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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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...the central (and not at all secret) component of Holocaust education is that Jews (and other groups killed by the Nazis) should not have been treated the way they were simply because they were Jewish.

I'm not the best person to answer since I'm not a Holocaust denier (or even questioner), but the constant drumbeat on the Holocaust doesn't seem like the central thesis here is merely that Jewish people shouldn't have been treated that way, but that they are unique and distinct in having been treated this way. There are Holocaust museums and memorials in many places that really have nothing much to do with the Holocaust and education generally includes significant chapters on the Holocaust specifically. If these things were about the horrors of genocide and used the Holocaust as one particularly nasty example of what humans are capable of, that would make perfect sense to me and wouldn't seem like propagandizing.

Let's concretize that a bit with an example. I recently had the great opportunity to visit the Imperial War Museum in London, which has one floor dedicated to World War 1, one floor dedicated to World War 2, and a third floor dedicated to the Holocaust, with a couple higher levels for temporary exhibits. Surely we can all see why the world wars would take such a place of prominence for a British History Museum, but what exactly makes the Holocaust stand out such that it gets it own floor? There are many horrifying examples of human suffering inflicted by governments, including governments that still (at least nominally) exist. To me, understanding that the Chinese Communist Party murdered so many would have much more modern significance than the Holocaust. Given the current year news, learning about the Soviet genocide of Ukrainians in Holodomor seems fairly relevant. The Killing Fields of Cambodia have always held a special horror for me due to the targeting of professionals and academics. Perhaps a look at Indonesia's genocide could convince me that I'm too harsh on communists and that my attitude is dangerous as well. If ethnic strife is the thing that horrifies us so, Rwanda stands to be mentioned. Alternatively, perhaps each of these examples is roughly equally horrifying and say something important about the human condition and its relationship to governments, so we should present a story of genocides through the ages and their common threads.

But no, that's not what we see. Just the Holocaust, only the Holocaust, and anything else is a footnote. In fact, suggesting that the Holocaust isn't that special is apt to get you called anti-Semitic. So the objection isn't to teaching the Holocaust, it's to teaching only the Holocaust as an example of how Jewish people are oppressed in a special fashion that separates them all the way up to the modern day.

But no, that's not what we see. Just the Holocaust, only the Holocaust, and anything else is a footnote. In fact, suggesting that the Holocaust isn't that special is apt to get you called anti-Semitic. So the objection isn't to teaching the Holocaust, it's to teaching only the Holocaust as an example of how Jewish people are oppressed in a special fashion that separates them all the way up to the modern day.

I agree that the fixation on the Holocaust is unfortunate (and I say that as someone raised Jewish who is just effing tired of hearing about it, along with all of the constant WWII metaphors about everything. It's the historical equivalent of shitty Harry Potter references on the internet.)

I suspect that this thing you're noticing has two major causes: (1) legibility bias, and (2) an unfortunate confluence of normal immigrant-group paranoia and network effects.

First, I think it's fairly intuitive that one reason the Holocaust is much more prominent in the West than, e.g. the Khmer Rouge, the Holodomor, or the Indonesian genocide is simple legibility. The Nazis left behind copious records, in an accessible Western language, concerning deeds done by a defeated power that contemporary politicians, archivists, and historians had no incentive to hide or shield from scrutiny. There's plenty of scholars and even laypeople who can translate and read the primary sources. There were plenty of people in the West who had personal knowledge of some part of the whole thing. And the Holocaust is tied up in the story of WWII, which has collectively obsessed the West for the past 70 years. For all these reasons it's very easy to go do research on the Holocaust and the Nazis more generally, and a natural and continuing wellspring of general public interest.

By contrast, those other events you mentioned are significantly harder for Western scholars to get at. The Khmer Rouge and the Indonesians left behind fewer records, in far-away parts of the world, in languages that aren't frequently translated into English or which have much intersection with a large scholarly community in the West, concerning events that few in the West have personal knowledge of. Moreover, the modern Cambodian and Indonesian governmental and archival systems aren't the best or most sophisticated. It's hard to do that kind of research, to say nothing of the fact that if you write your dissertation on those events, it's unlikely to be widely read (unlike a lot of Holocaust work, which is). Similarly, the primary sources for the Holodomor were locked behind the Iron Curtain, and even since the fall of the USSR access to records has been spotty at best (to say nothing of problems of fabrication, destruction, falsification, etc.)

So the Holocaust gets written about and has exhibits made etc., because, like the drunk looking for his keys under a streetlight, that's where the light is.

Second, it's not uncommon for immigrant groups in America to obsess over recent ethnic trauma. Armenians in my city are very vocal about the genocide of their people committed by the Kurds and Turks during and after WWI, and are also very vocal in their political and personal support for the modern country of Armenia in its battles with Azerbaijan. In DC, which has a large Ethiopian community, there have been large protests and counterprotests over the recent civil war, which includes an alleged attempted genocide of the Tigrayan people in the north of the country. On that basis I don't think it's all that unusual for Ashkenazi Jews in the U.S. affected by the holocaust to place lots of importance on it personally. However, due to network effects and a higher average IQ than normal, Ashkenazi Jews are more likely to work in white-collar, knowledge-work applications - particularly media. Add in a touch of that ever-present mental spice "typical mind bias," or "the things I care about are objectively the correct things to care about because everyone who doesn't think like me is crazy," and this means that Ashkenazi-specific neuroses and concerns get more play than the median minority group otherwise would.

There are Holocaust museums and memorials in many places that really have nothing much to do with the Holocaust

They are inhabited by relatives of people who died in the Holocaust. That's not "nothing much to do with".

If you go to places where lots of Ukrainian-Americans live, you will in fact find Ukrainian museums. It's not as if only Jews build museums.

Hm, I haven't thought too much about it before, but certainly the difference in how Hitler is treated compared to Stalin or Mao in the general zeitgeist is something many people have noticed and commented on. My favorite standup comic Bill Burr had a bit about this, I think comparing those figures and their kill counts to professional athletes and their statistical accomplishments. One thing I wonder now is if the 1619 project was an (likely unconscious) attempt to bring American slavery to the sort of "first among equals" status like Hitler and the holocaust, to aid in accomplishing the sociopolitical/cultural changes the people behind it wanted in American society. Then again, just by its very nature of being American, American slavery arguably already has that kind of status, so perhaps it's not a meaningful factor.

certainly the difference in how Hitler is treated compared to Stalin or Mao in the general zeitgeist is something many people have noticed and commented on.

Generally, the uniqueness there is that the Holocaust lacks even a hint of veneer of accidental outcomes. Bad decisionmaking, even predictably bad decisionmaking, leading to mass death is much easier to wave off. I don't personally agree with them, but "the gulags were just a mismanaged criminal justice system," "the famine after the Great Leap Forward was an accidental result of a well-meaning modernization campaign," and even "the Holodomor was caused by agricultural mismanagement" are arguments I've seen people (tankies) attempt with a straight face. The purpose-built death factories of the Holocaust and well-documented death squads don't seem to have much in the way of any other viable explanation.