Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
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might turn out to have been unique among genocides in some respects and not unique in others. The second is that the respects in which it was unique, while they might turn out to “belong to the Jews,” might just as well turn out to belong to others—that is to say, to the non-Jewish part of humanity. I believe, for reasons that I shall now set before you, that this second possibility is in fact the case.
Much has been made in the uniqueness debate, not only by David E. Stannard but also by many other contributors, of the uniqueness claim as a pretended attempt by Jews to exalt themselves above all other persecuted peoples since the beginning of time in respect of the supposed uniqueness of their suffering. One of the reasons why the bulk of Jewish (and for that matter non-Jewish) scholars have in fact made no such claim is, no doubt, that it would be an impossible claim to defend. Equally, I take it, the reason why those, like Stannard, hostile to the idea that the Jewish experience of the Nazi persecution was in any sense unique, emphasize the aspect of the Holocaust as suffering to the exclusion of all other aspects, is that by doing so, they think to position themselves on strong ground.
Both sides are right, at least about this! Sadly, there is seldom anything unique about suffering. However great, however abominable the present form it takes, however satanically ingenious the modes of its present infliction, as bad or worse can generally be found in the long panorama of human barbarity.
But the proper conclusion to be drawn from this truth is not Stannard’s. Suppose we agree with Stannard, for the sake of argument, that the Holocaust may be said to belong to the Jews under the aspect of suffering. In that case, it belongs to them under an aspect that, far from dividing them from the rest of suffering humanity, unites them to it. No distinction arises between Jews and members of other nations in that respect. As victims of suffering, we may all weep together.
But what about other aspects of the Holocaust? What in particular about its aspect as a persecution conducted against the members of a certain people for no other reason than that they were members of that people, and therefore, in logic, even if not always in practice, directed against every member of that nation without exception?
Here, the Holocaust does seem to me, as it has to many others, Jewish and non-Jewish, including all of Stannard’s “small industry of Holocaust hagiographers,” to have been unique.
But under that aspect, the aspect of persecution upon the sole ground of birth, the Holocaust in no way belongs to the Jews. It belongs to the rest of us, to non-Jews—that is to say, simply because the project of extermination on the sole ground of membership by birth of a given people has no Jewish component. It took its rise and, in the course of time, arrived at the moment of its attempted implementation entirely within gentile circles.
We seem forced to conclude, in short, that what belongs to the Jews, where the Holocaust is concerned—that is to say, suffering so vast as not in practice to be remotely imaginable or quantifiable—is not the thing that makes the Holocaust unique. It is rather what makes it part of the common human inheritance of distress. On the other hand, what does make the Holocaust unique—namely, the nature of the grounds upon which it was conceived and set in motion—is in no sense “the property of the Jews.” On the contrary, if it is part of any “inheritance,” the heritage of which it forms a part is not the Jewish heritage but the gentile heritage. As a property bequeathed by history it belongs, in other words, not to the Jews but, as the French say, to nous autres, to the rest of us: to non-Jews.
Every attempt to secure the “prize” of the term Holocaust for another oppressed group, however deserving of sympathy expressed in other terms, therefore carries with it the risk of losing touch with the uniqueness of the Holocaust as crime. Here it is worth quoting at length Pascal Bruckner:
In other words the Shoah has become a monstrous object of covetous lust. … From this comes the frenzied effort to gain admission to this very closed club and the desire to dislodge those who are already part of it. Consider this circa-2005 statement by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Great Britain until 2006, who proposed replacing Holocaust Memorial Day with Genocide Day: “The message of the Holocaust was ‘never again’ and for that message to have practical effect on the world community it has to be inclusive. We can never have double standards in terms of human life. Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time.” In short, and to put it bluntly, it is now time to change victims. In the contest for world title of best outcast, the Muslim must replace the Jew, all the more so because the latter not only failed to live up to his status but because he has himself become, with the creation of the state of Israel, an oppressor. In short, the idealization of the Jews has paved the way for his later vilification, or, to put it differently, the Judaization of the Muslims necessarily leads to the Nazification of the Israelis.27
Once again, it apparently needs to be said, the crime committed by the prosecutors of the Holocaust was that of treating a birth certificate as equivalent to a death warrant. It was not that of regarding the death of one person as less valuable (whatever that may mean) than the death of another. To think that it was is to forget. And with forgetfulness comes the possibility of repetition: perhaps this time not in the shape of a further destruction of the Jews but in that of some other group.
CONCLUSION: HOLOCAUST MEMORY AS BOTH DUTY AND PRUDENCE
That is the ultimate reason why Stannard and others who think like him are wrong to suppose that we can do without the term Holocaust understood as a singular term—a proper name referring uniquely to the destruction of European Jewry between 1933 and 1945. We need it because it is essential to the work of Holocaust memory that includes museums, such as the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, along with Holocaust Days, research groups, university and school courses, books and articles.
The place occupied by the Jews in the imagination of both Christians and Muslims being what it is, it might still be asked: But why should all this effort be put into remembering the sufferings of the Jews, when others have suffered as much or more without being accorded this kind of attention?
The answer I have offered here—to repeat it one last time—is that what such things serve to keep alive is not the (alleged) uniqueness of the suffering inflicted in the Holocaust but rather the (actual) uniqueness of the Holocaust as political crime. The Holocaust was a unique and (for the moment at least) uniquely European crime because it was the first moment in history at which an entire people was willed to destruction merely to save the credit of a political fantasy.28 No doubt we, who as non-Jews belong to nations the bulk of whose citizens are non-Jews, ought to remember these things as a duty to the Jews. But non-Jews like myself, and no doubt many of my readers, also stand under a duty of prudence of which I shall have more to say in chapters 14–16: a duty to ourselves as non-Jews to remember these things. While the Jewish world suffered the consequences of the Holocaust, it was the non-Jewish world, its mythic structures, its resources of secular political messianism, that originated and contrived it. But the bulk of non-Jews who were in no way a party to Hitler’s war against the Jews, except through lack of vigilance, also paid a price for that lack of vigilance. Antisemitism is certainly part of what drew converts to the Nazi Party, and so part of what served to bring Hitler to power. Hence, antisemitism lay causally at the root of many millions of non-Jewish as well as Jewish deaths. Antisemitism, as long as it remains alive, will continue to retain the power it then demonstrated, to blind many to the demonic character of messianic politics until it is too late.
That is why “the Holocaust industry,” as Norman Finkelstein derisively calls it, is not, as he and others like Stannard have wished to persuade us, a specifically Jewish enterprise. It is an enterprise that serves all of us, one that we should pursue with all the industry we can muster, because it is in everyone’s interest, the interest of all citizens of the free world, Jewish and non-Jewish, to remember the specific nature and origins of the Holocaust as a crime. To lose that memory, at the behest of a sophistical universalism, is to lose a precious bulwark against the perennial power of spurious moralizing to betray society into the bloody hands of political messianism.
CONCLUDING