“In the spring of 1940, when the Nazis overran France from the north, much of its Jewish population tried to escape the country towards the south. In order to cross the border, they needed visas to Spain and Portugal, and together with a flood of other refugees, tens of thousands of Jews besieged the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux in a desperate attempt to get that life-saving piece of paper. The Portuguese government forbade its consuls in France to issue visas without prior approval from the Foreign Ministry, but the consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, decided to disregard the order, throwing to the wind a thirty-year diplomatic career. As Nazi tanks were closing in on Bordeaux, Sousa Mendes and his team worked around the clock for ten days and nights, barely stopping to sleep, just issuing visas and stamping pieces of paper. Sousa Mendes issued thousands of visas before collapsing from exhaustion.
The Portuguese government—which had little desire to accept any of these refugees—sent agents to escort the disobedient consul back home, and fired him from the foreign office. Yet officials who cared little for the plight of human beings nevertheless had a deep reverence for documents, and the visas Sousa Mendes issued against orders were respected by French, Spanish and Portuguese bureaucrats alike, spiriting up to 30,000 people out of the Nazi death trap. Sousa Mendes, armed with little more than a rubber stamp, was responsible for the largest rescue operation by a single individual during the Holocaust.”
—Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
I imagine that most Jews would have no issue with Holocaust comparisons and using the Holocaust as a rhetorical device if that was all there was to it. But there’s a broader context. A context that Jews cannot divorce ourselves from (and I would imagine the same is true for Rromani, but I don’t want to speak for them). In the same breath, people who say “X is just like Hitler” or that “this is just how the Holocaust started” will also say they don’t care about Jews or antisemitism.
They call Israeli or diaspora Jews with whom they disagree over Israel: Zionazis, the new Nazis, or just plain old Nazis.
They insert the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into ever conversation even remotely related to Jewishness, Judaism, or antisemitism regardless of whether we’re talking about the present or Israel.
They conflate all the different camps used during the Holocaust into “concentration camps.” They conflate all treatment of targeted groups during the Holocaust so that “it wasn’t just Jews” with the implication that we should shut up and stop because we don’t own the Holocaust.
They think antisemitism began and ended with the Holocaust and we got Israel as a reward for surviving the Holocaust because “they’re white.”
They erase Jewish refugees. The erase Jewish refugees from the MENA. They erase that no countries took in Jewish refugees before, during, or after the Holocaust.
They say: “They’re the new Jews,” as if Jews have ceased to exist, antisemitism ceased to exists, and that things can be inhumane and due to prejudice without using another group’s trauma and history as a rhetorical device.
They call us white supremacists while actual white supremacists call us globalists, oppressors, kikes, and for our destruction.
They erase antisemitism from white supremacy and refer to it as if it as if it’s incidental to white supremacy instead of central to white supremacy. And when we tell the truth, we’re told we’re playing the victim and that we’re claiming to be the most oppressed (we aren’t).
They talk about our historical trauma as an ephemeral and divorced historical event while we still breathe and feel it every day. They talk about our historical trauma as if it was confined to the Holocaust and not spanning across centuries and nations since we were colonized and then expelled from our land.
For us, it’s never just a Holocaust or Hitler comparison. And evil things are evil because they’re evil not because of how closely they resemble the Holocaust or historical traumas sufferers by other groups.
All of this is true… but I think the comparisons are apt in this instance, and there are a lot of Jews using it too. The instant recognizability and emotional punch of the comparison can be helpful if it’s used judiciously… though unfortunately it hasn’t been, which dilutes its power. I think the most powerful and useful aspects of the comparison are that the Nazis were elected; that they built their way up to extermination gradually, by inuring people to lesser monstrosities; and that the political establishment and the international press ridiculed Mussolini and Hitler and believed their incompetence would limit the damage they could do.
An Israeli reserve officer visiting Poland with the Israel Defense Forces will be disciplined for holding up a sign at the Nazi Auschwitz camp that read “You too played a part.”
The incident occurred on Thursday, according to reports.
The officer was participating in the military’s “Witnesses in Uniform” project.
The sign was written in Polish. It was in protest of controversial legislation passed in February by the Polish Parliament which criminalizes blaming the Polish nation for Nazi crimes.
IDF officials with the group of officers at the site took the sign away and told the Polish security guards that they would handle the incident internally. The soldier was not immediately returned to Israel, arriving home with the rest of the delegation. He is scheduled to be disciplined in the coming days, despite Israel’s objection to the law.
The passage of the law has created tension and disagreement between Poland and Israel. The law is under review in Constitutional Court before it can take effect. Poland’s attorney general said in a nonbinding opinion that the court should shelve the parts of the law that have drawn criticism.
Israeli government officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and others have harshly criticized the law, which could lead to a prison sentence of up to three years, because, they claim, while it ostensibly targets those who say Poles collectively were responsible for the Holocaust, it could also be interpreted as criminalizing any reporting of Polish anti-Semitism during the period around the Holocaust, and any reporting of Poles who collaborated with Nazis.
Remember that before the Holocaust, there were 18 million Jews in the world. They killed a third of us.
Remember that pre-war Eastern Europe was the center of world Jewry, and it had a thriving Jewish society with Yiddish theater, poetry, literature, art, and political activism. An entire society was destroyed.
Remember that before the war, a third of Warsaw’s population was Jewish. The vast majority of those Jewish residents were murdered.
Remember that Salonika (Thessaloniki) was a city in Greece that had a Jewish majority for hundreds of years. It used to be known as Sabatopolis – the Shabbat city – because before electric light, ships going by on Friday night would see a dark shoreline because the residents could not light lights. In the 16th century, it was known as the “mother of Israel” and was a center of Jewish life where Eastern European Jews would come to visit and study. Fewer than 1800 Jews from Salonika survived the Holocaust.
Remember that in Krakow, what used to be the Jewish quarter is now a tourist trap for the groups who come to look at what once was. The Jewish community owns several beautiful synagogues but only regularly uses one because there are so few Jews left. Without the tour groups who regularly pray with them, they would have trouble getting a quorum of ten men by the beginning of the Shabbat service. The other synagogues are museums now.
So the Polish nation bears no responsibility for what happened during the Holocaust, hmm?
For Holocaust, no, just as the German nation is not responsible for Holocaust. What we should talk about is the fact that several people decided that it is a perfect time for another pogrom. We need to talk about historical atrocities, but not blame whole groups of people. Nobody blames “the American nation” for Native American genocide.
I honestly believe that this return to group responsibility is a second wave of Russian psyops. Posts very similar in thinking frame are propagated on Polish-language twitter… about Ukrainians, by Russian bots.
Huh? My comment was in reference to something very specific, namely, a law that was recently passed in Poland that “makes it illegal to attribute responsibility for or complicity during the Holocaust to the Polish nation or state.” That description is from this Politifact article, which provides a helpful explanation of what the law is ostensibly intended to do – to outlaw imputations of crimes during the Holocaust to the Polish state, which (as the article points out) had no independent existence during the Nazi occupation – and what the likely effect and, very probably (considering the right-wing nationalists who are in power right now), the real intention behind the law is: the suppression of research into the extent to which Polish nationals cooperated in the massacre of Jews.
Here are some telling claims from Polish officials and from scholars of the Holocaust:
“The legislation concerns only accusations of collective responsibility by the Polish Nation or Polish State for German Nazi Crimes,” said spokeswoman Małgorzata Safianik of the Polish embassy in Washington. “It does not seek to deny nor does it apply towards charges of individual collaboration by Polish nationals during World War II.”
“No serious historian would say the Polish people as a whole is responsible for anything,” Buchen, the Dresden historian, told us. “It’s rather the suspicion the law is a bit vague in order to allow any kinds of investigation that would shut down writers or people who deal with these issues.”
According to the Polish Minister of Justice, “There will be no punishment for witnesses of history, scholars or journalists who quote painful facts from our history.”
“In theory professors are exempt, researchers are exempt, playwrights are exempt,” Kassow said. “But in fact when you’re saying the Polish state and the Polish nation, what does that really mean? What is the Polish nation? If you’re a famous historian or a famous artist you might be safe from being prosecuted. But if you’re a high school teacher or untenured faculty member or a graduate student doing research on the Holocaust, this law could have a chilling effect.”
But regarding your argument… actually, yeah, a lot of people would say the American nation is responsible for the Native American genocide. That’s partly because it was a concerted effort by the U.S. government and military in cooperation with white American settlers; and it’s partly because, in virtue of living on lands that were stolen from Native Americans, other Americans find ourselves in the deeply uncomfortable position of benefiting indirectly from the dispossession and even murder of Native Americans.
But there’s a difference between calling for collective reckoning and collective punishment; “collective responsibility” is ambiguous between them. It is utterly selfish and irresponsible for white Americans to say “I didn’t own Black slaves or murder Native Americans, therefore I owe nothing to their descendants.” National reckoning means doing the painful work of confronting the extent to which ordinary citizens of the nation, including one’s own ancestors, were complicit in crimes that may have been directly committed by others, by remaining silent, by not condemning them, by maintaining friendly relationships with those who committed the crimes, and by accepting benefits resulting from those crimes: in the case of American slavery, cheap sugar, tobacco, and cotton textiles; in the case of the Native American genocide, land available for settlement; in the case of the murder of Jews in Eastern Europe, their homes and possessions, which were looted and auctioned off by the Gentiles who had lived alongside them.
As the article notes, Poland, unlike Germany, has gone through no such national reckoning. The narrative that has been presented by the Soviet government and now by the right-wing nationalist government is that Poles were victimized to the same extent as Jews, that they collaborated with Nazis only out of fear for their lives (and, apparently, that Zionists were the real collaborators… charming). More recent historical research indicates that many Poles (and Ukrainians, and Latvians, etc.) eagerly followed the Nazis’ orders and watched the murders with the same glee as white American southerners at a lynching. So I hope you can see why historians, and Jews, are suspicious about both the intent and the probable effect of the law. Unless you think the research itself has been fabricated by Russian psyops, in which case I can’t help you… and unfollow me now, please.
Loki is the Philosopher King 