Greg Wallance has written a book that is worth being made mandatory reading in high school and college courses for young people who are at an age where it is still possible to preserve their humanity and common decency.
It also documents meticulously the fact that people who had the power to do the right thing not only did not, but also actively thwarted and sabotaged efforts that could have forced them to do the right thing.
It is common for victims to be asked, by people in power who know better, to provide super-human proof of the efforts in place against them. It is a truly rare event when such proof actually makes it into the right hands.
The smoking gun in this book is the cable from the US State Department that clearly references an earlier cable that provided chapter and verse to the State Department about the Holocaust plans that had already been set in motion in Europe.
In much the same way as leaking and exposing State Department cables during the illegal war in Iraq threw much-needed light, the purloining by the good lawyers at US Treasury under Henry Morgenthau Jr. of both this cable from Europe and the utterly callous response from US State threw much needed light on the inherent culture of the US State Department and helped finally in the efforts of the War Refugees Board, which utterly and preventably late as it was, did save 200,000 human beings. That is 200,000 more than the State Department liked. Which is definitely worth it.
The reason for the success of the lawyers at Treasury is their clear-eyed acceptance of what State Department superiors really are like - cold, heartless and operating completely in bad faith. They did not get waylaid by nonsensical assumptions of good faith or the intrinsic goodness of all men in public service.
This false assumption of good faith lies at the root of most failed attempts worldwide to get people in power to do the right thing. In Soviet times numerous losers thought "if only I could get this news to Comrade Stalin himself, this travesty would immediately stop". During the Nixon era people asked "what did the President know and when did he know it?". The reality always is the leaders and their cabinet members know earlier than anyone else and the various travesties occur with their full knowledge and concurrence if not as a result of their direct order itself.
Knowing this, it is particularly heart-rending to read about the huge good faith efforts people in Europe put in at great personal risk to get the data to the State Department about the ongoing Holocaust and the utterly cold rejection they received in return. The people had totally believed that all they had to do to get Washington to do the right thing was provide all the information about the Holocaust.
Here is one paragraph -
> In Geneva, Gerhart Riegner had been profoundly shocked by the failure of the Allies to react to his information. "I felt they had doubted the truthfulness of our reports," he later recalled. "This pushed me to redouble my efforts to obtain additional testimony confirming the plan for total annihilation." <
The complete faith Riegner and others had in the good faith humanity of the US State Department is heart-breaking.
Even after their cold rejection he never thought for one minute that even with all the evidence in the world US State simply would not care. And that when they rejected his data, they already knew and did not care. All of State's efforts were aimed at preventing others from learning about the coming total annihilation so no one would trouble them into doing the right thing.
Even after the Holocaust devoured 11 million human beings, including 6 million Jews and fully 99% of all Romanis in the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, the US State Department behaved in exactly the same way during the Rwanda Genocide. State Department personnel were banned from even using the word Genocide in any context involving Rwanda. 500,000 human beings were raped and hacked to death even though it was clearly foreseen and could have been easily prevented. Nothing had changed at US State after the Holocaust at all. It would be exceedingly asinine to assume anything has changed at US State after Rwanda either.
One should also point to the deliberate withdrawal of Dutch peacekeeping troops in Srebrenica, thus officially allowing a huge massacre to occur that simply everyone in Europe knew was going to happen as soon as the Dutch deliberately withdrew.
The utterly predictable and callous calculations by the British Government are meticulously documented in the book as well, including a 12-day conference in Bermuda that was designed from the start to prevent any meaningful efforts to save millions of Jews from total annihilation. The British Foreign Office was US State's comrade in arms in this fully.
Genocides are always allowed to happen, by people in government.
The power of Wallance's book is this clear eyed acceptance of reality. It is what it is. People who wish to prevent the next Genocide from unfolding should learn from this book and deal with US State and the people in power in London, Paris, Berlin etc. accordingly if they are to have any hope at all of succeeding in saving millions from a totally preventable early violent death.
The Auschwitz Institute recently pointed out the importance of learning from the life of Joseph Hartinger. They wrote -
> For would-be genocide preventers, this story is important because it shows that even genocidal governments are not monolithic. Their goals may not be universally accepted or even known, which leaves them open to undermining in the early stages of their consolidation of power.
With this in mind, the Auschwitz Institute encourages the mid-level government and military officials from around the world who take part in our programs to be on the lookout for opportunities like the one Joseph Hartinger had, so when the time comes, they too can help halt the genocidal process. <
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The Auschwitz Institute would be well advised to use Wallance's book in it's programs as well.
The manner and style of Wallance's writing is very much in the same vein as Solzhenitsyn and just as powerful in the deliberate laying out of the data with a complete absence of self-righteous indignation or hyperbole. The book is a masterpiece which will draw you from beginning to end without tiring you out emotionally.
The cold anger and realisation at what sort of a world we allow ourselves to live in and what we all allow to repeatedly occur will come after you finish the book. It happens because we all allow it.
The next time you let something slide because surely your leaders would put a stop to it as soon as they find out, you have allowed an injustice to unfold, perhaps a Genocide even.
