Cultural Marxism Immigrants Marrus

Lessons of the Holocaust, by Michael R. Marrus. 2015

Cultural Marxism. Not Accepting Immigrants: Double Standard—Poland and Israel. The Holocaust-Related Belittling of Non-Jewish Heroism

Most of this book is the standard, oft-repeated fare. My review focuses on what is especially interesting—what I call the “emanations and penumbras” of the Holocaust. Here, the Shoah overlaps cultural Marxism, and I discuss this overlap.

POLAND BERATED FOR “ANTI-IMMIGRANT” STANCE; ISRAEL GETS A PASS IN THE PRESS. THE INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF THE HOLOCAUST CUTS BOTH WAYS!

In recent months, Poland (and PiS [PRAWO I SPRAWIEDLIWOSC] in particular) has gotten a lot of flak, from the Eurocrats without and the LEWACTWO (leftists) within, and especially by the mass media. All this brouhaha was cooked up because Poland resisted the pressures of the European Union, and moreover did so under the threat of sanctions, by refusing to blank-check accept hundreds of thousands of Third World immigrants. The Holocaust was instrumentalized against Poland, and used as a “club”. Thus, Poland’s “intolerance” of Muslims has now become a modernized form of her earlier “intolerance” against Jews. [The notion that Poland refuses immigrants is categorically false. Poland has accepted as much as a million Ukrainian immigrants. But these “don’t count” to the Eurocrats and the globalists, as it does not fit their agenda.]

THE STATE OF ISRAEL WANTS TO REMAIN A DISTINCTIVELY JEWISH STATE. SO WHY CANNOT POLAND REMAIN A DISTINCTIVELY POLISH CATHOLIC STATE?

Interestingly, the same issues surrounding immigration exist in the State of Israel, but with a very different handling by the leftmedia. Let Marrus describe the situation, “The Holocaust has similarly appeared in the passionate debate, in Israel today, about asylum seekers—thousands of people from African countries who have been trying, in recent years, to find refuge in the country. Opinion within the government has run strongly against these claimants. At the time of writing, the country’s Minister of Interior has estimated that over fifty thousand have entered Israel illegally, mainly from Eritrea and Somalia, often on foot, and insisting that they are fleeing life-threatening persecution and murderous attacks at home. Exclusionists protest that a fundamental lesson of the Holocaust is that Israel must preserve its Jewish character, and that a huge influx of foreigners poses an ‘existential threat’ to the country, particularly because of the refugees’ concentration in particular neighborhoods in large urban areas. They insist that the asylum seekers are in fact economic refugees, gravitating to Israel as the closest developed society to which they have access. To deal with this situation, Israel began implementing a Prevention of Infiltration Law in 2012, cracking down on masses of illegal immigrants. Demonstrations followed, and opponents of the asylum seekers pushed back, sometimes with ugly accusations. As the issue has heated, refugee advocates have made the case for openness—invoking the Holocaust, at times, against their opponents, who have also done so, but with precisely the opposite objective in mind.” (p. 135).

Note the two-way instrumentalization of the Holocaust, and the palpable double standard involving Israel and Poland. Evidently, it is a legitimate, even if contested, opinion for Jews to desire the preservation of the Jewish character of the Jewish State. But when Poles desire the preservation of the Polish-Catholic character of Poland, then they are just a bunch of regressive ethno-nationalists. It is all politics, and it all depends upon whose ox is gored.

But wait, it gets even better–and this is not mentioned by Marrus. Neo-Stalinist Jan T. Gross, famous for his uncritically-accepted media narrative of Polish responsibility for Jedwabne, has now been going around saying that Poland is so awfully “intolerant, illiberal, and xenophobic” for rejecting masses of Third World immigrants. Instead of such anti-Polish grandstanding, why doesn’t Jan T. Gross go to Israel and moralize to his fellow Jews about their awful “intolerance, illiberalism, and xenophobia” for failing to welcome masses of Third World immigrants???

JEWISH CYNICISM: THE HABITUAL “DECONSTRUCTING NATIONAL MYTHS”—OF OTHERS

By way of introduction, the student of Polish-Jewish relations is all too familiar with the very pronounced tendency of recently-written books to write in a condescending manner about Poland’s “heroic narrative” and of Poland as “the Jesus Christ of Nations”, moreover one that prevents Poles from being willing to bow down before various Jewish accusations against Poland.

Enter author Michael R. Marrus. Evidently not wanting to feel left out, he does the same. (pp. 34-35). He describes how he personally heard the HEJNAL in Krakow, and compared it to what he called “nationalist rallying cries”, such as the Irish Protestant’s appeals to ‘remember’ the Battle of the Boyne and the Texans’ calls to ‘remember the Alamo.’ He then approvingly cites historian Max Hastings, who penned these patronizing words, “‘They [Most people, even in the most liberal democracies] prefer a nursery view of their past to an adult one, and a host of authors and television producers is happy to indulge them.’” (p. 35).

The informed reader probably remembers that the Nazis caricatured the Jews as selfish opportunists that are prone to ridicule the ideals of other peoples. So, whenever the Jews run-down what they disparagingly call “national myths”, they are acting in accordance with their worst caricatures. Why do they keep doing this?

HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM: SOME MANIFESTATIONS

If the Holocaust has not quite monopolized the public memory of the many human genocides, it is not for lack of trying. A search of Google for “lessons of the Holocaust” produces more than nine MILLION hits. (p. 7).

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) opened in April 1993. In 20 years of operation, it has welcomed 38 million visitors. Of these, 34% were children. In addition, 12 percent of all visitors came from abroad, and only 10% were Jews. (pp. 77-78).

In recent decades, there has been a tendency of mollifying the marginalization of the genocides of non-Jews by promoting the Orwellian palliative message that the Holocaust is “universal”—that is, some kind of (self-appointed) “stand-in” or “representative” for all human genocides. Ironic to this, the director of the USHMM warned against making the Holocaust something that it is not (that is, out of Judeocentric concerns). Marrus quips, “‘The Holocaust was not an interfaith experience,’ warns Walter Reich, a former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Reich laments the growing effort to universalize the Holocaust, ‘to make it into a lesson about “man’s inhumanity to man”’. (p. 108).

Since 1988, there has been the annual so-called March of the Living, of Israeli teens, in Poland. The funding for these marches came from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany. (p. 100). Since its inception, some 150,000 young Israelis have gone on these trips. (p. 100). The reader can see, once again, that the Holocaust Industry is less about doing belated justice to “those poor, long-denied” Holocaust survivors, as often claimed as an appeal to sympathy, and more about being a self-perpetuating endeavor.

THE DE-GERMANIZATION OF THE NAZIS: COURTESY OF DAVID BEN GURION

German guilt diffusion is alive and well. Michael R. Marrus describes the Eichmann trial with these choice words, “But Ben Gurion DID interfere with the trial. In what was a highly irregular procedure to say the least, the Israeli prosecutor Gideon Hausner submitted his opening speech to the prime minister beforehand. Ben Gurion demanded several changes related to the country’s relationship with West Germany, all of which were intended to distinguish between ordinary Germans and the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The Israeli prime minister wanted the word ‘Nazi’ added to the word ‘Germany’ to assert the distance of Nazism from the German people; he wanted Hausner to omit a claim that Nazism was inevitable in Germany; and he wanted to emphasize the role of Hitler in German criminality rather than that of ordinary citizens.” (p. 118; Emphasis in original).