Jacob Howland
Unherd, Jan. 27, 2025
“Political opportunism and widespread antisemitism have distorted the way the Holocaust is remembered.”
When Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz 80 years ago today, on 27 January 1945, they found only 7,000 gravely ill and dying inmates. The SS had left them behind when they hastily abandoned the camp for Germany earlier that month, forcing roughly 60,000 souls into death marches through the bitter cold, some lasting more than a month. They’d hoped to leave few witnesses to the 42,500 ghettos, death camps, concentration camps, labour camps, and transit camps in Nazi-occupied territory, and they often told prisoners that nobody would believe them when they spoke of the monstrosities they had suffered.
Time has given the SS some posthumous victories. Surveys conducted in the US and UK show that memory of the Holocaust has faded like an old family photograph. The median age of Holocaust survivors is now 86, which means that half of them were six or younger in 1945 — too young to bear witness to much of anything. Soon, everyone who saw the inside of a Nazi camp or ghetto will be dead, and what happened in these God-forsaken places will disappear completely from living memory. Worse, political opportunism and widespread antisemitism have distorted the way the Holocaust is remembered. Eighty years on, Western shame about the Holocaust has turned into blame of the Jews.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) recently called for a boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK, insisting that the Gaza “genocide” be recognised as well. This is an old story: the Muslim Council of Britain was boycotting the event 20 years ago. What is new is the sudden acceptability of public expressions of Jew-hatred in the Anglosphere after October 7. The sight of large, keffiyeh-adorned mobs in London, New York, Montreal, and Sydney, marching in support of Hamas and calling through bullhorns for the death of Jews, would have been unimaginable just 16 months ago. These demonstrations have emboldened hard-core antisemites, in a radical-chic cosplay of Kristallnacht, to deface and burn Jewish businesses, schools, and synagogues.
The gatekeepers of high culture and intellectual life have played their part in this tawdry farce, embracing a binary ideology of oppressors and oppressed that has emanated from our universities. Academic societies and journals have overtly or covertly boycotted Israeli professors, while publishers, literary agents, art galleries, and cinemas have blacklisted Jewish writers, artists, performers, and film producers. These intellectuals claim to be anti-fascists, concerned above all with the fundamental human values of equality and justice. But political space curves like the Earth: go far enough Left and you’ll be far-Right. …SOURCE