By: Jim Taylor

Perhaps it's just coincidence that the trial of Robert William Pickton opened in Vancouver during the same week as Holocaust Day.
          But as James Redfield wrote in The Celestine Prophecy -- a poorly written book that contained many good thoughts -- coincidences are rarely just coincidences.
          Certainly this particular coincidence has something to say to us.
Pickton is accused of murdering and disposing of 26 women. That pales by comparison with the commonly accepted estimates of six million people systematically rounded up and murdered in Nazi extermination camps.
          The numbers make these acts appalling. But so do the intention, the mindset, the methodical and deliberate desire to eliminate others who aren't considered fully human.
          Long before Auschwitz, the Nazis had a eugenics program, codenamed "T4," intended to cull undesirable elements from the German gene pool. It called its victims, "life unworthy of life."
          That's the recurring rationalization of all genocides.

HORRIFYING STATISTICS
          Prior to the genocide in Rwanda, Hutu-controlled radio stations and newspapers began referring to the Tutsi as subhuman. On the surface, Rwanda's 800,000 deaths don't compare with Germany's six million -- but according to author Jared Diamond, three out of four members of the Tutsi tribe perished in the massacres.
          During Bangladesh's bloody separation from West Pakistan in 1971, Pakistan's military killed an estimated three million people. Native Bengalis were compared with monkeys and chickens. Pakistan's General Niazi called Bangladesh, "a low lying land of low lying people."
          Some historians claim that Russia deliberately starved 13 million Ukrainians to death in 1932-33. Up to 20 million Africans died in the slave trade. War and disease wiped out about 12 million American "Indians."
          Regardless of numbers, all of these have one common element. The victors considered their victims less than human.
So too with the murders in Vancouver's downtown Eastside.
          This time, though, the victims were not Jews. Or Africans. Or Bengalis. Or any other racial group. They were women.

VICTIMS NO ONE CARED ABOUT
          Had the murderer selected Jews, Chinese, or politicians as his victims, there would have been an immediate uproar. Hundreds of police would have been assigned to solve the crimes.
          But because he chose women -- many of them native, most of them drug addicted prostitutes -- he got away with his crimes for 20 years.
          Officially, women started disappearing in 1983. But Vancouver police didn't start investigating until 1998. Even then, they assigned only two officers to the case.
          Before that, police suggested that the women had just moved, leaving no forwarding address.
          By the time a joint Vancouver police and RCMP task force took the disappearances seriously in 2001, they concluded that more than 50 women had vanished, presumably murdered.
          The murderer got away with it for so long because our society viewed his victims as "life unworthy of life."
          According to Crown prosecutor Daniel Prevett's opening presentation to the jury, Pickton's method for disposing of his victims' bodies was at least as efficient as the Nazi crematoriums.
Pickton, said Prevett, ran a pig farm. After butchering pigs, he took leftover body parts to a rendering plant where, according to the plant's website, they were converted into "cosmetics, shampoos, candles, lubricants, paints, tires, perfumes, textiles, inks, polishes [and] cleaning solvents."
          But not all of the missing women went into household products. Investigators found severed heads in a couple of buckets in a freezer, several hands, teeth, and -- after sifting tons of soil and compost on Pickton's farm -- enough bone fragments to identify 26 victims.
          They had one tool that the investigators of Nazi crimes lacked -- DNA testing. The liberators of Auschwitz only had ashes.

DEHUMANIZING IRRATIONALITY
          We've come a long way since the Holocaust. But perhaps not far enough. Because the attitude that some people matter less than others persists.
          The news media regularly report the number of Americans killed in Iraq. They rarely mention Iraqi deaths, even though UN estimates suggest that civilian casualties outnumber American more than ten to one.
          Tragically, a German sociologist anticipated the Holocaust. A century ago, Max Weber defined the potential ill-effects of what he called "rationalization." Rationalization, he said, was based on four principles -- efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control.
          "From a purely technical point of view," Weber wrote, "a bureaucracy is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability."
          But Weber recognized a dark side: "Rational calculation.reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself into a bigger cog."
          Right there is an explanation of how otherwise decent men and women could collaborate in genocide. They were just cogs in a machine. The efficient functioning of the machine mattered more than the lines of humans herded into gas chambers.
          The machine, once rolling, could no longer tolerate second thoughts, could no longer reconsider its goals. In Weber's terms, rationality taken to an extreme became irrational.
          Thus the Holocaust created its own unstoppable momentum.
          Today, Weber's analysis echoes in the White House's obsession with waging war in the Middle East. And in the ever-enlarging U.S. prison and drug enforcement systems.
          Closer to home, it sounds eerily like some provincial health authorities.
          Whether the original intentions were good or bad, Weber argued, the result is the same -- dehumanization.
          The victims stop being individuals with needs. They become numbers to process.
          The Holocaust reminds us that we humans can inflict atrocities on other humans. The Pickton trial reminds us that we will never erase the threat of genocide until we learn to treat all -- regardless of race, sex, or religion -- as having equal rights.
Until there is no such thing as "life unworthy of life."

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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If you have comments or questions about Jim's column, write to him directly at jimt@quixotic.ca