At Slate.com, Ron Rosenbaum has written an important piece about the disturbing tendency to criticize people for being “Holocaust-obsessed.”
Imagine: worrying about extermination threats just because Hitler made extermination threats which he carried out. No reason to get all obsessed because another anti-Semitic leader who is seeking nuclear weapons makes similar threats, right? No reason to be troubled about the exterminationist anti-Semitic rhetoric that pervades the airwaves and the cyber realm of every other nation in the region.
Anyone who seeks to draw comparisons with the warnings of a “Final Solution” in the 1930s and the situation today—in other words to take history into account—is met with scorn as “Holocaust-obsessed.” Or accused of “hoarding the Holocaust,” as Peter Beinart has put it.
Indeed using “holocaust-obsessed” as an epithet has become, in effect, the new Holocaust denial. The new holocaust denial doesn’t deny the holocaust happened, it just denies it should have any historical relevance today. In an afterword she wrote for an anthology I compiled, Cynthia Ozick spoke about an English writer who castigated Menachim Begin for invoking the Holocaust murder of a million Jewish children as a reason for ordering the Israeli attack on Saddam’s potential bomb-making nuclear reactor in 1981. She called the castigation a denial of the very essence of historical discourse: making connections. “Is the imagination’s capacity to ‘connect’ worthy of such scorn … ?” she asked.
By the way, you can always tell one of this new breed of Holocaust denier by the way they claim that careful parsing of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map” or “wipe Israel from the page of time” (depending on how its translated), doesn’t really mean he wants to harm a single hair on the head of single Jew. See, if you read it carefully it’s nothing to worry about. He just wants to change the governmental set up! You know, so the state of Israel will no longer exist and thus not appear on the map (or the page of time). They cling desperately to the notion that it’s not a sinister euphemism like, say, Hitler’s “Final Solution.”
But Rosenbaum is also critical of what might be called “Holocaust exceptionalism.”
It has always seemed to me important not to use the holocaust to separate Jewish experience from the “historical traumas” and “tragic national experiences” of others. Important to err on the side of commonality and solidarity with other victims rather than to spend time arguing about what sets us apart from them.
…..
It’s a matter of choice, of emphasis. Why should we emphasize, even if it is true, the differences between our Holocausts and those of others even if they don’t measure up in body count or evil of the perpetrators exterminationist designs? Are the differences more important than the tragic similarities? Must we invoke the Passover night question: “Why is this night different from all other nights” to ask and answer “why is our holocaust different from all other holocausts?”
I don’t think so. I don’t think it diminishes what happened to one people if it leads to empathy for others—and to proactive intervention to prevent looming threats of genocidal mass murder.
That’s another kind of holocaust inconsequentialism. A removal of “our” Holocaust from history. From historical connection to others. And while it’s not a prescription for blithe spirits, perhaps we’d be better off if we were more holocaust-obsessed, in the sense of being concerned with all holocausts, historical and potential, and the profound flaws in human nature and human civilization that make them such a salient feature of our collective history.
A few excerpts can’t do it justice. Read it all.
(Hat tip: Normblog)
