The British writer Will Self has an essay here about his late German colleague W. G. Sebald’s writing about the Holocaust. In it he objects to the existence of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK and rejects the idea of the Holocaust being remembered at all. He writes,
In conclusion then, Sebald had no need of a Holocaust Remembrance Day - and I believe that if we read him rightly nor have we English. In Germany a Memorial Day for the Victims of National Socialism is indeed an appropriate response - if not an atonement - for crimes committed, but here Tony Blair might have done better to inaugurate a Refusal to Grant Refugee Jews Asylum Memorial Day, or an Incendiary Bombing of German Cities Memorial Day, or even - casting the shadow forward - an Iraqi Civilians Memorial Day, for these are deaths that more properly belong at our door. For Sebald and for those of us who hearken to his work, there is no need to remember, because the Nazis’ Holocaust is still happening in an interlocking space, while before us are the poisoned seas, the glowing piles and the cold putrefaction of an environmental one.
Note two things here. First, the miserable, vaguely postmodernist, notion that hey, the world is full of suffering and is generally going to hell in a hand cart so why single out the Holocaust for remembrance, the one that actually happened - and happened primarily and overwhelmingly to the Jews - when in some ludicrously vague sense it’s still going and in an “interlocking space” to boot.
The other factor underlying Self’s objection is that Holocaust Memorial Day was initiated in 2001, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister of Great Britain and such is the hatred of Blair among opponents of the Iraq War that every other initiative of his is now seen to be tainted by the decision to overthrow Baathism in Iraq.
Utterly depraved proposal.
Incendiary bombing of German cities and the Shoah cannot be placed on the same moral plane and anyone who does so is committing a felony against historical memory and decency.
It appears to me that Self’s proposal aims at achieving two ends:
1. The suppression of the Holocaust as a crime against humanity. Thus it will become an exclusively German affair of dealing with German historical crimes, revoking Jewish singularity in favour of all victims of National Socialism.
In other words, induce a memory loss on the special evil of the Holocaust by erasing the singularity of the Jewish Holocaust and/or dilute it by re-categorizing all death and destruction in WWII caused by the Nazis as meriting the exact same type of commemoration as the exterminated Jews.
2. “..there is no need to remember, because the Nazis’ Holocaust is still happening in an interlocking space..”
Simultaneously with the suppression of Holocaust memory as a universal concern, there will be a memory erected for the “genocide” of the “interlocking space” (wink wink, nudge nudge). For some reason no specific geographical region is suggested for this memorialization. The author, however, does make the point that this memory belongs to “us”, meaning, I suppose, that this particular genocide in the interlocking space deserves to be regarded as a universally-binding concern.
Self, with his anguished words and high-faluting English, reflects perfectly albeit cowardly,a much more honest proponent of the same doctrine:
“Former Khan Yunis mayor Fayez Abu Shamala deplored the world’s inaction in the face of what he called the Palestinian holocaust, and demanded that the curricula incorporate materials on “the Nazis of the 21st century.” He stated: “Even if all the world governments conceded that the Holocaust happened according to the Jewish version, it would never convince a Palestinian - because he knows that the world has acknowledged the injustice done to [the Palestinian people] yet disregards the holocaust being perpetrated against it on a daily basis…
… It is not enough for us Palestinians to refuse to teach our children about the Holocaust. We must introduce special classes about the Nazis of the 21st century - the Israeli Jews, [those] criminals [and] terrorists [who] continue to perpetrate a holocaust against us…”
http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/3662.htm
They both advocate the same measures: Deny or suppress the memory of the Holocaust as it pertains to the extermination of the Jews, while manufacture an imaginary holocaust to replace it in the world’s memory.
Christopher Caldwell (Weekly Standard, June 5, 2002) on this kind of historical manipulation:
“For anyone who inhabits Western culture, the Holocaust made that culture a much more painful place to inhabit – and for any reasonably moral person, greatly narrowed the range of acceptable political behaviour. To be human is to wish it had never happened. (Those who deny that it did may be those can’t bear to admit it happened,) but it did. If there is a will-to anti-Semitism – then the Arab style Judeophobia, which is an anti-Semitism without the West’s complexes, offers a real redemptive project to those Westerners who are willing to embrace. It can liberate guilty, decadent Europeans from a horrible moral albatross. What an anti-depressant! Saying there was no such thing as the gas chamber is, of course, not respectable. But the same purpose can be served using what Leo Strauss called the reductio ad Hitlerum to cast the Jews as having committed crimes identical to the Nazis’. They must be identical, of course, so the work of self-delusion can be accomplished. We did one, the Jews did one. Now we’re even-steven”.
Will Self cant be dismissed so lightly for all that,I think criticism of his use of well developed conceptual language and knowledge of twentieth century philosophy and post modernism is an anti intellectual cop out.I feel he makes valuable points about the guilt fests of Europe and the rash of special days,days for Holocaust,day for Rwanda,Day for world poverty,day for climate, another day to remember slavery etc etc but what does it change? answer? nothing
John,
He says, plain as the nose on yer face, that he’s against Holocaust Memorial Day.
Does Tony Blair think of those responable for the holocaust or its passive accepters when hes kissing the Popes Ring? or when hes chatting on the sat phone to his crusading buddy George w Bush? of the USA THE SAME USA which hid Nazis and employed other war criminals for its post war projects, such as the slave master Van Braun,?who took the apollo project to the moon.Schoolkids throughout europe should be made to view Lanzmanns film of The Shoah, plus other aspects of Twentieth century evil,on a grand scale such as Pol pots killing fields and Stalins gulags,I think for the future Education of this type would serve future gnerations better than media circus and “shows of public breast beating and commemorataion festivals