Seize your Heritage, Not your Tragedy

The men pictured here are not Germans, but Hungarians of

the Arrow Cross Party, yet they shared the same goal. Our goal

should be to show that we've moved beyond them.

After 72 years it's time we the Jewish people acknowledged the rest of our heritage, and not just the Holocaust.

This morning I saw a Facebook post from my best friend from my Israeli Army service, and it was a rant about how the media there in Israel focuses obsessively on the personality of Adolf Hitler and on the sheer madness that allowed him to pull the wool over the eyes of the German people. He disputed that, claiming that in truth the German people had been intrinsically anti-Jewish irrespective of Hitler.

To me it was a surreal experience to discover that today is Holocaust Memorial Day (as it is observed in Israel), but it completely slipped my attention. As a person that went to a Jewish middle school and lived in two different households that were Jewish (though vastly different in outlook), this holiday had once been a yearly pilgrimage to an auditorium. Ironically, as I began to explore many of the other areas of what the concept of a "Jew" is, in particular the religious ones, the importance of this day has steadily diminished. And rather than engage in self-recrimination over this, I'm writing today to tell you the reader that this day and activities like it have at least according to recent observations become more of a problem for Jews as a people and Judaism as a religion than it is the somber experience that it's intended to be. I'm not going to tell anyone else to stop remembering this awful event, but perhaps they are focusing on the wrong lessons to be gleaned from it.

The Germans and the guilt issue

This caricature of the German guilt complex leaves out the
Soviet Union, a fellow genocidal nation that has never
received the same stigma as the Germans.

As my friend correctly stated, sure the German nation had been actively complicit in the deeds of the Nazi war machine and then the drive to murder the Jews and other enemies of the state, but we have ignored several faces of that machine and by we I mean western mainstream culture. Recently I was having lunch with a number of coworkers and one of them, a German, openly acknowledged that this is a major problem in German culture. It is one that actually hinders the development of a healthy self-esteem and addressing of problems today such as immigration and multiculturalism.My friend was not a Nazi, but a person trying to make sense of his nation's current issues. We have had a laser like focus on the Germans, and in turn Germany at a certain point embraced a culture of both silence and guilt.

• The culture of silence among West Germans during the Cold War regarded the awkward knowledge that many of their parents and then grandparents had been part of a regime that contradicted the values of democracy that the new nation was attempting to build after the war. This was portrayed very accurately in the 1960s spy thriller The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth where the main character was a German journalist struggling to uncover a network of ex-SS agents while tackling the legacy of his father who died serving in the war. I felt judgmental about this as a kid until later I discovered that there were nations (Turkey, China) that had perpetrated mass murders like this and continue to openly deny them or continue to champion their perpetrators. Yes, this culture of silence was bad, but is it worse than the other examples I've raised?
• The culture of guilt is a later derivative of the German consciousness that they as a nation did commit these horrific crimes, and in order to atone for that they have undergone a bizarre mutation where they overcompensate and despise their own identity. This is doomed to one of two failures: Either the German people will experience a traumatic backlash among a coming generation of children that understandably do not want to be linked to deeds that they had no part in, or Germany's efforts to overcompensate will cause it to vanish into oblivion as they have by allowing an unfiltered wave of foreigners to enter the country and completely eradicate their own culture. 
• Neither of these outcomes is desirable. The German people and I reference the Germans that I've encountered personally as part of them have built a great society that I believe is a great competitor and friend of the United States and the world regardless of my opinions on the current government. To continue to hold the Holocaust over their hids is the most vindictive thing possible. It is not our place to continue to judge individuals today by the acts of their defeated ancestors, no matter how extreme they were. If we continue to do so, then there is no value to the concepts of redemption or forgiveness. I for one think we should treat the Germans as individuals. Funny thing is, I think that approach is a good one for non-Germans too. 

The others enabled by Nazism, and those enabled by themselves

There were people that consciously allied themselves with the Germans and went beyond the call of duty to support the Nazi vision, and even considered their encouragement a secondary motivation. 

Those nations included Lithuania, Croatia, Hungary, and various others where traditional anti-Jewish opinions were in fact far more conventional than in Germany. We don't hold the same animus towards any of these countries as we do towards the Germans. There has never been a movie like the hilarious yet completely fictional Inglourious Basterds where cartoonish Croat soldiers were mowed down by automatic weapons or beaten with baseball bats. With the Germans there are uncounted ones. There was even a genre of Italian films in the '70s called Nazi Exploitation that was basically gory pornography disguised as action movies. This is where I think my friend's analysis has to be extended further: Hitler's madness is not only used as a cop-out for his society, but also for many other nations that didn't need him as a motivating factor to accomplish their own goal of ridding themselves of the Jews or other undesirables.

At the same time, I've had friends from the local Croat community during my recently concluded college career. I don't believe that they really have the same issue with Holocaust guilt as what I've described with the Germans. That's not my place to judge. In fact my experience with these people has been rather positive, and my approach to meeting these Croatians is to try to absorb their background while at the same time being open to  their questions about mine. 

On the other hand I had a supervisor who was Lithuanian at a previous job who as it so happened did have an interest in Holocaust history. I learned a great deal from working with him in a professional sense as well as in a character sense. That is something that I find has far more importance than dwelling on a historical wedge between the Jewish and Lithuanian peoples. I take the same approach when I interact with my numerous friends from countries like Egypt and Lebanon that have baggage when it comes to my people and our religion. As Jews in a country where we have been given unparalleled freedoms, there is no advantage to throwing past tragedies in the face of people that don't have any control over them. In fact, it works in our favour to just allow people to draw conclusions from our actions and character as opposed to a heritage that naturally you have no control of. And that works both ways: These people, the Croats and Lithuanians that I meet, have made an impression on me that is completely independent of what's found in history books. Does that not make sense -- do you want to be judged by your actions, or by the actions of others that you may have never met?

Never Again has really meant Never mind

The Holocaust was not the first mass genocide and it certainly hasn't been the last, whether the subject is the Jews or not. In Ukraine and other nations where Jews lived prior to WWII anti-Jew actions including massacres but also various forms of discrimination or imprisonment, were commonplace and motivated by all manner of beliefs including other religious opinions on them, communism, or simple popular resentment against a strange group of people. There are only two differences in my mind between the Holocaust and other mass genocides.

1. The Holocaust was in many of its stages precision designed as if it was an industry. Other massacres of the Jews including the pogroms in Eastern Europe against Jews or the Ugandan genocide of the 1970s of target ethnic groups like the Lango were more incidents of popular rage and state opportunism but did not have the same organizational obsession.
2. The regime that perpetrated the Holocaust, unlike many other examples including the Soviet regime that executed the mass famines in Ukraine as well as Mao's China, was defeated militarily and therefore the full horror of the Nazis' deeds was exposed immediately. By contrast, it is possible that the full horror of Stalin and Mao's purges and mass murders will trickle out but never be fully discovered and by then interest in the topic will have already gone cold, a situation that's already happened.

So what does Never Again really mean? On the surface it's been our people's declaration that we won't be a victim anymore, but as I'll demonstrate later some of those that use it have the opposite meaning. What it really should mean if we Jews are to live up to our obligations towards the rest of the world as the "Light of the nations" would be to use this in order to help prevent all genocides. 

How many times have we said "never again" and then someone just says "You know what, I think we'll do it again"? Rwanda, Cambodia, North Korea, and numerous other examples show that this is an empty statement. In fact one of the main critics of President Clinton's inaction during the Rwandan Genocide, Samantha Power, served in the same capacity as the target of her criticism between 2013-17 as US Ambassador to the United Nations. She ended up repeating the same behaviour as her predecessor Madeleine Albright by constantly issuing empty condemnations of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad while at the same time the USA refused to do anything to stop his forces from committing atrocities. The Cambodian genocide was not ended by world disgust at this senseless act of national suicide, but rather by a political conflict between the perpetrators and their Vietnamese neighbours.

The objective of "never again" should have been made a priority immediately after WWII. Instead it's an empty platitude. I believe today the best mitigating agent to a genocide is one thing and one thing only: The promotion of a world where each nation is sovereign over its own borders, and we dispense with this fiction that world government will create a better humanity. The UN has done next to zero to prove this since 1945, and the League of Nations was a similar joke of an institution before that.

Our tragedy is not our identity

I can tell you that when Bernie Sanders started announcing lamely that he was the "child of Holocaust survivors" I was very unimpressed and I'm not ashamed to say so. In fact his statement wasn't saying at all what watchers and readers think it did. Bernie Sanders was trying to tell you that his heritage makes his bona fides as a Jew unassailable, but what I interpreted from this declaration and others by Bernie, was that this is the beginning and the end of his self-consciousness as a Jew. This is a counterproductive approach. I could care less for Sanders' sake whether he wants to explore his Jewish heritage more or not. Frankly if you follow my other articles I've made it clear that he's far more delusional in his opinions on virtually every other topic and this is not the most important one. 

Like Bernie Sanders, there are sectors of modern Judaism that transcend ethnicity and denomination that frame their entire Jewish experience around the Holocaust. So let me ask those of them that might read this: Do you know a single Irish person that does the same thing regarding the Potato Famine? Or a Chinese person that relates the same way to the Rape of Nanking? Our people are a keystone of this world. This is the perpetuating of victim status that "Never again" was originally supposed to be an answer against.

Under President Obama the victim culture reached its zenith. We've seen the same thing be thrown at the black community regarding past injustices committed against them. Often black leaders like Al Sharpton and Tariq Nasheed feed off of this culture of carrying grudges in order to build a following around themselves. Sharpton has used the misery of his people to catapult him into a charmed life. Just look at this photo here. This has gotten the black community nowhere; as their own elite performer class, what I openly call the "milk truck", gets wealthier and swells its ego their rank and file continue to be priced out of the middle class. The fact that we as Jews are better off statistically does not mean that we should adopt the same approach.

This tragedy is their opportunity

Yet some of us do. This January a minimally influential group called the Anne Frank Center (for Mutual Respect) began to issue a series of statements condemning newly elected President Donald Trump for a number of incidents that it claimed showed he was an anti-Semite. The most important incident was the neglecting of using the word Jews or a variation of it during the international version of Holocaust Rememberance Day (in January not today). This was naked political slander and it did not stop there, and the elevation of this political pressure group masquerading as a non-profit educational organization shows how this exclusive Jewish identity with the Holocaust has poisoned the discourse. The leaders of the Frank Center as well as current Anti-Defamation League leader Jonathan Greenblatt are transparent puppets of a political agenda fronted by none other than Trump's predecessor Barack Obama. Greenblatt was a former minor official in Obama's White House. Obama also appointed his former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes to the Holocaust Museum Board. Rhodes is a pure political appointment, but beyond that he was also a key actor in the deceptive process of convincing the US media to accept the opaque Iran nuclear deal, a diplomatic appeasement gesture with a regime that is transparently anti-Jewish. Let me ask you the reader, and I sincerely don't care whether you're Jewish or have an opinion on them, would you choose these types of characters that use your heritage as a spin mill to be the leaders of your community?

So I say to all of you: Jews, other people, this is a fraud. Yes there is anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States. And therefore what? When our heritage becomes political fodder for politicians, we render ourselves back to the victim crowd. We lose our individuality and let polished elites do the talking for us. The Book of Exodus speaks of two men, Dathan and Abiram, that were Pharaoh's stooges and constantly griped against Moses. Maybe we don't have a lot of Moses characters around, but I do see a lot of Dathans and Abirams. Let's make a decision to go the other way. Our heritage is not defined by tragedy, and it's not defined by a choice between Obama and Donald Trump. Let's connect with our people through the belief in the one God, and if you can't bring yourself to do that maybe at least explore a different Jewish topic beyond the Holocaust. We've had over 5000 years of history, don't narrow yourself to the twelve between 1933 and 1945.