Moral Arithmetic

JL Wilson sums up my feelings on holocaust denial quite nicely http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=1761 .

Up until I visited Auschwitz last year, most of my knowledge of the Holocaust was derived from the late 1970s miniseries and other movies. Six million dead Jews was appalling, but I reckoned that six thousand or six hundred would have been enough to shock my conscience, and I could never figure out what all the hullabaloo over the exact number was. I think that an atrocity was done when the Nazis killed their first Jew and that each subsequent murder should be considered another equally horrifying count in the indictment of Nazism. In my book, arguing that the Nazis killed only one million Jews or some other number less than six million is not a valid way to absolve them of culpability.

I suppose that it is useful to have the atrocities be of such enormity that they do not invite ready comparisons with our own national sins. If my country killed a few thousand residents of the Philippines to suppress the rebellion there, that was nothing like the Holocaust with its SIX MILLION. If my country wiped out tens of thousands of Indians, that pales in comparison to the SIX MILLION who died in the Holocaust. That was TOTALLY DIFFERENT.

Also, an enormous number means that the events are entitled special status as one of the most extreme examples of state sponsored murder instead of being just another run of the mill series of atrocities committed by states. States kill people in the hundreds of thousands all the time, so there is nothing special in many minds about events that culminate in the deaths of any fewer than say a million people or so.

How many Iraqi and Afghan civilians will the US have to kill as collateral damage before US subjects become concerned about the moral implications? Estimates that the sanctions of the last decade killed a million people left the Americans unmoved for the most part. A possible 100,000 dead and an officially acknowledged 30,000 dead are apparently not all that disturbing to most Americans. Americans rarely talk about the multitudes of Vietnamese dead as costs of that war but are troubled by the 50,000 plus US casualties. Perhaps my compatriots have an unlimited moral capacity to absorb the deaths of foreigners at the hands of the government but a limited capacity to accept American casualties.

Also, I suppose that it is important that the murders be done over a relatively short time period. If the German government killed six million Jews over a two hundred year period, that might not be as disturbing. By the same token, Americans seem to be OK with the instantaneous vaporization of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians on two occasions in 1945.

I don’t understand the moral arithmetic.