Thursday, January 27, 2005
Today is the 60th Anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. In commemoration of this day, and of the Wannsee Conference, in which the planning of the Final Solution took place, Israpundit has organized a "blogburst" in which over 150 participating blogs agree to post on the subject. The list of participating blogs is in the extended entry.
Please see Israpundit's post for the text common to all the blogs, and for many links and information on the events.
Let me also point out my post from a year ago today, Burnt Offerings.
On this day in 1945, soldiers of the Red Army liberated the Auschwitz death camp. There were only a few thousand prisoners left in the camp at that time, the rest (about 56,000) having been marched out by the Nazis in a mad rush west to mask their crime and finish their work.
I won't try, of course, to put to words in a simple blog post the things that went on in places like that. Others have done it far better than I could in both book and film.
But the reader may indulge me in a few thoughts...
For film, I recommend the Claude Lanzmann masterpiece, Shoah, as very much worth your time. Also, for a film on the Wannsee Conference, consider Conspiracy, a film with Ken Branagh among others.
A few brief thoughts of my own:
I think we've failed. I think, in spite of all the work by powerful Jewish organizations, all the books, all the films, all the TV specials, college courses and activism, we've failed. Maybe it's overkill. Maybe it's that we ourselves have allowed the message to become too watered-down into a milquetoasty message of universal love...I don't know. But someonewhere we failed.
We failed to communicate the true dimensions of the thing. "True dimensions"...heh. See? Even I'm watering it down with recycled pat verbiage that's easily skimmed by and little pondered. Rare are the works that frame the events differently and "RE-present" them so we look again. Lanzmann's Shoah might be one such, but who's going to sit through 10 hours of film? Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust is certainly another, but who's going to read 600 pages of small print? Not many.
The danger's still real. The hatred, specifically of Jews as Jews, regardless of their religious or political beliefs is still real. In Russia and the Middle East, South America...indeed, all over the world.
I think one of the biggest things we've failed at is the combination of communicating the scope of the Event, and preventing it from being dumbed-down by being turned generic (also here), and communicating why it is that it's in no one's interest to do so. This is not simply a Jewish issue. The non-Jewish or nominally Jewish but Atheist operators of many blogs such as LGF, Jihad Watch, Israpundit and The World and many, many others recognize this. This is a question of human freedom - of conscience, of thought, of belief, of association - and freedom from persecution...and murder.
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for te Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller
But it starts with the Jews as Jews. The enemy knows how powerful this is:
British Muslims are to boycott this week’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz because they claim it is not racially inclusive and does not commemorate the victims of the Palestinian conflict.Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, has written to Charles Clarke, the home secretary, saying the body will not attend the event unless it includes the “holocaust” of the Palestinian intifada.
The boycott was condemned by Khalid Mahmood, the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr:
“I’m proud to be a Muslim. But if people are boycotting this then I think it’s a mistake. People who were exterminated in the Holocaust were not just Jews. There were Romany gypsies as well. Anybody who is interested in human rights should support this remembrance.”
Well there's a powerful argument: People who were exterminated in the Holocaust were not just Jews. Yes, I think we get the message.
Indeed we do. The attempt to turn THE Holocaust and its various remembrances into generic events almost always carries with it an ulterior motive. Whether from the outright enemy like the Islamists and overt anti-Semites above, or from members of the extreme Left for who share their same goals - destruction of Judaism as a particular identity (they believe in putting such identifiers behind us - regardless of the real-world consequences) - and let's not forget the average, well-meaning secular Jew, who maybe feels a bit uncomfortable with their identity and wants to put their gentile friends at ease and show that they're not that Jewish by watering down, or participating in the watering down of the particularity of the Holocaust.
No, Jewish groups and their supporters should recognize this and refuse to participate in any event that seeks to render events like the liberation of Auschwitz generic, and they must always speak out at spurious comparisons that function as a soft form of Holocaust denial by in effect, by false comparison, render the Holocaust as less than it was. Further, for out part, we must be cautious in our speech, never to feel as though we, as Jews or supporters, have some special license to speak lightly and too frequently ourselves of The Events. We must always, through the way we speak or write of them, communicate their gravity, their weight, their seriousness and their particularity. If we cannot do that, if we cannot communicate well (and the more I think of this, the more I despise films like Life is Beautiful) then we ought to remain silent, and let our silence convey the burden of memory whilst others speak with the proper voice.
The extended entry contains a complete list of blogs participating in this burst.
Update: Amy Ridenour points to this excellent video archive of Holocaust survivor testimony. One of the truly great uses of the web. (via Michelle Malkin)
