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

Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings, edited by Andy Pearce. 2018. Routledge, London and New York

Collective Narcissism? The Jews’ Holocaust is Taught in Poland

In this review, I focus primarily on the way that the Polish educational system is maligned for not quite falling in line with Jewish ways of thinking. As always, the attacks revolve around the presumed special-ness of the Holocaust and of the Poles not being contrite enough about real or imagined wrongdoing to Jews. The maligning is laughably ironic, as shown next.

TURNING AROUND THE HOLOCAUST-MEMORY INSINUATIONS DIRECTED AGAINST POLAND

I first focus on the article by Mikolaj Winiewski, Marta Beneda, Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, and Marta Witkowska. The foregoing is a sampling of the attacks on Poland. Ironically, if Poles are guilty of the following accusations, then Jews are 100 times more guilty!

The authors write, “Belief in the morality of one’s victimized nation and competitive victimhood produce a distorted image of history, and constitute a threat to positive intergroup relations” (p. 161). But who does this better than the Jews?

They continue, “The battle for victim status has tended to inhibit the empathy of Poles for the suffering of others, making them unlikely to acknowledge the complexity of Polish attitudes towards Jews during the Holocaust.” (p. 161). Empathy, huh? How much empathy do Jews show, towards all the non-Jewish victims of genocide, when they selfishly insist that the Holocaust was variously unique, unprecedented, or the greatest crime in history?

Winiewski et al. go on and on, “Underlining the suffering endured by one’s nation and failing to see losses suffered by other groups has more serious psychological consequences than just a biased interpretation of numerical data.” (p. 167). How does respect for others’ suffering square with the ongoing Jewish monopolization of Auschwitz? After all, we are reminded, non-Jews were “only” 9% of the victims.

Not done yet, the authors continue, “For example, some nations construct their identity around the belief in the uniqueness of their suffering; this may result in competitive victimhood, which constitutes a base for the so-called siege mentality…” (p. 168. Italics in original). This is deliciously ironic: Who more than the Jews exhibit a siege mentality (e. g. the Holocaust must be perpetually taught so that violence against Jews never happens again), and energetically promote the supposed all-importance of the Holocaust?

To crown the whole Judeocentric fraud, the authors introduce the term collective narcissism and dump this charge on the Poles. They comment, “Collective narcissism is associated with negative out-group attitudes and hostility, especially when action of the out-group are perceived as threatening to the in-group’s positive image.” (p. 170). But none other than the Jews are the absolute masters of collective narcissism: They grandstand about their virtues, make themselves out to be perpetually aggrieved victims (whence Holocaust supremacism), blame everything on the goyim, and never ever admit that they have done anything wrong. If this is not collective narcissism, then what is?

POLITICS OF MEMORY: THE HOLOCAUST IS IMPOSED ON ALL THE NATIONS

All this “Holocaust bullying” is not only with regards to Poland. Caplan and Imber portray the Holocaust as something so special and so important that it has some kind of inherent “right” to intrude on other nations’ historical memories. Without using this phrasing, they write, “In general, most countries commemorate days that relate to their own national history, such as independence days, birthdays of monarchs, and other anniversaries…The Shoah is an unprecedented chapter in history and its relevance reverberates in classrooms around the world for students of all ages to this day.” (p. 174). Indeed, it does. Once again Jewish collective narcissism makes this so.

COMPARATIVE GENOCIDE: THE HOLOCAUST RULES OVER ALL OTHER GENOCIDES

If you think that the greater attention to non-Jewish genocides, in recent years, has finally dethroned the Holocaust, think again. The Holocaust has been mystified anew in order to maintain its privileged status over all other genocides. The onetime “uniqueness” of the Holocaust has largely been replaced by other Orwellian terms, such as the Holocaust as a “paradigmatic genocide”.

Author Andy Pearce comments, “Depicting the destruction of Europe’s Jews as a paradigm is a move which–willfully or otherwise–necessarily stakes a claim for its uniqueness among other genocides; asserting, in effect, that the Holocaust is ‘uniquely unique’. Yet ‘subscribing to the Holocaust’s special difference’, even if employing ‘euphemisms’ and ‘near-synonyms’ rather than the word ‘unique’, has become ever-more untenable given advances in genocide studies and, to a lesser extent, post-colonial studies in recent decades. Despite this, the paradigm thesis has lost none of its social, cultural, or moral capital.” (p. 43. Emphasis added).

The notion of the Holocaust as a “paradigmatic genocide” is a rather creative Judeocentric invention, and another manifestation of Jewish collective narcissism. It ascribes quasi-magical properties to the Holocaust, which moreover no other genocide gets. No one, for instance, suggests that the Gypsy genocide is a paradigm for the Armenian genocide, or that the Holodomor is an exemplar for the Rwandan genocide.

STIFLING STUDENT UNDERSTANDING OF GENOCIDES

Finally, the notion of the Holocaust a paradigmatic genocide actually stifles the education about genocides. Pearce quips, “With the notion the Holocaust is paradigmatic holding sway in the fields of Holocaust education and remembrance, as well as in political and historical culture, much pedagogy and policy abstracts the Holocaust from the phenomenon of genocide at the same time as positing it as the genocidal archetype. This process does little to truly advance students’ knowledge and understanding of what the Holocaust was, what genocide is, or how either are to be thought about, remembered, and responded to.” (p. 41. Emphasis in original). It is educational malpractice.

JEWISH COLLECTIVE NARCISSISM: THE CONNIPTION ABOUT PRESIDENT TRUMP NOT EXPLICITLY MENTIONING THE JEWS

During the 2017 Holocaust Memorial Day observances, the Trump administration sought to give non-Jewish genocides equal attention to the Jews’ Holocaust. Some Jews went ballistic. The editors try to blame Trump, “The White House was combative in the face of widespread criticism by institutions like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), the Anne Frank Centre, and the Anti-Defamation League [ADL]. The statement was intended, explained spokeswoman Hope Hicks, to take ‘into account all of those who suffered’ and be inclusive towards other victims of Nazism.” (p. xviii).

Besides being a transparent act of politicizing the Holocaust, the attack against Trump was a rather childish manifestation of Jewish collective narcissism.