Key Concepts in Nazi Antisemitism: 5. Paranoid Nihilism

In this final blog of the series, I address the nihilistic nature of Nazism: the fact that it was a state whose central aim was to destroy other systems, cultures and physical beings. Such nihilism was not unique to the Nazis - it can also be found in Communism, Italian fascism, and some episodes in the history of European and American imperialism - but it was applied more systematically by the Nazis, and was framed in racial terms that made it more genocidal in its effects, deliberately targeting millions of women and children as well as adult males, for no other purpose than to destroy their group. Moreover, I argue below that Nazi nihilism was more paranoid than the other destructive systems, and this explains why it was more willing to undertake a high risk, pre-emptive total 'war of annihilation' rather than the limited wars that are associated with the other regimes.

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The origins of nihilism have been studied by such seminal figures as Franz Borkenau, George Orwell, Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. Borkenau observed that Bolshevik and Nazi oligarchies were akin to a "religious order of professional revolutionaries" (cited in Erika Gottlieb, "The Orwell Conundrum", 1992, p.108) Their Messianic faith in the perfection of their political philosophy removed all moral constraints from using state power to kill those who did not share it. Orwell argued that totalitarianism stemmed from the failure of modern societies to replace religious morality with a socialist-humanist one. Instead, Orwell argued, these societies (in which he included Britain and the US) were obsessed with "orthodoxies" which made them indifferent to mass murder. Obedience to systems became an excuse to cast aside one's conscience and humanity in pursuit of conformity to a political utopia.

Orwell's view was similar to Hannah Arendt's argument, in the "Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), that recourse to the "laws of nature" (Nazism) or "laws of history" (Marxism) gave a charismatic leader unlimited arbitrary destructive power, because he could claim that any act of violence was historically necessary. Liberal or religious qualms about mass killing could thus be dismissed as irrational or sentimental. Eric Voegelin echoed this view in his concept of 'radical alienation', or 'deculturation', defined as "a sort of apocalyptic construction by which all past history is thrown out as more or less irrelevant..." Voegelin went a step further, however, by arguing that totalitarianism is a form of gnosticism that seeks to "immanentize the eschaton"; i.e. to create utopia, redemption and salvation in this life rather than the afterlife. This utopianism, especially when placed in a Manichean political context in which two potential utopias are fighting against each other, creates the potential for unlimited slaughter and genocide because any group that is viewed as a barrier to utopia (Jews, 'the bourgeoisie', 'infidels', Communists) is now, not only 'polluting the body politic', but preventing that body from fulfilling its destiny.

These political theorists can therefore point to common causative features of genocidal potentials in Hitlerism, Maoism and Stalinism; but what about the features that made Nazism more systematic and universal in its genocidal killing than the others?

I would argue that two points stand out. Firstly, under Communism, ultra-conservative western imperialism, ultra-Zionism or radical Islam, the blockage to utopia is a rival ideology or system. It is not placed in a biological system in which the body of every political opponent must be exterminated, including the possibility of future generations. Thus it was only the Nazis whose ideology led them to insist that:

The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)

Secondly, Nazism took more risks with its own survival in order to carry out an all-or-nothing war of extermination. This was racist paranoia gone berserk. There was no need to take on Stalin (who had purged his officer corps) in 1941. Stalin and Mao did not take reckless risks in order to export their revolutions. They believed that the global historical laws of Marxist-Leninism would work themselves out over generations. Hitler, by contrast, believed that he had to be pre-emptive and risk the entire German state and economy in an all-out gamble for supremacy.

This, in turn, can be explained by the Nazi obsession with biology and Pollution. The Nazis could not live with a Cold War in which Superpowers faced off for decades. Their eschatology was more urgent and required a more immediate return. Nazism could not defer political and religious gratification. Hitler's greater intensity of genocidal impulse, generated by a more intense eschatology and racism than was felt by Stalin and Mao, created a short-termism and addiction to reckless gambling that they never shared. This is why they lived a natural lifespan and he did not.

Key Concepts in Nazi Antisemitism: 4. Chimeria

The term 'chimeria' comes from Langmuir and is useful for identifying beliefs that are purely delusional, rather than stereotypes or xenophobias that are developed by taking a 'kernel of truth' then exaggerating and distorting it. 'Chimeric' beliefs portray Jews as physical embodiments of Satan, and as a conspiratorial force of darkness that plots world domination. This, in turn, gives the antisemite a Messianic mission of redemption. Thus, as Saul Friedlander argues, Nazi antisemitism has to be understood as 'redemptive': a pseudo-religion.

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So far so good, but what are the limits of the concept? I would identify two major ones. Firstly, 'chimeria' only really tells us about the Nazi "true believers", such as Hitler and Streicher. There is no conclusive evidence that the bulk of the Nazi Party's membership believed in Streicher's wild imaginings. Secondly, antisemitic beliefs that build on stereotypes, or which are used to disguise instrumental motives, can be just as genocidal in their effects. Infact, beliefs which can point to a "kernel of truth" (no matter how exaggerated or distorted) are more likely to convince waverers, so may be more useful in a radicalization of policy setting such as Germany in 1939-42. It would be unwise to assume that only "true believers" can participate in genocide. Indeed, such an assumption would take us dangerously close to Goldhagen territory.

For this reason, I would prefer the concept that I discussed in Part 3 of this series, namely Pollution. The advantage of Pollution over Chimeria is that Pollution can have stereotypical or chimeric contents. Pollution helps us to explain how a 'reality-based' concept such as fear of disease or anger at defeat in warfare (the mood of 1918) can be exploited to generate entirely chimeric beliefs. For example, the belief that Bolshevism has some Jewish members is 'reality-based' because some revolutionaries were secularized Jews, but the belief that it was a Jewish conspiracy against gentiles is chimeric because these Jews were not acting from religious or cultural motivations but from political ideas that they shared with their gentile partners.

I would therefore argue that, by separating Chimeria from any "kernel of truth", Langmuir misses the methodology of Nazism, which is to create chimeric beliefs from perverse readings of empirical observations. Delusions are created by converting reality into fantasy, not by generating fantasy entirely independently of real circumstances.

Key Concepts in Nazi Antisemitism: 3. Pollution

On 13 March 1942, a Nazi court delivered a death sentence against Lehman Israel Katzenberger, whose age at that time was over 68 years, for the crime of 'racial pollution' under Article 2 of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor. Katzenberger was beheaded by guillotine at Stadelheim Prison in Munich on 2 June 1942. The presiding judge, Oswald Rothaug, declared that “It is sufficient for me that the swine said that a German girl had sat upon his lap.” He also stated that:

Together with his offense of racial pollution he is also guilty of an offence under paragraph 4 of the ordinance against people’s parasites. It should be noted here that the national community is in need of increased legal protection from all crimes attempting to destroy or undermine its inner cohesion.

Rothaug thus admitted that a key political strategy of the Nazi state was to maintain the 'cohesion' of its mythical racial identity by accusing Jews of polluting the body politic. Why did the Nazis pick this particular strategy and what were its historical antecedents?

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Pollution is a syncretic political strategy which exploits a myth that appears historically in three different but overlapping contexts: religious, medical and nationalist. The strategy enabled the Nazis to overcome resistance to their political authority among religious believers, doctors, academics and the armed forces by tapping into their mentalities and igniting themes that were part of their institutional histories but were often marginalized during the century of relative liberalization that preceded the Nazi rise to power. Uncovering the genealogy of the myth therefore gives an insight into how the Nazis melded old and new prejudices into a dogma of genocidal force.

The link between pollution and social cohesion strategies has been noted by anthropologists. The most famous of these, Mary Douglas (1966), argued that pollution myths concerning the body were projected on to the entire group in order to symbolize dangers to its unity. Dirt signified "matter out of place" (p.36) and came to represent pollution of the entire social order (p.5):

Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death

Pollution thus came also to represent social death in certain caste systems. For example, Lifton (1986: 482) notes that the Japanese outcaste group, the Burakumin, used to:

bear the name "Eta", whose literal meaning is "full of filth", "full of pollution" or "abundant defilement".

However, anthropologists like Douglas were referring primarily to the social cohesion of minority sects, such as the Israelites in the Biblical era. Pollution myth only became genocidal when it was used by a majority against a stigmatised minority. In Europe, that process dates from the eleventh century, when the Church and state united to form a 'Persecuting Society' (R.I. Moore, 2001). From around the time of the First Crusade in 1096, Jews began to be accused of crimes such as 'ritual murder' and 'usury'. An example of the pollution discourse used to frame these accusations is provided by Robert Chazan (1997: 122):

William of Chartres, in concluding his report on the discussion between Louis IX and his advisers with respect to Jewish usury, has the king speaking of Jews as infecting his land with their poison. The discussion ends with the king telling his advisers: “Let those prelates do what pertains to them concerning those subject Christians, and I must do what pertains to me concerning the Jews. Let them abandon usury, or they shall leave my land completely, in order that it no longer be polluted with their filth”

However, at this point, the alleged pollution was spiritual, not biological. The Jew was usually allowed (or forced) to convert to Christianity. This began to change in the aftermath of the Spanish Inquisition, when converted Jews were accused of being false converts or 'Marranos' (pigs). Pollution began to find expression in peculiar beliefs about the Jew's Body (Gilman, 1991). For example, Beusterien cites this claim by a royal physician:

In 1632 Doctor Juan de Quiñones, an official in the court of King Philip IV, devoted an entire treatise to Jewish maladies, focusing on the allegation that Jewish males menstruated. He wrote: "every month they suffer from a blood flow as if they were women."

Even before the emergence of racial science, therefore, there was already a potential for the syncretic merging of religious and medical delusions about Jews. It was not necessary to invent biological racism from scratch, as its seeds were already in the culture of post-Inquisition Europe. The fact that was unique to the post-1800 period was the inclusion of classes below the ruling elites in the definition of the 'body politic'. This was due to the fact that race and nation functioned as tools of vertical integration. This had the effect of multiplying the numbers of groups eligible to be included in the myth of the nation, until it became a concept that was amenable to socialist and liberal applications as well as reactionary ones. We therefore find that, by 1900, Jews could be blamed by a range of political groups for a variety of national ills across the European continent, expressed in terms of biological degradation.

For example, in France, Jews were blamed for the loss of the Franco-Prussian war (Brustein, 'Roots of Hate', p.121), and this fuelled the Dreyfus Case two decades later. French and German nationalism borrowed from the 'degeneracy' theories of Gobineau, whilst German Volkish discourse took on a virulently antisemitic tone in the work of Wilhelm Marr and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Marr had been a socialist in his youth. In Italy, Cesare Lombroso was an assimilated Jew and a socialist who nonetheless believed that the "white race" was threatened by the innate criminality of degenerate breeds. In Britain, the Eugenics Society included such liberal figures as the Webbs, Beveridge and Keynes. Beveridge, the future founder of the Welfare State, wrote in 1905 that:

It is essential…to maintain the distinction between those who, however irregularly employed, are yet members, though inferior members, of the industrial army and those who are mere parasites, incapable of performing any useful service whatever…[The unemployable] must be removed from industry and maintained adequately in public institutions, but with the complete and permanent loss of all citizenship rights - including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood [cited in Rose, 1999: 254-255]

The influence of these ideas on antisemitism became apparent in the passing of the 1905 Aliens Act, which was designed to keep out East European Jews (Gainer, 1972). Beatrice Webb, a leading Fabian, had referred to "the greed of the Jew" in her research into the textile industry in the East End; and the liberal economist J.A. Hobson had blamed financiers, "chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race" for the Boer War.

However, it should be noted that radical antisemitic parties fared poorly in national elections in Britain in 1906 and Germany in 1907, so there was no immediate risk prior to 1914 of such ideas leading to mass killing. It was Germany's defeat in 1918, followed by the displacement of educated elite groups by Germany's economic problems in the 1920's, that allowed the Nazis to intensify these ideas into forms of hatred that could appeal to mentalities that would be amenable to its policies.

The result of these alliances was support among carefully chosen elites for the kind of state murder discussed in the opening paragraph. Hitler declared that Jews were a "race of criminals" and was able to recruit enough doctors to carry out sterilizations, judges to pass death sentences, and SS men with PhD's to lead the Einsatzgruppen (Stahlecker, Rasch, Ohlendorf).

It was thus a simple exercise to escalate from individual judicial and medical murders to a mass genocide. The willingness of doctors and judges to knowingly conspire in individual murder leading to genocide is made clear in primary sources. On 11 May 1942, Dachau doctor Rascher wrote to Himmler that:

For the following experiments Jewish professional criminals who had committed race pollution were used.

Similarly, the correspondence from the Reich Minister of Justice Thierack to Reichsleiter Bormann dated 13 October 1942 revealed that:

With a view to freeing the German people of Poles, Russians, Jews, and gypsies and with a view to making the Eastern territories which have been incorporated into the Reich available for settlements for German nationals, I intend to turn over criminal proceedings against Poles, Russians, Jews, and gypsies to the Reichsfuehrer SS. In so doing I base myself on the principle that the administration of justice can only make a small contribution to the extermination of members of these peoples. The Justice Administration undoubtedly pronounces very severe sentences on such persons, but that is not enough to constitute any material contribution towards the realization of the above-mentioned aim.

Pollution had thus escalated from a 'crime' that warranted individual death penalties to a menace that required the extermination of all Jews.

Key Concepts in Nazi Antisemitism: 2. Biological Racism

George L. Mosse noted famously that Nazism was a scavenger ideology. This was especially true in its conceptions of nation and race. The Nazis borrowed a "Volkish" ideology that had been evolving since the work of Fichte a century previously (pioneered in his Reden an die deutsche Nation of 1807-1808), and synthesised it with eugenics and Aryanism. Contrary to Goldhagen, therefore, Nazi ideology was not uniquely German in most of its elements: it took lessons from the French (Gobineau), British (Galton), Americans (the first compulsory sterilizations, which Hitler deliberately copied) and, ironically, from Jews (Lombroso, the Italian theorist of innate criminality, was an assimilated Jew).

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In industrial societies, racism is a crucial instrument of power because it separates status from class. It is counter-revolutionary because a person's social status and identity is not totally determined by their exploited class position but can instead be elevated by membership of the privileged racial group. Race thus provides a 'vertical integration of social honour', in which a proletarian has access to social honour that, in a pure class system, would be reserved for an aristocrat or bourgeois. The Nazis perfected this instrument by highlighting the myth of the Volksgemeinschaft, an ideal community in which no Aryan was exploited, alienated or excluded. A German was no longer defined merely as an academic, a pen-pusher, a petit-bourgeois or a labourer.

This contributed towards the Holocaust specifically in the sense that it was especially crucial in the recruitment of volunteers for SS duty in anti-Jewish actions. An SS officer who killed Jews was, in his self-image, simply preserving the Volksgemeinschaft. In this respect, contrary to the Browning-Goldhagen debate, there was no such thing as an 'Ordinary German' in the Order Police and Einsatzgruppen, as those men had been taught to see themselves as privileged, not ordinary, and this privilege exempted them from the moral norms associated with mass murder.

However, the key question raised by this blog is the degree to which the depiction of Jews in Nazi antisemitism was a product of these Volkish and racist influences.

My first answer to this question is that racism and antisemitism have often evolved in largely separate domains, and could not therefore be combined without creating contradictions that Nazism could not resolve. The clearest explanation of this separation was provided by Oliver C. Cox in his classic study, Caste, Class and Race. Writing in 1948 in an American context, Cox (p.90) put forward this schema:

The dominant group is intolerant of those whom it can define as anti-social, whilst it holds racial prejudice against those whom it can define as subsocial…Persecution and capitalist exploitation are the respective behaviour aspects of these two social attitudes...[The] dominant group or ruling class does not like the Jew at all, but it likes the Negro in his place. To put it in still another way, the condition of its liking the Jew is that he cease being a Jew and voluntarily become like the generality of society, while its condition of liking the Negro is that he cease trying to become like the generality of society and remain contentedly a Negro

The Nazis therefore created a logical problem when they adopted a racial hierarchy, because the historical status of Jews was meant to be, not underneath society (subsocial) but as a hostile alien outside it (anti-social). The status of 'subsocial' required a myth that the victim group was stupid, lazy and submissive, and reflected the fact that the mythical status was designed to reinforce and justify slavery. Its victim group was the colonial subject, usually defined by skin colour. Jews, by contrast, were subjected to a baggage of myths that portrayed them as conspiratorial, wealth-hoarding, controlling, secretive and demonic. Jews were thus, in most racial systems, more of an 'outcaste' group (Orlando Patterson, 1982: 50) than a racial one, and the Nazis had to over-ride this contradiction in order to treat Jews as a race.

Paradoxically, therefore, I conclude that Nazi racial antisemitism relied extensively on 'extra-racist' elements. It had to scavenge outside the normal terrain of racist discourse in order to generate a new racial category in which only Jews could fit. An example of this scavenging is presented in the next blog in this series.

Key Concepts in Nazi Antisemitism: 1. Social Death

This is the first of several blogs in which I evaluate the usefulness of theoretical concepts in understanding the nature of Nazi antisemitic beliefs. This initial study looks at the notion of "social death", which was first employed by Orlando Patterson in "Slavery and Social Death" (1982) and then adopted in Daniel Goldhagen's infamous "Hitler's Willing Executioners" (1996). I argue below that "social death" was a key factor in the ability of the Nazis to generate indifference to the fate of Jews, but that Goldhagen abuses Patterson's original usage and fails to understand its real applicability to the Holocaust.

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As Claudia Card notes, the infliction of social death on a group prior to its murder is a feature of genocides that distinguishes them from other mass murders:

Social death, central to the evil of genocide (whether the genocide is homicidal or primarily cultural), distinguishes genocide from other mass murders. Loss of social vitality is loss of identity and thereby of meaning for one's existence. Seeing social death at the center of genocide takes our focus off body counts and loss of individual talents, directing us instead to mourn losses of relationships that create community and give meaning to the development of talents.

However, it should be noted that social death can be inflicted without physical death. If this distinction is not made, social death loses all analytical power, because it simply becomes a synonym for genocidal acts that involve murder. It ignores the fact that, for example, medieval Jews and lepers sometimes existed in a state of social death without being subjected to killing; pogroms occurred in some times and places but not others. This is one of the errors that Goldhagen makes when he abuses the concept, because his model assumes that social death must be accompanied or followed by extreme violence in all cases. This leads Goldhagen to make the abusive claim (p.169) that:

In a fundamental sense, slaves did not suffer complete "social death"...Jews were really socially dead.

Goldhagen (ibid.) makes the totally unsupported assertion that:

slave societies depend upon slaves for production and even honour...and some, if not many, of them have had ongoing social relations and ties to their oppressors, including intimate and even loving sexual relations.

This was clearly not Patterson's meaning when he originated the term. Goldhagen's hypothetical slaves, if they ever existed, bore no relation to most of those described by Patterson, whose lives were a "living death" (p.8) and who were "Formally isolated in their social relations" (p.5). Goldhagen thus denies the reality of slave experience in order to privilege the social death of Jews. He ignores the fact that the Nazis did not just inflict social death on Jews but also did so on all groups who were defined as 'non-Aryans'. Social death was a racial schema for the Nazis, not a concept that they applied uniquely to the Jews. Instead, Jews were subjected to a social death that was combined with specifically antisemitic forms of dehumanization that must be analyzed in their own right, rather than simply being conflated with Patterson's concept.

Goldhagen thus fails to understand that the uniqueness of the Final Solution lies, not in the infliction of social death, but in the escalation in policy from social death to total extermination, a radicalization that social death enabled (by making the general public indifferent to the fate of non-social beings) but did not determine. Social death was a necessary, but not sufficient, precondition for the implementation of eliminationist antisemitism by the Nazis. To understand why this escalation occurred with Jews but not with Polish gentiles, it is therefore necessary to examine the additional ideological themes of Nazi Jew-hatred. This will be the task of the remaining blogs in this series.

Zichronem livracha

Today is Yom ha-Shoah (literally "Day of the Holocaust" in Hebrew), an observance of the Holocaust instituted by the State of Israel in 1959. It has become for many countries an official or unofficial observance of Holocaust remembrance. However, other countries observe Holocaust remembrance on other days. The U.K. commemorates the Holocaust on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Germany, over the sixty years since the Holocaust ended, has commemorated it either on January 27 or on November 9, the anniversary of Kristallnacht.

I have very mixed feelings about Yom ha-Shoah, though I think it’s obvious I find value in Holocaust remembrance, or I wouldn’t be involved with this blog, with the Holocaust History Project, or with RODOH, all of which I view as important ways of keeping memory alive. However, as I have written earlier, I am among the minority of Jewish Holocaust scholars who are not Zionists, and, as such, I shy away from Israeli-ordained commemorations. Two chief considerations cause me to reject Yom ha-Shoah as a date of commemoration of the millions of victims of the Nazis.

First, it is not a rejection of Israel’s legitimacy that moves me to instead observe Holocaust remembrance on 10 Tevet, a minor fast day and the day set aside on the Jewish calendar for those people whose yahrzeit (death anniversary) is not known. It is what I would consider the highly politicized use of the Holocaust by the Zionist movement from the discovery of the Holocaust to the present day. For instance, one might consider why, given the Holocaust’s obvious role in the immediate superpower recognition of the State of Israel, why it took until 1959 to set a day aside on the Jewish calendar to commemorate the day.

The answers are several, but principal among them were the political considerations of David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, who was dealing with a handful of scandals in the same period of time, among them the Lavon Affair becoming public knowledge and a highly controversial arms deal with West Germany (Ben-Gurion agreed to sell weapons to Konrad Adenauer, a move many Israelis saw as treasonous). To raise his political capital, Ben-Gurion signed into law the creation of Yom ha-Shoah. At the same time, he prepared to bring Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem to try him for crimes against the Jewish people.

In the end, Ben-Gurion ended up retiring before Israel’s next turning point in its relationship with the Holocaust, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Genuinely faced with destruction for the first time since its independence, Israel found itself face to face with a possible second Holocaust. The effect on the state has been profound. Not only did history repeat itself with the 1973 war, but the aftermath of that war catapulted into power the only leader of Israel who lost his family in the Holocaust –- Menachem Begin.

Begin made immense use of the Holocaust in his leadership over Israel, comparing Yasir Arafat to Hitler, comparing every enemy of Israel’s to Nazi Germany, and evoking the memory of 1.5 million murdered Jewish children in justifying his military actions against Lebanon and the Palestinians. The height of immorality is for the Jewish State to use the Holocaust as a bludgeon to beat down the Palestinian people, but far too often this has been the case in Israel over the last thirty years. The New Historians in Israel, most notably Tom Segev in his landmark study The Seventh Million, have made this a focus of their research.

The second consideration upon which my rejection of Yom ha-Shoah is based is the question of whether it is appropriate that Holocaust remembrance take place in every nation of the world. Certainly it is appropriate in Israel, and I do not begrudge the state its right to set aside a day for remembrance. But is it necessary, for instance, for the U.K. to have an official day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust? After all, the U.K. did not carry out the Holocaust. Neither did the United States, but there are more Holocaust museums in this country than there are in Israel. Granted, there are also more Jews here than in Israel, but the largest museum is in the nation’s capital where the Jewish community is rather small. New York’s museum in Battery Park seems appropriate (over 10 percent of New York’s population is Jewish), but an American landscape dotted with Holocaust museums seems a bit much to me.

What would be appropriate, then? Well, it seems that Germany, being the successor to the perpetrator state during the Holocaust has done a fine job of creating memorials where concentration camps once stood, as have the Poles, who live where most of the mass killing was carried out. Russia lost an immense number of people in World War II, both in the Holocaust and in other circumstances, and Holocaust remembrance there seems logical and right.

But what of the U.S., U.K., and other European nations who were more victimized than victimizers during the Third Reich? I would much rather see a museum in Washington, D.C., dedicated to remembrance of the tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of aboriginal peoples of this continent exterminated by successive French, Dutch, British, and American regimes. And it would seem also seem right that the U.K. and other nations with colonialist histories build museums and set aside days of remembrance for the victims of imperialism.

As David E. Stannard, author of American Holocaust, points out in his brutally frank essay, “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,” to commemorate the Holocaust and promote its uniqueness at the expense of remembering other equally brutal genocides both before and since degrades both Holocaust remembrance and the memory of peoples who have been made to disappear from the face of the earth in the name of white supremacy in the Western Hemisphere or fell victim to political democide in Europe and Asia in the twentieth century. I, for one, could not agree more.

Nevertheless, all that being said, as a Jew it is important to me to remember the Holocaust, not just on a day set aside by a government, but every day that genocides continue to be carried out all over the world. And so I say “Zichronem livracha” (“May their memories be a blessing”) and bow my head for a moment of silence in spite of myself.

Those "Nazi analogies"

There's simply no way comparison to the Nazis is inapplicable to recent outbursts of a certain savage:

They are very depressed by the weakness that America is showing to these psychotics in the Muslim world. They say, "Oh, there's a billion of them." I said, "So, kill 100 million of them, then there'll be 900 million of them." I mean, would you rather die -- would you rather us die than them? I mean, what is it going to take for you people to wake up? Would you rather we disappear or we die? Or would you rather they disappear and they die?

Or take Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler's hysterical rant:

The majority of paleswinians just decided that they want war until every last Joooo is dead. They had a choice. They made the wrong one.

Now wipe the kaffiyeh’ed genocidal subhumans out.

No excuses, no more diplomatic kabuki theater, no more waffling.

Wipe them out.

They want war.

Let them have it.

Now.

NEVER AGAIN!

What about children? Should they be murdered?

Why not? Think of it as post partum abortion…

After all, they just grow up to be mass murderers...

Now, this is a very familiar logic. Here's what police secretary Walter Mattner (from Vienna) was writing from Mogilev to his wife in October of 1941 (C. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, 2004, University of Nebraska Press, p. 298; emphasis mine):

When the first truckload [of victims] arrived my hand was slightly trembling when shooting, but one gets used to this. When the tenth load arrived I was already aiming more calmly and shot securely at the many women, children, and infants. Considering that I too have two infants at home, with whom these hordes would do the same, if not ten times worse. The death we gave to them was a nice, quick death compared with the hellish torture of thousands upon thousands in the dungeons of the GPU. Infants were flying in a wide circle through the air and we shot them down still in flight, before they fell into the pit and into the water. Let's get rid of this scum that tossed all of Europe into the war and is still agitating in America. ... I am actually already looking forward, and many say here that after our return home, then it will be the turn of our own Jews. Well, I'm not allowed to tell you enough.

A Short Manifesto by Andrew E. Mathis

This semester I've been teaching a Holocaust course at Villanova University, my alma mater where I've taught on and off since 2000. By no small coincidence, the last day of the class will be Yom ha-Shoah, Israel's day of remembrance for victims and heroes of the Holocaust.

On a seemingly unrelated note, there a minor fast day in Judaism, 10 Tevet, which originally commemorated the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC. The city walls were breached in early summer and the Temple was destroyed in late summer, on 9 Av. For today's non-Zionist Jews, such as myself, this is also the day where we commemorate the Holocaust, not just by fasting, but by saying the Mourner's Kaddish for the six million Jews who were killed, 10 Tevet having been designated as the yahrzeit (death anniverary) for any Jew whose date of death is unknown.

One of the books on my course syllabus is Is the Holocaust Unique?, a volume of essays on comparative genocide edited by Alan S. Rosenbaum. The foreword was written by Israeli psychologist Israel Charny, who is a strong proponent of the idea that the Holocaust was not a unique event in history, and Rosenbaum quotes Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer in stating that the Holocaust is not unique in so far as it happened (and thus was possible), and anything that happened can happen again (to anyone), and so rather than it being revered for its uniqueness, the Holocaust is perhaps most importantly regarded as a warning against future genocides against any nation.

This is a touchy point for many people, Jews and non-Jews alike. And, agreeing to a large extent with Charny and Bauer on this point, I do expect to raise some hackles on this point when we address it in two weeks or so. After all, you don't find many non-Zionists or anti-Zionists (particularly religious non- or anti-Zionists) in Holocaust Studies, but we are here, and we intend to be vocal, even if this makes us bêtes noirs among our colleagues, because despite the desire to make the Holocaust a central feature of our faith, we resist that idea and would prefer not to make twelve horrific years the central event in 3,000 years of recorded Jewish history. Commemoration is one thing; the creation of a Holocaust cult is quite another.

For more on this topic, check out this debate between scholars at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, the crème de la crème of institutions of Jewish learning outside of Israel.