This week began with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and ends with the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. These two events are not unconnected, for per yours truly on page 105 of America Alone the EU is "a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem". They shouldn't really be quite so entwined, but as I said to Laura Rosen Cohen on the seventieth anniversary:
I think they drew the wrong conclusion from 'Never Again'. The Jews were sort of peripheral to the meaning of that. I think what 'Never Again' means to a Continental European is never again, as they saw it, the nationalism that led to war. So their response to 1939-1945 was to undermine their own nationalism. At the time of the European Constitution, so-called, a decade ago, you had these apparatchiks from the European Commission standing up and warning the Dutch and the French that if they didn't sign on to this Euro-superstate they would be on the path to Belsen and Auschwitz.
In other words, it's one or the other. You've the European Union or you've got ovens. That was the lesson they drew - that nationalism was bad, that nation states were bad, that national identity was bad. And, as part of that, they imported the next generation of anti-Semites to Europe.
(We might run a bit more of Laura's interview with me in the next couple of days.)
Nevertheless, several readers asked why SteynOnline didn't join in Monday's observances. The short answer is that I have a semi-official policy of sitting out Holocaust Memorial Day, on the grounds that in Europe formal veneration of dead Jews grows ever more fulsome in direct proportion to formal indifference to living Jews, and the extinguishing of what remains of Jewish life on the Continent.
I write below of "cultural appropriation" of the Holocaust, and there was a fair bit of that in Monday's coverage on European TV. I noticed that many spokespersons for "Holocaust remembrance" organizations were anxious to universalize the occasion: it's not just Auschwitz, it's Rwanda ...and Darfur ...and Srebrenica... Indeed, even Auschwitz is getting less Jewish. The BBC interviewed a nice lady who responded to a question about the victims thus:
Jews - plus disabled, gay, trades unionists...
Golly, is there anyone who wasn't in the Holocaust? Well, give it a year or two:
"What are you doing for Holocaust Memorial Day?"
"Isn't that something to do with Jews?"
"Not really. Well, okay, there's a few, but it's mostly gays and socialists and disabled transgenders..."
"I dunno. It still sounds a bit Jewy..."
A prominent Canadian university found it convenient in its round-robin email to lump observance of the Holocaust in with the third anniversary of the Quebec City mosque shootings. Six people died in that, as opposed to six million Je ...er, trades unionists. But it's not even about the numbers: Wars, and civil wars, happen, and it's not pretty on the ground. But Germany was the most advanced and civilized culture in Europe, and so even its extermination procedures were advanced and civilized: bureaucracy, paperwork, official government identification numbers, massive streamlined processing facilities... That is the unique evil of the Holocaust, and it's different from some guy opening fire on a mosque or taking his machete to the neighboring village. If Holocaust Memorial Day is a memorial to everybody, it's a memorial to nobody.
And the universalization thing doesn't work anyway: Five minutes after the nice lady's bleating about disabled gay shop stewards, the BBC news bulletin announced that overnight anti-Semitic graffiti had been sprayed over what remains of Jewish businesses in the East End of London.
I'm old enough to have known those who saw the camps for themselves. For example, my late friend Denis Norden:
Like all funny men of his generation, he'd been in the war - a wireless operator in the RAF whose commanding officers knew of his comedic bent and let him produce variety shows to keep the chaps' morale up. In the spring of 1945 he was preparing one such entertainment with Eric Sykes in northern Germany and needed some lights. He was told there was a German camp down the road lit up like a Christmas tree, and he could surely find what he needed there. So off he set, and walked straight into Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where, among others, Anne Frank had died a month before. 'We hadn't heard a word about it,' said Denis.
The camp had been not so much 'liberated' as abandoned: The German commandants and Hungarian guards had gone, shooting some of their starving prisoners on the way out and making perfunctory efforts to bury the evidence. Norden and Sykes were greeted by a world of wraiths: you couldn't tell which of these slumped emaciated husks was thirty or seventy, and in some cases alive or dead; wizened starving mothers clutched their shriveled babies, unaware that all life had fled. Denis found some lights, took the jeep back to the RAF, and at base rustled up all the provisions he could find and took it back to Belsen - and, even as he handed it out, worried whether the ruined digestive systems of humans starved to all but death would be able even to handle food.
The "slumped emaciated husks" he fed that day are almost all gone now, and their memory is useful to the New Europe in a way that the victims of today's Jew-hate are not. Here's what I wrote on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz - in The Daily Telegraph in January 2005. Fifteen years on, everything is pretty much the same, only more so:
According to a poll by the University of Bielefeld, 62 per cent of Germans are "sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews" - which is an unusually robust formulation for a multiple-choice questionnaire, but at least has the advantage of leaving us in no confusion as to how things stand in this week of pan-European Holocaust "harping on". The old joke - that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz - gets truer every week.
I have some sympathy for that 62 per cent. Killing six million people is a moral stain on one's nation that surely ought to endure more than a couple of generations. But, on the other hand, almost everything else about the Germany of sixty years ago is gone - its great power status, its military machine, its aggressive nationalism, its need for Lebensraum. The past is another country, but rarely as foreign as the Third Reich. Why should Holocaust guilt be the only enforced link with an otherwise discarded heritage?
"Enforced" is the operative word. If most Germans don't feel guilty about the Holocaust, there's no point pretending they do. And that's the problem with all this week's Shoah business: it's largely a charade. The European establishment that has scheduled such lavish anniversary observances for this Thursday presides over a citizenry that, even if one discounts the synagogue-arsonists and cemetery-desecrators multiplying across the Continent, is either antipathetic to Jews, or "sick of all the harping on", or regards solemn Holocaust remembrance as a useful card to have in the hand of the slyer, suppler forms of anti-Semitism to which Europe is now prone.
From time to time, the late Diana Mosley used to tell me how "clever" she thought the Jews were. If you pressed her to expand on the remark, it usually meant how clever they were in always keeping "the thing" - the Holocaust, as she could never quite bring herself to say - in the public eye, unlike the millions killed in the name of Communism. This is a fair point, though not one most people are willing to entertain from a pal of Hitler. But "the thing" seems most useful these days to non-Jews as a means of demonstrating that the Israelis are the new Nazis and the Palestinians their Jews. Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, has told the Home Secretary that his crowd will be boycotting Thursday's commemorations because it is racist and excludes any commemoration of the "holocaust" and "ongoing genocide" in Palestine.
Ah, well. He's just some canny Muslim opportunist, can't blame the chap for trying it on. But look at how my colleagues at The Spectator chose to mark the anniversary. They ran a reminiscence by Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, which contained the following sentence: "When on 27 January I take my mother's arm - tattoo number A-25466 - I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah."
Jenin? Would that be the notorious 2002 "Jenin massacre"? There was no such thing, as I pointed out in this space at the time, when Robert Fisk and the rest of Fleet Street's gullible sob-sisters were going around weepin' an' a-wailin' about Palestinian mass graves and Israeli war crimes. Twenty-three Israelis were killed in fighting at the Jenin camp. Fifty-two Palestinians died, according to the Israelis; according to Arafat's official investigators, it was 56 Palestinians. Even if one accepts the higher figure, that means every single deceased Palestinian could have his own mass grave and there'd still be room to inter the collected works of Robert Fisk. Yet, despite the fact that the Jenin massacre is an obvious hallucination of Fleet Street's Palestine groupies, its rise to historical fact is unstoppable. To Lipmann, those 52-56 dead Palestinians weigh in the scales of history as heavy as six million Jews. And what's Fallujah doing bringing up the rear in his catalogue of horrors? In rounding up a few hundred head-hackers, did the Yanks perpetrate another Auschwitz? These comparisons are so absurd as barely to qualify as "moral equivalence".
I'm not one for philosophical meditations on Zionism. Had I been British foreign secretary ninety years ago, I doubt I would have issued the Balfour Declaration. Nor am I much interested in whose land was whose hundreds or thousands of years back. The reality is that the nation states of the region all date back to the 1930s and 1940s: the only difference is that Israel, unlike Syria and Iraq, has made a go of it. As for the notion that this or that people "deserve" a state, that's a dangerous post-modern concept of nationality and sovereignty. The United States doesn't exist because the colonists "deserved" a state, but because they went out and fought for one. Were the Palestinians to do that, they might succeed in pushing every last Jew into the sea, or they might win a less total victory, or they might be routed and have to flee to Damascus or Wolverhampton.
But, whatever the outcome, it's hard to see that they would be any less comprehensively wrecked a people than they are after spending three generations in "refugee" "camps" while their "cause" is managed by a malign coalition of UN bureaucrats, cynical Arab dictators, celebrity terrorists and meddling Europeans whose Palestinian fetishisation seems most explicable as the perverse by-product of the suppression of their traditional anti-Semitism.
Americans and Europeans will never agree on this, and the demographic reality - the Islamisation of Europe - will only widen the chasm in the years ahead. But, if I were a European Jew, I would feel this week's observances bordered on cultural appropriation. The old defence against charges of anti-Semitism was: "But some of my best friends are Jewish." As the ancient hatreds rise again across the Continent, the political establishment's defence is: "But some of our best photo opportunities are Jewish."
~from The Daily Telegraph, January 25th 2005
~Tonight, Thursday, Steyn will be joining Tucker Carlson live across America at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. We hope you'll tune in!
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I was going to make a point down there by asking about collaborators, but then I couldn't get access to this site for a whole day. So let me start over.
My initial response to this was going to be that the whole Nazi phenomenon was made possible by blind obedience to authority and peer pressure. People will do terrible things to people if an authority figure tells them to and they see others going along. That led me to think about the collaborators, the ones who would cooperate with their own group being demonized and attacked.
While musing on that, I had another thought which was: Never again?! Hell yes again, It's happening now.
There is a group of people who have become acceptable to lump together and bash. Their very descriptor is often used as a pejorative, not in secret but right out in the media. Defending this group can get you attacked, banned, and fired. Being in this group means that you have to take a backseat in being admitted to colleges, getting hired, getting funding for your business, etc. If you're in this group, you are supposed to admit how terrible people in this group are and how ashamed you are of being one of the despised. And some in this group go along with it.
I'm sure that, by now, you know I'm talking about whites. Oh, we aren't being herded into boxcars yet or sent to camps, although the supporters of one prominent Democratic candidate have been caught on video saying that may be necessary.
However, I will include a link to some of Bret Weinstein experiences at Evergreen State College below. If you don't have the time or interest to watch, what it shows is how he lost his job for refusing to be discriminated against for being white. Watch the meeting where the rules are: "whites are to stand by the wall and not sit in the chairs. The food is for people of color. Whites are not to eat it." Watch how the whites meekly go along with this.
This is the point I was going to make about collaborators. The current anti-white mood in this country is only made possible by all the whites who go along with it, many eagerly. No, it's not boxcars and camps yet, but it is more than racial discrimination, it's racial demonization and many of that race meekly go along with it. This is how it starts. Watch the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf5fAiXYr08
Steven,
Are you near that area of WV where WiFi is banned because they are trying to talk to Space Aliens? I'm just messing with you. Once a few days ago I had trouble connecting with SteynOnline but it went away by the time I tried again a few hours later. I chalked it up to a power outage in northern NH, a denial of service attack or an incoming Space Alien message. Pay no attention to the van parked down the street marked *ACME Electric*.
As long as we're on this topic I have noticed a few posted comments that seemed to disappear a day or so later as if Mark changed his mind and sent them into the ether. The content of the posts didn't seem all that bad to me but I'm not the one getting sued.
I have to agree with your point that the only approved discriminees are white, heterosexual men (preferably Christian.) Affirmative action is the most pernicious cult of our time. AA is never openly discussed, supposedly banned but is getting stronger and stronger. UC Berkeley now has a diversity filter that applicants must pass before being considered for any job. I actually pass stage 1 by being the first generation to go to college and being from a rural area but no way past stage 2.
Remember, even paranoids have real enemies.
Very interesting closing line, Walt. But I know that, like Motel 6, they always keep the light on for me here at the Club. The gaslight.
Ironic that we're reminded about the slavery of Africans here in America but when it comes to the Holocaust we're told to forget it. Given the stance the EU has taken for allowing a demographic that hates Jews I can guess the visit was one of great awkwardness. We could say that they were the first people to have to "apologize" for being what they are but now an apology isn't what haters want but for their extinction.
Simon Wiesenthal spoke at the University of Washington years ago and stated that with so much emphasis on the 6 million Jews that the 5 million other victims were often overlooked. There is no doubt that the Nazis (and nothing is changing) blamed much if not most of their grievances on the Jews. The Nazis were looking beyond "The Final Solution" to a new one involving the Slavs. "Never Again" is happening again and again these days. The Nazis murdered a lot of people , the majority being Jewish, but today it's "purer"... no Slavs, no Gypsies , no Communists.....just Jews in the crosshairs. One day of remembrance as if a Saturday confession to cover the other 364 days.
Hitler was in a macabre horse race with Stalin when it comes to murder. Stalin got a head start on Hitler and murdered millions before the war, kept pace during the war and continued after WWII was over. Stalin won the race. From what I've read, the accounting as to whose column the 11 million dead and the reported 27 million Soviet war deaths should be divided into is not at all clear. No, this doesn't mean I think the Nazis didn't murder millions of people but as long as we are remembering, we should keep all sides in mind.
I read that Stalin had murdered more people by 1934 than Hitler ever would. Years ago I saw this well put together movie called The Soviet Story by Edvin Snores. It was a devastating look at what happened to the Ukraine under the Soviet Union.
And King Leopold was a close second before 1910.
Trump needs to create a new Department.
The Department of Executive Decisions.
Move all Obama-era staffers into it.
It might be "clever" of Jews to keep in the public eye the fact that their forebears were the victims of a genocide, but it's far smarter when your co-religionists are killing Jews to keep in the public eye that you're collectively the victims of a "phobia".
Excellent essay, Mark. Look forward to more of the interview with Laura.
"Never again" is indeed meaningless when the "formal veneration of dead Jews grows ever more fulsome in direct proportion to formal indifference to living Jews". Ms Ilhan Omar very cleverly co-opting the Holocaust for her group victimhood narrative is quite sickening to watch.
Speaking of "never again" I was wondering how the plans for the Mosque at Ground Zero are coming along. Maybe Mike will get that done too.
A question for Mark, Laura, or anyone who knows: were there Jews who went along with and/or helped the Nazis by identifying other Jews? I imagine that there were but really don't know.
Soros?
I am by no means a scholar on the subject but what I have read is that the Jewish establishment largely cooperated with the government in supplying information such as membership lists. This cooperation was not selling out fellow Jews in bad faith, though I suppose in some cases it might have been, because Jewish populations had routinely been closely regulated throughout history.
In previous times of persecution things might have deteriorated for a while but had eventually improved. Who could really believe the extent of the deterioration this time?
You can look up "Jewish collaboration" online, Steven, as I just did, but it's more depressing than edifying. In a state of terror (which the Nazi regime was if ever there was) no one is safe. Safe from the monsters of the regime, or safe from the consequences of their own terror. Some "collaborators" might have served a purpose (or thought they did) by acting as intermediaries between the brutal and sadistic overlords and their vulnerable victims. But ultimately, the phenomenon is just another facet of Nazi evil. Rivka Brot, a researcher into the subject, summarizes thusly:
"Jewish collaboration was a typical product of the German regime of murder, which, perhaps for the first time in human history, turned its victims into an instrument of their own annihilation, both by creating a mechanism of collaboration and by erasing human life and reducing it to the level of sheer survival. [...] The more documents that piled up on my desk, and the more I read and reread them, the more I understood that I understand nothing. I understood that no one has the right to come today and judge people for their behavior in the lower depths of hell."
The lower depths of hell. I've never been, but I hear things are different down there.
Steve - we are told that there were many people of all backgrounds all along the continuum of compromise during the walk to WWII. The threat of taking away the life of you and all your family likely motivated many to consider all possible responses, including total cooperation with the rulers. Those who totally escaped punishment by cooperation went very silent after the War as the atrocities became known, which would include quite a few Poles and Czechs, as well as Austrians, French, Dutch and Germans. This aspect of compromising honor when a gun is at your head is another subject that doesn't get much discussion, as we prefer images of complete honor until death.
My thoughts exactly...
...which begs the question: is there really anything wrong with droning a "monster"? Just pray we maintain our technological edge. Though I haven't heard of a lot of microprocessor or cutting edge software technology coming out of Gaza, Yemen, Syria or even Iran, for that matter, lately.
And Quislings.
Fighting and winning... how very old fashioned of you Mark. The USA changed the department of War (meant to win wars) to the department of Defense (meant to not lose wars) shortly after WWII.
Sometimes I think the reason there is so much hatred of the current President is that he actually wants to win. Then brag about it, and glory in it. And that is... unacceptable.
I always wonder how Jews can continue to believe in God after these horrors. Of course Elie Wiesel who wrote Night about his experiences in the death camp seemed to have as his ambition afterwards to be a good Jew according to his son Elisha Wiesel and practiced his religion til his death.
I visited Krakow a couple of years ago but couldn't bring myself to visit Auschwitz partly because I feared I would forever have nightmares, but also because of the crass commercialism of advertised trips: Krakow Auschwitz:
Convenient cancellation up to 24 hours before your event — no questions asked. Book before you travel. Enjoy our best price guarantee for top tickets & tours. Book on your phone. No hassle booking. Fast & easy booking. Sightseeing tours. Best price guarantee.
That's unbelievable, Nicola.
As a formerly long-time Catholic and learning a little about Judaism now, I think Jews continue to believe because they know that as humans we're not ultimately in control of our destiny; that we can only try to grow more spiritual by practicing patience, reading the Torah or Scriptures, doing good deeds and praying. Also, that life is a constant struggle and there's suffering in that struggle daily. Also, that we can climb up incrementally, kind of like ladder rungs to where we really ought to be headed. Through the struggle we can get closer to G-d and we can be assured that rewards will come our way if they're meant to. Also, to accept the good things that come our way with a joyful heart when they do and love our fellow human beings with the same degree of respect we would want given to ourselves. (Just a beginner at learning some of the Jewish ways. It reinforces what I learned as a young Catholic and I like that aspect of Judaism. In a backdoor kind of way, I'm getting more tuned to the foundations of my own religious beliefs).
Cynically speaking, the Bible is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. It states that the Jews are the chosen people through whom the ultimate victory of man over satan and death will come. It also states that the devil is having none of that and animates his subjects to prevent the Jews from succeeding.
But in spite of all the devil and his devotees can do, the Jews endure. So history proves the message of the Bible true in that all efforts to extinguish the Jewish people have failed.
The non-Jewish Jew can easily be forgiven for wanting to opt out of chosen people status. Spinoza, a prominent Jewish thinker of the Enlightenment chose to renounce his faith and was excommunicated by the Jewish establishment. He led the way for many more non-Jewish Jews to follow, including Karl Marx.
With the Christian era, Jewish history arrived at a fork in the road with those Jews who believed that Jesus was the promised messiah going one way, and those who did not, continuing as before.
Whether you read the Bible cynically or faithfully, the message remains historically validated but given the choice, why would anyone choose to be a miserable cynic?
Nicola, that's an interesting question because I've cared for patients who fought in WW II and some who were caught up in it. Recently I cared for a dying woman in her 90s who was a prisoner at Auschwitz for several years during her early teens. She was a beautiful woman whose personality had been shaped by the war, but not in a bad way. She was always sending canned food to her kids when they were adults and to her grandchildren when they were growing up.
I've had patients that fought in WW II in Europe and Japan. The Japanese were particularly brutal to their prisoners. Some of my patients used the war as an excuse to stop believing in God. Some of them had stronger faith as a result.
There are a few good books I read that helped me understand people's responses to horrific situations. One was The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. It's an excellent book about a family in Amsterdam that hid Jews. The author and her sister were sent to a concentration camp where her sister died. The author and her sister never lost their faith. Another was the book We Were At Auschwitz. It's first hand accounts of people at that concentration camp. It's a difficult read, but hiding from things isn't helpful because we may need to be strong enough to face such things in real life.
A good book about a man who witnessed genocide but still believes in God is Shake Hands With The Devil by Romeo Dallaire.
Also, read the writings of Maximillian Kolbe, and read a good biography about his life.
I wish you great strength and great wisdom in all things. Cheers!
Bielefeld is the twin town of my home town, Rochdale. Make of that what you will.
I'm wondering when a single main stream 'journalist' will get around to telling their readers which side Islam was on in WWII. Islamists are not only getting away with this obscenity but are celebrated far and wide both in our media and in academia. Watching them march arm in arm in unison virtue signaling their moral superiority is nauseating. Where is Anjem Choudar when we so need him? Hate him if you like but at least he speaks the truth. I'll take the ugly truth over this mindless solidarity any day.
The answer is never, because they are "journalists" now and not reporters. You can be sure, though, that right-wing think-tank crackpot historians and un-credentialed hateful writers will get around to telling such hatey hateful things.
Couldn't agree more, RAC. I *respect* the honesty and directness of Choudary and co regarding their religion.
I've often wondered about that. It's my understanding that the Palestinians turned hundreds of thousands of Jews trying to escape the Holocaust back to their death. I also read that the Grand Mufti of Palestine was a friend of Hitler who helped him formulate the idea of the final solution.
When the Palestinians complain of unfair treatment no one points out to them that they had a role in murdering thousands of Jews during WW II.
Well, you have that correct Kitty. Much of our press and most of academia strongly support the Palestinian cause
and continue to demonize Israel. Their clearly stated goal is to drive the Jews out of the middle east once and for all. The state of Israel does not appear on Palestinian maps which seems to bother no one on the far left or in the democratic party. What Palestinian school children are taught about the Jews is truly sickening.
Your history is correct.
Warm & fuzzy Solidarity, another person's writings you might want to read is Andrew McCarthy's journey into the world of Islamic Supremacism. He put the Blind Shiek away for the rest of his life. The Muslim Brotherhood when in control of Egypt after the Arab Spring lobbied Obama for his release. The Diversity is Our Strength crowd consider McCarthy to be "divisive" because he's shined the light of truth on their evil ideology. President Trump is an "easy read", he's not an anti-semite, Obama and this generation of DEMS are. They wrap themselves in the "cloak of compassion" and "all are welcome B.S." and call all of us Deplorable's. If you water down hate and evil, history will indeed repeat itself.
Mark, thank you for a profoundly moving and important column.
I remember our conversation as if it was yesterday and even at the time, I was blown away by how many profound insights you shared and they are, of course, as relevant today as they were then. I am so honoured to know you and have had the privilege of having a long-form conversation with you.
Your statement "in Europe formal veneration of dead Jews grows ever more fulsome in direct proportion to formal indifference to living Jews, and the extinguishing of what remains of Jewish life on the Continent" is one for the ages.
I could not agree more, and I truly cherish people like you who celebrate us live ones you and I am sure that I speak for many of us living Jews when I say how grateful I am for what I can only characterize as your brotherhood with the Jewish people and your moral fortitude, affinity is too tame a word.
Some of your best friends are indeed Jewish, and Jews like myself are indeed blessed to be your friend. I'm sure it's not easy being one of the preeminent truth tellers and prophets of a generation, but you wear it well and we-the civilized world-are better for it.
Beautifully expressed, Laura.
My question is always this. Will the demographic groups who should fight - I mean really FIGHT - against this awaken from their anesthesia in time to turn this tide? Or will the decline of these groups continue until fighting is no longer a viable option?
All of Europe is perhaps 100 to 200 years at most from undergoing a Constantinople-to-Istanbul transition, and the powers that be are almost inviting it, or even facilitating it. Nobody cares so long as their iPhones work.
Mark replies:
They do not have two hundred years, Wayne, even "at most". Or, come to that, a hundred years.
I have been familiar with Europe for thirty years now. My wife is Belgian and I went to visit her in1990 when she was still just my girlfriend. I was a young soldier at the time that was stationed in Turkey so oddly enough I flew in from Istanbul. It was a wonderful three week trip. I saw my wife's hometown of Antwerp, as well as Brussels, Brugge, Paris, and Berlin. I have gone back every year or two since and spent two extended periods in Germany on military orders in 2002-3 and 2011. The Europe I saw in 1990 no longer exists and the transformation is accelerating. I seriously doubt there is still a hundred years left to turn it around.
I suspect I chose an elongated timeline so not to induce any further despair. Hey, at least we won't have to worry about global warming anymore.
Wonderful as ever, expressing so much that's hard to put into words oneself. Good to hear a shout out to Bielefeld. We lived there 50 years ago while my father was in charge of communications on our part of the front. Our house, built in 1938, had a sophisticated air-raid shelter with gas-tight doors and window shutters and a hardened escape route in the cellar. I went for a walk one winter day in the sunshine on a popular ridge overlooking the town. Smiling with the pleasure of the winter sun and the exercise I heard someone say, referring to me, "Er ist aus Bethel" (the local asylum). Amusing at the time but less so this week. I've got my bottle of Lanson for 23:00 GMT tomorrow.
Your discussion of the EU and the Holocaust is interesting. As you say, part of the reason that the EU was formed was to destroy nationalism. The EU has been so successful at it that it has led to not only to a lack of ability to respond but the enthusiastic embrace of the massive immigration that will destroy Europe in short order. When I hear of the rise in anti-Semitism in Europe I don't think it is being done by altar boys, it's being done by the I-word group that can't be named. There haven't been Nazis in charge for 75 years. Never Again is just useless talk. The violence is cycling around again and you can see it coming if you care to look.
Part of my preteen youth was spent in South America where riding the local municipal transport or jitneys was often my main form of conveyance. Not on every bus, but on a majority of them, there would be a few European women here and there with a line of symbols and numbers tattooed on their forearms. They had been slave workers drafted by the Nazis. They all seemed to be mostly in their mid twenties to thirty in age by then..........
I knew what the marks on their skin meant without asking anyone. I guess education was bit more thorough back then or being a bookworm, I had read about their suffering somewhere.
On the matter of the Day of Brexit, here is the essence:
https://twitter.com/FinnaganMarina/status/1222872639452205057
Whoop! Whoop! Lovin' it!
And toasted around midnight GMT with a Samuel Smith 1758 Yorkshire Stingo.
Very nicely said by Mark, as always. "The lesson" of the Holocaust has been mentioned all my life, and was never agreed upon. Mark here describes the unique horror: that a modern, advanced state willfully commissioned it. The Lesson has wandered around from Jews Are People, Too to Let's Avoid Big Ovens to Don't Pick on the Defenseless, all of which miss at least one main point: that even modern, sophisticated man still has plenty of potential for evil, now on an industrial scale. One more complex question never gets answered, and rarely openly discussed: why so often has it been the Jews on the receiving end?
The sanctimonious statement of "Never again" never steps up to say what and how/why -- how & why did "it" happen, and how will we avoid it next time? In an unfairly simple summary, what happened was a mass killing and attempted elimination of a group of innocent people, by a ruling group that presented itself as advanced, capable and superior. The "how" gets murkier -- quite a larger group tolerated, ignored, and even supported the actions, while the ruling group deemed it allowable, based on the lack of value or respect for the victims, and appropriate based on shallow economic and war priorities. And that gets dangerously close to implicating ..... us, the living, the capable, the superior ones who would not likely be victims. Yes, if they could do it, we could do it, if we choose similar perspectives and bent value systems. That's part of the Lesson that we don't like: it wasn't just Nazis, or Germans; it was modern, civilized man, misguided. And it doesn't have to be Jews, but may be anyone our cracked philosophy deems inferior and, therefore, less valid.
There will, indeed, always be grand-standers finding personal affirmation in joining the chorus of sanctimony, but it is still important to keep the subject in the public conscience, so Those Listening might have a chance at defining, and therefore recognizing the malady, and avoiding it some time in the future.
"Why so often has it been the Jews on the receiving end?" I've wondered a lot about that, too. The more I learn about the Jewish perspective the more I realize they stand out because of their thousands of years of faith traditions. Despite having been victims of enslavement, dispersement, torture, systematic and brutal persecution over the course of the history of civilization, they always maintain their identity, and that identity seems to get stronger and survives against all the odds.
Jews also have been committed to carrying their faith traditions forward to the present and treat their faith as the greatest gift they can bestow upon their children, grandchildren and future generations. With their strong faith, their ability to assimilate into other cultures successfully, I can almost understand how an maniacal, militant, psychopathic dictator like Hitler could see how their existence could be his big problem.
His method of instilling fear in the hearts of people maybe just doesn't work so great against a people whose very faith and identity cornerstone is to be free. Jews are not readily going to adapt to living in fear either. From Hitler's point of view, it was necessary to eliminate the Jews and anyone seen to protect them for his vision to be actualized. This kind of fearlessness just wouldn't fit into that vision of a purified race which could run the world's greatest industrial war machine. After Hitler was defeated, I think the Jews just became a convenient scapegoat for any group that is miserable with their own status in the world.
"why so often has it been the Jews on the receiving end?"
Simple answer: The Jews keep coming back. The reason is a not-so-hidden cultural advantage.
When Constantinople became Istanbul, it happened once, and once was enough. But Jerusalem has been in and out of Jewish hands for millennia.
'"Why so often has it been the Jews on the receiving end?" I've wondered a lot about that, too.'
Fran,
The Jews keep coming back, unlike almost every other small nation who historically disappear after the first few serious attempts at genocide. Why? The Jews have a not-so-secret advantage. Laura Rosen Cohen gives the secret away in almost every article and comment she writes : Love of life.
Not to worry though, the secret is safe. Love of life is one 'cultural appropriation' the Europeans won't do.
I get that, Andrew. But why would a love of life be the reason that they are on the receiving end of cycles of persecution? There are other groups of people who love life who don't get subjected to this degree of persecution.
Fran & Andrew - the term "coherence" comes to mind -- the Jewish people have a long, long history of a coherent faith, love of life, but also as "a people", and often a people with no real geographic homeland, which left them so often as guests in someone else's land. That coherence or loyalty to something outside of their hosts' perspective, coupled with the tenacity you mentioned, may have been viewed as a threat. Certainly lack of acceptance of the local current popular religion would add to suspicions. The Jews have so often been outsiders, which meant a lot more until the last 70 years when people began moving around and many of us got used to a true taste of diversity. The loyalty to My People, those in my locale and family, is strong, and so easily transforms into a resentment of anyone different. The Jews also have 6,000 years of coherence, compared to the couple hundred years of most world-dominating forces, once again adding to envy and suspicion.
That explanation makes good sense to me, James. Thank you!
Very powerful and very appropriate. Every year The Holocaust becomes more of an atrocity theme-park that other attach themselves to in the hope of gaining a little "reflected victimhood" from that awful event. The Holocaust will always be unique, not just for the killing, but for the hyper-organized, efficient, industrial-level and sheer bureaucratic artistry of the killing. If all Nazis went to Hell (we can hope) then I guarantee Satan's realm is by now running like a Swiss watch. New and improved Evil being produced as the result of an effective R&D Department.
I've always been fascinated by the mayor of the town of Ohrduf and his wife. Ohrduf was near a labor camp that was itself a sub-camp of Buchenwald. The Ohrduf camp was liberated General Walton Walker made a group of local dignitaries, the mayor and his wife tour the camp and see the horror. The mayor and his wife immediately went home and killed themselves. Why? They had to KNOW what was going on at the site in the years before liberation. But did they force that knowledge deep down into the inner recesses of their mind? Did they carry it around like a monster locked int he cellar only to have it burst forth when confronted with the actual physical facts? How many Germans (who did not commit suicide) do the same? Jonah Goldhagen in his book "Hitler's Willing Executioners" Godhagen argues that the industrial-scale size of The Holocaust required that hundreds of thousands (of more) of Germans knew about it and still "did their bit." It could not have taken place otherwise. How many of them were like Mr. and Mrs. Mayor of Ohrduf whose innterdemons broke through when confronted with the evidence and how many of them stuffed the beast back into the basement and went on with their lives? And.......How many descendants of this latter group are still with us today? I think that the rising tide of Anti Semitism is due to the fact that the "watering down" of the Holocaust and the portrayal of Israel as a monstrous aggressor is enabling people who are "sort of" inclined to anti-Jewish feeling to really let er' rip and make common cause with the beast in the basement.
As Mark has said - "The oldest hatred didn't get to be that way without the power to adapt." . .
Sadly, as Dr. Jordan Peterson points out, we all want to think that had we been Germans we would have worked to save Jews. Maybe some of us would. But the harsh reality of human nature says most would have at least kept our mouths shut so the State enforcers didn't come looking for us. The reason The Holocaust deserves remembrance is simply this: We too might be Nazis. And there seem to be plenty of modern day Brownshirts with no objections to beating, jailing, or killing their opponents. All the more reason The Holocaust lesson is timeless.
Indeed, Hitler and the Nazis were not unique. Stalin, Mao, King Leopold and Pol Pot each designed inconceivably monstrous misery machines with arguably higher body counts. Any ideology that sets aside another group of human beings as inferior is just sickening.
David, as you suggest in the first part of your comment, it's more likely that we too might keep our mouths shut, rather than be Nazis. The silent majority facilitated the atrocity by "not noticing".
It's a photo-op for the bien-pensant, sans black-face natch, to do a bit of virtue-signalling whilst they continue shipping in Jew-hating Muslims with their tolerant co-religionists.
They did the same after Charlie Hebdo: had a stroll for the news and then enforced the censorship, lest we remember what it was all about.