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Old-style Holocaust denial has become a distinctly fringe belief. It’s been replaced by something equally problematic: the transformation of the Holocaust into a historic brand, a generalised feeling rather than a specific event. This has come at the price of a hollowing-out of the Holocaust’s unique significance. Where once racists accused the Jews of inventing the Holocaust, now the demand is that the Jews share the Holocaust. Yes, the Jews can have remembrance of their genocide, but first they must agree to share it with other victim groups.
We’ve seen a stubborn insistence on the ‘sharing’ of the Holocaust time and again in recent years. Who can forget when the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day on the basis that it was ‘too narrowly focussed on Jewish suffering’? It needs to be more inclusive of ‘recent genocides such as that in Rwanda and of Muslims in Srebrenica’, the MCB insisted. In short, share your victim status, Jews. Give us a taste. Pool your historic suffering.
Today, humanity’s memory of the Holocaust is assaulted less by the noisy denialism of racist scum than by the jealous claims of victim groups who want some of that glow of victimhood that they think the Jews have been keeping to themselves. How else to explain the MCB’s tantrum over society’s ‘narrow focus’ on Jewish pain? So the Holocaust is not denied, at least not by respectable people, but it is shared, which is to say diluted. Every time a modern event is inserted into the moral universe of the Holocaust, the Holocaust itself is diminished, dismantled, rendered ordinary rather than extraordinary. We go from Holocaust denial to everyone having their own preferred Holocaust.
The motor of today’s dismantling of the specificity of the Holocaust – which is to say, the truth of the Holocaust – is not fascism or racism. It’s victim politics. Ours is an era that validates victimhood above all else. Which grants moral authority to those who ‘suffer’. Where you can accrue both social standing and state resources through advertising your wounds, through bigging up your experiences of hate speech, oppression, etc. And so it just won’t do for the Jews to have a singular claim to the greatest, vilest act of victimisation in human history. No, they’ll have to share it. They’ll have to let us all on to that hallowed territory of a thing called ‘Holocaust’.
Welcome to the era of Holocaust envy. The fashionable thing to do in the 2020s is not to deny the Shoah but to covet it – covet its pain, covet its historical enormity. From the trans lobby to Muslim activist groups, they all want some Holocaust.
This Holocaust Memorial Day, it’s clear that vast numbers of people have no understanding of what the Holocaust was. Gaza is another Holocaust, they say, unforgivably unaware that more people were killed in a week in Hitler’s camps than have died in four months of this war that was started by the fascists of Hamas. The alleged death toll in the Israel-Hamas War is 25,000. That many Jews were gassed in Auschwitz every single week for four years. It wasn’t war – it was the industrialized slaughter of a people on the basis of their race. Nothing like it had happened before, and nothing like it has happened since.
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