Category: History

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day, we are publishing this chapter from Brendan O’Neill’s book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation.

One of the most striking things in the aftermath of 7 October was the silence of the fascism-spotters. You know these people. They’re the centrists and liberals who see fascism everywhere. Who think everything is ‘like the 1930s’. The vote for Brexit, Donald Trump, the rise of populist parties in Europe – all of it reminds them of the Nazi years. And yet when the Islamofascists of Hamas stormed the Jewish State and butchered a thousand Jews, suddenly they went quiet. No more Nazi talk. No more trembling warnings of a return to ‘the dark days of the 1930s’. No more handwringing over ‘new Hitlers’. It seems that to a certain kind of liberal, everything is fascism except fascism.

These are the people who lapped up Guardian articles with headlines like ‘The reich stuff’, exploring the supposed ‘comparisons between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler’. They’re the people who will have nodded in vigorous agreement when a spokesperson for Joe Biden slammed Trump for parroting ‘the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler’. They’re the folk who no doubt permitted themselves a chuckle when it was revealed that Biden staffers refer to Trump as ‘Hitler pig’ behind closed doors. They’re the self-styled ‘vigilant’ members of respectable society who will have cheered when Biden described Trumpism as a ‘semi-fascism’ that threatens the ‘soul’ of the free world.

They’re the pro-EU middle classes who fretted over the vote for Brexit, viewing it as a ‘return to the 1930s’. They’re the broadsheet readers who will have murmured in agreement with headlines saying there are ‘terrifying parallels between Brexit and the appeasement of Hitler’. They’re the royalty-sceptics who will have found themselves in agreement with princes for once when Charles, then Prince of Wales, said populism has ‘deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s’. They’re the weekend marchers who will have attended anti-Trump demos at which people waved placards showing Trump with a Hitler tache, and anti-Brexit protests at which speakers issued dire warnings about our descent into Hitlerite mania.

There was a time when you couldn’t open a newspaper or peruse social media without seeing some pained liberal hold forth on how populism will drag us back to the death camps. Fascism panic was the fashion of the day. And then it stopped. In the wake of the 7 October pogrom – the worst act of slaughter against the Jews since that period of the mid-20th century these people love talking about – their fascism chatter evaporated. In fact, they started warning people not to use Nazi analogies. Not to compare 7 October to the 1930s. Not to engage in the very fascism fretting that had been the bread and butter of their own political commentary for years.

Just two weeks after the pogrom, the Guardian published a piece denouncing Israel for ‘weaponising the Holocaust’ in its response to Hamas’s assault. It is an outrage, it argued, that Israeli leaders are likening Hamas to fascist Germany and thus portraying Israel as ‘powerless Jews in a struggle against Nazis’. This is the same Guardian that had been namedropping the Holocaust for years. Which ran pieces asking ‘Are we living through another 1930s?’ after the vote for Brexit. Which published columns saying that, thanks to Trump, ‘the world could be heading back to the 1930s’. Yet when Israelis suggested that the slaughter of a thousand Jews by fascistic men with knives, guns and rocket launchers was somewhat reminiscent of the 1930s, the Guardian essentially tut-tutted.

It is fine, it seems, to ponder on ‘the reich stuff ’ of Trumpism and Brexit. But it is terrible – ‘dangerous’, in fact – for the Jewish State to say the Jew-killers who invaded its lands on 7 October echoed the evils of Nazi Germany. Do Guardianistas not think that Hamas has ‘the reich stuff’? That this movement whose founding charter promised to ‘fight Jews and kill them’ is at least a little Hitlerish? What about the pogromist who took a break from his no doubt exhausting barbarism on 7 October to phone home and boast to his parents that he had ‘killed 10 [Jews] with my own hands’? Would they call him a ‘Hitler pig’, as they no doubt enjoy hearing Biden staffers say about Trump?

Other centrist publications that have likewise spent the populist era panicking about the resuscitation of fascism also turned coy in the aftermath of 7 October. A writer for Time magazine thundered on the ‘danger’ of ‘using Holocaust analogies right now’. We are witnessing the ‘Holocausting’ of the ‘Israeli psyche’, he said, where Israeli leaders are ‘using historical trauma to advance their agendas’. He criticised Israel’s envoy to the UN for wearing a yellow star while speaking to the Security Council three weeks after the pogrom – this is ‘not a proportionate historical comparison’, we were told.

Is this the same Time that loved comedian Louis CK’s description of Donald Trump so much that it put it in a headline, ‘The guy is Hitler’? The same Time where a writer warned that Trump in the White House represented a ‘new dawn of tyranny’ that was not unlike the ‘rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s’? So had Time’s ‘psyche’ also been ‘Holocausted’? Or is it only when the Jewish State uses fascism analogies that we need to reach for the Freudian analysis?

Business Insider also took umbrage at the Israeli envoy’s yellow-star stunt at the UN, reporting that he had ‘disgraced the memory of the Holocaust’ by ‘comparing war on Hamas to WW2’. This is the same Business Insider that has been churning out Trump / Hitler clickbait for years. Which reported that Trump’s rhetoric ‘increasingly [mirrors] Nazi talking points’. Which got anti-Trump social media all a flutter by pointing out that the ‘Trump cards’ his supporters are encouraged to carry in their wallets feature a ‘right-facing golden eagle’ reminiscent of the Nazi-era Reichsadler eagle, which ‘also faces right’.

Did that ‘disgrace the memory of the Holocaust’, too? Did that ceaseless marshalling of the darkest moment in human history to try to land a few blows on the man the coastal elites love to hate, to the extent of madly suggesting a picture of an eagle on some plastic cards might be a sly nod to Nazism, also demean the historical memory of the Holocaust? Or is it only problematic when the nation built by descendants of the Holocaust says that something in the present is reminiscent of the Holocaust?

The centrists’ overnight conversion to no longer talking about the Nazis was summed up in the figure of Gary Lineker. This is the BBC’s top sports commentator whose social-media handwringing over the Tories and Brexit made him the moral conscience of Britain’s depressed liberals. He caused a storm in early 2023 when he said the then home secretary, Suella Braverman, had used language that was ‘not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’. Braverman had made a speech promising to ‘stop the boats’ containing illegal immigrants that frequently set sail from France for England. It was this proposal of a policy for better policing at Britain’s border that made Lineker feel he had been transported into some kind of fascistic cosplay.

Given his sensitivity to things that are ‘not dissimilar’ to the 1930s, you might have expected him to have something to say just a few months later in 2023 when Hamas carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Nazi era. When young Jews at a music festival were rounded up and put in trucks to be transported to enemy territory. When Jews’ homes were set on fire by a marauding mob of men who are members of an organisation whose leaders incite people to buy cheap knives and ‘cut off the heads of Jews’. Alas, no. Lineker’s social-media feed was curiously politics-free in the aftermath of the pogrom. He promoted his various podcasts and congratulated Tottenham Hotspur for getting to the top of the Premier League, but he seemingly couldn’t find the time to comment on a world-historical atrocity that really was ‘not dissimilar’ to the 1930s.

How do we make sense of this sudden falling out of fashion of Nazi analogies? Why, for years, was it seen as legitimate to dredge up the 1930s in every chat about populism, but now we were being told it is ‘dangerous’, ‘disgraceful’ and ‘distorting’ for Israel and its supporters to say the words ‘Hamas’ and ‘Nazi’ in the same breath? Why was it fine for the liberal elites to use the spectre of the Holocaust to underline their furious opposition to Brexit and Trump, but when Israel mentioned the Holocaust following the murder of a thousand of its people, that was a sick exploitation of ‘historical trauma’?

It is tempting to see it as just hypocrisy. Just another case of the political class saying one thing and doing another. But there is something else at work in this jealous ringfencing of the right to use Nazi analogies, this arrogant hoarding of Holocaust comparisons for the liberal establishment alone.

More broadly, it speaks to a sinister separating of the Holocaust from the Jews. To a creeping severance of the memory of that most calamitous event from the lives of the very people who experienced it. The cultural elites’ finger-wagging at the Jewish nation for mentioning the Holocaust in its condemnations of Hamas, even as they themselves throw around Nazi analogies like confetti, is fundamentally a calling into question of the Jews’ moral ownership of the Holocaust. It essentially says: ‘This isn’t your historical reference point anymore. It’s ours.’

Western liberals’ covetous seizing of the right to use Holocaust analogies speaks to a wrenching of the Holocaust from its true context. It speaks to the removal of the Holocaust from its historical specificity, and its transformation instead into a free-floating symbol of general human wickedness that the privileged of the West can conjure up to add weight to their angst about political life in the 21st century. It speaks to the dejudification of the Holocaust: an unnerving intellectual trend that has profoundly troubling implications for historical memory, truth and freedom itself.

The admonishment of the Jewish State for mentioning the Holocaust following Hamas’s pogrom was swift and severe. ‘Stop weaponising the Holocaust’, screamed a headline in the Hill. Members of the activist class even hit the streets to scold Israel for its supposed Holocaust exploitation. Three weeks after the pogrom, members of Jewish Voice for Peace stormed Grand Central Station in New York City with banners saying ‘Never Again For Anyone’. Their action was celebrated by observers as an effort to ‘disrupt’ how ‘the Holocaust can be deployed’ by Israel to ‘rationalise and spin’ its war in Gaza. They were cheered for taking a stand against Israel’s ‘weaponising… of the Holocaust’. So the same activist class whose adherents were noisily likening Israel’s war on Hamas to a Hitler-style genocide were also actively ‘disrupting’ Israel’s ability to make any such Nazi comparisons. Holocaust analogies for me, but not for thee.

The chiding of Israel for its Holocaust talk went global following Jonathan Glazer’s controversial speech at the Oscars in March 2024. Glazer won the gong for best international film for The Zone of Interest. It tells the story of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp, and his family’s idyllic life of horrifying indifference in their stately home next door to the factories of death in which a million Jews were vaporised. In his acceptance speech, Glazer, who was flanked by his fellow Jewish colleagues, said: ‘We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of 7 October in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.’

What was most notable about the post-October explosion of concern for the historical sanctity of the Holocaust was how new it was, what a break it represented from the attitudes of the very recent past. For we live in an era of wilful Holocaust exploitation. Actual ‘hijacking’ of the Holocaust to make a political point or boost a social-justice campaign has been all the rage for decades. Across the Western world, political leaders, the media elites and leftish activists have summoned up the Holocaust to try to get eyes on their pet causes. And yet those of us who have raised concerns that this diminishes the Holocaust, that comparing everything from trans-sceptical commentary to factory farming with the greatest crime in history threatens to rob that crime of its uniqueness, have often struggled to win an audience. Then, all of a sudden, after Hamas murdered 1,200 Jews and the Jewish State said it was reminiscent of Nazism, everyone started agonising over what a grave insult it is to dead Jews to ‘hijack’ their pain in this way.

It’s a shame this respect for the memory of the Jews murdered by the Nazis was so lacking when People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) launched its grotesque awareness-raising campaign describing a meat dinner as the ‘Holocaust on your plate’. Or when PETA put up posters showing cow carcasses under the title, ‘The Final Indignity’, as if making beef was comparable to the extermination of six million human beings. Or when trans activists hysterically use terms like ‘transgender genocide’ to refer to the discrimination trans people allegedly face. Or when the New Statesman emblazoned the words ‘The Next Holocaust’ on its front page, positing that Islamophobia in Europe might drag us towards another round of Nazi-style extermination: ‘[What] we did to Jews we may now do to Muslims.’ Or when Muslim News in the UK wondered if Islamophobia is ‘leading to another Holocaust’.

Or, for that matter, when wars really were justified through a hijacking of the Holocaust. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the West’s military interventions in Serbia and Iraq were presented to us as just crusades against ‘new Nazis’. The Serbs’ attacks on Kosovo Albanians ‘evoke memories of the Holocaust’, we were told. The Serbs are ‘NAZIS’, said the front pages of the papers, their behaviour containing ‘chilling echoes of the Holocaust’. The then German defence minister accused the Serbs of a ‘systematic extermination that recalls in a horrible way what was done in the name of Germany’ in the Second World War. Both the Gulf War in the early 1990s and the Iraq War of the early 2000s were, in the words of Stanford University humanities professor Russell Berman, ‘fought in terms of a metaphor: Saddam as Hitler’ (1). George HW Bush said of Saddam: ‘We’re dealing with Hitler revisited.’

You didn’t need to be an apologist for either the ruthless Serb regime of the 1990s or Saddam’s unmourned tyranny in Iraq to be troubled by the West’s moral appropriation of the horrors of the Holocaust to justify military incursions in those places. As Nazi camp survivor Elie Wiesel said of the Serb question in 1999: ‘The Holocaust was conceived to annihilate the last Jew on the planet. Does anyone believe that [Slobodan] Milošević and his accomplices seriously planned to exterminate all the Bosnians, all the Albanians, all the Muslims in the world?’

Words matter. The word ‘Holocaust’ matters in particular. It refers to a singular event in history, unparalleled in its barbarity, unmatched in its cruelty. Cheapening this word by attaching it to world events that might be very bad indeed, but which are not comparable to the death camps, cheapens the Holocaust itself. It renders it mundane, ordinary, just another regrettable thing in our past. ‘Just another fuckery in human history’, as Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam notoriously said of the Holocaust in an interview in 2019. There is no Holocaust on your plate, there was no Holocaust in Iraq, and there is no Holocaust in Gaza. There has only been one Holocaust.

Jonathan Glazer accepts the Best International Feature Film award for ‘The Zone of Interest’ at the 96th Annual Oscars in March 2024.

And yet where was the rage against the ‘hijacking’ of the Holocaust before 7 October? There was some, yes, but not nearly as much as we have seen following the Jewish State’s mentioning of the H-word after the pogrom. Indeed, many of the liberals and centrists who’ve huffed over Israel’s alleged Holocaust exploitation were firm supporters of those ‘humanitarian’ interventions of the 1990s and 2000s that were expressly justified as battles against the New Nazism; which ‘weaponised the Holocaust’, one might say.

Why the differential stance? Why is it fine, in the liberal mind, for America and Britain to weaponise the Holocaust, but not the nation that was born from the very fires of the Holocaust? Naomi Klein provided a clue in an essay for the Guardian in which she celebrated Glazer’s reproaching of Israel for its Holocaust-hijacking. We are entering a new intellectual era, she wrote, one in which people are openly asking if the Holocaust should be seen ‘exclusively as a Jewish catastrophe, or something more universal’. Where people are demanding ‘greater recognition for all the groups targeted for extermination’ by the Nazis. Where people are querying whether the Holocaust really was a ‘unique rupture in European history’ or a ‘homecoming of earlier colonial genocides, along with a return of the techniques, logics and bogus race theories they developed and deployed’.

In other words, how special was the Holocaust, really? How Jewish was it? Isn’t it time we treated it as a ‘universal’ horror, in which everyone suffered, not a specifically Jewish calamity? Klein, in her giddy welcoming of the dismantling of older understandings of the Holocaust, tapped into one of the most regressive intellectual trends of our time: the ideological chipping away at the Jewishness of the Holocaust experience in order that other social groups might lay some claim to the greatest instance of suffering in human history.

We are living in an era of Holocaust envy. The ascendancy of the politics of victimhood has nurtured a palpable hostility towards the idea that the Holocaust was uniquely barbarous. In an era in which victimhood confers moral authority, when the way you secure both social sympathy and state resources is by claiming to suffer ‘structural oppression’, it simply won’t do that the Jews have a singular claim over the gravest instance of victimisation in history. And so their claim on the Holocaust must be questioned, weakened, loosened. What about the other victims of Nazi murder? What about other genocides? Challenging the distinctive nature of the Holocaust, even demoting the Holocaust further down the pecking order of human agony, is the grim inevitable consequence of a cult of competitive grievance in which accruing ever-more tales of pain is the way you move ahead.

As Frank Furedi has noted, in our age of victim politics it is precisely ‘the moral authority conferred upon Jews by the Holocaust’ that has made Jews ‘the focus of resentment among competing identity groups’. Identitarians really do envy Jews their history of torment. Recall when the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day on the basis that it was ‘too narrowly focussed on Jewish suffering’. It needs to be more inclusive of ‘recent genocides such as that in Rwanda and of Muslims in Srebrenica’, the MCB insisted. Or witness the clamour among trans activists to be included among the groups who were targeted by the Nazis for extermination, even though, as one writer notes, there were ‘only a handful of trans victims’ and, crucially, ‘most of these victims were also Jewish or homosexual’. Everyone wants their pound of Holocaust flesh.

The end result of making the Holocaust a ‘universal’ horror on which all victim groups might gleefully feast is that sometimes the Jews are forgotten entirely. In 2008, Britain’s Socialist Workers Party handed out leaflets outside a festival organised by the far-right British National Party. The leaflets reminded attendees of the horrors of the Holocaust in which ‘thousands of LGBT people, trade unionists and disabled people were slaughtered’. Spot the omission? They forgot the Jews. The SWP chalked it up to an administrative error, but as its rivals in the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty pointed out, ‘for such a slip to pass unnoticed through writer, typesetter, printer, organisers and distributors, without anyone at any stage picking it up, must say something’.

Indeed it must. What it says is that the reimagining of the Holocaust as a universal catastrophe rather than a Jewish one, a process that Naomi Klein and others gravely mistake for a progressive intellectual endeavour, can lead to the erasure of the Jews. It can nurture new, insidious forms of Holocaust denial. It is not surprising that a poll carried out at the end of 2023 found that 20 per cent of Americans aged 18 to 29 believe the Nazi murder of six million Jews is made up. An additional 30 per cent said they were unsure whether the Holocaust really happened. In 2007, a poll in the UK found that 28 per cent of Britons aged 18 to 29 ‘don’t know’ if the Holocaust happened. Some ascribe this ignorance to poor schooling. Perhaps. But it seems unquestionable that the ideological rebranding of the Holocaust as a general horror in which all were victimised is making it more difficult for people to understand the true nature of this industrialised act of anti-Semitic mania. Jealousy of Jewish suffering is the new means through which Jewish suffering comes to be forgotten, and even denied.

And now we have the activist class on the streets, forbidding the Jewish State from mentioning the Holocaust while also accusing it of carrying out a new Holocaust in Gaza. It is essential that we appreciate what is taking place here: this is the gloating of the victors in the ideological struggle over the Holocaust. It is the crowing of that section of political society that has succeeded in ‘liberating’ the Holocaust from the Jews and making it the moral property of others, in particular the Palestinians and their Western supporters. It is the exaltation of an ascendant new class of self-styled victims glorying in their colonisation of the Holocaust for themselves. When they damn Israel for weaponising the Holocaust while simultaneously weaponising it themselves, what they’re saying is: ‘This is ours now. We own it. We own your history.’

They are ‘disinheriting [Jews] of pity’, says Jacobson. It is a form of ‘retrospective retribution’, he says, where the implication, always, is that ‘Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday’. Where the Holocaust was a physical effort to dejudify Europe, today’s weaponisation of Jewish suffering against the Jews themselves is an intellectual effort to dejudify the Holocaust. To cleanse it of its associations with Jewish extermination in order that it might be wielded as a cudgel against the Jewish nation in the Middle East and used to fortify the claims to victimhood of the non-Jewish activist class in the West. It is something arguably worse than Holocaust denial – it is Holocaust theft.

The moral fallout from the 7 October pogrom shines an unforgiving light on our crisis of Enlightenment values. Objectivity, in this case the objective truth of the Holocaust, is overridden by the subjective needs and desires of the activist class. Historical truth is sacrificed to ideological gain. Reason and reality are trampled in the rush of identity groups to consolidate their victim status. And our right to remember what really happened in the past is interfered with by ideologues who manipulate the events of history to suit their political agendas in the present. Such Orwellian meddling with the truth of the Holocaust is an insult not only to the victims of that calamity, but also to the freedom of living people today. As Milan Kundera put it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. Let remembering the Holocaust be our small rebellion against the new anti-Semitism.

This is an extract from Brendan’s book, After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation. You can buy it on Amazon while stocks last.