Some reflections I wrote on Holocaust Memorial Day, from New Interventions, Volume 10, no 3, Spring 2001. * * * If someone had spoken of the Holocaust when I was a young lad back in the 1960s, I would have been baffled. So would everyone I then knew, Gentile or Jewish. That is not to say that people then weren’t conscious of the Nazis’ wartime slaughter of six million Jews, any moderately informed person in Britain during that period was aware of it. But it wasn’t called the Holocaust then. Nowadays, the Nazis’ biggest crime is called the Holocaust, and the further time draws away from the 1940s, the more the images of those terrible days are presented to us. The official declaration of the Holocaust Commemoration Day a few weeks back said: ‘We pledge to strengthen our efforts to promote education and research about the Holocaust and other genocide.’ We weren’t ignorant of the facts back in the 1960s. There were history books and television documentaries on the subject, nothing like on the level of today to be sure, but one could easily find out the details. The declaration continues: ‘We must make sure that future generations understand the causes of the Holocaust and reflect upon its consequences.’ One can ask, for all the additional research and education on the subject since the 1960s, is the general public in a better position to ‘understand the causes of the Holocaust’, and following from that, are people better able to ‘reflect upon its consequences’? How the Nazis’ wartime massacre of Europe’s Jews became known as the Holocaust is well documented, and most people these days use the term. Nevertheless, the term, with its religious overtones, helps to obscure the reasons for its occurrence. Once the Holocaust is removed from the social conditions which led to it, it becomes mystical, beyond comprehension. The cool analytical rationalism that is necessary to comprehend people’s actions, however frightful they may be, seems to be almost disrespectful to the memory of the Nazis’ victims. This mystification is certainly the case with the recent Holocaust commemoration. For all the declaration’s appeals for us to ‘understand the causes of the Holocaust’, what it actually says does absolutely nothing to further people’s understanding of it. It continues: ‘The Holocaust Memorial Day reflects upon a tragic and disturbing past. As its focus, the day confronts and reflects upon the mass destruction of European Jewry and the variety of victim groups persecuted by the Nazis. But the day also recognises that the type of behaviour demonstrated in Nazi Germany was not a phenomenon limited either to Germany or to the mid-Twentieth Century. Events in Cambodia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Rwanda and Kosovo, to name but a few, amply demonstrate the propensity of human beings to murder en masse.’ Leaving aside the reasons behind the choice of countries — whatever the viciousness of the Yugoslav wars, they were typical of such conflicts, and this government would not wish to remind its US friends of the several million deaths in the Vietnam war, or remind the rulers of Indonesia of what they’ve done in East Timor, and any hint of reminding the rulers of Turkey of the fate of the Armenians in 1915 is completely taboo — and despite the declaration’s calling for ‘understanding and combating the processes that lead to such tragedy’, we are left with this horrible banality of ‘the propensity of human beings to murder en masse’, as if wars just happen because of the innate wickedness of human beings. The declaration tops this off with a grossly pessimistic attitude towards humanity: ‘Persecution and mass death will almost inevitably form a part of the future of human behaviour too.’ So it’s all down to our behaviour. The declaration ends by telling us to be nice and inclusive, to see everyone as equal (if different). The tendencies and processes in society that lead to the unpleasantness of day-to-day racism, to the internecine killings in the Yugoslav wars, and ultimately to the genocidal mass murder of the Armenians in 1915 and the Jews in 1941-45 are left obscured. The corollary of the mystification of the Holocaust is political banality. In one sense, the more people learn about the Holocaust the better. It is important that people, and especially youngsters, learn what happened in the past. But this kind of commemoration, with its banal and misleading statements, does little or nothing to advance people’s understanding of what happened under the Nazis. In this sense, despite the far greater amounts of information available to the public these days in respect of the ‘how’ of the Holocaust, the ‘why’ of the Holocaust is no better understood than during my childhood in the 1960s. It is necessary for socialists to demystify the Holocaust, to demonstrate the mundane, anonymous economic and political factors that led to Hitler’s movement taking power, and which subsequently led the Nazis to embark upon their murderous actions. That is the best way to honour the victims of the Holocaust, and to help ensure that such events do not occur again.
Posted on: Tue, 27 Jan 2015 21:30:26 +0000
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