In fractious times, remembering the Holocaust is as vital as ever
In these fractured and fractious times, the one thing that people of different political stripes and ideologies seem able to agree on is that we are living in fractured and fractious times.
Juliet Moses
We face a vortex of interwoven challenges and changes – a pandemic with long-term ramifications, growing inequality, climate change, globalisation, the use of technology, rising populism, collapsing democracies and institutions, wars and high inflation.
Split Enz told us that history never repeats, and that is true, but it does rhyme (as we have also been told in a phrase that has, it seems, incorrectly been attributed to Mark Twain but definitely wasn’t Split Enz). This means that we see the same patterns and themes of the past emerging but not manifesting themselves in exactly the same way.
Every year on January 27, UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day services are held around New Zealand and the world.
Of course, for Jewish people, the Holocaust still looms large. It is when one third of our global population – 6 million of us – were murdered. At about 15 million worldwide, we are still not back to our pre-Holocaust numbers.
But non-Jewish people who have no direct connection to the Holocaust might well ask why these civic services are held, and in fact increasing in size and attention, every year. And why should some young Kiwis learn about it at school?
Why should it matter to us today, more than 75 years after the end of World War II in a country about as far away from its epicentre as you can get? Do we really need to keep hearing about it, when there are so many terrible things that have happened since then, and are happening right now, and when we are only just learning our own history as a nation?
Those are fair and important questions worth pondering.
The vast array of documentaries, scholarly writing, non-fictional and fictional movies and books about the Holocaust, still produced to this day, suggest that learning about and memorialising the Holocaust does matter.
One of the most famous pictures of Jews being rounded up by Nazi Germans during the Holocaust, this from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in May 1943. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Apart from our two world wars, there is arguably no event in recent history that has so captured the imagination, discourse and attention of the West.
There may be many reasons for this, but one is surely the uniqueness of the cross-border industrialised genocide of 6 million people sponsored by an apparently highly civilised state.
For better or worse, the Holocaust has become what author Thomas Pegelow Kaplan calls a “metahistorical moral standard”. But perhaps paradoxically, as the ubiquity of the Holocaust has grown, so too has ignorance about it.
In a New Zealand Jewish Council survey released last year, 17% of New Zealanders said they knew virtually nothing about the Holocaust. Only 42% could correctly identify that six million Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust. This reflects similar overseas trends.
Historical illiteracy is, in itself, never good, but is also like a gateway drug to further ills.
Take the glorification and naked antisemitism we saw from Kanye West during his public meltdown late last year, when he said, “every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler. There’s a lot of things that I love about Hitler”, apparently unaware that, given the colour of West’s skin, Hitler would not have reciprocated his admiration.
It can take the form of trivialisation, when someone tries to win an argument by drawing an analogy to Hitler and his regime, a phenomenon so prevalent that it has earned its own name, Godwin’s Law, and one that was taken to new heights during the pandemic.
And we see it in Holocaust denial, which involves negating facts about the best-documented genocide ever – an embrace of contradiction and preposterous belief in a vast conspiracy of deceptive victims, bystanders, perpetrators and historians across time and place.
Recently, in different contexts, I’ve been referring to historian Timothy Snyder’s pocketbook, On Tyranny –Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
Nazi ideology, experiencing a resurgence around the world, is but one form of the tyranny and illiberalism that we find rhyming right now.
Snyder’s 10th lesson is entitled “Believe in Truth”.
He says: “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.
“This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual – and thus the collapse of any political system that depends on individualism.”
Later he notes that it is “our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society”.
That renunciation of reality is perhaps, for the times we live in, the overarching reason why learning about the Holocaust is so pertinent – not just because we must counter specific Holocaust denial, but because, in the denial of the truth, of any objectively verifiable facts, are the seeds of our demise as a society.
Juliet Moses is a spokesperson for the New Zealand Jewish Council
