I was just about to start a wormseye on the new American visa regulations. And, while tossing around column ideas, I discovered one that would really cause a stink: “What the world needs is an annual Holocaust Forgetfulness Day.” Actually, it’s only part of the world that needs that. There are still huge chunks of the Arab and Muslim world where holocaust denial is an active malignancy. But in the US and to some extent here, there is a rather different misunderstanding, where the Holocaust is taken as a uniquely significant genocide, the pattern of which all others are merely feeble reflections.
This is a largely religious idea — in Christian terms, the Holocaust has been assimilated into salvation history. In this version of history, the important thing about the Holocaust is that its victims were Jews, and it is the genocide of Jews that is the danger that a policy of “never again” is to avert. Without being even the tiniest bit in favour of any genocide of Jews, I still find this attitude worrying and wrong. I don’t see anything more shocking in the murder of a Jewish doctor and all his family than of a Russian one, an Armenian, or a Rwandan.
It seems to me that the centrally horrifying and instructive fact about the Holocaust is not who the victims were. It is the identity of the organisers. If the Germans could do it, anyone could. I really do admire German civilisation. The Germans Jews who said to themselves that this was the country of Goethe, Beethoven and all the rest, and so terrible things could not happen there really should have been right. Admittedly, the Germany in which HItler rose to power had been horrendously traumatised by war, pestilence, inflation, and occupation; of these things only the war and the occupation were really the Germans’ fault. (It is of course probable that the influenza and other diseases of 1918-19 would not have been nearly so lethal had they struck a well-fed, peaceful population). It took a very great deal of stress to break down the inhibitions that had kept civilisation in place. But they did break down. I always think that it was, so to say, luck that they broke down there and not elsewhere.
I suppose this question is a litmus test in the American culture wars. The idea that any government or any people might turn as wicked as the Nazis has been completely devalued by overuse since about 1960, so that it’s now worth as little as a 1920 Reichsmark. The last, deeply silly unpleasant and silly expression of this is the idea that the Israelis are now behaving towards the Palestinians as badly as the Germans (and Lithuanians, Poles, Ukrainians, etc) behaved towards them. What’s happening on the West Bank is not remotely comparable to the Holocaust; but that’s rather the point about genocide: nothing else could be nearly as terrible. That doesn’t make right, or even excusable, some things that are very much less terrible .
It seems to me that almost all contemporary American discussion of the holocaust takes two facts as centrally significant: that the victims were Jewish, and that the perpetrators were ‘European’, But the ethnicity of the victims has no moral significance; and ‘European’ is in that context just an expression of ignorant contempt. If the lessons of the holocaust are going to be so systematically misunderstood, we would be better employed in thinking about other genocides, when we must think about any at all. the whole idea that thinking about genocide is morally uplifting is itself rather questionable. I have sat through Shoah; I have walked down the railway tracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau and picked my way across the ruins of the crematoria. I don’t know that I’m a better person as a result, or even that I have a better grasp of the enormity of what happened than I might have gained by reading Primo Levi. I certainly wouldn’t wish the experience on my children. I had to stop reading Gilbert’s “Holocaust” two thirds of the way through. I simply could not go on for the nightmares. I don’t see that “remembering” any more would do me any good, nor undo anything that happened.
As a curious sidenote, I don’t think I have ever come across, in any history of the Gulag, anyone reflecting that the Russia was the country of Tolstoy, Pushkin, or Pasternak, and so incapable of barbarity, even when they were reciting Pushkin on the cattle trucks. But cultured Germans did believe that art ennobled a people, and I would like to believe it too.
