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Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?
With everything going on in the world, it's notable that this article from the upcoming May issue of The Atlantic is featured as the One Story to Read Today. It deserves to be closely studied- not just skimmed and written off as "progressivism gone amok."
Earlier in the thread, @JTarrou theorizes on politics replacing religion:
I'm not shy about being a Holocaust Revisionist, and I'm aware that it seems to be a strange hobby horse to the vast majority of people including most here. Why dedicate so much time and credibility to this issue? It's not profitable, it's extremely low status, there's an extremely low chance of Revisionist criticisms of the narrative breaking through the mainstream in the near future. Ostensibly it's a controversy surrounding history rather than an immediately relevant cultural or technological issue. The reasoning is simple: the Holocaust already is the religion in the West that fulfills the function proposed by JTarrou. Long before I would cite any Revisionist or anti-Semite to make that case, I would plead for anybody who doubts that to closely read this Atlantic piece by Horn.
The Holocaust religion is growing and evolving with technology, and the motives have never been more transparent.
If you read the article title maybe hoping for some nuance or self-reflection on the Holocaust Industry, you will be disappointed. According to Horn, Holocaust education is essential, but it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews, particularly in young children.
One of Horn's chief complaints is that Holocaust education fails to impart on children the uniqueness of Jews. On the one hand, this is a fair criticism of Holocaust curriculum which is rife with the "Jews were completely normal and, one day for no reason at all, everybody hated them." On the other hand, it makes the political motivations of the Holocaust religion more transparent: the uniqueness and particularity of Jews should be explicitly taught and celebrated as curriculum. Jews aren't normal, they are special. If that sounds like an uncharitable interpretation, consider this exchange she had with a Holocaust educator:
Gas Chamber Simulacra
The Dallas Holocaust Museum was opened in 2019 and features prominently in her article: it covers an entire city block in the historical downtown district (Dara complains that it has almost two wings dedicated to the suffering of other minorities in a noble act of self-erasure). If this isn't a proselytizing religion then I do not know what is. Many thousands of children will be herded to these temples of tolerance to Learn their Lessons.
They will be taught the moral thesis of the world, Jews, and the moral antithesis, Hitler. They will sit in the pews learning from the saintly apparition about the Holocaust, using a conversational AI that is no doubt archaic compared to what will soon be displayed in Holocaust museums across the world. They will write down the lessons they have learned and make pledges (i.e. to "welcome and help new immigrants coming into Chicago").
The article covers the ways technology is used to teach the Holocaust to children in the form of holograms, AI, and VR. Dana describes a VR exhibit at one of the museums that takes the viewer on a first-person adventure from a boxcar to inside a gas chamber at Auschwitz.
A way Forward
Still, according to Dara, this doesn't achieve the primary objective of fighting anti-Semitism, which she dubs as a "Western mind virus" in the vein of the critical theorists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists who preceded Holocaust remembrance in diagnosing the Gentile authoritarian personality. Dara emphasizes:
Dara's idea of a credible explanation for why Jews were targeted is revealed near the conclusion:
I wonder what Safe AI-powered simulacra will be used on my children when they become of age, scientifically optimized to train their perception of Jews - and their own identity. Horn has no shortage of ideas:
Your thesis is quite coherent if one believes, as you do, that the Holocaust is a hoax and Jews are waging a shadow-war against Western civilization.
If one doesn't believe that, well, you still make a convincing argument that the Holocaust is overemphasized in American education and that Jews still suffer from a neurotic fear of persecution that is dramatically disproportionate to the actual level of threat offered to them. (I actually do believe this.) But if one supposes, just for the sake of argument, that there really was a concerted effort to exterminate them within living memory, one can surely see a motive for feeling this way that is not mere zeal to convert the heathens, no?
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When you go from 'racism is a property of uniquely evil people called nazis' + 'evil nazis want to kill Jews because they are the good guys' to
'racism is your uniquely original sin and there is nothing you can do to wash it away' + 'somehow this does not apply to similar-looking people called Jews because it just doesn't'.
At some point the people targeted by #2 are going to wonder about #1 and how and why the uniquely evil nazis that they are made to identify with felt about the suspiciously similar but immune people.
Something's gotta give.
The only way to stop antisemitism is identical to the only way to stop racism, for Jews to assimilate. Unlike various races that have been more than happy to blend in together, the current Jews are descended from people that ferociously refused to.
While Jews enjoy a pretty comfortable situation at the top of American society, from an economic, social, prestige pov, they are not satisfied until the goyim grovel and endlessly apologize, even if they are billionaires, even if they are minorities, even if they are beloved, high status entertainment figures.
That's not sustainable.
Jews have assimilated pretty well in the US. Unless you mean they should literally stop being Jews?
This is just vilifying your outgroup without evidence. (Not modhatted, because I'm in the conversation, but you should know better.)
If by 'being Jews' you refer to '(1)only allowing blood-related people into your religion, claiming that only blood-relation can make you Jewish and (2) the whole other host of beliefs associated with the Holocaust/progressive worldview related to white people and institutions they like being intrinsically racist'.
(2) being most obviously exemplified by the memetic double claim 'fellow white people now is time to end racism/whiteness etc' + 'I'm not white I'm Jewish' when time comes to explain why affirmative action somehow does not apply to Jewish-heavy institutions.
Then yes.
But guess what, that is implicitly and sometimes explicitly what is demanded of white people. 'stop supporting whiteness'.
'stop surrounding yourself with other white people' / 'stop excluding non-whites' / 'stop taking non-whites' space [in formerly white-built institutions]
Why wouldn't it be more inclusive to have every synagogue open to worship Mohammed or even Hitler?
Well then not all Jews (NAJ).
Just the handful of ones that hold such power that they can get a beloved entertainment billionaire African-American to lose a money-printing contract with a sports clothing company.
[ADL & co / Kanye West / Adidas]
But uh oh isn't that an antisemitic trope to claim that a handful of Jews have disproportionate power?!
This is not a requirement to be Jewish. They do not go looking for converts, but it is possible to convert into Judaism.
This isn't a component of Judaism, and while it may be a fair description of many (not all) socially liberal Jews, it's not a defining characteristic of "Jewishness."
Your main objection seems to be specifically about contemporary leftist SJ-aligned Jews, yet you made reference to historical "ferocious" refusal to assimilate.
Even if we go with "Jews control Hollywood," yeah, that's still a long shot from saying "Jews cause anti-Semitism because they all cancelled Kanye and are afraid of being Holocausted and won't assimilate."
Not a very common thing to see. At least we can admit that they are pretty insular people.
In the one country where there is a large amount of them, Israel, they can't really be said to be very nice to the non-Jews.
Well, yes. Refusal to assimilate. All the Jews that decided to assimilate converted to Christianity, 2000 years ago.
All the Jews that exist now descend from people that had a chance to convert at some point, and decided not to.
And they've taught their descendants not to.
Similarly to the Amish. The Amish exist because they descend from a line of people that decided not to adopt technology and to teach their children not to. There are very few converts.
At any point in time an Amish person can decide to stop living the Amish life. Sure, they could still be considered Amish, but their children or grand-children would not.
The difference between the Amish and the Jews is that the Amish don't control banking and media corporations, don't control people's livelihood, what they buy, are allowed to buy or what they are allowed to think, who they are allowed to vote for.
Imagine if the owner of TheMotte was talking trash about the Amish and the Amish somehow coordinated with payment processing systems, internet infrastructure companies, other corporations to force the owner to close the website.
And when they would try go tell somebody about these events, their media invites would get cancelled or the media that did decide to host them would get banned from internet infrastructure companies, payment processing companies, etc.
This is what happens very often if not always when somebody talks trash about the Jews.
This would be fair if that was the first time this ever happened.
Rick Sanchez had the same issues in the 2010s.
Norm was joking about it in the 90s
My point of view is that a conspiracy does not need to exist for the results that we see.
I think that Jews in general, going through the historical selection that they went through, led them to inherit characteristics of people that not only cannot assimilate to a wider body of humanity, but also constantly feel under attack from the majority of humanity, and tend to overreact to that perceived attack, therefore triggering resentment.
Kind of like the common psychological phenomenon of somebody feeling insecure, thinking that everybody is constantly judging or scrutinizing them, therefore projecting an aura of awkwardness wherever they go, and causing people to perceive them as they self-evaluate.
These people find each over and bond over their uniqueness and their vulnerability against the rest of the mean world, and when inevitably their behavior causes the rest of the tribe to suffer, they are the first out the door, and the most likely to survive!
Who is most likely to survive a banking riot, the honest guy that doesn't really have any opinion about banking, or the insider Sam Bankman-Fried, who knows that there's a lot of bad things happening in banking, and if they're not coming for him, the pitchforks outside the windows are not good news anyway?
The easiest for rich, powerful Jews to get others to like them, is to personify noblesse oblige.
Be generous with your money, share your wealth, be a role model for others.
What do so many of them do?
George Soros goes and hires people to make US cities more dangerous (soft on crime DAs).
Others found organizations to help people illegally immigrate to the US (break the laws that protect the American people).
Sam Bankman Fried goes and scams a bunch of do-gooders who wanted to improve charity.
And of course the endless stream of progressive media 'stop whiteness now', 'you are racist for having standards of how your country should be that rich Jews disagree with' etc.
This is historical too. So many Jews could not stand that Americans had a right to self-association so they funded the Civil Rights movement.
The Amish like their life a certain way, they like to live among themselves and not mingle with others, like the Jews, but they're not forcing or even coercing anyone else to live their beliefs, drop their borders, accommodate foreigners, accommodate sexual minorities, drug addicts, etc.
"The Jews" don't control banking and media corporations - specific Jews do - and they're not uniformly Jewish. As I keep banging on about, Jews come in all sorts of different groups, and increasingly they're not even all that Jewish at all.
Specific Jews do the unbanking.
Specific Jews do the media influencing.
Specific Jews do the ADL, AIPAC, soft-on-crime DA, gun control, illegal immigrant charity... funding.
Specific Jews write the opinion pieces about how all white people are racist.
Specific Jews theorize the critical race, gender, border theories and teach them in colleges.
When you add them all up that ends up making a lot of specific individuals, but that still doesn't add up to the full Jewish population.
What are the other ones doing?
Are they coming out and saying 'us representatives of the Jewish bowling club of Broward County Florida, would like to address the egregious accusations against Kanye West / Nick Fuentes / etc, and show our support...'?
I haven't seen it.
If somebody happens to be an individual Jew who absolutely hates to see right-wing people get banned from media, people lose their job over criticism of powerful people, people get smeared every day for their skin color and other such things.
Then good for them.
But what I would call 'Team Jew' is absolutely opposed to them.
If that one individual is unable to shut down 'Team Jew', to tell their family members, cousins, in-laws, synagogue fellows, other members of the Jewish bowling club etc, to stop being part of Team Jew...
...well then they might become a casualty of the inevitable wave of 'antisemitism' (resentment against 'Team Jew').
That's not a threat, it just seems like a law of nature to me.
No nation in this whole world will endlessly tolerate a small group of people that is constantly undermining the majority
(which is what I perceive 'Team Jew' to be doing, which you may disagree with).
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Then it would behoove those jews who are apparently not being represented by the 'elite' jews to stop supporting them through ethno centric advocacy groups that go as far as to say that any talk of 'international' or 'cosmopolitan' elites is inherently anti-semitic.
You can't have AIPAC, the ADL, and the thousands of jewish advocacy groups in the US and act like the concept of a 'jew' doesn't hold any value and that it can just be brushed away by mention of the fact that poor jews exist.
Unlike the anti-white racial theories of unconscious bias and systemic racism, anti-semitism doesn't need to go that far to make its point. It just needs to point to any one of the widely supported explicitly racially exclusive jewish advocacy groups.
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