Holocaust Supremacism Modern Disguise Example Rothberg

Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, by Michael Rothberg. 2009

“Multidirectional Memory”: An Attempt to Deflect Argument, About the Pre-Eminence of the Holocaust Over All Other Genocides, By “Universalizing” It

This book appears to be an attempt to mend fences, between the Jewish and African-Americans, in the wake of the criticisms, by some African-American leaders, of the preeminence of the Jews’ Holocaust over African-American slavery in the USA.

Consider what often has been called victim competition and even victimhood Olympics. Author Michael Rothberg suggests that this need not be so. He writes, “Against the framework that understands collective memory as COMPETITIVE memory—as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources—I suggest that we consider memory as MULTIDIRECTIONAL: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing: as productive and not private.” (p. 3; Emphasis in original). But the two are hardly mutually exclusive!

IMPLICATIONS OF THE MULTIDIRECTIONALITY OF THE HOLOCAUST

The phrase “Multidirectionality of the Holocaust”, to some readers, has Orwellian connotations. It effectively transforms the Holocaust into a privileged, unelected “gateway” genocide or “yardstick” genocide through which all other genocides must pass, or to which they must all be compared with, if they are to be heard and understood. This is built-in into the very language we commonly use. For instance, whenever we speak of the Armenian Holocaust, the Black Holocaust, the Gypsy Holocaust, the gay Holocaust, or the Polonocaust (Polokaust), we are tacitly paying tribute to the Jews’ Holocaust as the most important genocide, and we are tacitly affirming that non-Jewish genocides are be understood by the public with reference to the Jews’ Holocaust.

Without saying it in so many words, Rothberg tacitly recognizes as much, as he quips, “Along with its ‘centering’ in public consciousness in the last decades, the Holocaust has come to be understood in public imagination, especially in Europe, Israel, and North America, as a unique, sui generis event.” (p. 8). In view of this fact, how could the public not be under the strong impression that the Jews’ Holocaust is above the genocides of all other peoples—moreover regardless of its very-real multidirectionality? In the end, it sounds like the multidirectionality of the Holocaust is a disguise for Holocaust supremacism.

ISSUES INVOLVING NAZISM AND COMMUNISM

This book raises certain issues that deserve a deeper examination than presented in this book. Author Michael Rothberg (p. 228) mentions some individuals who found parallels between Nazi German conduct against the French and that of France towards its colony Algeria. However, the reader should realize that this is an old Nazi German exculpatory tactic. Klaus Barbie, the onetime Gestapo chief of Lyon, said that his torturing of French captives, in Gestapo dungeons, was no different from the French tortures of Algerian nationalist captives. At the earlier Nuremberg trials, the Nazi defendants said that their conduct should be excused because, after all, it was on the same level as the British concentration camps in the Boer War, and really no different from the American treatment of the Indians.

This book, along with many others nowadays, indexes Communism with a lower-case “c”. (p. 368). Why? Is it done in order to lesson the crimes of Communism relative to those of Nazism?