Don’t let the bland title deter you from reading the brilliant and necessary article on Slate “A New Slur” by Ron Rosenbaum. The author’s subject is the increasingly ubiquitous accusation of “Holocaust obsession” used against those who persist in seeing significance in this greatest of all human atrocities. Writes Rosenbaum:
It’s the word “obsessed” that seems problematic to me. It implies a bright line between legitimate interest and something else, something over-intense, feverish, and counterproductive. But where is that line? How much time should we spend worrying about the threat of future Holocausts and genocides, not just those involving Jews.
I’m not just harkening back to the early days of blogging when I urge you to read the whole thing.
Holocaust denial comes in many forms. The use of “obsession” is merely a new wrinkle in the pattern of Holocaust-denial-by-inclusion.
Inclusion-denial started rearing its head a decade or so ago. At its base, it seeks—as the new use of the term “obsession” does—to marginalize and dismiss those who insist on being so crude as to point out that the Holocaust, as such, was aimed at one group in particular; the Jews.
Yes, the Nazis killed perhaps 11 million civilians, of whom “only” 6 million were Jews. Many of the “other” 5 million died in forced-labor camps, as did a number of the 6 million Jews. But what distinguishes the Nazi atrocity is the creation, not of forced-labor camps (the Russians, the Chinese, the Cambodians, the Cubans all have, or had, those), but the creation of death camps, whose sole purpose was to commit murder on a wholesale scale. And those camps were built by the Nazis as the Final Solution to the “Jewish Problem.” Not the “Polish problem,” the “Slavic problem,” or even the “Gypsy problem”; the Jewish problem. It was the Jews who were not considered fit even to be worked to death on starvation rations for the glory of the Reich, but to be killed out of hand. Gypsies, too, perished in the death camps, of course—but the camps were built to dispose of the Jews.
Why emphasize this? Because since the Left has made “victimization” the gold standard for demanding political power, everybody wants a piece of the Holocaust. The mendacious LGBT lobby, ever-eager to hermit-crab its way into a victim narrative, has made much of “the pink triangle”—but while homosexuals were consigned to, and died in, the forced-labor camps of Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, they were not sent to the extermination camps of Chelmno, Treblinka and Sobibor, which owed their existence to the Nazis’ determination to convert the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe to ash even though using the railroads to do so starved their Eastern armies of much-needed rolling stock.
Inclusion-denial allows all the nations of Europe and many subgroups to claim a little piece of the Holocaust, as they aver that some of their number perished in the Nazi brutality—as, of course, they did. But in doing so, these claimants—some of them, perhaps, unintentionally—are effacing the fact that the entire orgy of slavery, brutality and murder that was the Nazi regime became possible precisely because all these other nations were more than willing to wink at the Nazis’ atrocities when they first began—as long as those atrocities were directed primarily towards the Jews, whom they all loathed anyway. Inclusion-denial says, “How dare you Jews ‘hog’ the Holocaust, when it affected all humanity!”—conveniently forgetting that the Holocaust’s roots lie in the world’s willingness to exclude the Jews from the rest of humanity in the first place.
Which brings us to “Holocaust obsession.” Indeed, there is plenty of Holocaust-obsession around; the New Black Panthers are busy trying to popularize “the black holocaust”; the Arabs deny that the Holocaust happened at all while trying simultaneously to style Israel’s victory in the 1948 War of Independence as “the Arab holocaust.” These overreaches go beyond even the inclusion-denial popularized in the West by the Left.
To deny those other 5 million deaths in the Holocaust is to deny their humanity. Those millions of Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others were just as innocent as were the 6 million Jews. They were murdered just as dead even if the means were different. To deny them inclusion is a diservice to humanity and the horror that was the Holocaust. It’s saying their deaths were not as tragic nor their lives as important as of the Jews. That’s just wrong and to me is a form of Holocaust denial in itself.
You point up, inadvertently, the trouble with definitions: once you create one, deciding what the definition does or does not cover becomes a basis for dispute.
I’ve never liked the term “the Holocaust”; it first started popping up sometime in the early/mid Sixties. Before that, in the Jewish community, people simply referred to “what the Nazis did,” or to “the Nazi genocide.” “Holocaust” is a problematic term because it refers, strictly speaking, to a burnt offering—a sacrifice slaughtered and sent up in flames on an altar to propitiate a deity. I doubt that one person in ten who uses the term realizes that, and I’d be surprised if most of the people who use the term would feel comfortable with it if they did.
It is in no way denigrating to the “humanity” of any of the Nazis’ victims to differentiate between those whom the Nazis killed because they were targeted for genocide and those who were killed merely because, as political or ethnic untermenschen, they were inferiors worthy of enslaving. Rather, it points up that there were distinctions and rankings in the Nazi worldview; to gloss over that, as you attempt to do, is to miss the point of the Holocaust entirely; that the entire orgy of death was enabled because the world as a whole was perfectly willing to “deny the humanity” of one particular population at the outset.
Once again: there were no death camps built for Slavs, or homosexuals, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and these subject populations were not slated to be sent to them.
Too much attention to the extermination of 6 million Jews oh so long ago, just because 6 million or so more are being threatened with exterminationist rhetoric today.
Well, but isn’t that the sad truth in a nutshell?
As a boomer I grew up with in the shadow of the Holocaust and as unpleasant as it all was, it seemed reasonable to be concerned about it, to try to come to grips with it, but by the 1970s or 1980s I certainly had the thought, “can’t this now fade into the past?” And yet just as we got into the 1990s and 2000s we have attacks by Islam that are clearly genocidal in intent, even if they are of pitifully small scale in reality … so far. And that’s the US view – the Israeli view is of course 100x worse. So, no, I guess we cannot just let it fade into the past, not yet, not anytime soon.
First of all, if there is an obsession today, it’s with the Palestinians.
Second, I won’t read Rosenbaum’s piece because the only 2 comments of mine which were censored on PJM were comments to Rosenbaum posts. Call me spiteful if you like, I don’t care; as long as you realize that I am grateful that nobody else censored my comments here.
Third, I beg to disagree with this:
“… those who persist in seeing significance in this greatest of all human atrocities.”
Of course there will always be significance in atrocities of this scale, but is it really “greatest”?
I’d rank the Belgian Congo/Congo Free State, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouges, as the most repellent atrocities.
But I accept that there is plenty of room for debate; and at this level of depravity, who cares?
Then there’s holocaust derision, such as the use of the term “climate denier”.
I escaped from a family of white supremacists. In the rare moments when they found themselves in respectable, polite society (most of their time was spent in the echo-chamber of their own home) they would play the part of “holocaust downsizers”: “It wasn’t 6 million; more like half a million.” But get a beer in them and it turned into complete holocaust denial.
Roger, thanks for bringing Ron Rosenbaum’s article to view. I never read Slate so I would not have seen it otherwise. His last sentence is so appropriate.
– Final Solution, but the Total Solution — H. Goring.
I’ve never had any sense there was anything resembling “holocaust obsession.” There’s never been any trend, at least that I’ve perceived, to wield it like a truncheon or to make it seem worse than it actually was; no exaggerating the number of dead. In fact, considering it’s the most heinous deed in terms of a short space of time, the numbers, and the deliberateness of it, it’s a rather hard thing to exaggerate.
Nevertheless, I feel if the Holocaust ever was in the purview of the liberal Left, it would be used and exaggerated in exactly such a fashion. Generally speaking, people who’ve written about, talked about, and documented the Holocaust, seem to have been pretty pragmatic and rational about their approach to what happened.
Although I know there are some who agree with Norman Finkelstein, I’ve never felt there was anything like a “Holocaust Industry;” certainly it has never been pimped to the general public and has no triumphant adherents like Al Sharpton and Melissa Harris-Perry are for their own very real racism industry.
Of course there is Holocaust Obsession. Rosenbaum himself is obsessed, although probably more for professional and financial reasons. The major discursive problem of Holocaust Obsession is that it tends to focus the public imagination so completely on a historically distinct, isolated, non-repeatable phenomenon like Nazi Germany (1933-1945, based on German racial supremacy), that it utterly blots out the much more persistent, repeatable, global threat of Soviet Communism, Marxism-Leninism (1917-1991) that after killed and oppressed far more people, possibly even more Jews, than Hitler. I’ve seen Mao and USSR and Che t-shirts at the local mall – I’ve never seen one with a swastika or Goering. So perhaps it’s time to at least broaden the discussion.
And if you think the Arabs are capable of a modern Holocaust against the modern Jews without the direct diplomatic, organizational and military aid of the Kremlin and it’s regional foward-operating regimes like Assad’s Damascus, you are an idiot.
Yes there’s an “obsession” in the sense that the explicitly antisemitic genocide, in one of the most advanced nations, has unavoidable world historical centrality. But it is just this priority, that the Jews are always already first in the theatre of modern victim worship, that drives the victimary wannabes of the left-Islamist alliance nuts. Those who cry obsession don”‘t want to hear abut the crimes of communism (in which ethnic Jews had a big part on both sides, not least the criminal side); they want priority for all the alleged victims of white Western civilization. And the fact that a white, educated, market-oriented people has victimary historical centrality in the revelation of the evil potential of modern civilization, that only antisemitism can lead to the clarifying model of the Nazi/Jew distiction, is what drives cries of obsession.
Some people, yes I include you, devoid of empathy, bearing grudges all their own , find it is easy to turn another persons pain into an abstraction. For some of us, Jews and assorted enlightened human beings, it remains quite personal.
http://www.aish.com/sp/so/48959856.html
What “Truepeers” said. I would add that todays Leftist Jews DO seem to use the Holocaust as a truncheon against the “right” while promoting ideologies that killed more people than Nazism.
I often point out to people that the difference between the American so – called “right” and the right in Europe is that – at least traditionally – we do not believe in an all powerful centralizes state no matter the iodeology of the parties. The genocide delivery vehicle is an oversized and omnipotent state.