On Sunday evening, Jerry Fowler delivered one of five keynote addresses featured in the Witnessing Genocide Symposium to a crowd of about 100 students, faculty and community members in 182 Lillis.
Fowler, who is the Podlich Distinguished Visitor at Claremont McKenna College and Staff Director of the Committee on Conscience at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, asked attendees if bearing witness to genocide can have any practical effects toward eliminating mass violence.
He began by talking about how the willingness of political leaders to talk about contemporary genocide has evolved over recent years.
“Just a couple of weeks ago the President of the United States, George Bush, gave his first speech devoted to Darfur,” Fowler said, adding that he had talked about it before but never focused on it.
Darfur is a region in western Sudan where more than 2 million people have been driven from their homes and remain at risk as a result of ethnic violence, Fowler said.
He later referred to former President Bill Clinton, saying, “It’s not so long ago that we had a President of the United States who, personally and throughout his administration, assiduously avoided even using the term ‘genocide’ for fear that he would be called upon to do something.”
Fowler talked about the history of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and how it relates to the idea of bearing witness.
He said that the Holocaust Memorial Museum was originally conceived as a “living memorial” in three parts. The first two were a museum and an educational foundation. The third part was a “committee on conscience” designed to bear witness to acts of genocide being committed today.
“The idea,” Fowler explained, “was that there had not been people willing to stand up during the Holocaust and say what was happening, bear witness to what was happening, and that was something that contributed to the continuation of the Holocaust.”
Fowler ended his lecture by saying, “We may never have a world without genocide, but that doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility as witnesses to speak out and have the hope and the imagination that lives could be saved because of what we do.”
Graduate student Zachary Tigert was drawn to the lecture by its title, “Today’s Witness to Genocide: Moses or Sisyphus?” which refers to stories from Jewish religious tradition and Greek mythology.
Moses watched his people suffer but was also able to see them reach the “Promised Land.” Sisyphus, however, was doomed to push a boulder to the top of a mountain then watch it roll back down for him to push back up again, eternally repeating the same task.
“I like how he tied that in to where we’re going with witnessing genocide and how we have a role to step beyond the whole social psychology bystander effect. … We’ve moved from not saying anything and not wanting to take political action against genocide to now talking about it, and actually having it be a big issue. … Whether this is going to lead to something positive or whether it’s going to be futile, you’ve just got to try anyway,” Tigert said.