How myths are erasing the history of the Holocaust
According to Francis Fukuyama in his seminal 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, humanity at that time reached "the end of history as such," "the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
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As controversial as it was when it came out, along with more recent works like Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, it showed how our worldview is changing via a multi-stage process of political devolution.
But it's the threat of the changing history of the Holocaust that is of concern. So with the upsurge of Jew-hatred in the U.S., U.K., and France, in other parts of the world due to a process of degradation, relativization, infantilization, and substitution of the unspeakable suffering of the Jewish people during World War 2, the end of Holocaust history is happening before our eyes.
In the U.S., Joel Kotkin for Spiked wrote: "American Jews face levels of anti-Semitism not seen since the 1930s, with half saying they have observed anti-Semitic incidents over the past year." In a recent article, former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss wrote: "Progressives will insist that we have progressed, as it were, beyond antisemitism. We don't live in that world anymore. Don't be paranoid! The violence in the streets doesn't represent the movement! Note that the same people who insist that America hasn't made one iota of progress on race — that we have so much work to do — also insist that we have resolved the Jewish problem that goes back to Jesus. Sure."
Furthermore, noted Weiss, "[n]ow we are confronted with the spectacle of members of Congress droning on the House floor about how the Israeli army is somehow guilty of systemic racism and superimposing complicated ideas concocted by a French philosopher they've never read onto a conflict they barely comprehend."
This degradation of the Jewish experience belies modern anti-Semitism's inane origins. Like comedians over-using the slur "Nazi" when describing rude New Yorkers or unpopular U.S. presidents and the normalization of Nazi-like symbolism across popular culture, the infantilization of World War Two Jewish suffering is widespread and commonplace.
As Weiss and others have pointed out, added to that is the widespread demonization of Israel's right to defend itself — a type of bullying that enacts Holocaust denial by denying Jews a country of their own, all the while vilifying Israel ad nauseam.
"By transforming the Jewish State into a force for evil, they have forced the Jew to defend that attachment. They have created a space separating the Jew from America, and, in that space, they have legitimized violence against the Jew for defending the indefensible: 'apartheid,' 'colonialism,' 'white supremacy,' 'ethnic cleansing,' 'genocide,'" wrote Weiss.
Image: Boston Review
Not surprisingly, Europe is also in the grip of this disease, as Kotkin recently wrote: "According to a 2015 Anti-Defamation League survey, just over half of Germans now believe that Jews overplay the Holocaust, while a third blame Jews themselves for rising anti-Semitism."
"Another study shows, says Kotkin, "that 60 percent of German anti-Semitic messages come from well-educated people. And recent research concludes that today barely half of Europeans think Israel has a right to exist," while the explicit anti-Semitism of the U.K.'s Labor Party was also a shock.
However one of the most rabid and intractable Holocaust relativization battles is occurring in the Balkans, where the very soul of Holocaust history is being "stolen" by one ethnic group in order to overcome another and where one of their main weapon of choice is a WW2 concentration camp called Jasenovac.
While there is no doubt that it was a place of brutality, Jasenovac is also used as a wellspring of fake news to underline Serbian "martyrdom," with the camp's death toll exaggerated by Serbian historians in order to "prove" that their suffering was equal to or greater than that of the Jews, so that in the Balkans, at least, Jews are being Photoshopped out of the Holocaust and replaced with Serbs.
The site, which Yugoslavia in 1979 rebranded as "The Auschwitz of the Balkans," mainly to make money from West Germany, also has the dubious honor of being the only former concentration camp that is unable to provide any forensic evidence nor any documentational, or demographic or for that matter, photographic evidence for its claims, while at the same time publishing stolen pictures of Nazi horrors from Treblinka, Ukraine, Latvia, and Poland in lieu of providing any evidence of its own.
Moreover, recent independent research has shown its victim database as being 89% unverifiable, duplicated or in some parts, fake, while the original death toll has increased 40-fold since 1945 — and is incredibly still growing now in the 2020s!
This substitution of the Jewish Holocaust for the mythical "suffering' of Serbs," or what Variety Magazine termed as the "hijacking of the Shoah," represents an existential threat to accepted history, exemplified by Serb nationalist Vuk Draskovic, who has erroneously claimed: "It is by the hands of the same executioners that both Serbs and Jews have been exterminated at the same concentration camps, slaughtered at the same bridges, burned alive in the same ovens, thrown together into the same pits."
Jewish inmates in the Sajmiste internment camp in Serbia, 1942.
As this actual Jewishness of the Shoah is further diluted by a hyper-nationalistic Serb state that works actively to hide its own role in the Holocaust, the warnings from Holocaust experts like Professor Lea David from the Weiss-Livnat International MA Program in Holocaust Studies at the University of Haifa grow louder. "The Serbian political elite has hijacked Holocaust imagery and symbolism to present Serbians as righteous victims and justify a new nationalist ideology," she says.
All this is made worse by the silence and ongoing acquiescence of bodies such as Yad Vashem, who says Prof David, “ …who did not realise what Holocaust memorialization would be made to serve in Serbia.”
But these are just some of the threats to Holocaust history, mostly underwritten not by tiki torch–carrying white supremacists, nationalist populists, or radical jihadists, but rather by those tasked to honor and protect the lessons of the Holocaust — not just for the Jewish people, but for the entire world.
Note: This is an updated version of an earlier article published by American Thinker.
