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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37391 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."

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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