HOLOCAUST Memorial Day, the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp by the Red Army, is one of the most solemn days in the labour movement calendar.
The industrialised effort to exterminate Europe’s Jews, Roma and Sinti, alongside others the fascists deemed unworthy of life like gay, disabled or mentally ill people, remains the most systematic and calculated genocide in history. It must never be denied or downplayed.
Yet the meaning of Holocaust Memorial Day is increasingly obscured. Partly this is due to the rewriting of history.
Holocaust relativism presents the Nazis’ programme of racist mass murder as just one among many crimes of “totalitarianism,” postulating a false equivalence between Nazi Germany and the country which played the biggest part in its defeat, the Soviet Union.
The result is an equivocation between those who ran the death camps and those who liberated them — something masked in much British media discourse by referring vaguely to Auschwitz’s liberation by “the Allies” rather than the Soviets.
This has already regressed in some quarters into implied support for the Nazis or their local auxiliaries as anti-Russian freedom fighters, as we saw when a Ukrainian Waffen-SS veteran was applauded by MPs in the Canadian parliament, or when Estonia’s Foreign Ministry posted tweets denouncing the 80th anniversary of the Soviet assault on Tallinn, not mentioning the context that Tallinn was under Nazi occupation. Calling out such distortions of history should not, of course, blind us to the manipulation of the memory of the second world war by the present Russian government for its own purposes either.
The removal of context allows the memory of the Holocaust to be deployed cynically by Britain’s rulers too.
The UN resolution establishing Holocaust Memorial Day is clear that its message is a universal one: “The Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of one third of the Jewish people, along with countless members of other minorities, will forever be a warning… of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.” It also “condemns without reserve all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief.”
This text calls on us to apply the lessons of the Holocaust to all instances of racist persecution and all genocides.
It is disregarded by a British government which will not call out the Islamophobia of the far-right rioters who attacked mosques last summer, and which has been complicit in an assault on the people of Gaza recognised as a genocide by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and as plausibly amounting to one by the International Court of Justice.
Indeed, the memory of the Holocaust is misused to shield the state of Israel from accountability for its acts of war and ethnic cleansing, and it will be interesting to see which British politicians have the courage to condemn Donald Trump’s call this weekend to “clean out” “probably a million-and-a-half people” from Gaza to facilitate its colonisation by Israel.
So far removed are some self-appointed authorities from the reality of the Holocaust as a product of fascism and war that the Anti-Defamation League, quick to accuse Palestine solidarity campaigners of anti-semitism, could only admit to an “awkward hand gesture” when confronted by evidence of a fascist salute by Trump ally and tech tycoon Elon Musk.
Both anti-semitic and Islamophobic hate crimes are on the rise. Confronting that means returning to the real lessons of the Holocaust, as thousands will do at local trade union and political meetings this week, though our government will not.
That does not mean depoliticising it. The Holocaust was political, emerging from the ideology of fascism. When we say “never again,” we must commit ourselves to anti-fascism — which is sadly once again an urgent political cause.
