German Guilt Diffusion Blaming European AntiSemitism Russell

Teaching the Holocaust in School History: Teachers or Preachers?, by Lucy Russell. 2006

German Guilt Diffusion at the Holocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London

This book mostly says things that have been said many times before. For example:

SLIPPERY SLOPE: EITHER THE HOLOCAUST REFERS ONLY TO JEWS, OR ALL VICTIMS OF WWII MUST BE INCLUDED IN THE TERM HOLOCAUST

The author complains that, once you start including non-Jews in the term Holocaust, then anyone left in or out of the definition will be the object of an arbitrary decision. Exactly! But ANY victimhood hierarchy (including the one that places Jews at the top) is inevitably an arbitrary and divisive construct.

Russell notes that civilians killed by Nazi bombing would not be placed in the term Holocaust because they had not been subject to a racial attack. (p. 46). But this only shows the wisdom of the original approach used at the Nuremberg Trials, and one to which we should return. There was no division of the dead. Germany was criminal because of her racial aggression, and Germany was also criminal because of her military aggression (crimes against peace). Hence the Jew and the Pole in the German gas chamber, and the British civilian killed in the Blitz, are all victims of Nazi German criminality and aggression.

GERMAN GUILT DIFFUSION: THE ORWELLIAN BLAMING OF “EUROPEAN ANTISEMITISM”

Lucy Russell comments, “Our exhibition starts in 1918 at the end of the First World War, then later on in the exhibition you go back even further as well, and see this as a European-wide phenomenon…” (p. 47).

Instead of putting the blame for the Holocaust where it belongs—on the Germans and the centuries of German supremacism and barbarism—the blame is shifted to “centuries of antisemitism”. The reader should remember that antisemitism was commonplace, and that it waxed and waned over the ages, before the emergence of Nazi Germany, without ever once leading to the extermination of Jews!

In addition, this blame-shifting tactic creatively transforms the Holocaust from what it is—a perpetual Austrian-German liability—into a perpetual all-European liability.

JEWS CAN VE VICTIMIZERS AS WELL AS VICTIMS. HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM CHALLENGED AND SLIGHTLY SOFTENED

Author Russel writes, “In January 2005, it was reported that the Muslim Council of Britain [MCB] would boycott the 60th anniversary commemoration of the Holocaust in London because, according to the Council’s Secretary General Iqbal Sacranie, the event does not acknowledge ‘genocide’ in the occupied territories of Palestine.” (p. 50).

In addition, Iqbal Sacranie advocated the term Holocaust be returned to the range of meanings it had until the 1940’s. (p. 50). Evidently, to him at least, the customary practice of mentioning non-Jewish genocides, as some kind of ornaments around, or afterthoughts to, the Jews’ Holocaust, does not do away with the injustice of Holocaust supremacism.

[More recently, U. K. Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn (who hit the nail on the head when he said, “All lives are valuable”) took a lot of flak from Jewish groups for merely suggesting that Holocaust Memorial Day be renamed Genocide Memorial Day. Evidently, there is now a compromise that, while collectively mentioning the genocides of non-Jews, retains a slightly softer form of Holocaust Supremacism. The term to use is now: Holocaust and Genocide Memorial Day.]

DOUBLE GENOCIDE (RED=BROWN)

This book quotes Deborah Lipstadt and her belittling of the Communist murders of Soviet citizens, “’In contrast [to the Jews in Nazi German ruled Europe] no citizen of the Soviet Union assumed that deportation and death were inevitable consequences of his or her ethnic origins.’” (p. 54). [Lipstadt forgets that not all Jews assumed this either, and that not a few Jews were either spared by, or ended up surviving, the Nazis.]

Let Lipstadt tell what she did to the millions of Ukrainians (and others) who perished in the Holodomor. In rebuttal to Lipstadt, author Russell quotes Kinloch, who points out that the forced collectivization of the inhabitants of Kazakhstan could well have induced its inhabitant “‘as a deliberate and murderous assault upon their ethnicity.” (pp. 53-54).

Both sides of this contrived debate forget about classicide: Being targeted for death for belonging to a particular race [in Nazi Germany] is no different from being targeted for death (“enemies of the people”) for belonging to a certain social class [under Soviet Communism].