Has America got the Holocaust all wrong?
JVL Introduction
While the Board of Deputies (without a vote of its members) is strongly in favour, as is the self-appointed Jewish Leadership Council, many Jewish people who would normally not be out of step with the “mainstream communal membership” are deeply opposed as are some Holocaust survivors.
We intend to cover the debate in the near future.
Meanwhile Noah Berlatsky’s views from the States raise interesting questions overall about the nature and purpose of Holocaust memorialisation.
As he remarks in the essay below “if remembering the Holocaust was supposed to preserve democracy and prevent an upsurge of bigotry and fascism in America, then how we remember the Holocaust hasn’t worked very well at all.”
[Amended: 9 Aug at 22.20]
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Thu 15 Jul 2021. Read the original here.
Has America got the Holocaust all wrong?
In America, fascism is rising. And all our talk about the Holocaust, that it would ward off bigotry, hatred, and totalitarianism, all our museums, memorials, movies and school curricula, hasn’t stopped it
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I think that we do have to remember the Holocaust. But one very obvious criticism that I have is that you hear very little at all about the corporations that profited from it or made it possible. This is a very glaring omission.
Yes we should remember the holocaust but the question is how and to what purpose. What Noah Berlatsky doesn’t mention is that holocaust memory has been used to SUPPORT racism and fascism, in particular Apartheid Israel and Zionism.
A good example of this is Niemoller’s famous saying “First they came for the Communists”. Of course this presented a problem for cold war anti-communist America which is why, when I visited the US Holocaust Museum in Washington the communists were eliminated! It began with ‘socialists’.
A brilliant essay on this appeared in Haaretz in March 1988 by Yehuda Elkana, ‘The Need to Forget’. Elkana, a child survivor of Auschwitz and former Rector of the Central European University (which Orban drove out) cited Thomas Jefferson’s dictum that democracy and worship of the past are incompatible.
As Gideon Levy wrote in ‘On This holocaust Remembrance Day, Let Us Forget’ (May 2019)
‘I have yet to hear a single teenager come back from Auschwitz and say that we mustn’t abuse others the way we were abused. There has yet to be a school whose pupils came back from Birkenau straight to the Gaza border, saw the barbed-wire fence and said, Never again. The message is always the opposite. Gaza is permitted because of Auschwitz.’
That is what has happened. The holocaust has been absorbed by western ideology as a justification for its wars and conquests. Saddam Hussein, Nasser, Yasser Arafat etc. are the ‘new Hitler’.
The IHRA is a prime example of this.
It is ironic that in the immediate aftermath of the holocaust it was the left who used the memory of the holocaust. At the funeral of the Rosenbergs, who were executed by a vengeful McCarthyist American state the Song of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance was sung. In those days talk of the holocaust was seen as making you a communist fellow traveller. Today holocaust remembrance is a desecration of the memory of those who perished – Jews and non-Jews.
[This psot has been edited for length – JVL web]
Question: Is the lynching and public spectacle of lynching black people treated in the same way as the Holocaust? Are there equivalent museums? Because the everyday crimes of torture and slow murder committed against black people who had no power were just as horrific. Numerically perhaps less? But not if one looks at slavery alongside as the cruel racism. It was also a crime against humanity.
I know you won’t publish this but really JVL team, look into your Jewish souls and our Jewish history, which culminated in the most evil crime of modern civilisation, the Shoah, and think about the fact that you, a group of Jews, publishes the statement “the targeting of Jews was one horror among many”.
The experience of every group persecuted by the Nazis was to some extent unique but socialists must always have solidarity in the forefront of our minds and actively seek out similarities. The Roma Holocaust closely resembles the Jewish one. Gipsy, Roma and Traveller communities are under attack from the UK Government at present and deserve all the support that we can give them.
When facts and reason are cast aside in favour of anecdotes and manipulated herd behaviour then you end up with events like the holocaust. In the UK the Tory party under Johnson has been ignoring facts and stoking up hatred with the use of anecdotes and utilising herd behaviour. Immigration being perhaps the best example. Johnson also needed the complicity of the media. The USA still seems to have a free media but the UK has no free mainstream media, it doesn’t look good for our future.
At the Charlotteville demonstration the chant was “The Jews shall not replace us”. US Jewry should look left for solidarity and mutual protection.
Alexander said said that ‘the USA still seems to have a free media’. I don’t know where you got THAT idea from, but you couldn’t be more wrong.
Anyway, I just happened to come across the following earlier today – ie an article by Moshe Machover with the headline: ‘The real reasons for expulsion’, published in the CamdenNewJournal in October 2017, and here’s an extract from it:
Last month (September 2017) I was approached by a related group called Labour Party Marxists, asking my permission to reprint an article of mine…. The article, entitled “Anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism” was well received by many but was met with great hostility by some. I pointed out in it that in the mid-1930s the Nazis welcomed certain aspects of Zionist ideology, which was very much a minority view among the Jews in Germany (as indeed in this country). I quoted the Nazi monster Reinhard Heydrich, who several years later was to be a prime planner and organiser of the Holocaust, saying in 1935 nice things about Zionism, calling it “the great spiritual movement within Jewry”. Many people found this very upsetting. So do I. But it is a historical fact that needs to be understood and lessons learnt from it.
As a matter of fact, there is something even more upsetting that I did not include in my article. Heydrich was actually responding to something unbelievable published by the Zionists. On September 17 1935 the official Zionist paper Jüdische Rundschau, printed on its front page the notorious ultra-racist Nuremberg Laws, which had been promulgated two days earlier, and alongside them it printed an editorial praising these laws as according with Zionist wishes! This was because Zionists agreed that the Jews in Germany were not real Germans, not part of the German nation who differ from other Germans by religion, but a separate nation or race that should not assimilate among Gentiles.
http://camdennewjournal.com/article/the-real-reasons-for-expulsion
RE: Holocaust and corporations -this is useful:
Bilsky, L. (2017). The Holocaust, corporations and the law : unfinished business, Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, [2017].
See Google Books for more information