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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.

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.