Another post from John at Ezra’s, provocatively advocating that we forget WWII, forget the Holocaust.
The problem is that the actual utility in remembering the Holocaust is basically zero at this point. “Never again”, as more than one commenter has put it, has become “again and again” when it comes to allowing genocides in the post-WWII environment. We have fundamentally failed in any obligation to protect endangered minorities across the planet.
(As one wit put it, “never again” seems to have only meant “never again will we let the National Socialist Party of 1930s Germany organize an industrial slaughter of European Jews.”)
If we aren’t going to put memory to use, what the hell’s the point?
Meanwhile, World War II and the memory of the Holocaust have positively deleterious effects on American foreign policy, both in rhetoric and the views of America’s leaders.
He goes on to make a pretty solid case from there. And, I’m sympathetic to his views, but ultimately, I may have to disagree, at least on the Holocaust one. I understand the WWII mythos could use some deflating. And it’s frustrating to have the powers that be make invoke a crude holocaust comparision to set the war-mongering in motion. But I don’t believe that forgetting the holocaust would, in any way, impede anyone’s desire to go to war, ever, under any circumstances. WWII and the holocaust have a convenient rhetorical power, and they’re often sufficient justifications for some, but not necessary ones. The warmongers would need only find a new rationale. And they would.
Clearly the reverence with which we hold the soldiers who fought for a great cause, and the “great leaders” who saw us through such difficult times, causes those who never outgrew playing little war games as kids, to want to recreate such a moment. They want that heroic thrill of saying I stood up against evil, or blah blah whatever, when most of them… you know, they’re not exactly imprisoned Ezra Pounds, if you know what I mean. But they want imagine they’re George Orwell or somesuch craziness. Would like to have lived through the bombings of London so they too could show off their stiff upper lips. I’d pity them if they weren’t so dangerous.
But, and, I don’t want to take John’s point too literally, but he himself in recognizing that we have fundamentally failed to protect endangered minorities in a post WWII environment, I think concedes that there is something many of us have yet to learn about the Holocaust. I don’t think forgetting the Holocaust accomplishes anything, and we still have at least the potential to learn something from it.
Obviously, the lesson most of us have taken away from WWII is that America kicks ass for righteousness, and so the warmonger need only sell that thin veneer of righteousness to get the political system into kick ass mode, and I think there’s a lot of mythology built into this WWII business; we’ve been blowing quite a bit of smoke up our own asses over it. But forgetting this bit of history is wrong. What we need is more critical thinking. We need more people who are able to look at facts today and not look at them through the prism of WWII. We need to forget the adage that “if you don’t learn from history, you’re doomed to repeat it” as if that were some kind of fixed rule, a law of the universe. Because quite often we seem to overlearn those lessons. History is not iterative.
18 Responses to “Forgetting the Holocaust”
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[…] Pandagon […]
Eric Zorn, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, once proposed that in any debate, the first side to reference Hitler or the Nazis loses.
By the way, don’t you just love these wingnuts who sling around references to Churchill, Patton, etc., but wax apoplectic if someone dares to utter the word “Vietnam”?
I think the progressive community, dating back to when it was primarily a marxist community, and the democrats of America, have always had a problem with mass murder of any sort.
If you begin discussing how FDR and the NYT were pretty comfortable with the way Germany was handling the “Jewish” problem, folks shut you out. If you discuss the millions killed under Soviet and Chinese communism, folks shut you out. If you discuss the millions of Africans killed when we exported them to the “new world” and the incredible damage that did to the ones left behind, you get shut out.
If you talk about the genocidal policies that were continued even under Clinton against the First Americans (policies that both the republicans and democrats embrace) you get shut out.
I can’t think of a single political affilation, a single grouping that is actually against mass exterminations, if it is their side that instigates it. Most conservatives I know like to talk about Russia, but not the First Americans. Most Progressives like to talk about the Holocaust, but not the way even Democrats are trying to finish off the First Americans.
We probably should not ignore such things, but we should admit, whether progressive or conservative, “groups” turn a blind eye to their own
So, lets talk remember the holocaust, lets remember that even the most “liberal” of papers, NYT, and FDR himself, didn’t want to talk about the Jewish Holocaust. I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t turn a blind eye to at least one of the mass executions of the past 250 years.
If there is one thing that the Republicans and Democrats have agreed on over the last one hundred years, it’s that the best way to deal with this stuff, is to avoid it.
The Holocaust was on my mind this weekend with every word I wrote about Hamdan, and I wrote a lot of words. Not WWII examples of prisoner of war abuse, but the Holocaust, and the dangers of classifying anyone as a less-than-human or non-human. It is constantly on my mind, although I may not use it in my rhetoric about feminism or gay rights, it is there.
It is not a slippery-slope, it is a bright white line that may not be crossed, a moral wall. Equal protection under the law. The horrors and atrocities of WWII give the principles the weight of the world. The post-war conventions define entry requirements for civilization and community.
I don’t know why people and nations do what they do. I don’t know if we really learn from experience and history and change. I do believe the story, that knowledge is a good thing, is useful.
Another thing that makes me think studying the Holocaust is still a good idea is the number of people I encounter, across the political spectrum, who look at it, not only as a one-off event, but also as something that came out of nowhere, as if the world just woke up one day and found that this entire schema and infrastructure for genocide had popped into being more or less overnight.
They don’t consider that it was part of a process of history that began some time before and built up slowly in psychological and practical terms.
They haven’t realized that it began with a few whispered insults and a turn toward them/us thinking and was built, slowly and carefully and with malice aforethought, into a huge slice of Hell on earth.
ESPECIALLY they don’t recognize that the twisted and corrupt men who brought the Holocaust just HAPPENED, in that particular instance, to be German.
And they don’t realize that those men decided what they were going to do, decided who had to die or be destroyed to make it happen, and set out calmly and patiently to make those people become dead or destroyed and then they made the things they wanted to see happen, happen.
They don’t realize that the Nazis, by dint of careful planning and years of advance work, taking over all branches of the government and intimidating the press, did it all without breaking the law.
And the reason they don’t want us thinking about it is that, if we can be persuaded to forget history, we can probably be conned into repeating it.
‘Overlearn’ is an absolutely astounding word…I love it, it works.and it’s what we’ve done.
You know by now about ‘independant’ which is not so good a word.
The Holocaust should not be forgotten.
But the expression “never again” is now only a shameful reminder that the world stood by and watched it happen again in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur (still!). Shame on us all.
As one of my comrades argued, the memory of the Holocaust is important because that memory helps fuel resistance to the attempts of the fascist right to rebuild.
The trouble with the memory of the Holocaust is its abuse. The US and USSR both made stirring speeches atop the mounds of human ashes, using the liberation of the concentration camps to retroactively justify their imperialist war. Never mind the massive atrocities they’d committed during the war. (Or Stalin’s near-complete destruction of the Bolsheviks, justified with anti-semitism.) Never mind that the concentration camps were built well before the war began, and the existence of them was known the world over. Never mind the Allies refusing to admit Jewish refugees. Never mind that the concentration camps were completely ignored until the war had ended.
As for cynical manipulation of the memory of the Holocaust, it’s hard to beat the State of Israel, which is openly engaged in a campaign of genocide against the Palestinians — funded and supplied and supported by the US.
One of the most disturbing documentaries of the Holocaust I’ve seen, from the late 40s or early 50s, ended by explicitly linking the Holocaust to other genocides and atrocities that happened in the past and were happening in the present. Making such connections is exactly what’s missing. I remember in college how the Holocaust was described in quasi-religious terms, that comparing it to other events was sacrilegious. Such an idea is disastrous.
And the worst thing that could happen in Darfur is for the US to intervene. Have you forgotten Somalia, or Kosovo, where the worst bloodshed was committed by the US and its allies? No imperialist power can be trusted. The US murders for the benefit of the ruling class, then looks for any justification that can be believed.
I think that looking at the Holocaust, especially out of the “Band of Brothers” prism of WWII military history, is important in making people realize the horrors that ethnic nationalism is capable of producing. Hitler’s war was not just about Jews and Communists - he had a plan for ethnic division and allocation of Eastern Europe. Looking at the conditions of post-WWI Germany and supportive countries, which produced ethnic nationalism, is especially important today, when ethnic war happens either outright or under a civilized guise.
Even the United States, especially the United States, has a government which creates fear based on ethnicity (”watch out for the Arab terrorists” or “these Hispanic guest workers are stealing jobs from ‘good Americans’”) to eradicate the strength of democracy in our country (Guantanamo? PATRIOT Act?) in the name of wartime necessity and to perform political and economic rent-seeking (how was Bush re-elected in 2004? and just who is profiting from the war in Iraq?)
Realizing that the Holocaust didn’t happen out of nowhere, and re-examining the conditions which led to, and can lead to, such atrocities becoming an “acceptable” tool of war to an entire people, is important for keeping it from happening again, and protecting our own democracy.
I realize that this could be a dangerous oversimplification. We do not live under a totalitarian system, do not have a madman in power, and hopefully, Americans have not been completely lulled by fear into allowing our democracy to completely go to shit. But just where is the breaking point? When will we get these dangerous people out of office?
I take “Never Again” seriously. And we need to remember and shove each and every Holocaust down people’s throats until it truly cannot happen again. First Nations, Africans, Stalin, Jews, Rwandans, Darfur, Cambodia..the list is long and sickening.
This is something that I hear often, “Why study the holocaust, it was so long ago, there are other geonocides,” and so on and so forth. What makes studying the holocaust so important in America is that it could easily happen again here. Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Darfur, and countless others have a slim chance of being recreated on US soil. But consider the roots of the holocaust: A democratic nation has suffered a lousy economy and a humiliating military defeat. Unemployment is rampant. A group of conservative politicians promise to make the nation great, to return to the old morality, and to strengthen the family. They do so by scapegoating homosexuals and ethnic and religious minorities. They consider dissent unpatriotic and wish to eliminate all opposition parties. They talk about deporting people they don’t like. They build up the army and create a cult of militarism, placing special emphasis on sacrificing one’s life for leader and country. Think that can’t happen here?
One of the things my students freak out about is when I say the Holocaust is both exceptional and mundane. As others have pointed out, it’s hardly the only genocide humanity has engaged in. Its exceptionalism is in the irratonal rationality brought to murder.
Ziggactly, Ellis! The case of Nazi Germany is a case of a modern, First World democracy with a high level of education among its citizenry, and significant assimilation of the targeted population before the scapegoating began. Germany had one of the best integrated Jewish communities in all of Europe. My grandmother used to live next door to an elderly lady of German-Jewish extraction. In her living room she had a display case of medals which had been awarded to relatives now deceased. There were medals from WWI which had been awarded by the German government to her father and uncles, and medals from WWII which had been awarded by the British government to her brothers and husband. In the same box. Her family had lived in Germany for something like 150 years before they were forced out in the 1930’s, and didn’t practice any religion. And even when they left for England, they took their medals with them, a symbol of their patriotism to a country which had retroactively decided they no longer belonged.
The genocides in Armenia, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan, etc. etc. etc. are tragic. But they’re easy to dismiss as “couldn’t happen here” because they’re impoverished countries, parts of the world where both the victims and the persecutors look different from us and have a radically different culture from us. Germany had a democracy (albeit a flawed one) before the Nazis came to power (quite legally). It was a member of the League of Nations and one of the most prosperous countries in the world at the time. German universities were renowned, and there was a large, well-educated middle class. We’re not talking about a civil war-ravaged backwater here, but a longtime centre of art and culture.
The US was founded on a genocidal war against the indigenous people of North America, and countless thousands of Africans died in the Middle Passage being transported to slavery in North America. Since WWII, the US killed three million in Vietnam, and hundreds of thousands more in Iraq, as well as hundreds of thousands more in other wars, and countless more have died at the hands of proxies of the US.
It’s not what might happen, it’s what’s happening now.
Ellis hit the nail on the head. The banality of evil is one of the hardest but most important lessons of the Holocaust. It *can* happen here, and once you know that, you have to speak out against scapegoating, which is otherwise something many people let slide since “it doesn’t effect them”.
Also, the AmerInds have gotten a very raw deal, but I don’t agree people don’t want to talk about it. Maybe it’s a California thing, but a majority of voters get pissed when the state tries to get pushy with the tribes. If the media took a good look at BIA corruption, etc, I do believe that there would be a lot of political pressure to fix things.
Back to the topic of WWII, there was a Britcom called “Allo, Allo” that sent up the French resistance. It was considered controversial, but I thought the way it protrayed most of the Germans, as well as the French, as basically ordinary people, would actually get viewers to think about the reality of it. One German Lieutenant, for instance, is gay, which would have meant if he wasn’t in the army, he’d probably have been in a concentration camp. Captain Hans Geering manages to get mistaken for a British POW and sent to England, and refuses to come back (to the veiled relief of his commander/uncle, who knows Hans doesn’t fit in with Nazi Germany). They are normal people– not heroes, not monsters, just folks too cowardly to take a stand against a system that killed anyone who took a stand against it. Which makes their cowardice understandable.
It’s more comfortable for people to believe there is a wide gap between good and evil, but safer, in the long term, to acknowlege that there is always danger to democracy and the tolerence than needs to go with it. The price of freedom is constant vigilance, not from outside, but from false ideals raised within.
I know the holocaust; I have occasion to think about it every day, and I’m not even kidding. Every day. What do I want people to learn?
I want them to learn that people – all people – are flawed and thus capable of doing evil in the name of good. I want them to learn that totalitarian states are but the hosts upon which parasitic despots feed. I want them to learn all life has value, and not just that life it’s politically convenient for them to defend. I want them to learn it can happen here, even as it was borne not long ago of another technologically advanced democracy.
They won’t learn these things. I know they won’t. So Ezra’s right: forget the holocaust. You can always make yourselves another.
The holocaust is something no one should forget. The wholesale slaughter of roughly six million human lives isn’t something that should ever be a footnote in some other history. At the same time, I think the thing that WWII’s mythology has done for North America is given us our dark reminder in history of how awful humans can be, but allowed us to centre it elsewhere. The myth we’ve built the Nazis up to be is sort of a secularized Satan - Ultimate, absolute, irredeemable evil. They were evil, no doubt, but Fascism is something people around the world are still grappling with, and simplifying the problem into a good vs evil scenario doesn’t help us win.
It’s a lot easier to say “never again” when you read old transcripts of Germans talking about the “Jewish Problem” than it is to do so reading North Americans’ discussions of the “Indian Problem”, because our governments are still robbing land from Native people, and while Germans have long since left Facism behind, the American Ruling class seems to have clung to a lot of aspects of the ideology of Manifest Destiny.
It also makes it easier to gloss over the less pretty things that the Allies did in WWII - Dresden, The Japanese Internment, Rounding up dissidents, Conscription. Germany wasn’t the only country that built up a monster state during the war, it simply built up the most monstrous of them.
I don’t think the Holocaust, or any of the other history of WWII should be forgotten, but I think there’s a lot of other things that need remembering. Genocide not only can happen here, it did.
ten million. of all the lessons of the holocaust things I wish people would learn, it’s that it wasn’t 6 million human lives.
it was 10 million human lives. 6 million were the jewish civilian human lives.
you also have Polish and Russian POWs, gays and lesbians, gypsies, the mentally ill, the handicapped, inteligensia, religious leaders, etc.
Jewish people were the bulk of it, but more than halfagain as many were others.
it’s very late, so I’m not too organized on this, but no, it shouldn’t be forgotten. because then Hitler was right. Doing something that vicious, that vile, is morally acceptible, because history won’t care about it.
So we have to remember those the nazis killed.
and the Amerinds.
and the Rwandan.
and the Armenians.
and the Cambodians.
and so on, and so on, and so on.