DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE UNIVERSAL HOLOCAUST
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Everyone deals with trauma in different ways. Getting violently attacked on a street late at night. Watching a loved one murdered in front of your eyes. Feeling the fire on your skin as your home burns. It’s not just the pain of the experience, it’s realizing afterward how your world has changed and that your life will never be the same.
There are two basic human responses to an assault. I will protect myself. I will make the world a better place. The first deals with the risk of an attack. The second with your feelings about the world. The first leaves you better able to cope with an attack. The second makes you feel better about the world.
The Jewish response to the Holocaust fell into these two categories. Never Again and Teach Tolerance. And the two responses were segmented by population. Never Again became the credo of Israel and Teach Tolerance became the credo of the Western Diaspora. There were many Israelis who believed in teaching tolerance and many Western Jews who believed in self-defense, but for the most part the responses were structural. And yet the divide between Nationalists and Universalists also predated the Holocaust.
There are nice Jewish boys and girls who have read Anne Frank’s diary, visited Holocaust museums and even Auschwitz and come away as anti-semities. They don’t of course call themselves that. They call themselves human rights activists, they board flotillas, they boycott Israeli products, smash Jewish store windows, hug terrorists and rationalize suicide bombers. And it’s not entirely their fault. The lessons that they drew from their education is that the underdog is always right, that people in uniforms are bad, and that you always have to stand up for minorities.
That is the Holocaust in its universalized form. Never Again made the Holocaust a teachable moment for Jews. Teach Tolerance made it a teachable moment for all mankind. The Nationalist and the Universalist draw two opposite lessons from the Holocaust. The Nationalists focus on resistance while the Universalists focus on persecution. The Nationalist aspires to be a ghetto fighter while the Universalist aspires to be a good German.
The Universalist version of the Holocaust is a lesson on how we must all aspire to be good Germans, its natural lesson is that our governments, at least the non-progressive ones, are embryonic Third Reichs, which are only one flag waving leader away from opening concentration camps, and must be opposed and undermined. And so there are plenty of young Jewish and non-Jewish boys and girls who smash Jewish store windows and throw stones at Jewish soldiers, out of a desire to be good Germans. If they manage to destroy Israel and all its Jews, then they’ll be the best Germans of all.
This madness follows naturally from Universalist doctrine which does not mention the English boys, who were being good Germans before the time when those words meant anything to anyone, were gathering at anti-war rallies or the role of the left in undermining military action against Hitler, particularly after the Hitler-Stalin pact. It does not mention the leftist intellectuals who insisted that the Allies were no better than the Nazis. Why would they? People might draw sordid conclusions about their modern peers who insist that America is no better than Al-Qaeda or that Israel is no better than Hamas.
The Holocaust did not divert most Jewish Universalists from their course, no more than the pogroms or any other pivotal event did. For every Herzl who realized that the Universalist vision was bunk and worked toward a Jewish state, there were far more who went on preaching the same tired mantras of peace and justice for all, a new red dawn for the human race. And when the gulags and gas chambers were done, after wars of extermination launched three times by Arab Muslim alliances and all the rest of it, they are still holding on to the podium and denouncing Zionism as an obstacle to the progress of mankind.
The debate over Israel is only one of many such fights between Universalists and Nationalists of every creed and from every nation. It is a struggle between those who believe that nations, religions and cultures have innate worth, and those who believe that they can only exist on sufferance as vehicles of progressivism, until the time comes when mankind will have moved beyond the need for such crutches and becomes one great jello bowl of togetherness.
The Universalists go on commemorating the Holocaust, but they don’t understand what it means. They don’t believe that they are living within history, but at some tail end of history, a cosmic event horizon before a new era of global awareness kicks in. To them left-wing anti-semitism is “The New Anti-Semitism”, though only people who have not been paying attention could call it that. And the Holocaust was also a new event to them, rather than part of the continuity of Jewish history which had seen massacres in every age. To them there is no Pharaoh, Haman, Chmelnitsky, no sack of Jerusalem, poisoned wells and bodies burning in the public square. Everything is new to them and they are always being surprised by all the old things that keep showing up.
Anti-Semitism? Didn’t that go away in 1945? The Holocaust? Do you mean the one in Sudan or Rwanda? And on and on, they step out of doors only to find its raining and then debate the need for an umbrella and its impact on the environment. They are forever being surprised by events because they have no context. They are certain each time that the world has become a better place, and there is no need, as Einstein testified shortly after the Holocaust, for a Jewish State, as surely such an event could never happen again. History to them is always ending, and yet it never seems to finally end.
The significance of the Holocaust is the significance of history, and those who do not believe in history, who have cut themselves off from their own history, have no hope of grasping it. When the left looks at the Holocaust, as when it looks at anything else, it sees only the mirror of its own ideology, it manipulates everything into its own template until all the organic significance is gone, and its agenda sits enthroned on the corpse of history.
Israel did not emerge out of the Holocaust, it emerged out of a history in which the Holocaust was only another link in a chain of events, a pattern of outcomes. To say otherwise is to reject history, which is a thing the Universalists habitually do. The only way for them to continue repeating their folly is to kill history, so that everything is always new and so that no one learns anything from the past except to repeat their homilies and history becomes their educational theme park.
The Universalists, like the Nazis, sought to wipe out the Jewish people, as they seek to wipe out all people. Their genocide was to be a soft genocide, as H.G. Wells envisioned in a book that was published the year that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, “Between 1940 and 2059 in little more than a century, this antiquated obdurate culture disappeared. It and its Zionist state, its kosher food, the Law and all the rest of its paraphernalia, were completely merged in the human community.”
The method of the Wellsian final solution was fundamentally different from the Hitlerian one, where Hitler believed that the Jewish people had to be exterminated by physically forcing them out of the body of the Aryan race, Wells believed that they had to be exterminated by forcing them into the body of a shapeless human community. The final outcome either way was the same.
The Nazi Holocaust failed, but the Universalist Holocaust is still ongoing. Every time a leftist gets up to denounce Israel and to look forward to the day when the Zionist state, its Kosher food, and its Law and all the rest of it disappears, you are seeing the Universalist Holocaust grinding on. It is a slow process, but the willingness to wait, to pace the revolution, is where Wells differed from Lenin in their conversation, which Wells recorded in, “Russia in the Shadows”.
While we remember the Nazi Holocaust, those who want the Jewish people to disappear are still working toward 2059. And they have no shortage of Jewish assistants who are eager to complete the task, believing that a humanitarian utopia waits on the other side of the gas chamber door. The Jewish Universalists lost faith in G-d, but they did not lose faith in humanity. They still believe with all their hearts that if we strum the guitar loudly enough and sing, “Imagine”, that a better world will appear behind that door. Disbelieving in history, they have forgotten that the last time that door was opened in Russia, there was barbed wire and bitter cold on the other side.
Jewish Nationalists understood what was coming last time. They understand what is coming this time. Yet no matter how many times they are proven right, from Warsaw to Jerusalem, the beautiful dreamers refuse to listen to the pattern of history which proves them wrong. They’re still waiting for the European Union, the United Nations, for the dead hand of history to let go and the better world to be born out of the ashes of the old, out of the ashes of the Zionist state, its kosher food and its law.
We all die, sooner or later. It is what we leave behind that ventures into the uncertain future that gives us life. History is the road map that charts where the past lives that made ours possible has gone and shows us where the lives that we make possible may go. The Universalist Holocaust would burn those maps and kill our future for their better world. The Nazis have been defeated, the last of them is dying now, but the Universalists continue their long war against us.
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