 1980, The result is that the Holocaust is in danger of becoming de-Judaized and Americanized. The specific martyrdom of the Jews in the Holocaust risked being obliterated by their friends in future representations 7
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of the event.8 For Bauer, there has been a constant tension in seeking to reconcile the uniqueness of the Holocaust with its universalist meaning, a challenge which institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC have struggled with, since the Museums universal message potentially threatens the singularity of Holocaust experience.9 While the current debates rage about how Holocaust memory is to be commemorated, some negatively arguing that it has been unduly manipulated in the political sphere, or cheapened in the cinematic sense, it is valuable to go further back to see how early debates constructed the legacy of such an event.10 This particular appropriation is usefully analysed in the context of debates held on the Convention as a counter to the current view, expressed most prominently by Novick that the Holocaust or Final Solution, as it was then termed, was memorialised only after the deepening of ties between Israel and the United States after the Arab-Israeli Wars.11 In this sense, the role of Jewish identity and the Holocaust, a vast field in itself, is only referred to in the context of how American political discourses shaped it, rather than broader issues of how Judaism, nationhood, and identity have been debated both before and after the Holocaust.12 In the context of the Genocide Convention the Jews of the Holocaust were considered, at least by such commentators as Lemkin, to be victims of a complex hatred, based on nationality, race, ethnicity, and religion, requiring future prevention. There were two dominant trends in the discourse behind the ratification of the Convention in the early years of the Cold War. The impression made upon Allied soldiers at the liberation of German concentration camps and the atrocities committed against Jews figured as dominant tropes in the public debate as to whether the United States should participate in an international effort to punish genocide.13 However, it is true that the general formation of the Holocaust in collective consciousness was inconspicuous in the early stages of the Cold War, given the fact that the particularity of Jewish suffering was seen as part of a broader narrative of German brutality against undesirable races. Indeed, the US Secretary of War Henry Stimson feared the punishment of crimes committed on the basis of ethnicity, given the United States continuing problem with prosecuting lynch crimes at home.14 Nor were the most symbolic features of the Holocaust, the death camp of Auschwitz being the most infamous, liberated by Allied soldiers, since they were located in Soviet occupied territories. Concentration camps, for all the atrocities they facilitated, were not designed for the complete extirpation of the inmates on the basis of ethnicity or race, a feature that proved unique to the death camps.15 In this sense, the lament about the more specific nature of a Judeocide, by such figures as Bauer in the 1980s, was already taking place in debates after the liberation of the camps, where the specificity of Jewish fate was ignored.16 Nonetheless, the issue of ethnicity and ethnic identity in international relations remained an issue of notable importance in the political dialogue that took place in the aftermath of World War II. The debate was particularly intense in widely read progressive journals such as The Nation and the literary magazine The New Yorker. The counter-response came from such conservative organisations as the American Bar Association (ABA), where the argument against ratification was advanced along the lines of diminished sovereignty, violation of state rights and how genocide could operate against American citizens within the borders of the United States. What emerged in these debates, both for and against ratification, was a specific reading of the Holocaust, where genocide was coopted into a fight against the Soviet Union, thereby extending the original significance of the Final Solution beyond its ethnic dimensions to include political and economic groups. 17 The narrative of victimisation was thereby altered to include a broader reference to the victims of Nazi terror, a reference that made Jewish suffering non-exclusive.18 The Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, for that very reason, became the target of political groups and lobbies who had aligned themselves against the Convention. As the keen student of totalitarianism, Claude Lefort has noted, communism [during the Cold War] was defined as a totalitarian system, the most highly developed and perfected example of that system, one which had withstood the destruction of fascism and national socialism, but which proceeded from the same causes and pursued similar ends. Communism was invested with features which had once been imputed to fascism.19 In Eastern Europe and the USSR, the Holocausts significance was shaped as a discourse of continuing crime against political and economic groups. This particular reading conflicts with modern 8

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historiography, which posits the Holocaust as a unique historical episode that is ideally represented as a transcendent event of singular momentousness.20 As Michael A. Marrus has written, unlike the massacres before or since, every single one of the millions of targeted Jews was to be murdered. Eradication was to be total.21 The scholarship of Michael Burleigh has been important in focusing on the racialism of the Third Reich, a racial state that historicised its anti-Semitic obsession within a clear framework of pre-existing pathologies in Europe.22 When the United Nations General Assembly passed the Genocide Resolution unanimously, commentators used the significance of the Final Solution in urging nations to ratify the Genocide Convention. Richard Lemkin expressed joy that his legal examinations of this specific type of atrocity had paid off. Ernest A. Gross, a US delegate behind the drafting process of the Convention, told the UN in an address in 1949 that in a world beset by many problems, and great difficulties, we should proceed with this convention before the memory of the recent horrifying genocidal acts has faded from the minds and conscience of man.23 Such a resolution, we find The Nation opining, is certain to prove a formidable deterrent to the kind of systematized persecution of a racial or religious minority which the Nazis instituted in Germany in the thirties.24 Support for the Convention came from the highest political figures in the United States. The Truman administration made its intentions clear by putting the Convention to the Senate in the first place. In his letter from Washington in The New Yorker, Richard H. Rovere wrote of much support for ratification: It [the Convention] will probably be brought up in this session, and if it is, it will almost certainly be carried, since few senators in an election year would risk being charged with favouring mass murder.25 The State Department predicted an alteration in norms of international relations with the advent of the new covenant. The Deputy Under-Secretary of State Dean Rusk explained this effect on the US in the international comity of nations before the subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 1950. There were overt references to the extermination programme of the Third Reich against the Jews, placed in the historical context of genocide. No one can yet have forgotten the organized butchery of racial groups by the Nazis, our enemies in World War II, which has resulted in the extermination of some 6 million Jews.26 The result of the Final Solution could no longer be tolerated in civilized society and that [genocide] should be prohibited by the international community. If the United States could cooperate with other nations in the suppression of such lesser offences as the killing of fur seals then surely other nations [could] look to the United States for cooperation in the suppression of the most heinous offence of all the destruction of human groups.27 Rusk gives us one of the first explicit references to a strategic use of the Holocaust in US foreign policy where ratification becomes an ideological weapon to mount against totalitarianism. The Final Solution enables a discourse to be shaped where the Convention can be aimed at punishing the crimes of totalitarian regimes; the victims of Nazism are metaphorically related as victims of Eastern Bloc oppression. Internationalising the regime of Genocide punishment and prevention would place the United States in a position of moral leadership in international affairs and to participate in the development of international law on the basis of human justice.28 The Convention is thus fashioned as a weapon, offering, in the words of the Solicitor-General, a measure of protection for the unfortunates who still live in fear of torture and death at the hands of the cruel, ruthless rulers or dictators who are or may become obsessed by a master race or that they are apostles of a master ideology, dedicated to the extermination of other races or creeds.29 The writings of some prominent officials behind the Nuremberg trials showed a clear interest in evoking references to the fate of Jews during World War II in convincing the US Senate to ratify the Convention. One of the most prominent prosecutors at Nuremberg, Telford Taylor, was trying to win over the public with the lesson of the Final Solution. Practising at a New York law firm, Taylor argued that non-ratification on the part of the United States could have serious strategic consequences. This was made clear in a speech to a thousand-strong audience at the Waldorf-Astoria for the National Conference of Christians and Jews in June of 1950: Our failure to ratify the treaty on such grounds as [its violation of US sovereignty] would be a devastating blow to our foreign policy and undermine our prestige abroad. The victims of the Final Solution are mentioned for 9

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their political and moral force. The Final Solution was in effect nudged into the limelight as a moral lesson, remembered through the Genocide Convention. Not heeding it would dint the credibility of US occupation forces. To this end Taylor recalled an embittered German official at the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials who opined that the trials simply proved that there was one law for Germans and another law for everyone else. The failure to ratify would simply confirm these words.30 Much in line with Taylors reference to atrocities committed under the Third Reich was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts, who warned of the consequences of a US refusal to ratify the instrument in the Senate. The effect of non-ratification would not merely ignore the victims of Nazi genocide; it would spell a blow to the US in the Cold War. In the subcommittee hearings Lodge noted how, having gotten this far, if we do not go through to complete the rest of the course, it will do a serious damage to the position of the United States in the current Cold War.31 The victims of the Final Solution came with an historical freight that was impossible to ignore. Another review encouraging ratification, through evoking scenes of Holocaust memory, was provided by Washington journalist Alan Barth in The Nation. Barths commentary urged readers to consider the scene that greeted Allied soldiers on liberating the occupied territories of Europe: Group killing is not an imaginary or theoretical crime. But the human mind finds it difficult to remember, as it found it difficult to grasp, that in a single concentration camp, Birkenau, approximately 1,765,000 Jews were put to death by poison gas between April, 1942 and April, 1944, their bodies burned in specially designed furnaces and their ashes distributed as fertilizer.32 What was unusual about the events of Birkenau was that it was neither typical homicide nor typical atrocity; it was impersonal motivated, that is to say, only by the identification of the individual victims with a group. Barths analysis paves the way for a reading of the Holocaust as state-centralised murder. In contrast to critics of the Convention, Barth noted that this type of totalitarianism was racial. The gas chambers and furnaces were scientifically contrived instruments for the extermination of an entire group. In writing approvingly of the UN resolution on genocide, Barth urged for a US policy of prodding the Economic and Social Council of the UN to act on genocide at once.33 In the main, Jewish groups were the dominant ethnic group in promoting the legitimacy of the Convention, though the language of suffering proved inclusive. There was no attempt to infer a Judeocide as such, an emphasis on singularity that would only reach prominence in the 1970s during the Holocaust commemoration debates, which resulted in such projects as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.34 On 20 January 1950, Mrs Samuel W. Halprin, head of Hadassah, the Womens Zionist Organization of America, telegrammed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support of the Convention arguing that, [t]he heinous crime genocide which destroyed many millions of human lives, both Christian and Jewish, is a blot on our civilization.35 At the Thirtieth Annual Convention of the Federation of Jewish Womens Organizations, held in the surroundings of the plush Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, it was resolved that the United States had to ratify the Convention to give global leadership against genocide for the world is awaiting our endorsement.36 The statements to the Subcommittee were equally passionate. Jacob Blaustein, President of the American Jewish Committee, argued that the world awaited US ratification of the Convention as a move to build the Temple of Peace.37 Joachim Prinz, from Newark, New Jersey and of the American Jewish Congress, recalled the experience of burying his dead brethren under Nazism: I cannot forget that I served for 4 years the Rabbi for the city of Berlin under the Nazi regime, and during those 4 years I have buried the victims of genocide.38 While one particular line of argument in favour of the Convention and its ratification stressed the spectre of the concentration camp and its victims, arguing that such a Convention might combat Communist governments, opponents highlighted a different aspect of the same problem. While the symbolic value of the camps stood in the background, with their legacy of victims, their historical value was assessed differently by policy makers and political groups who had decided that ratification was not in the interest of the United States. Their arguments formed a politico-legal analysis that constituted, in the words of one observer, the most elaborate pettifogging that we have been subjected to since Dickens recorded the history of Allerdyce against Allerdyce.39 Such 10

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a Convention, argued some members of the ABA, was irrelevant if it did not target the regimes that had set up camps of political prisoners across the Iron Curtain. Others saw the Convention as an international calumny on the American judicial system, whose introduction into the local law would spell administrative chaos. The argument on the Conventions value as a covenant of security was reversed by emphasising a different problem: that it would threaten US security and thereby weaken resolve in combating genocide altogether. The ABA was the key opponent of the Convention until the 1980s and it provided the standard arguments against ratification. The resolution of the Bar Associations 72nd meeting in St Louis, on 5-9 September 1949, was particularly enthusiastic in excoriating the Convention, though taking care in paying lip service to shocked consciences. While the members noted their disgust at genocide (that the conscience of America, like that of the civilized world, revolts against Genocide40), its punishment was not above American juridical quibbles. Its second paragraph noted that the suppression and punishment of Genocide under the international convention to which it is proposed the United States shall be a party involves important constitutional questions.41 In its current state, the Convention was a legal intrusion, an anomaly inconsistent with our form of government. 42 The most striking example of this opposition was provided by George A. Finch, Editor-in-Chief of The American Journal of International Law, and Member of the Special Committee on Peace and Law through the United Nations of the ABA. Before the Sub-committee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early 1950, Finch argued that his organisation was not an opponent of international moves to punish genocide. I wish to assure this Sub-committee that I am not only not allergical to international cooperation for this purpose, but have spent substantially all of my life in seeking to promote [world peace and cooperation] by practical and rational means.43 He duly provided, in a lengthy paragraph, an explanation as to what he believed to be the true implications of the Convention: its role in placating Eastern Bloc countries, and sanctioning the murder of political enemies by communist regimes. The definition of genocide under the Convention does not apply to the mass killing and destruction of peoples by totalitarian governments44 but merely appeased them. With impunity they could bring to bear the same treatment the Nazis had levelled on the occupied territories. Notably, Finch drew no distinction between the political atrocities committed under either Nazism or Communism. On the surface, he expressed a view in line with his opponents who favoured ratification, defining the Final Solution as the offspring of a totalitarian system. In such reasoning, the race-motivated Final Solution ceased to become a higher principle in encouraging ratification; it was the outcome of bureaucratic entities dedicated to liquidating enemies of the state. The bureaucracy implied that central mechanisms were at work, with government complicity behind the destruction of Jews. There is not a word in the Convention which denounces as genocide the mass killing and destruction of peoples by governments.45 By virtue of the exclusive definition of genocide within the Convention, the political debate becomes one between Capitalism and Communism, one which ironically undermines the policy of ratification. Finchs Cold War mentality not only found fault with the ideology of the Convention, but with the possibilities that the Convention threatened various constitutional safeguards within the United States. The image of the Final Solution, far from proving evocative of a US commitment to halting or preventing a recurrence of genocide, was overshadowed not merely by Soviet crimes, but by the Conventions potential to weaken the United States and destabilise global security. The Convention would cause more friction between peoples and governments than the evil itself now does and would tend to promote war rather than to preserve peace between nations.46 On the subject of trying national subjects, citizens would have to front up before an international tribunal. In complete dissent to the message that had come out of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, Finch argued that such a body would be unconstitutional: Any proposal to send for trial without the limits of the United States any person charged with a crime committed within the United States would be clearly unconstitutional. It cut to the core of Americas evolution as a constitutional republic, for, argued Finch, it was this method of punishing the colonists used by George III which led to the passage

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of Article VI of the Bill of Rights giving American citizens the right of trial for crimes in a speedy fashion in either State or District courts within the United States.47 In effect Finch saw a different Final Solution, not exclusively the ethno-religious form of persecution that Lemkin had advanced, but a definitive political form that such an international crime had to take. Why stop at punishing crimes of race when communism was advancing across the Eastern Bloc and in other parts of the globe? Evidently, reproached Finch, the UN committees behind the various drafting procedures felt that political and economic groups were apparently not considered as needing or worthy of protection.48 Genocide had to adapt to American temperaments, encompassing a definition that would protect enterprising, money making citizens from envious Communist plutocrats. The Soviet government and its communist satellites accept the convention, which they have not done up till now, may liquidate property owners and others who believe in private enterprise on the ground that they are political enemies of the state and therefore not covered by the convention.49 Finch was in good company, being one of several ABA advocates militantly against ratification. Past president of the ABA Carl B. Rix warned against the new doctrine of internationalising criminal law at the expense of the municipal system of governance.50 Alfred J. Schweppe, who was the chairman of the ABA in 1949, matched Finch word for word in his fears that the Convention was inadequate, though he denied that the Final Solution was neglected in his calculations. In fact, in his presentation to the subcommittee, he acknowledged the crimes that had been committed against Jews and other minorities during the war, parading the fact that one of his Semitic colleagues at the Bar was an exceptional advocate. For my part, I yield to no one in my opposition to genocide or in my desire to have Jews, persons of color, and other minority groups receive fair treatment throughout the world - I have a law partner who is a Jew and he is my partner by my own choice, one of the finest men at the bar. Before the committee, he urged whether the instrument before you ... the one by which we shall accomplish the prevention of genocide, and whether we render a service to the American people and to the world by ratifying the convention as submitted.51 The Final Solution was then interpreted in such a manner to justify why the United States should not become party to a convention that had been drafted to punish its recurrence. Like Finch, Schweppe envisaged the Final Solution as a product of government, with genocide the result of centralised government instigation. Genocide needed the trigger of state complicity. Without the agents of government, an operation to carry out orders to exterminate a race could only be a domestic crime.52 The refusal by various UN members to countenance this American suggestion proved fatal. The elaborate network of camps behind the Iron Curtain, choked with political dissidents, would remain out of laws reach, and the struggle against the Soviet Union would suffer a blow, with the Convention regarded as a meaningless document.53 In Senate hearings, Senator McMahon complained that, there is no thing in this treaty that makes it possible to punish them [the Soviets for the genocidal policy in the Ukraine].54 Leander H. Perez of Louisiana, Chairman of the States Rights Committee, called the Convention a monstrosity born from a dishonest subterfuge in its violation of constitutional rights of the states.55 The Final Solution, in this interpretation endemic of the totalitarian state, was perversely revised in anti-Convention arguments to suggest that ratification, far from deterring genocide, would encourage it. The American Mercury featured a pessimistic contributor Claude Bunzel who saw the Convention as the pathway to a world government, administered by foreign functionaries in an arbitrary manner in which [treaties] override the domestic law of nations.56 There was, in fact, no distinction drawn in the analysis between the UN, totalitarian ideologies, and the notion of World Government. The UN, with its associated bodies, were sinister bureaucrats, more similar to a Politburo than Congress, armed with a treaty that was a political shillelagh for the police state, with the implementing legislation the arm that swings it upon the head of hapless victims. The International Law Commission had created a political monopoly for communist totalitarianism.57 Any suspect charged for violations under the Convention, implied Bunzel, would have as many rights as the accused in a Stalinist show trial.58

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The perversion of the Convention as an instrument of the very totalitarian philosophies that produced the Final Solution was evident in the campaigns of the National Economic Council, a body that feared the invasion of Orwellian thought-police controlling the mode of speech and manner of social interaction in the United States. Ratification of this convention, tying the American people into the legal systems of other countries, many of them having totally different concepts of law, argued one of its representatives Harry S. Barger to Congress, would further ... burden the American people in a way that is not only unnecessary but extremely unwise.59 Somewhat perversely, as was amply shown in Bunzels piece in The American Mercury, the Genocide Convention was vested with authoritarian potential, and the very instrument inspired by the Holocaust becomes generic with state ideologies that produced it. In the thought-control implicit in the Convention, any John Doe, by his conversation, or his communication to the newspapers, or his public speeches could be liable for causing serious mental harm and be tried by a UN international body for genocide.60 There was even the claim made in some of the submitted statements to the subcommittee in 1950 that the Convention, had it existed in the 1930s, would have been ineffectual before the use of force. Such a Convention, argued Associate Secretary of the National Council for Prevention of War James Finucane, would not have stopped the aggrandising schemes of Hitler. Would it have saved the Jews? Not likely. Rather, Hitler might have exploited it to persecute the Jews because he charged the Jews were plotting to destroy the German nation.61 Thus Finucane revealed the penchant for the anti-Convention critic to be a critic of the Nuremberg trials, a view of the Final Solution that was confused and yet consistent with those who saw a Germany vengefully punished by the victorious Allies.62 Beware, warned a sermonising Finucane, how Nuremberg and the Convention could come back to haunt policy-makers. The Nuremberg trials were one-sided. We might someday have to stand in the Prisoners dock. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts was impatient with this line of thought, which led to the following exchange:
Lodge: You dont put General Eisenhower in the same category with General Goering, do you? Finucane: Technically, they were both in charge of an airforce that conducted mass bombing.63

With some satisfaction, Finucane argued that, In all the wars since 1945 Palestine, Indonesia, India, Indo-Pakistan the Nuremberg trials have not received the compliment of a single imitation.64 As the North Korean army stormed south of the 38th parallel in its 1950 offensive, debates on the Genocide Convention threatened to pass into obscurity. Perhaps Truman, sensing this, chose to bring to the attention of the Senate the importance of ratification even as the Korean peninsula was being engulfed in conflict. In his letter to Senator Tom Connally of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Truman warned of a potential repeat of genocide in Korea, thereby extending the relevance of the Holocaust to a more recent context. This time, the offending party also becomes a totalitarian apparatus. The Ambassador of Korea calls attention to the imminent danger to the Christian population of Korea from the Communist invaders. Deterring genocide would be a step in preserving American hegemony, essential to the effective maintenance of our leadership of the free and the civilized nations of the world in the present struggle against the forces of aggression and barbarism.65 The encouragement from the White House fell on deaf ears. The ratification debate gradually diminished as the war on Korea took centre stage. In 1951, the Assistant Secretary of State for UN Affairs John D. Hickerson was attempting to resuscitate a dying discourse with the familiar reference to the Holocaust, again noting the slaughter of some 6 million Jews and Poles by the Nazis.66 He attempted to place the Korean conflict within the context of a possible repeat of genocide, noting that the claims from Seoul had moral weight. Hickerson then countered the various arguments that had gathered momentum. Not all acts of war were genocidal, and therefore susceptible to trial at international law. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was merely another instrument of war and not an instrument of genocide.67 With the new Eisenhower administration the Holocaust as an influential trope in international relations was lessened. The same general, whose belief in the immutable nature of what he had seen 13

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at Buchenwald, had encouraged him to invite American soldiers and pressmen to make a record of German atrocities, felt swayed by his administration to refuse any genuine participation in any comprehensive human rights regime at the international level. This was evident by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles position that the United States would never, under Eisenhower, become a party to any [human rights] covenant for consideration by the Senate.68 Given the position adopted by Washington towards the Genocide Convention, including suspicions voiced by Senators Bricker and McCarthy at the threat to U.S. sovereignty posed by the United Nations and international law,69 it seems unsurprising to find the memory of the Final Solution somewhat diminished, if not absent, in US international relations at the end of the Korean War. In the spring of 1953, the UN would witness a series of puzzling gyrations, in the words of The Christian Century, that would illustrate the confused state of US foreign policy and the legacy of the Holocaust. Responding to a UN resolution calling on countries that had yet to ratify the Convention to speedily do so, the American delegate Archibald J. Carey of Chicago said yes at first instance. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., heading that very delegation, followed suit. But the moment Lodge stepped outside the room in which he had voted for that resolution [he] distributed to the press a statement which said that by voting to call on other nations to ratify we had made no commitment as to whether or when we ourselves would ratify.70 The episode proved so baffling that the Jesuit publication America could only put it down to diplomatic oversight: a case of insufficient briefing by the undermanned staff to the delegation.71 At the wars ending, the image of the concentration camp came to the fore as a defining image of genocide; a crime against humanity that charged debate in the United States on whether it should participate in a Convention to deter its recurrence. The Final Solution as a trope was extended beyond ethnic extermination by both sides of the debate, appropriating communism as a totalitarian ideology that succeeded Nazism as the main enemy of American values. In this specific way, the Holocaust was Americanised in political struggles of how best to describe the political fault lines of the Cold War. The effect, ironically, was to regard the Holocaust as less than sui generis by enabling it to be used in different politically self-interested contexts to combat Communism. The victims of genocide in the Second World War became metaphorical images in a debate on the Conventions relevance to American values. After the Convention came into being, with smaller nations (Guatemala, Ecuador, Australia) ratifying the instrument, The New York Times expressed concern that the United States was ignoring its own legacy: Those who for years have worked hard in the State Department and civic organizations to develop one of the greatest civilizing ideas of our century into law are deeply perplexed that legal hair-splitters are now obstructing ratification by the government. The Times emphasised Americas past record, a long and honourable record of fighting genocide over the years, which only left one avenue open: On this issue, our ratification is long overdue.72 Critics of the anti-Convention advocates found various ironies in the American political discourse on genocide. For one thing, noted an exasperated Revere, the chairman of the subcommittee on genocide is Senator McMahon, who is also Chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, a group that is now concerned with forging instruments of genocide so effective that total race destruction is [a] prospect.73 Far from showing an interest in the preservation of peace, these figures grappling with the Convention were bound to undermine it. It would take an opportunistic President Richard M. Nixon to put the Convention back into the spotlight after two decades in hibernation, but the old divisions remained, only to be overcome by an equally opportunistic Reagan administration in 1988. By then, ratifying the Convention was said to be in US interests for much the same reasons the Democratic administration of Truman had argued in the 1950s. It made good political sense.

Notes
1

The author is grateful to Dr. Andrew Bonnell, the Limina Collective and an anonymous referee for their helpful suggestions on previous drafts of this paper.

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See Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Government Printer, Washington, D.C., 1944. For existing literature looking at the US role and its resistance to ratification of the Convention, see Richard F. McFarland, The United States and the Genocide Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, PhD Thesis, American University, Washington, 1971; Lawrence J. LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1991; Peter Ronayne, Never Again? The United States and the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide since the Holocaust, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., London, 2001; Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell: American in an Age of Genocide, Random House, New York, 2002; William Korey, The United States and the Genocide Convention: Leading Advocate and Leading Obstacle, Ethics and International Affairs vol. 11,1997, p.279. 4 The same arguments would be repeated in subsequent debates held before a Senate subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee and Congress. Examples can be found in Hearings on the Genocide Convention Before a Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 91st Congress, 2d sess., US Govt. Printing Office, Washington D.C., 1970. See for instance, the debates in the Congressional Digest vol. 63, December, 1984, p.295 ff. 5 See Jeffrey C. Alexander, On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The Holocaust from War Crime to Trauma Drama, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 5, no. 1, 2002, pp.5-85; Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 5, no. 1, 2002, pp.87106. 6 For this line, see Peter Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory, Bloomsbury, London, 2000; Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Verso, London, 2000; Jean-Michel Chaumont, La concurrence des victimes. Gnocide, identit, reconnaissance, Editions La Dcouverte, Paris, 1997. For an earlier reference to the role of Holocaust commemoration as civil religion in the case of Israel, see Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel: Traditional Judaism and Political Culture in the Jewish State, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983. 7 See Michael Berenbaum, The Nativization of the Holocaust, in After Tragedy and Triumph: Modern Jewish Thought and the American Experience, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp.3-16; Hilene Flanzbaum (ed.), The Americanization of the Holocaust, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1999; David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal, American Sacred Space, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1995. 8 Yehuda Bauer, Whose Holocaust? Midstream, vol. 26, no. 9, November 1980, p.42. 9 ibid., pp.42-46; and discussions of such tensions in Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create the Holocaust Museum, Penguin, New York, 1997. 10 In addition to the political critiques by Novick and Finkelstein, see Tim Cole, The Selling of the Holocaust: from Auschwitz to Schindler; how history is bought, packaged and sold, Routledge, New York, 1999; Linenthal, Preserving Memory, p.12. 11 Novick, The Holocaust and Collective Memory, pp.149 & 151. 12 For instance, see Steven T. Katz, Historicism, the Holocaust and Zionism: Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought and History, New York University Press, New York, 1992; Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays, Blackwell, Oxford, 1993. 13 See the comments of the American prosecutor at Nuremberg, Telford Taylor, in U.S. Urged to Back Genocide Treaty, New York Times, June 21, 1950, p.20. 14 Secretary of Wars [Stimsons] Suggested Changes in proposed Cabinet Committee Recommendations. 9 September 1944, in Henry L. Stimson Papers, Reel. 128, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut. 15 For the significance of this see Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1994. 16 The use of Judeocide is Arno Mayers preferred categorisation of the Final Solution or Holocaust, in Why Did the Heavens Darken? The Final Solution in History, Pantheon, New York, 1988. 17 Charles S. Maier regards the ethnic dimension as one of the key features of the Holocaust, in distinction to the atrocities committed by the Soviet state: The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1988, p.76. 18 For the shaping of narratives on victimisation and its role in forming identity, see Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, 1994, p.18. 19 Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1986, p.274. 20 Maier, p.92. 21 Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History, University Press of New England, Hanover, 1987, p.24. 22 Michael Burleigh, Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p.156; Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. 23 Quoted in Committee on Foreign Relations, Genocide Convention: Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United State Senate, 81st Congress, 2nd Sess., On Executive O, the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, US Gov., Printing Office, Washington D.C. 1950, herein Hearings, 1950, p.98. 24 lan Barth, Outlawing Mass Murder, The Nation, vol. 166, 14 February 1950, p.179. 25 Richard H. Rovere, Letter from Washington, The New Yorker, vol. 25, 11 February 1950, p.55.

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Dean Rusk, The Place of the Genocide Convention in General Pattern of US Foreign Relations, Address before the Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 23, 1950, Department of State Bulletin vol. 22, no. 552, 30 January 1950, p.163. 27 ibid., pp.164-165. 28 ibid., p.165. 29 Richard B. Perlman, The Genocide Convention, Nebraska Law Review, vol. 30, no. 1, November, 1950, pp.1-10. 30 Quoted in U.S. Urged to Back Genocide Treaty, New York Times, 21 June 1950, p.20. 31 Hearings, 1950, p.84. 32 Barth, Outlawing Mass Murder, p.179. 33 ibid., p.181. 34 See Edward T. Linenthal, Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create the Holocaust Museum, Penguin, New York, 1997. 35 Noted in New York Times, 21 June 1950, p.20. 36 D P Change Asked by Jewish Women, New York Times, 12 January 1950, p.30. 37 Statement in Hearings, 1950, p.89. 38 Statement in Hearings, 1950, p.98. 39 Statement of Shad Polier, American Jewish Congress, in Hearings, 1950, p.100. 40 George A. Finch, Genocide Convention Does Not Prevent Mass Killing of People by Governments: Address before the Sub-committee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Washington D.C., 24 January 1950, Vital Speeches of the Day, vol.16, no. 14, 1 May 1950, p.445. 41 Noted in George A. Finch, The Genocide Convention, The American Journal of International Law, vol. 43, 1949, p.733. 42 ibid. 43 Finch, Genocide Convention ... Address before the Sub-committee, p.445. 44 ibid. 45 ibid. 46 Quoting Finch in Proceedings of the American Society of International Law, 1949, pp.80-81, noted in Nehemiah Robinson, The Genocide Convention: A Commentary, Institute of Jewish Affairs, New York, 1960, pp.46-47. 47 Finch, Genocide Convention ... Address before the Sub-committee, p.445. 48 Finch, The Genocide Convention, p.734. 49 ibid. 50 Both quotes in New York Times, 25 January 1950, p.9. 51 Alfred J. Schweppe, Genocide Convention Should Embrace Crimes Committed with the Complicity of Government, delivered before Subcommittee of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Washington, DC, 24 January 1950, Vital Speeches of the Day, vol. 16, no. 11, March 15, 1950, pp.335-336. 52 ibid., p.337. 53 ibid. 54 Hearings, 1950, p.319. 55 Quoted in New York Times, 25 January 1950, p.9. 56 Claude Bunzel, The UNs Secret Key to Power, American Century, vol. 83, November 1956, p.22. 57 ibid., p.25. 58 ibid., p.26. 59 Statement in Hearings, 1950, p.307. 60 National Economic Council Letter, Reject that Genocide Convention, 15 September 1950, quoted in Robinson, The Genocide Convention, p.ix. 61 Statement in Hearings, 1950, p.317. 62 For an excellent discussion on the Nuremberg response in the US see William J. Bosch, Judgment on Nuremberg: American Attitudes toward the Major German War-crime Trials, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1970. 63 Lodge and Finucane, Hearings, 1950, p.315. 64 Comment of Finucane, Hearings, 1950, p.314. 65 Truman to Connally, White House press release, 26 August 1950 in U.S. Department of State Bulletin, vol. 23, September 4, 1950, p.379. 66 John D. Hickerson, Should the USA Ratify the Genocide Treaty? The Rotarian 79, August 1951, p.14. 67 ibid., p.52. 68 Noted in Editorial, U.S. Double-Talk on Genocide Convention, The Christian Century vol. 70, no. 46, 18 November 1953, p.1315. 69 Power, A Problem From Hell, pp.69 & 73. 70 The Christian Century, US Double-Talk, p.1315. 71 Editorial, Hope for the Genocide Convention? America, vol. 90, 31 October 1953, p.115. 72 Editorial, For a Genocide Treaty, New York Times, 22 January 1950, IV, p.12. 73 Rovere, p.56.

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