The Irish President’s Holocaust Address Was a Predictable Disaster Michael Brendan Dougherty
The European impulse after the Holocaust is a kind of utopian death wish. The Zionist impulse is a thrilling will to live.
Above the expressed objections of the Jewish community in Ireland, Irish president Michael D. Higgins was invited to speak at the National Holocaust Memorial commemoration yesterday.
He managed to bungle it, of course. Twice he referred to the “attempted genocide” of the Holocaust. Not once in the last year has he qualified the word “genocide” when using it to describe Israel’s policy in Gaza. A granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor was physically dragged out of the ceremony.
Higgins gave what I have come to call the European religious answer to the Holocaust:
We must never lack the courage to challenge hatred and persecution in whatever forms they are sought to be manifested by promoting a world that is free from persecutions based on difference, such as faith or ethnicity, by embracing diversity, by working for equality, peace and justice, thus making possible a world that is free, too, from so many of the sources of war and conflict based on a distorted reflection of the ‘Other’.
Theologian and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw such a peaceful state as being achievable through a species evolution in human consciousness, believing that humankind is not only capable of living in peace but by its very structure cannot fail eventually to achieve peace.
It’s hard to communicate to the Irish mind how offensive this is. The closest I can come is to say that this is preaching Raglan Road manners to kids who have to grow up in Crumlin. But it’s something worse than that.
The European answer to the Holocaust is the moral imperative to dissolve national and religious loyalties to the maximum extent possible, to make “othering” itself a kind of impossibility. In a way, Europeanism is the moral imperative to live as Nietzsche’s last man. He can’t be dangerous because he believes in nothing.
It is an irony of history, however, that this last man is destined to be a gibbering antisemite. Why? Because Zionism came to a less utopian but more practical conclusion about the Holocaust: Nations that want to protect themselves need a modern state capable of defending them. This answer is practically the opposite of Europe’s, and on a religious question, oppositional answers are heresies. Europeans are thus possessed by a weird moral superiority that makes them thrilled to call Jews Nazis. Again, it’s easy for people who have been retired to the old folks’ home of history, existing behind America’s imperial protection, to look across the world to a border region and declare it full of thugs.
Europe’s impulse after the Holocaust is a kind of utopian death wish. Zionism’s is a thrilling will to live, even in the face of the difficulties and tragedies presented by life on this earth. You see it in Israelis’ birth rates. You see it in their foreign policy. For Jews everywhere committed to Zion, you see it in their faces.
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