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This chapter explores the social creation of a cultural fact and evaluates the effects of this cultural fact on social and moral life. It analyses the creation of moral universals, focusing on the Holocaust and the associated war crime and trauma. It attempts to explain how a historical event, an event marked by ethnic and racial hatred, violence, and war, became transformed into a generalized symbol of human suffering and moral evil and a universalized symbol whose very existence has created historically unprecedented opportunities for ethnic, racial, and religious justice, for mutual recognition, and for global conflicts to become regulated in a more civil way.

How did the Holocaust, an event marked by ethnic and racial hatred, violence, and war, become transformed into a generalized symbol of human suffering and moral evil, a universalized symbol whose very existence has created historically unprecedented opportunities for ethnic, racial, and religious justice? This cultural transformation has been achieved because the originating historical event, traumatic in the extreme for a delimited particular group—the Jews, has come over the last fifty years to be redefined as a traumatic event for all of humankind. This chapter explores the social creation of a cultural fact and the effects of this cultural fact on social and moral life. In the case of the Nazis' mass murder of the Jews, the decided increase in moral and social justice may eventually be the unintended result.

The chapter assesses the systematic violence inflicted on Jews in Nazi Germany and on Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. What was arguably novel about the twentieth-century phase in the long history of the brutality that human beings have periodically shown to each other was the ideological prominence that was repeatedly given to the spurious idea of “race” as a legitimating basis for systematic violence. The approximately 6 million Jews who were slaughtered in the Holocaust or Shoah, and the 800,000 to 1 million Tutsi and Hutu who were killed in Rwanda in 1994, died because they belonged to an ethnic category whose very existence was deemed to threaten the health and even survival of the nation to which they belonged. Indeed, ideas of racial difference played a more prominent part in the history of collective human violence than in previous centuries. It is also undeniable that the churches in many cases proved receptive to such ideas to an extent that poses uncomfortable questions for Christian theology. For Christians, what is doubly disturbing about the unprecedented scale and rate of ethnic killing in these two cases is the seeming impotence of their faith to resist the destructive power of racial hatred. Ultimately, the two holocausts—in Nazi Germany and in Rwanda—both tell a depressing story of widespread, though never total, capitulation by churches and Christian leaders to the insidious attractions of racial ideology, and of the habitual silence or inaction of many Christians in the face of observed atrocities.

The chapter demonstrates that principles of equality and non-discrimination are fundamental components of international human rights law. The primary goal of legal instruments that aim for non-discrimination and equality is substantive equality—equality in practice—for every human being. Substantive equality can be connected to the terms ‘positive peace’ and ‘negative peace’. The chapter focuses on inequality and discrimination regarding race and gender. The ways in which non-discrimination and equality, as embedded in the CEDAW and the CERD conventions, contribute to peace is studied, and four approaches identified: peace beginning in the home; racial hatred speech and violence; direct and indirect discrimination; steps to transforming society. The chapter looks at how civil society plays a crucial role in the struggle for equality and non-discrimination. It is emphasized that civil society and the legal sphere must pull together as both are essential to the foundation of peace.

This chapter approaches Othello experimentally from a formal perspective to assess the part played by Iago's mode of address in this tragedy of racial hatred. Most evidently, his dry, low-key style stands in direct contrast to the passionate poetry that defines the hero. Othello defines his passion in the poetry that characterises all Shakespeare's tragic heroes and seems to invite the sympathy of the audience, whatever the measure of the protagonist's failures of insight or of ethics. Iago aligns himself with the manner of the essayists: terse, prosaic, forthright. His adoption of the dispassionate manner of the essayists is more than a charade, a pose designed to fool the people he plans to destroy. Shakespeare's tragedy of love and nihilism shows a contention of genres, as well as passions, in the poetic hero's contest with an essayist who cloaks racial hatred in casual indifference.