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

Genocide and International Relations, by Martin Shaw. 2013. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York

Holocaust Sacralized: How the Holocaust Came to Marginalize All Other Genocides

This book generally follows the typical Holocaust supremacist memes and adds some new ones. I focus on these.

““SACRALIZING THE HOLOCAUST EVIL” AND THAT OF NO OTHER GENOCIDE

Quoting another author, Shaw comments, “Of course, ‘millions of persons were victims of Nazi mass murder in addition to the Jews–Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, handicapped persons, and political opponents of all types.’ But in the process of sacralizing the Holocaust evil, ‘virtually all of these non-Jewish victims were filtered out of the emerging collective representation.'” (p. 18).

So, there you have it–in plain language. The mystification of the Holocaust is in overdrive. The Holocaust, and no other genocide, has imaginatively been transformed into a sacralized evil. The Holocaust sits on the pedestal, above all other genocides, and, as if this were not enough, all other genocides are excluded (in Shaw’s words, filtered out).

The Judeocentric construct of sacralized Holocaust evil is closely related to that of the Holocaust as radical evil. (p. 18). The message is obvious: No other genocide can possibly be as evil as the Jews’ Holocaust. This is tantamount to saying that the death of a goy is not as significant as the death of a Jew. If this is not racist, then what is?

LIFTING THE HOLOCAUST FROM WWII AND TRANSFORMING IT INTO AN EVENT OF COSMIC SIGNIFICANCE

It gets better and better. Author Martin Shaw discusses how the Holocaust came to be elevated above all other genocides. He comments, “The starting point for the paradigm has been the assumption that there are stand-alone episodes which can be compared. Here the Holocaust influence is very evident. In constructing it as a paradigmatic evil event, modern Western culture simultaneously emphasized the distinctive features of the Nazi mass murder of the Jews and de-emphasized the ways in which that campaign of atrocity was linked to others (against other populations and by other actors) as well as to their common Second World War context…Yet, as we have seen, the Nazi extermination of the Jews was not originally understood as a stand-alone episode, but as part of the wider sets of Nazi and indeed many-sided atrocities in the world war.” (Emphasis added, p. 31). Once, common sense ruled.

All this has expanded. Various oft-repeated messages and directives reinforce Holocaust supremacism. Earlier, the ruling message was that we must not “relativize the Holocaust”. Now the Holocaust thought police goes further. It insists that we must not compare the Holocaust with any other historical event (except perhaps to show its inferiority to the Holocaust). The thought police decreed that we must not compare the crimes of the Communists to those of the Nazis (against Jews, that is). The Holocaust establishment gets all excited, and goes after Poland, whenever she dares to include the German-made Holocaust in the broader context of Nazi German crimes against Poles. The Holocaust supremacist nonsense never ends.