"Never Again" Has Lost All Meaning

Holocaust Memorial Day 2024

“Never again” we whisper in the wind. It is the Holocaust that those two words imply. The Shoah. The Völkermord. The industrial-scale extermination of European Jewry. The attempted final eradication of the People of the Book. The murderous continent-wide effort to extinguish a race perennially hated in all the possible ways humans have learnt to hate.

And yet, today on Holocaust Memorial Day 2024, 67% of Americans aged 18-24 year olds think that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors”. So too, 44% of 25-34 year olds. In the U.S. Jews hide on student campuses, university presidents permit the calling for genocide of Jews “depending on the context”. In Britain, a 2021 poll showed over half the country did not know 6 million Jews were killed in the genocide. After October 7th last year, Jewish schools and synagogues were closed for safety and weekly marches through London see blood-libel placards and age-old antisemitic tropes smeared on banners and posters.

Antisemitism has gotten so bad that Natan Sharansky, the refusenik Gulag-survivor, said that October 7th and the reaction in the West has done more to encourage Aliya of Jews in diaspora than the Jewish Agency have been capable of in decades. The Jewish Agency, for which Sharansky served as chairman, being an organisation whose express purpose was to encourage Jewish emigration to Israel.

Most nefarious of all is how Israel, attacked by the explicitly genocidally motivated Hamas, are themselves accused of committing a genocide, as they attempt to retrieve their kidnapped citizens and defeat their enemy. This is a “moral inversion, which undermines the memory of the worst crimes in human history” and was designed to “tear open the still gaping wound of the Holocaust”, as Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis mournfully observed.

In the wake of October 7th it is obvious that “never again” is relying too heavily on its implicit meaning. By not being explicit about the cause of the Nazi concentration camps it has failed as a commandment. It may even be the case that testimonies, records and videos of the 1940s turbo-charged mass-slaughter were so shocking we took for granted what the root of the evil actually was.

If we did learn the right lessons about the Second World War, and I am not sure that we did, we have certainly failed to educate the next generations.

Flippant use of labels like “Nazi”, “fascist”, “far-right” and “literally Hitler”, not least by this same generation who think Jews are oppressors, is no coincidence. These slurs have been splurged so recklessly on anyone from author and women’s rights activist J.K Rowling to Bernie bro podcaster Joe Rogan, that they’ve lost all meaning. One might deduce the only lesson learned from the Third Reich horrors has been “right-wing bad, left-wing good”. Or perhaps more accurately: anything not progressive is evil.

So what is it exactly that we mean when we say “never again”?

It seemed obvious to me when I fist heard the phrase “white privilege”, about ten years ago, that antisemitism was a next logical step. I read the BLM literature carefully. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Ta-Nehisi Coates and the cross pollination with intersectionality that produced the million-selling “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, amongst other vile bumf. These race-bating books were by design unchallengeable. They were carefully crafted Kafka-traps - the denial of their accusations was evidence of your guilt - you’re a racist!

Yet it was the progressive worldview that was evidently Hitlerite.

So the logic goes: First, ethnic identity groups are compared and contrasted. A substrata of the highest achievers of a certain group are taken to represent the whole group. Meritocracy, competence, talent and cultural influence are all ignored or derided. Instead it is systemic racism, power, tyranny and oppression which are the only explanations.

So it is that Jews again become the target. Ashkenazi Jews, over-represented in high-ranking positions across varied industries, are taken to represent all Ashkenazis and then all Jews. The antisemitic explanation for their success is identical to progressive identitarianism.

To believe in “white priviege” is to ignore the millions of poor working class whites. Just as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion did of the poor shtetl Jews. To think that disparate outcomes of different groups is evidence of oppression, as the postmodernists do, is exactly what antisemites have been doing for centuries.

I spoke to Sharansky in Jerusalem last week (an interview soon to be published on my podcast). He says the biggest threat of antisemitism today comes from progressives. This tradition is obvious in figures like former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, under whom eight Labour MPs quit because of antisemitism. Since the start of the Israel-Hamas War, Corbyn can be heard on the streets of London, or on X (Twitter) spreading anti-Israel misinformation, directly in line with Hamas propaganda. But it has a long tradition on the Left, not least under Stalin, lest we forget the notorious Doctor’s Plot when he planned to transport 2 million Jews to Siberia, a plan thwarted only by his death.

Doctor’s Plot cartoon published in Krokodil magazine, January 1953

I have little hope that anti-semitism can be defeated. It is a hatred as archetypal as Cain and Abel. As long as there are humans who are jealous, angry and bitter the age-old bigotry will continue. Just as the Holocaust was denied, now we watch the October 7th Massacre denied in realtime.

“Never again”, to me, has lost all meaning. On the one hand I cannot believe what we have seen in Britain and America these last months. On the other hand it was all so predictable. A failure of education and the triumph of progressive identity politics has begotten an ancient hatred. This Holocaust Memorial Day I am filled with sadness. Sadness not only for what has happened and been forgotten, but sadness for what evil awaits.

WM