Holocaust Indoctrination Via Selective Memorialization Maier

The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity, with a New Preface, by Charles S. Maier. 1998

Inadvertently Shows the Unfairness of Overattention to the Holocaust and Not Enough to Other Peoples’ Genocides

Much of this book is an attack on German historian Ernst Nolte, especially for daring to compare Communist genocides with the Nazi German-made Shoah. It includes the mystification of the Holocaust, and it repeats the myth that all Jews were targeted for extermination. [They were not. But even if they were, it would not make the Holocaust one iota more significant than, for example, than the Polokaust (Polonocaust).]

Author Maier cites Richard Lukas and his seminal work, THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST. In doing so, he shows the reduction ad absurdum of the Jews-are-special mentality. He writes, “If Polish Americans claim their own ‘forgotten Holocaust’, what recognition should they enjoy? Do Armenians and Cambodians also have a right to publicly funded holocaust museums? And do we need memorials to Seventh-Day Adventists and homosexuals for their persecution at the hands of the Third Reich?” (p. 165).

Good questions.