Tom Lawson

Coming to Terms with the Past: Reading and Writing Colonial Genocide in the Shadow of the Holocaust

The question of how the Holocaust is located within wider histories of mass and especially colonial violence is once again at the forefront of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. This essay surveys this debate, asking whether the lens of post-colonial studies might offer greater mutual understanding in what is an often intemperate discourse. This essay argues that the protagonists in the debate are united by a common desire to respond to what appear to be, from their very different vantage points, the ethical demands of the Holocaust. Ultimately such a debate reveals the instability of the past and the need for scholars to accept the provisional and political nature of their narratives.

The Holocaust and Colonial Genocide at the Imperial War Museum

Relatively little comment has been passed on the role of the Holocaust at the Imperial War Museum (IWM). There is a critical discourse about the role of the exhibition in the museum of course, and Rebecca Jinks’s and Antoine Capet’s essays contribute admirably to that discourse, yet the specific question of the relationship between thinking about the Holocaust and thinking about Empire and imperial genocide has seldom been asked. Yet as Jinks’s essay makes clear, Britain has an imperial past and as such it is not possible for the Holocaust exhibition to just avoid that context. It would be very difficult anywhere in Britain, but in the IWM, the official repository of the nation’s war memories, it is impossible. What is more, the IWM specifically tasks itself, in its Crimes Against Humanity exhibition, to engage with genocide in a wider context and as such to place the Holocaust in that context. And the British Empire was a site of genocide. One might expect then to find that the IWM grapples with the problem of genocide in the British Empire (in Australia, in Ireland, in India for example). It does not. As such, I want to use this commentary to think more about the relationship between the galloping British memory of the Holocaust that Capet identifies, and Britain’s memory of genocide in its Empire that Jinks highlights, using the IWM as a case study.

New (and Old) Perspectives on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust

Recently there has been a flurry of publications reviewing the controversy of the Catholic response to the Holocaust. Despite an unchanging documentary record, all of these interventions have produced vastly differing conclusions. This article attempts to account for this range of historiographic perspectives, and uncovers a great diversity of philosophical and methodological approaches to the study of history, and deeper controversies regarding the meaning of the Church and Christianity in the twentieth century. It is therefore argued that the controversy over the Catholic Church and the Holocaust masks a much wider disagreement about the Church, history and, in the final instance, the meaning of the Holocaust for the contemporary world.