Some 25 years ago, I travelled to Lithuania, the country from which my paternal grandfather, Toli, had emigrated in 1926. In his home town of Wilkomir, our family had lived for generations. Soon after the German invasion of June 1941, those who remained – along with the rest of Wilkomir’s 6,000 Jews – were murdered in the neighbouring woods by the notorious Einsatzgruppen: roving death squads largely made up of middle-aged, middle-class, often educated genocide enthusiasts, a kind of nightmare Dad’s Army, abetted by eager local collaborators. Few of Lithuania’s Jews survived long enough to experience the subsequent industrialised slaughter of the death camps.
With my (now late) father, and his cousins, I visited Wilkomir, and other sites of anti-Jewish atrocities. Many of these – around 200 across the country, I learnt – were memorialised only by monuments dating from the Cold War, commemorating the massacre of “Soviet citizens”, with no mention of their identity or the reason they were killed. It was, I wrote at the time, “a particularly insidious form of Holocaust denial; proclaiming the crime while burying the motive”.
That corruption of history did not end with the fall of communism. It still happens today, routinely, annually, in our own Western liberal democracies. Media, unions, churches, sporting bodies, politicians, celebrities, private individuals: all of them echo those Soviet inscriptions, making twice judenrein what the Nazis did once.
This year, to pick just one representative example from many available, BBC Radio 4’s news bulletin reported: “Buildings will be illuminated to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which commemorates the six million people murdered by the Nazi regime.” “People”, you say? Let us envisage the kind of person for whom Holocaust Memorial Day exists in the first place. Not a Jew, that is, because it does not exist for our benefit – despite the widespread conviction that this is its sole and sinister purpose – but someone who might need informing or reminding of the subject. That listener would, at this point, be left wondering: which people – and why? The murderers, it seems, must be identified. The victims, however, go unnamed. That same omission, in identical language, appeared across multiple BBC broadcasts throughout the day
There is a word for this. It is known in progressive circles as “erasure”, and it is understood – quite rightly – to be a very bad thing. Until it is done to Jews by progressive in-groups themselves, or by the institutions in which they hold sway. At which point it is standard and acceptable behaviour.
“It wasn’t just Jews who were killed in the Holocaust!” the Good People™ will assert, in defence of this erasure – as if Jews, through greed and vanity, are clinging to an unwarranted status. (Lucky us, to be thus singled out by history, no? Boy, do we feel special.)
But it was. By definition. That is what the Holocaust is. That is what the word means: the genocide of six million Jews, through a process engineered to exactly that end, by the Nazis.
What the Good People™ refer to here is the simultaneous murder of many others by the Nazis, sometimes using the convenient mechanisms set up to kill Jews. Those deaths, which should always be remembered in their own right, were not the object of the Holocaust. The object of the Holocaust – categorically, and by the Nazis’ own account among themselves – was the destruction of Jews.
Fairness demands we acknowledge that the aforementioned news item went on to add, “Organisers say that at a time of rising antisemitism, this is a moment to stand together.” A clue! One might then begin to puzzle out the whole business. But why so coy? When the news involves any other group on the sharp end of violence, you may count upon a body that mentions it to be clear on just who they mean. You are not required to obliquely infer it.
That such bodies replicate the sleight-of-hand of an archaic Soviet ruse I witnessed in Lithuania is not, as it might at first seem, a coincidence. These are bodies in which antizionism, today’s dominant strand of antisemitism, has become institutionalised.
“But antizionism isn’t antisemitism!” the Good People™ indignantly cry. The thing is, though, it is. Not as a matter of this writer’s opinion, but one of historical record. As anyone will know who read this newspaper’s recent interview with the USSR-raised scholar Izabella Tabarovsky, antizionism did not emerge organically on the left. Instead, it was intentionally fomented from the 1950s onwards in the USSR, drawing on the tropes of “classic” antisemitism and remoulding them to fit activist mindsets in different territories, then propagated globally – going on, like many such monsters, to stalk the earth long after its Frankenstein’s demise.
Few of its current adherents have the slightest inkling of this history. One would need to be a choleric retired major in Aldershot to believe the BBC means to reproduce Soviet propaganda. As so often, conspiracy is not required as an explanation when folly – in this instance, the Socialism of Fools – is available.
It is curious how Holocaust Memorial Day is the only date in the year when so many people who otherwise obsess endlessly about Jews – who fulminate about “Zionists”, and project upon the only Jewish state their weird fixation about the source of the world’s evils – suddenly lose the capacity to mention Jews at all. Jews as antagonists must be named, and of course, shamed. Jews as prey must be rendered generic, without identity or history, lest they be accorded the marvellous privilege of unsurpassed victimhood, which they will only abuse by declining to repeat it. They must be the tragic, random and indistinct casualties of a universal wickedness rather than the explicit targets of a specific and resurgent one.
The Holocaust was a programme devised and enacted by Nazis to eliminate Jews from the world. Today we have programmes devised and enacted by progressives to eliminate Jews from the Holocaust.
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