RUTHFULLY YOURS

On 27 January 1945, Soviet forces liberated those then still imprisoned at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration and death camp. Eighty years on, millions of young people in the West know nothing about Auschwitz or indeed the Holocaust itself. They are ignorant of the gravest crime of the 20th century.

A recent survey has shown that one in nine young Germans has not heard of the Holocaust. A quarter cannot name a single concentration camp, death camp or ghetto. It also showed that ‘nearly half of American adults could not identify any killing sites of the Holocaust’.

A poll carried out by The Economist and YouGov in 2023 made for equally disturbing reading. It showed that more than a fifth of young Americans, aged between 18 and 29, agreed with the statement that ‘the Holocaust is a myth’, while a further 30 per cent neither agreed nor disagreed. That means that less than half of young Americans firmly believe the Holocaust actually happened.

This growing historical amnesia is worrying enough. But of even greater concern is the way in which the meaning of the Holocaust has been distorted and inverted by our cultural and political elites, and weaponised by anti-Israel zealots.

Indeed, Auschwitz itself – a death camp designed for the genocide of the Jews – is fast being turned into something else: an all-purpose symbol of human cruelty. It is becoming Disneyfied, transformed into a gruesome theme park for those looking for an easy moral message.

Take UNESCO, arguably the most powerful international cultural institution in the world. In its official assessment of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, a World Heritage site, it talks of its ‘outstanding universal value’. It claims that the camp serves as a symbol of ‘humanity’s cruelty to its fellow human beings in the 20th century’.

To treat Auschwitz as a generic symbol of cruelty, as UNESCO has done, renders it totally banal. There are countless examples of humanity’s terrible cruelty throughout history, but there is only one Holocaust. Its unique historical significance derives from the fact it was an industrialised extermination campaign singularly directed at Jewish people. And it’s that meaning we are now in danger of losing altogether.

Indeed, in recent decades, the Holocaust has been increasingly detached from the experience of Jewish suffering. It is becoming an all-purpose brand for campaigners and activists to use to lend moral weight to their causes. Animal-rights activists talk of a ‘Holocaust on your plate’. Anti-abortion campaigners in the US have denounced a Holocaust of fetuses.

It is now a term to be applied to all cases of human aggression and bloody conflict. There is, supposedly, an African American Holocaust, a Bosnian Holocaust, a Rwandan Holocaust. And of course, there is now the Gaza Holocaust. It seems that every act of apparent war, aggression or victimisation invites the label of a Holocaust.

The Holocaust has been ripped out of its historical context. So much so that its historical meaning has now been thoroughly inverted by assorted anti-Israel activists. After Hamas’s pogrom on 7 October 2023, ‘pro-Palestine’ protesters quickly characterised Israel’s self-defence as Nazi-like aggression. On their marches, they waved placards featuring a Star of David inside a swastika. They compared Israel’s siege of Gaza to Nazi concentration camps. They cast Israeli soldiers fighting to defend their nation as Nazi stormtroopers. In the most grotesque inversion of all, they cast the Hamas terrorists responsible for the atrocities of 7 October in the role of the Holocaust’s Jewish victims.

It now seems that Gaza is equated with Auschwitz itself. In May 2024, pro-Palestine demonstrators went so far as to disrupt an Auschwitz remembrance march with a ‘Stop Genocide’ protest. According to Maung Zarni, a supposed genocide expert, Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza is a ‘repeat of Auschwitz’, and a ‘collective white imperialist man’s genocide’.

This wilful warping of the historical record is breathtaking. If Gaza is the new Auschwitz, then where are the packed trains transporting their ‘passengers’ to their death? Where are the deadly gas chambers? Where is the routine violation of the corpses of the dead? Anti-Israel zealots are not merely robbing the Holocaust of its horrific reality, they are also hollowing out its moral significance.

Holocaust inversion is rife among the anti-Israel crowd. As Lesley Klaff explains, it involves both ‘an inversion of reality’, casting Israelis ‘as the “new” Nazis and the Palestinians as the “new” Jews’, and an ‘inversion of morality’, in which the ‘Holocaust is presented as a moral lesson for, or even a moral indictment of, “the Jews”’.

Anti-Israel propaganda is infused with Holocaust inversion. The UK-based Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) has even called for the boycott of today’s Holocaust Memorial Day on the grounds it is ‘morally unacceptable’ that Gaza is not considered as a genocide alongside the Holocaust. It wrote to 460 town halls and educational centres asking them to boycott the event.

The words ‘Never Again’ have become thoroughly corrupted. Decontextualised and Disneyfied, the Holocaust has become a weapon to be wielded against the very people who were its historical victims. The ease with which Hamas and its Western supporters have turned the memory of the Holocaust against its historical victims is an indictment of Western culture.

We must start reasserting an uncompromising commitment to ‘Never Again’. Eighty years after its liberation, the memory of Auschwitz must be freed from the powerful forces committed to distorting its meaning.

Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.