Softcore Holocaust denial
Deborah Lipstadt was in Amsterdam for a screening of Denial when her phone lit up with the news about Trump’s Holocaust Memorial Day statement that conspicuously did not mention Jews. At first she thought it was just a clumsy mistake…but then she no longer did.
I quickly learned that the White House had released a statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day that did not mention Jews or anti-Semitism. Instead it bemoaned the “innocent victims.” The internet was buzzing and many people were fuming. Though no fan of Trump, I chalked it up as a rookie mistake by a new administration busy issuing a slew of executive orders. Someone had screwed up. I refused to get agitated, and counseled my growing number of correspondents to hold their fire. A clarification would certainly soon follow. I was wrong.
In a clumsy defense Hope Hicks, the White House director of strategic communications, insisted that, the White House, by not referring to Jews, was acting in an “inclusive” manner. It deserved praise not condemnation. Hicks pointed those who inquired to an article which bemoaned the fact that, too often the “other” victims of the Holocaust were forgotten. Underlying this claim is the contention that the Jews are “stealing” the Holocaust for themselves. It is a calumny founded in anti-Semitism.
There were of course other victims, she says, but that was not the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was something entirely different. It was an organized program with the goal of wiping out a specific people. Jews did not have to do anything to be perceived as worthy of being murdered. Old people who had to be wheeled to the deportation trains and babies who had to be carried were all to be killed. The point was not, as in occupied countries, to get rid of people because they might mount a resistance to Nazism, but to get rid of Jews because they were Jews.
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Had the Germans won, they probably would have eliminated millions of other peoples, including the Roma, homosexuals, dissidents of any kind, and other “useless eaters.” But it was only the Jews whose destruction could not wait until after the war. Only in the case of the Jews could war priorities be overridden. Germany was fighting two wars in tandem, a conventional war and a war against the Jews. It lost the first and, for all intents and purposes, nearly won the second.
They frequently compromised their military capacity by diverting it to the extermination project. Trains, fuel, soldiers and SS needed for the war were instead used for the genocide.
The de-Judaization of the Holocaust, as exemplified by the White House statement, is what I term softcore Holocaust denial. Hardcore denial is the kind of thing I encountered in the courtroom. In an outright and forceful fashion, Irving denied the facts of the Holocaust. In his decision, Judge Charles Grey called Irving a liar and a manipulator of history. He did so, the judge ruled, deliberately and not as the result of mistakes.
Softcore denial uses different tactics but has the same end-goal. (I use hardcore and softcore deliberately because I see denial as a form of historiographic pornography.) It does not deny the facts, but it minimizes them, arguing that Jews use the Holocaust to draw attention away from criticism of Israel. Softcore denial also makes all sorts of false comparisons to the Holocaust. In certain Eastern European countries today, those who fought the Nazis may be lauded, but if they did so with a communist resistance group they may be prosecuted. Softcore denial also includes Holocaust minimization, as when someone suggests it was not so bad. “Why are we hearing about that again?”
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After Hicks’s defense of the statement, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus doubled down, insisting that they made no mistake. On Meet the Press Chuck Todd gave Priebus repeated chances to retract or rephrase the statement. Priebus refused and dug in deeper, declaring “everyone’s suffering in the Holocaust, including obviously, all of the Jewish people… [was] extraordinarily sad.”
In the penultimate sentence of the president’s statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the White House promised to ensure that “the forces of evil never again defeat the powers of good.” But the statement was issued on the same day as the order banning refugees. It is hard not to conclude that this is precisely what happened at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Nazis could have – probably did – deliver precisely that promise when they were carrying out the Holocaust, and would surely have believed that was just what they were doing. For that matter, people of genuinely good will can promise that while doing perfectly good things. It’s empty til you specify the forces of evil and the powers of good and it’s scary til you make clear what you’re NOT willing to do in pursuit of that assurance of victory.
Trump’s clarified that the forces of evil include Syrian refugee children and leaving them to die is not merely acceptable but the policy working as intended.
A weird thing is that Donald Trump’s de facto First Lady, his daughter Ivanka, converted to Judaism on account of her Orthodox Jewish husband, Jared Kushner. One might expect the two to have objected “Isn’t this forgetting the Jews?”
6 million Jews. 5 million others. Not exactly the numbers you’d expect from reading: “But it was only the Jews whose destruction could not wait until after the war”.
‘Inclusion’ is actually something I’d like to see more of in this context, but it is achieved by specifically naming these others and the atrocities committed against them, not by making the language more vague.
To elaborate, the Trump administration should have mentioned Jews and anti-semitism, as indeed they should have mentioned gays and homophobia, gypsies and anti-ziganism, … But of course they are every bit as homophobic as they are racist, so no wonder they couldn’t bring themselves to mention any of it.
David Rutten @ 3 – I think you missed Lipstadt’s point. It wasn’t rhetorical, it’s a fact that the Nazi determination to exterminate the Jews was often at the expense of winning the war. That’s why I added the bit about diverting resources. That really happened, to the massive frustration of the military.
And in defending their exclusion of jews, was another deliberate exclusion: the list of non-jew demographics killed by Nazis very deliberately dropped homosexuality from the top of the list.
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#2
Your mention of Ivanka as de-facto First Lady reminded me of how little we have seen of Melania since the election. At first I was mildly surprised at this, but then I realised that this is very much in keeping with this and other observations of his total disregard of her.
“Had the Germans won, they probably would have eliminated millions of other peoples.”
Yes, however the comment is misleading. The Nazis didn’t waste any time exterminating the Roma or Slavs either.
The Nazis also exterminated about a million Roma during the war, was their determination to annihilate the Roma somehow qualitatively different? Who speaks for them? Also nearly 20 million Slavs were exterminated. For the Nazis, the elimination of Jews, Roma, Slavs and other people not worthy of life was an ongoing process and integral to the war effort.
The overwhelming violence of Nazy tyranny includes (of course) more than Jews. The term ‘Holocaust’ has become lazy shorthand for the whole sweep of Nazi murder.
‘Shoah,’ and ‘Final Solution,’ are better terms for the switch to complete commitment to genocide. The willingness to sacrifice chances for victory to the priority of killing Jews. Around a million Jews in Poland and beyond had ALREADY been murdered on a more ad hoc basis before the Wansee Conference.
There’s a story I heard from my Russian grandmother. When she and her daughter were trying to flee the German takeover of Czechoslovakia (Maybe it was Bohemia at the time? History is not my strong suit.) German soldiers came through the train looking for Slavs. My mother and grandmother escaped because they were both fluent in French and passed under the radar.
So, no, the Nazis were not waiting for the end of the war to move on to their lesser priorities. (And to be accurate, they killed tens of millions of slavic people, but mostly as a byproduct of war. Not in goal-directed gas chambers. Mostly.)
That said, the Nazis certainly had a focused hatred of Jews beyond their bloodlust against other groups except maybe gays and the disabled.
I agree that the way to acknowledge that is to name all the groups, not to quietly diminish the Jews. Shoah (=Annihilation in Hebrew) is definitely a way better term for the industrial-scale killing factories targeting largely Jews. A forest fire can be a holocaust. It was way more personal than that.
The Nazis did not divert massive resources from fighting the war to hunting down Roma or Slavs. That’s not saying they didn’t murder Roma and Slavs and lesbians and gays and disabled people when they got the chance. It’s saying they didn’t put winning the war at risk to do so.
And no, it’s not always appropriate to “name all the groups.” Sometimes it isn’t.
Y’all are taking the denialists’ bait, here.
quixote, @9
Slavs were not killed as a ‘by product of the war’ but as a result of a deliberate policy of genocide, to provide living space for the Germans. I’d be interested in reading a defence of the proposition that there’s a moral or practical distinction between annihilation by deprivation and starvation as in the case of the Slavs, or by lethal gas or a bullet in the head. The victims as just as dead.
Confession, I spend no time listening to the primary sources of Trumpish madness, so I get my information secondhand from sites like this. So I just now stumbled across the point that the White House Trash were trying to obscure the point of the Shoah being to annihilate Jews. Well, DUH. I wasn’t even aware that that was out there. Fercryinoutloud. So, sorry and apologies if it looked like I was arguing against that. I wasn’t. Not at all. I was just saying that the Nazis targeted lots of people, and we shouldn’t forget that, but it’s definitely a fact that they aimed for the Jews with a whole special frenzy, and we shouldn’t forget that either. And since the latter is the whole point of Holocaust Remembrance Day focusing on Jews is totally appropriate.
RJW @11, clearing out Slavs to make room for Germans is murder, but it’s not genocide. That wasn’t part of a campaign to exterminate all Slavs everywhere, which is what genocide means. (They might well have moved on to that later, although if I remember right the Untermenschen had their place as servants.) The word tends to be used these days as a synonym of mass murder, which it isn’t. And that was not where the lion’s share of the 30+ million Russians, Poles, and other Slavs died.
As for the distinction, when you’re talking about the Nazis, there’s a big distinction and it’s important. From the standpoint of the victims, they’re just as dead, as you say. Maybe it’s easier to see the distinction if you compare the US culpability for the civilian deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Nazis for Jewish deaths. Intent matters. Otherwise there would be no difference between murder and manslaughter, even though the victims are just as dead.
quixote@ 12
I understand your argument in regard to the definition of ‘genocide’. However after applying that definition we would have to include the attempted annihilation of the Roma as genocide as well.
I’m not sure what point you’re making with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki references. Yes the nuclear attacks weren’t part of an attempt to exterminate the Japanese, however it was deliberate mass murder. Intent does matter and that was the intent, to kill civilians, as many as possible as quickly as possible.