
28 Jan On NOT Learning the Lessons of the Holocaust
Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day and, as such, was the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Many aspects of the remembrance, especially in Europe, were quite moving. The appearances and testimonies given by survivors were powerful and touching. The Princess of Wales continued to demonstrate that she is the only possible reason not to nuke the entire British Royal Family from outer space. Many wonderful and important things were said about the importance of remembering the Holocaust and living out the meaning of “never again.”
And then there were the politicians.
The dreadful little troll who serves as the President of Ireland was dreadful and small, as expected. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was primarily concerned with his and his nation’s current fates, rather than the fates of those who suffered and died during the Holocaust, as expected. And British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was trite and smug and tedious, as expected.
The most frustrating and infuriating aspect of the political presenters was their desperate need – on the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, for crying out loud – to promise to “remember and learn the lessons of the Holocaust,” even as they confirmed that they had no idea what those lessons are. Almost to a man, the politicians who spoke offered their condemnation of “antisemitism and all hate,” and pledged to remember “the Holocaust and all genocide.” Even on Holocaust Remembrance Day, it couldn’t just be about the Holocaust or the unequaled suffering of the Jewish people. It had to be about everyone, everywhere who has suffered at the hands of an oppressor.
Don’t get me wrong. I think what happened in Rwanda, for example, was a horrible, grotesque evil. And I believe that all the nations of the earth should do their very best to ensure that ungodly massacres such as that one occur “never again.” Preventing or stopping evil is, by definition, good, wherever it takes place.
Nevertheless, I think it’s patently obvious that anyone who conflates antisemitism with all hate or who thinks that what happened in Rwanda is the same as what happened in Central Europe before and during World War II is hopelessly ignorant. They have learned nothing from the Holocaust, much less its most important lessons.
The Holocaust was, in many ways, a perfect reflection of the pathologies of the West. For example, the West has, since its inception in the fertile sands of the Mediterranean more than 3000 years ago, suffered from occasional bursts of chiliastic and dualistic religious fervor. Indeed, the primary synonym for “dualistic” is Manichaean, which is a reference to the early Christian-era heresy that posited a dualistic cosmology pitting good against evil, light against dark, and spiritual against material. These spasms of millenarian dualism persisted throughout the Middle Ages and, after the Enlightenment, increased in frequency and ferocity, even as they took on quasi-secular characteristics. Hilaire Belloc, in his classic The Great Heresies, referred to these quasi-secular movements as “the Modern Attack.” We know them better as the innumerable varieties of leftism.
A second characteristic of the Western world is its propensity to use Jews specifically as the scapegoats for all tragedies and problems and, often, to see them as the embodiment of the forces of darkness and evil in their Manichaean religious constructions. Anti-Semitism represents something completely unique among the prejudices that afflict the Western world. Hatred of and anger toward Jews is not the same as other forms of bigotry. Historically, Jews are not only the perennial scapegoats during periods of social upheaval and displacement, but resurgent anti-Semitism serves as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the rise of revolutionary movements.
In his classic The Pursuit of the Millennium, the British historian Norman Cohn argues that the Jewish diaspora generally fit comfortably, if tentatively into European society for most of the first thousand years or so A.D., and Jews only became a hated and perpetually persecuted minority with the rise of utopian Millenarianism that accompanied and then outlived the Crusades. Beginning then and continuing for the next nearly a thousand years, Europeans came to associate Jews with the antichrist and thus to associate hatred and persecution of Jews with preparing the battlespace for the Second Coming. Many historians, including Hannah Arendt, believed that the anti-Semitism that was such an integral part of the West’s Twentieth-century collapse into totalitarianism was relatively new and, in any case, distinct from medieval anti-Semitism. Cohn’s history suggests otherwise, connecting the religious eschatology of medieval Europe to the quasi-religious eschatology of post-Enlightenment Europe, thereby connecting it to the persistence of Western anti-Semitism as well.
You take all this, add in the vaunted German bureaucracy and modern mass-killing technology, and you get the Holocaust. It’s important to remember, however, that the KEYS to it all were the Manichaean millenarianism of National Socialism and the rabid, persistent, centuries-old antisemitism of Central Europe. Without those two characteristics, mass murder or genocide or whatever you want to call it is simply not comparable to the Holocaust.
To be clear, in places like Ukraine (the Holodomor), China, and Cambodia, the Manichaean millenarianism of Communism found other scapegoats to murder. And again, in places like Rwanda, the mass slaughter was grotesquely evil. Still, without BOTH characteristics – the specific religiosity of both the perpetrators and the victims – none of these is even remotely comparable to the Holocaust.
Many of the speakers at yesterday’s event at Auschwitz noted the return of the “ideology” of antisemitism. Most of these speakers were Jewish, and they all have more than just cause to be worried. Although I might quibble with their characterization of antisemitism as an ideology, they are right to worry that today’s growing Jew-hatred is alarming. After all, Islamism is very much a Manichaean-millenarian religious tradition, and this is especially the case of Iran’s Twelver Shiism. Islamism also shares Europe’s tradition of scapegoating the Jewish people for all the ills that befall or could befall it. (The aforementioned Hilaire Belloc would, of course, go one step further, arguing that Islam shares Christendom’s antisemitism because it is one of the five greatest Christian heresies. But that’s a story for another day).
One should not doubt for a second that the Iranian mullahs desperately want nuclear weapons specifically because they want to be able to repeat the Holocaust, despite lacking anything approaching a functional government, much less German-level administrative efficiency. Indeed, it is only by virtue of the fact that Islamism is incompatible with capable governance and military competency that Israel survives today.
As the politicians prattle on about “hatred” and “genocide,” they are both belittling the Jewish people’s suffering and emboldening their current enemies. The lessons of the Holocaust are, quite simply, Jewish-specific. Yes, Hitler murdered others, but the whole point was to produce a “final solution” for the continent’s Jewish “problem.” By trying to be “inclusive” the West’s political leaders are missing the point entirely. They are flatly ignoring the lesson s of the Holocaust.