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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   39169 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Is the progressive left developing it's own form of Holocaust denial?

I came across this video on Twitter where an ITV presenter informs us that:

"Six million people were killed in Nazi concentration camps during the second world war, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".

This reminded me of something similar I saw last year, where then Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf talked for several minutes about the victims of the Holocaust without mentioning the...distinguishing ethnicity of who exactly was most targeted.

The above examples might just be two cases of human error, although I find it hard to imagine how such an oversight could have taken place in the ITV situation. And while this sort of thing stands out less in tweet format, where you don't have many characters to begin with, it still seems strange that Angela Rayner can't find space to mention Jewish victims when Keir Starmer manages to.

Does this point to the emergence of a longer term trend? Despite proportionally being the victims of most hate crimes, Jews are too pale and too successful for the left to care about advocating for (unless it's for the purpose of making dubious claims of fascist sympathies against right-wingers). Given that for many on the progressive left being anti-Nazi is the primary sources of their moral legitimacy, I do wonder if many of them feel the need to find more sympathetic victims of the Holocaust whose future wellbeing they can claim to be the only reliable safe-guarders of.

With the broad racial nature of the progressive coalition, it's also impossible to rule out straightforward antisemitism from many of the far-left's more diverse members. I wouldn't be surprised if the ITV staff member responsible for writing the script was from a Muslim background.

It is of course impossible to divorce this issue from Israel. Despite strenuous claims that anti-Zionism != anti-Semitism (which can technically be true), I imagine that even some committed progressives struggle with the cognitive dissonance of claiming to care about Jewish well-being while simultaneously advocating for the massacring of 50% of their remaining global population. It could well be just too tempting to give up this fig-leaf and instead aim to eventually shift the perception of Jews towards never having been serious victims of oppression in the first place. This comes with the bonus of being able to credibly claim that Israel is the modern day equivalent to Nazi Germany.

Is there something there? Or am I reading too much into a handful of small cases?

ETA: 15 upvotes and 13 downvotes. This is most likely my most polarising post in the short time I've been active here. I wonder what that says.

Consider also the other side of the coin:

As I've posted before, it may be possible that the Nazi regime could lose those qualities of evil we've assigned to it from history, if political realignments continue as extrapolated. After all, for those pro-Israeli Jews being criticized, one would have to look at what happened in the Gaza War, and perhaps conclude that "this is what 'securing a future for your people' looks like."

I think that the defence and moral justification of what Israel has done in Gaza is an extremely bad thing for the jews in the long term for these (and other) reasons. Setting a precedent that inconvenient minorities can just be liquidated and murdered to acquire more living space for your ethnicity is not, in my opinion, going to be particularly pleasant for the diaspora - especially when you look at how quickly antisemitism is rising around the world. Most people agreed with "Never again" as a general principle, but if it turns out that it just meant "Never again to us, we can do it to others" a lot of that support is going to evaporate, and fast.

Looking on from a European perspective, I always found it curious how much the American narrative around the Nazis focussed on the Holocaust to the exclusion of everything else. In Germany's own self-flagellating historiography (at least the version of it delivered in the Eastern states) it maybe is assigned something on the order of 50% of the total weight of sin, with the rest being split between assorted other internal oppression, warmongering, the eastward expansion in search of Lebensraum, and the attendant scouring of Slavs; and in Russia, the focus is naturally overwhelmingly on expansionist conquest and the extermination of their own. That's also why in the context of the Ukraine war, "Zelenskiy is Jewish" looks like a slam dunk argument against "Ukrainian Nazis" to listeners living in the American memespace, but like a barely relevant piece of trivia to those living in the Russian one.

I see too much of an interlocking web of conflicting interests in place in Europe to enable a rehabilitation of the Nazis anytime soon - even in the maximalist scenario of both "Israel is evil" and "killing Soviets is good" catching on, there is still the circumstance that Poland (America's new protégé in the EU) relies on the Nazi invasion of itself for its national myth-building and as a cudgel to keep German interests in check when they are at odds with its own, and the meme is also a very reliable tool against nativist-antiglobalist parties that both are easily associated with the Nazis and a constant threat to ruling class objectives.

I think it goes like this: during the war and after the war, there was already a consensus that Hitler represented a historical form of evil, but during that period the main thing he was considered evil for was warmongering, ie. starting it, all the flagrant invasions, all the bodies (military and civilian) caused by the war, the industrial efficiency of the war and so on. For a lot of countries, of course, the most raw memories were related to German occupation itself and its depredations, or German bombings, or so on. However, after the war, it was the Soviets who staked a stronger claim to this narrative due to bearing the yeoman's burden for fighting the war.

The West soon started to find the focus on the war itself sort of problematic, not only due to the Soviet narrative but the necessity of getting the West German war machine back in order and finding places from former Nazis in the said war machine, getting rid of pacifist tendencies the war narrative was creating etc. This particularly meant America, which hadn't had the experience of German occupation on its own territory.

Thus, in the new narrative, a particular facet of the war - terror against civilians, the Holocaust - took a major role, with the war being cast in terms of democracy and genocide. This, for instance, allowed a comparison of Soviets and Germans as totalitarian states, since Soviets were also associated with persecution, killing and camps - and it actually facilitated the integration of Germany into the military apparatus of the West, since it focused on one particular sin that Germany could repent from vigorously through reparations, while the idea of "good Wehrmacht, bad SS" in terms of the Holocaust (later to be challenged, sure) meant that sufficiently non-Holocaust-contacted German personnel, and some whitewashed Holocaust-connected ones as well, could be utilized.

The Russian WW2 narrative, meanwhile, as said, continues to focus particularly on "the war itself" and the atrocities committed by Germans on all Soviet citizens, implicitly cast as Russians, which means that references to Zelenskyy being Jewish and so on do not really answer this narrative mcuh at all.

The Russian WW2 narrative, meanwhile, as said, continues to focus particularly on "the war itself" and the atrocities committed by Germans on all Soviet citizens

Ironic, because the red army was all about committing atrocities on civilians.

It's not particularly expectional about nations to focus more on atrocities committed by others on them than on atrocities they've committed on others.

I'm somewhat surprised I haven't come across memes responding to pictures of destruction in Gaza with pictures of Berlin in 1945 with the caption "What did you think punching Nazis looked like?" But I have a personal policy of not directly engaging with meme warfare ("memefare"?), and maybe this has already happened somewhere I'm not following.

It's hard to make Hamas looks like Nazis. People have a list of things they associate with the Nazis, usually it's something like: discipline, uniforms, industrialized cruelty, progressivism, scientific discrimination. Religious fanatics led by rich and cynical manipulators don't look like that at all.

I mean, there was that whole "Hitler 2" storefront in Gaza. That was a thing.

Does this make Indians Nazis as well? https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/tasteless-but-true-made-in-india-hitler-ice-cream-cafe/story-C6usCqTUqv4zAeU30b0GVM.html

Now I want to learn what karak mejaz is.

Also, while it's just one isolated post, I did find this on Bluesky today.

I actually thought about that very idea before, I'm intrigued to read that a confluence of interests between antisemites and Zionists was hypothetically conceived. It seems logical that you'd want a place you could send Jews if you didn't like them that much.

But raw ethnic antisemitism just doesn't make logical sense to me, if you really hate Jews I presume you'd consider the Holocaust a great achievement, but antisemites deny it happened, and if you think Jewish presence in your country creates a disloyal class, presumably you'd want somewhere to banish them, but antisemites hate even the concept of a Jewish state. Frankly, I've never been persuaded from my core assumption that hardcore antisemitism is just people looking for a scapegoat to pin their ingroup's problems on the outgroup, and if the scapegoat goes away the problems can no longer be blamed on it.

But also, honestly, I don't know that the far-right actually supports Israel in large numbers, although I'm sure it happens. It seems to me that far-rightists who hate Jews tend to really despise the state of Israel for similar reasons to the left, and believe that any support for the Israelis in the West is due to "Jewish control of the media."

Possibly the bluesky poster is saying someone like Trump is far right, but I consider the idea that the firmly pro-Israel part of the right is either far-right or anti-semitic to be laughable. These are the most philosemitic gentiles who have ever existed on the face of the earth, they brag about how much they love Jews and how much they want Jews to like them.

….if you think Jewish presence in your country creates a disloyal class, presumably you'd want somewhere to banish them, but antisemites hate even the concept of a Jewish state.

I mean, interwar Poland (largest Jewish population in Europe, second largest in the world, ~20% of world Jews) was pretty enthusiastic about Jews emigrating en masse to, sure, Palestine, why not.

That’s fair, and good context — my point is mostly about modern-day antisemitism of the kind Jewish people seem to be worried about, where I’ve rarely seen this; I’ve seen a lot of people complain about “New York Jews” but few, if any, who make such complaints and then talk about they should all go to Israel. It seems more like aimless, grumpy complaints, or like sour grapes, like I’ve said, rather than something thought out.

It seems to me that far-rightists who hate Jews tend to really despise the state of Israel for similar reasons to the left, and believe that any support for the Israelis in the West is due to "Jewish control of the media."

IRL antisemites giving a take on the war in Gaza will like use the term 'sand nigger' and talk about how the Gazans are all terrorists.

if you really hate Jews I presume you'd consider the Holocaust a great achievement

It's very possible to be a racist without also supporting mass murder. Maybe someone doesn't want to live around a certain race, or believes races in general should have their own nations, but isn't an insane mass murderer.

You've missed the second part of what I said: I said that antisemites often both deny the Holocaust and despise the concept of a Jewish state. If you "believe races in general should have their own nations", but not the Jews, and also don't want to live around them, essentially what you're saying is that the Jews should go away, but there's not any place on earth you can put them... well, that rather sounds like the public position of the Nazi party before the Holocaust. The final solution was final because they decided the other solutions wouldn't work to get rid of the Jews they despised. If someone doesn't want to live around Jews, hates the concept of a Jewish state, and despises mass murder, it rather prompts the question of what exactly they want Jewish people to do.

Which brings me back to my point: the crux of antisemitism isn't about trying to do something with Jews, even though that can spiral out of control -- it's about finding a scapegoat for the ingroup's problems. "Our society would be grand and peaceful and glorious, were it not for those dastardly Jews!" is a refrain heard from Toledo to Berlin to Little Rock; somehow the cause of good German Aryans white liberals being liberal isn't white people's culture, but the Jews, because good German Aryans white people are, of course, the master race with protagonist energy, they've just been duped by the Jews and their damn verbal intelligence. It lets people rectify the purity of the ingroup, by blaming all its problems on the outgroup. But it also says some pretty pathetic things about the ingroup, if you think about it.

I get why Jews make an easy scapegoat -- they do have a strong sense of ingroup-loyalty, they do have a lot of success in fields requiring high verbal fluency, and they do have a unique, even odd, culture, which makes them easily distrusted, especially in pre-modern societies that never prized pluralism. But I think the error of the Zionists who claimed antisemites would be on their side is they thought the point of antisemitism was about trying to not live near Jews or wanting an ethnostate -- in fact the very things you're saying -- rather than getting really, really angry at Jews for problems they didn't actually cause, because they're an easy scapegoat.

The idea that Trump would be an anti-semite when his daughter converted to Judaism to marry into an Orthodox Jewish family is insane to me.

if you really hate Jews I presume you'd consider the Holocaust a great achievement, but antisemites deny it happened,

This is because a lot of anti-semitism discourse is not really about the jews. Most anti-semites have never met a jew. There are some who just look for someone, anyone, to hate, but I think a lot of rightwingers are "antisemitic" because of the anti-semitism discourse. There is this line of argument, which Ill summarise as "If society could do this, it could do the holocaust if it wanted. As a jew, I feel threatened by this.", which is frequently deployed against them, where the "this" includes things they consider central to a functional society. That gets them really mad, and thats basically it. You dont even need actual jews to make this argument, the lefties will do it for them.

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