HOW TO AVOID A VICTIMIZATION OLYMPICS

 An Article by Catherine Chatterley in the

                                    Huffington Post

Comparing the suffering of human beings is a fruitless enterprise that breeds resentment, hostility and competition. An old professor of mine at the University of Chicago, the distinguished historian Peter Novick, called this dynamic, appropriately, the” Victimization Olympics”. For scholars trained in specific fields of history, comparative analysis of different genocides can be valuable and productive, but for the general public, for ethnic victim groups, and even for academics with a more activist orientations to scholarship, comparing genocides often devolves into this kind of destructive competition. Often the goal in these cases is not really comparison but equation, and even supersession of others` experiences. 

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has just concluded its five-year investigation of the residential schools system, a traumatic program of forced assimilation imposed upon the Aboriginal populations of Canada from mid-1800s until 1996.  And unfortunately, the “Victimization Olympics” have begun again.  I want to suggest that we stop comparing the experiences of victim groups and understand the specificity of each collective experience, while noting the diverse experiences of individuals within each group.

Over the last decade, students have entered my university courses on anti-Semitism and the Holocaust and made instant equations made between Auschwitz and Canadian residential schools.  I have learned not to react to these uneducated assumptions and explain that as students learn about Auschwitz-Birkenau these kinds of inaccurate equations disappear.  As horrifying as residential schools were for the children forced into them, they have no resemblance whatsoever to a death camp designed to gas and burn human beings, in a larger process of systematic physical annihilation across Europe.  Forced acculturation is not extermination.  In fact, the very concept of using education and socialization to “kill the Indian in the child” assumes that there is a common underlying humanity that is actually accessible and “reformable” .  This would have been a total impossibility in Nazi racial thinking.

These differences are historical facts, but they should not be used to rank the suffering of people. The holocaust was not a universal experience; it was a specific program to erase the Jewish people from the continent of Europe. It was the most extreme genocide in modern recorded history and therefore it should not be used as the primary meter stick to gauge human suffering or to define genocide. There are parallels however, between the destruction of aboriginal cultures and languages under European colonialism and the forced conversions and subjugation of Jews in Christian Europe.  In the modern period, as well, the French Revolution allowed for the emancipation of Jews granting them civil rights, but with the requirement that they be “reformed” out of their Jewish identity and turned into Frenchmen.  Both Jews and Aboriginals have lived under enormous assimilationist pressure and much of it violently.

Facile comparisons to the Holocaust and other genocides do not do justice to the uniqueness of the Aboriginal experience either.  Life was completely altered for the indigenous population after European settlement was established in Canada, which made their traditional existence impossible.  The government and churches dictated one’s rights, obligations, and movements, and invaded one’s most intimate setting– the family.  Having this kind of absolute control over the lives of people invited widespread opportunities for abuse and the sexual and physical violation of children by clergy is a whole other level of trauma scholarly attention and respectful discussion at the public and government level.

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