Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, by Michael Rothberg. 2009

Holocaust Dissembling: “Multidirectional Memory”: An Attempt to Deflect Argument About the Pre-Eminence of the Holocaust Over All Other Genocides

This book appears to be an attempt to mend fences, between the Jewish and African Americans, in the wake of the criticisms, by some African-American leaders, of the preeminence of the Jews’ Holocaust over African American slavery in the USA.

Consider what often has been called victim competition and even victimhood Olympics. Author Michael Rothberg suggests that this need not be so. He writes, “Against the framework that understands collective memory as COMPETITIVE memory–as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources–I suggest that we consider memory as MULTIDIRECTIONAL: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing: as productive and not private.” (p. 3; Emphasis in original).

But this is just a clever act of changing the subject. Victimhood competition can certainly co-exist alongside any constructive engagement between genocides! Let us take a closer look at this.

HOLOCAUST DISSEMBLING. MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY: A FEINT

The fact that non-Jewish genocides can sometimes “ride the coattails” of the Holocaust is unremarkable. If it weren’t for the fact that the Holocaust saturates western public consciousness in the first place, why would spokespersons of non-Jewish genocides feel the need to “ride the coattails” of the Holocaust in order for their genocides to potentially become visible?

The phrase “Multidirectional Memory” itself has Holocaust supremacist connotations. It effectively transforms the Holocaust into a self-appointed, privileged, “gateway” genocide or “yardstick” genocide through which all other genocides must pass, or to which they must all be compared with, if they are to be heard, understood, and recognized. This is built-in into the very language we commonly use. For instance, whenever we speak of the Armenian Holocaust, the Black Holocaust, the Gypsy Holocaust, the gay Holocaust, or the Polocaust (Polokaust), we are tacitly paying tribute to the Jews’ Holocaust as the most important genocide, and we are tacitly affirming that non-Jewish genocides are be understood by the public with reference to the Jews’ Holocaust.

Without saying it in so many words, Rothberg tacitly recognizes as much, as he quips, “Along with its ‘centering’ in public consciousness in the last decades, the Holocaust has come to be understood in public imagination, especially in Europe, Israel, and North America, as a unique, sui generis event.” (p. 8). In view of this fact, how could the public not be under the strong impression that the Jews’ Holocaust is above the genocides of all other peoples–moreover regardless of so-called multidirectional memory? In the end, it sounds like the multidirectionality of the Holocaust is just a disguise for Holocaust supremacy. Once the mask is removed, the Holocaust still reigns supreme. In other words, the master (Jew) and the slave (the goy) may engage in dialogue, and the dialogue may be productive and sincere, but the master is still the master and the slave is still the slave. Nothing substantive has changed.

The facts are clear. Just because the Holocaust can sometimes be cross-referenced with other tragic events does not mean that the dominance of the Holocaust, over all other genocides, has lessened, much less disappeared. So we still remain on square one.  In addition, whatever “multidirectional memory” exists, it is kept on a very short leash. Many Jews nowadays complain about “Holocaust distortion”, “Holocaust obfuscation”, and “Holocaust trivialization”“. Evidently, there is only one valid way to understand the Jews’ Holocaust and only one narrow Judeocentric way that the Holocaust can validly be juxtaposed with other genocidal events. So much for “multidirectional memory”!

ISSUES INVOLVING NAZISM AND COMMUNISM

This book raises certain issues that deserve a deeper examination than presented in this book. Author Michael Rothberg (p. 228) mentions some individuals who found parallels between Nazi German conduct against the French and that of France towards its colony Algeria. However, the reader should realize that this is an old Nazi German exculpatory tactic. Klaus Barbie, the onetime Gestapo chief of Lyon, said that his torturing of French captives, in Gestapo dungeons, was no different from the French tortures of Algerian nationalist captives. At the earlier Nuremberg trials, the Nazi defendants said that their conduct should be excused because, after all, it was on the same level as the British concentration camps in the Boer War, and really no different from the American treatment of the Indians.

This book, along with many others nowadays, indexes Communism with a lower-case “c”. (p. 368). Why? Is it done in order to lesson the crimes of Communism relative to those of Nazism (against Jews, that is)?