Life in Silico

Two days ago was Yom Hashoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. This year I didn’t witness any ceremonies - I was at another base, which had a strictly-business attitude, and considered a simple line-up before the sirens sound at 10 AM as quite enough, thank you very much. Five days from now will be Yom Hazikaron, the memorial day for Israel’s fallen soldiers, the Yishuv’s fallen fighters and victims of terror attacks (yes, it’s a long description). And the following day is Yom Ha’atsma’ut, independence day. The dates for the first two days were set with an eye on the last day - a theme of “from holocaust to resurrection” which permeates Zionist thinking.

The attitudes to the remembrance day vary, and I guess it’s the same in other countries with their own memorial days - from seriousness to apathy to dislike (consider - shouldn’t their memory be with us all the time? Aren’t we forgetting by the very act of deferring the memory to a single day?). Although it’d be interesting to see just how attitudes vary as a function of elapsed time and other parameters.

More curious are the takes on foreign Holocaust memorial days, laws banning Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi groups, and so on. There are basically two camps (besides the apathy camp) - those who think Germany and other states should remember the horrors done to Jews, and those who think that the sons should not pay for the sins of their fathers. Somewhere in the background is the idea that Israel is trying to “milk” the Holocaust for what it’s worth to its own end.

I’ll take the cynical approach and not entirely disagree, yet I think that the real Holocaust, like so much else, has been substituted with its own symbolism. It is thought of in terms of martyrs and heroes, victims and executioners, monsters and saints. It is taken as some super-special event, which befell only the Jews and which lacks any historical context. (Curiously, this trend is being reversed in Israeli education, possibly because those who are left to speak up are not those who fought (who all died, save the partisans), but those who somehow survived, forcing a more sober look at life back then.)

But not just Jews suffered in the Holocaust, but also Roma, Russian prisoners of war, Poles, even Germans and many others from whom the Nazis didn’t allocate any living space. It was the result of Hitler’s policies, the same policies that led Germany’s military expansion. But that didn’t work, and the result was a shattered Europe, and with it a shattered Germany. It is clearly in the interest of Europeans that such a thing will never happen again. The remembrance of the Holocaust is a part of their own history, important to Europeans in itself, not something enforced from outside by the Elders of Zion. For the same reasons, we should remember our own history, with atrocities such as the Kafr Qasim massacare.

But a more global issue is also at stake. Alongside the Holocaust you may also want to consider the Nanking Massacare, Unit 100 and Unit 731, the Great Purge and the Gulag. Going back in history, we have the Inquisition, the pogroms, the conquest on the New World, and even the fictional but gruesome stories of the conquest of the land of Israel, where God commanded mass murder left and right. Back to modernity, there was the Rwandan genocide, today there is the Darfur genocide, and many others of which I don’t know because the news (or historical accounts) didn’t reach me (there’s a list here, though). The Holocaust is a special case, but it illustrates a much more horrible generality.

This is a grim picture of humanity, and I wonder what have we learned from history. Not what we say we learned, but what we actually do about it. Recently, the Israeli i government enacted a policy of refusing entrance to Darfur refugees. Many experiments, for example Milgram’s obedience experiments and Zimbardo’s prison experiment cast dark shadows on behavior of otherwise completely normal people. You should ask yourself what you would do in such a situation.

I think that this is a case of nature vs. nurture. Ultimately all such behavior - obedience, cruelty, compassion, whom we protect and whom we fight - has roots in our evolution, our genes. Overriding them is not easy. But simply remembering the past is not enough. Modification of actual behavior requires strong conditioning. Where is the incentive for government to teach and practice such morality in actions rather than words? Remembrance is just the first step. Who is willing to take the second?