Treblinka - What happened with humanity? Tomasz Cebulski PhD, Sky Heritage Pictures
Theory of socio-political evolution towards genocides explained.
11 STAGES:
The stages are:
Classification - The differences between people are not respected. There’s a division of ‘us’ and ‘them’ which can be carried out using stereotypes, or excluding people who are perceived to be different.
Symbolisation - This is a visual manifestation of hatred. Jews in Nazi Europe were forced to wear yellow stars to show that they were ‘different’.
Discrimination - The dominant group denies civil rights or even citizenship to identified groups. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their German citizenship, made it illegal for them to do many jobs or to marry German non-Jews.
Dehumanisation - Those perceived as ‘different’ are treated with no form of human rights or personal dignity. During the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, Tutsis were referred to as ‘cockroaches’; the Nazis referred to Jews as ‘vermin’.
Organisation - Genocides are always planned. Regimes of hatred often train those who go on to carry out the destruction of a people.
Polarisation - Propaganda begins to be spread by hate groups. The Nazis used the newspaper Der Stürmer to spread and incite messages of hate about Jewish people.
Preparation - Perpetrators plan the genocide. They often use euphemisms such as the Nazis’ phrase ‘The Final Solution’ to cloak their intentions. They create fear of the victim group, building up armies and weapons.
Persecution - Victims are identified because of their ethnicity or religion and death lists are drawn up. People are sometimes segregated into ghettos, deported or starved and property is often expropriated. Genocidal massacres begin.
Extermination - The hate group murders their identified victims in a deliberate and systematic campaign of violence. Millions of lives have been destroyed or changed beyond recognition through genocide.
Denial - The perpetrators or later generations deny the existence of any crime.
SILENCE -
Genocide unfolds in predictable and defined stages. They do not always occur linearly one after the other. They often occur simultaneously and are interrelated. According to G. Stanton's definition, usually a later stage in his typology must be preceded by an earlier one. Individual stages may last throughout the entire process and take on different intensities characteristic of the social, cultural, political and international conditions in which the genocide takes place. The awareness that at least some of the potential victims can be saved at each stage is critical for prevention activities.
The best way to remember and prevent genocides is to raise awareness of their recurrence in human history.
There shall be stage 11 called SILENCE added to G. Stanton's theory of 10 stages. This has been evidently showing in my 20 years of work with survivors and their families. This last stage demonstrated itself strongly in the two decades after World War II. In that period historiography and the memory of the Holocaust were, at best, silenced, at worst, redefined and ousted from public debate for the needs of current politics and collective identity.
STEP 11 - SILENCE: Victims no longer have the right to express and narrate their experience, even if they try there is no language, cultural context or cultural code to express their trauma. The evidence of the crimes have been erased, those who escaped have become destitute refugees. They are making first generation of emigrants trying to take care of their basic existence and often even survival. The survivor guilt syndrome plays a key role in the formation of the period of silence. The initial period of silence is characterized by attempts to change identity or deny traumatic experiences. The period of silence is catalyzed and reinforced by another phase of the outside world's indifference to the phenomenon of genocide. The committed genocide gradually becomes a social taboo, and the memory of it is often erased from the pages of history. The mechanisms of the period of silence and forgetting of genocides contribute to the deepening of social indifference to the subsequent phases of radicalization of the language and ideology of the state. Such cycle may be taking place decades later, but may lead again to entering the path of a vicious circle of successive stages on the way towards another genocide. Silence, lack of awareness about the genocidal potential of humanity and lack of knowledge about the repetition of these phenomena in history closes the theory of stages by G. Stanton and at the same time explains the cyclical nature of these crimes in the history of mankind.
Author: Tomasz Cebulski