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

Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance, by Debarati Sanyal. 2015. Fordham University Press, New York

Holocaust Subterfuge in Hogging Attention and Covertly Marginalizing Other Genocides

This work focuses on the Jews’ Holocaust in a Frankocentric sense. I consider some items of broader significance.

HOLOCAUST SUBTERFUGE: INSTRUMENTALIZING THE HOLOCAUST AND INDOCTRINATING CHILDREN

Holocaust educators and politicians often go to great lengths to make Holocaust lessons “stick”. For instance, Sanyal writes, “In spring 2008 French president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed that each French primary student bear the memory of a Jewish child deported from France and killed in the camps…Children were envisioned as repositories of national memory, bound to the nation by their identification with the dead.” (p. 240).

Identification with which dead? Jewish dead, of course, and never with Polish dead, nor with any of the child victims of non-Jewish genocides. It is yet another special right for Jews.

This Holocaust manipulation faced pushback. Author Sanyal continues, “Predictably, the proposal provoked a wave of criticism from educators, politicians, and mental health professionals for its instrumentalization of Holocaust memory and its disregard for children’s well-being. The state’s encroachment on the educational apparatus also met with vocal protest, as did the threat of turning the discipline of history into an affective response to the past.” (p. 241. Emphasis added). No other genocide is even in a position to be instrumentalized.

WHY THE RECOGNITION OF ALL GENOCIDES IS A MORAL IMPERATIVE

Yes, non-Jewish genocides matter. The author quotes a French-language article by Esther Benbassa, as follows, “‘A genocide’s official recognition is a remedy that heals [panse] if possible the wounds of those who suffered, and even more so, their descendants. It draws attention to the injustices and the crimes of history and induces a legitimate recognition in the public.'” (p. 321).

It should be obvious what happens in the standard situation of Holocaust monopoly. The wounds of non-Jewish genocides do not heal for the bearers. Nor do they heal in the descendants. And no attention is drawn to the injustices which non-Jews faced. Non-Jewish genocides are deprived of their legitimate recognition by the public. For more on how the ignoring of non-Jewish genocides inflicts a “second wounding” on the affected peoples, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/victimhood-competition-jews-beat-ukes-govier/

Genocide-Recognition Equality Now!

HOLOCAUST SUBTERFUGE. HAVING IT BOTH WAYS: THE HOLOCAUST IS SIMULTANEOUSLY TRIBALIST AND UNIVERSAL

Sanyal makes this revealing comment, “Paradoxically, the Shoah is constructed as both an irreducibly singular event and a universal paradigm of racialized violence in the public sphere…We witness a version of this classificatory collapse in the contemporary French memory laws, where the Shoah, in its singular scope, is defended as a universal paradigm of racialized violence and thereby co-opts the specificities of other legacies of violence such as slavery or colonialism.” (p. 218. Emphasis added).

Non-Jewish genocides are most certainly also co-opted. Everything is just folded into the Holocaust, and so other legacies of violence are marginalized. So much for the doubletalk (not paradox) about the Holocaust being exceptional and at the same time universal–whichever is convenient at the time. For example, saying that the Holocaust is a stand-in for the Rwandan genocide makes about as much sense as saying that the Rwandan genocide is a stand-in for the Jews’ Holocaust. To call the Jews’ bluff, we only need to ask the Jews if they would find the latter arrangement acceptable. I rather doubt it!

Enough Holocaust subterfuge.