The Holocaust is Not a Political Cipher
can we stop using the Shoah as a political talking point or a shock jock tool or measuring device, and can we stop the Holocaust envy, please?
NB: Comments are off because dopamine junkies irritate me and I will not indulge them here.
There is nothing happening now that’s like the Shoah. There is nothing that happened that’s like the Shoah except the Shoah. There is one Shoah. The Holocaust is not a talking point, a measuring stick, a political shock device to subdue your interlocutors during a political debate. It cannot be distilled down to a clever Don Draper engagement farming strategy. The Holocaust is not evidence for the veracity of race theory. Jews are not a religion because the Nazis made them into a race is a really repugnant as fcuk. Judaism is an ethno-religion. Like Hinduism. Race theory is dumb and pseudoscience. There’s a long history of hatred of Jewish peoples, it extends well beyond race discourse. That’s a topic in and of itself. Not for this essay.
Image :: "End of July 1941. Shooting of Jews by the SS in the Berdichev citadel," and at the bottom: "July 28, 1941." From the diary of Walter Materna, via USHMM
Look at the photograph, from July 1941. Look carefully. This is one scene of countless across the European continent. Across the continent. Firing squads were a primary way of exterminating Jews until 1942, when Zyclon B became the preferred killing method. Look at the images in the gallery below. Click on them to enlarge. Look at the images. Study them. There’s a reason Eisenhower arranged for this documentation.
Spend time knowing what the Shoah was and learn about the human tragedy on a mass industrial scale. Learn the details of what happened to people.
Learn so you will never again use the Holocaust as a rhetorical tool in a discourse, or a measurement tool, or a shock therapy to score points. This is not a game.
April, 1945 — photographs :: A portion of the bodies found by U.S. troops when they arrived at Nordhausen concentration camp in Germany. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton are given a tour of Ohrdruf concentration camp. Here they visit a burial pit containing the charred remains of prisoners who were burned to death at Ohrdruf, Germany. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton are given a tour of Ohrdruf concentration camp. Here they visit a burial pit containing the charred remains of prisoners who were burned to death at Ohrdruf, Germany.
“[T]he most interesting – although horrible – sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’ … If you could see your way clear to do it, I think you should make a visit here at the earliest possible moment, while we are still conducting a general offensive. You would be proud of the Army you have produced” — Eisenhower in a letter to Marshall, 15.4.1945
The sights and human reality of the Nazi atrocities rendered seasoned army men like Eisenhower and Patton sickened and stunned and unable to even physically withstand. You and I are in no position at all to ever compare anything to that. Please stop doing that. The Holocaust is not a tool for any nationalism agenda. It is not a geopolitical cipher. It is not anything you can use to promote your crappy political ideology. The memory of the Shoah must be kept free from all attempts to capture it and make it a star in a modern day crusade.
Zionism saved Jews from nazi extermination before modern day Israel was on the map. Because Zionism serves בּני ישׂראך (b’nei yisrael), and not Israeli nationalism. These two are not the same thing — b’nei yisrael is served by and does not serve Israeli nationalism.