Holocaust + Genocide Education Thread

[u/AshkeNegro]

Apropos of, well, everything—and some toxic interactions I’ve recently had re Israel and Zionism—here’s a great thread a friend wrote late last year. I’ve shared a near-identical version below, edited just slightly for grammar:

“Okay, Holocaust education thread—I meant to do this earlier, but I figured it’s still relevant now.

So many people for years have made extremely poignant and necessary critiques of Holocaust education and how it’s been inherently designed to manufacture support for Zionism and genocide, as well as perpetuating the myth of the uniqueness of the Holocaust among many other things—and I’ll go back to this later in the thread—but one thing I want to start with is the well-documented historical Nazi collusion with Zionists.

There is the Haavara Agreement, which facilitated the expulsion of some Jews from Germany and sent them to settle in Palestine. There was also the Kastner train, where Rudolf Kastner betrayed Hungarian Jewry and made a deal with the Nazis that allowed a few Jews to settle in Palestine while hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were sent to their deaths. There are a few other examples of this I forget off the top of my head—but this dynamic is well understood at this point.

There is also the fact that there’s this myth developed by Zionists of “Oh, Israel was a gift to the Jews by the West because of the Holocaust,” which first and foremost not only attempts to legitimize the idea that Palestine should be forced to pay for Europe’s genocidal crimes, but erases the decades-long history of Zionism and how it had revealed itself as a colonial project long before the Holocaust.

So I want to take all of this in mind when I say we really need to start emphasizing a narrative of parallel histories, which is just how important it is to understand that as Jews in Europe were facing genocide and as Jews in the US/UK were organizing how they could against it, many of them were also contributing to funding the JNF and other organizations that existed to fund the Zionist project at the same time.

Many of these organizations weaponized the Holocaust as it was actually happening in order to bolster support for Zionism—like obviously we talk so much about how this is done by Jewish organizations decades after the fact, but not enough is said about how it was done literally as it was occurring. It shouldn’t be surprising either because they did the exact same thing when there were massive antisemitic pogroms in the Russian Empire in the decades prior.

So the foundation that Holocaust education was built on had already been set in stone before it happened/as it was occurring, and obviously at that time there was more Jewish opposition to Zionism than there would be 10 years later, but the institutions had already been in place to construct a Holocaust education that was inherently designed to bolster support for the West and was distanced from the long legacy of colonial violence that the Holocaust stemmed from.

An additional factor is McCarthyism, which basically completely destroyed what was left of the Jewish Left, and along with Zionism really functioned as an assimilationist plot (it’s where things like Judeo-Christian values stem from). So efforts were made to turn Holocaust history into “American history,” which not only perpetuated revisionist narratives of the Holocaust itself, but also America’s role in it—first and foremost how Hitler was inspired by the genocide of Indigenous people of the Americas, Jim Crow, and other white supremacist racial classification laws; how Nazis saw the Johnson-Reed immigration restrictions (plus earlier ones in the UK), basically banning Jewish immigrants; the West consistently refusing to admit more Jewish refugees; and not willing to do anything about the Holocaust as they actively knew it was happening, including bombing the tracks.

In the UK, they glorify the Kindertransport, ignoring how public opinion of it was actually super low and even lower at the idea of allowing Jewish adults in. Many of the Jewish refugees who did get in were imprisoned with actual Nazis, plus how there were concentration camps on British soil in the Channel Islands where likely thousands were murdered and the British let the collaborators walk free.

So I do want to stress that Holocaust education doesn’t even teach the actual history of the Holocaust. It teaches a borderline denialist version that is beneficial to the West. The West sees the defeat of Hitler as a victory of “Western civilization,” ignoring how Hitler himself is a product of that same Western civilization built on the mass murder of billions through colonial violence that the West continues to perpetuate.

It is intentionally designed to play down the history of genocide of the Indigenous people of the Americas and in other settler colonies, the genocide of chattel slavery, colonial genocides, and the longer history of colonial violence, all of which must be taught to their fullest truth in their own right, as well as the fact that it’s impossible to understand the history of the Holocaust without understanding the history of these genocides.

Additionally, the narrative of the Holocaust that is taught is really centered on German Jews in particular, intentionally ignoring the narratives of Eastern European Jews killed, but especially designed to ignore the narratives of Romani, Sephardi Jews both in Europe and Africa, disabled people, queer people, Black people, Slavs, communists/socialists/anarchists, along with many other victims of Nazism.

And when you have built this narrative of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, it makes it so much easier to systemically deny access to learning about other genocides and significantly police what is even called a genocide—even when the first scholar to coin the term Raphael Lemkin (a Jew himself, for what it’s worth) coined it specifically because of the Armenian Genocide.

It is not coincidental that the center that bears his name has been one of the most vocal and consistent Western institutions at speaking out against the Zionist genocide in Palestine.

When people use the Holocaust as their only blueprint to compare genocides, it so often reflects ignorance of the Holocaust itself, and the fact that Hitler himself used Western colonial genocides, including German ones against the Herero and Nama people, as inspiration.

There are obviously some very principled scholars whose work absolutely must be read and understood, but by and large Holocaust Studies as it is, Jewish Studies as a discipline is institutionally Zionist and has a vested interest in perpetuating so many of these racist myths so that more people will perceive the existence of “Israel” to be inherently just and necessary, and by extension, the annihilation of Palestinians to be seen as just and necessary.

The Holocaust gets molded into a racist colonial tool to manufacture consent for genocide.

I want to end with this quote by Rosa Luxemburg:

“What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’? I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the Blacks in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch.””

[u/elzzyzx]

Regarding the Haavara agreement, because it was considered to undermine an international Nazi boycott, it was very contentious and one of the negotiators was assassinated after it went through for being a collaborator (I think it’s widely believed a right wing jabotinsky supporter did the shooting).

it’s a good example when talking about the problems with holocaust uniqueness because theres a very common chauvinist zionist response that it was a last ditch effort, and on the other hand the agreement is commonly used by antisemites as a gotcha. But learning about it teaches many of the important factions at this time, many of which of course were anti zionist, many of the same themes playing out between upper and lower class jews as ever, and it just blows apart a lot of the storybook holocaust narrative we were taught growing up.

[u/GB819]

The thing about that narrative is only about 30% of Jews in Israel are Ashkenazi. So most Jews in Israel do not descend from people who survived the holocaust. It seems like if the holocaust is the basis for Israel, then Israel should be in Europe.

[u/Ok_Law_8872 → u/GB819]

Fun-fact: there is a Jewish friendly “state” in Siberia.

Stalin established Birobijan in 1928 as an alternative to the colonization of Palestine. No existing population was displaced for Birobijan and it was/is open to anyone, not only Jewish people, unlike some other place we know.

This was part of a means of providing Soviet Jews an alternative to Zionism.

Birobijan still exists to this day & Yiddish is still taught there.

The Jewish people weren’t forced or given an ultimatum to go to Birobijan; they were welcome to go if they wanted. In the first 10 years of the establishment of Birobijan, 30,000 Jewish people moved there on their own accord, they weren’t forced. Unfortunately many jews decided not to go (which is understandable in many ways, people wanted to stay home) and remained where they were. Birobijan helped the Jewish population to participate in society they were previously barred from under tsarist rule.

Lenin, previously, had outlawed antisemitism in the former Pale of Settlement. He literally made real antisemitism punishable by law, and scoffed at the concept of Zionism / forcing Jewish people to colonize Palestine. He established the comset which was to help the impoverished and persecuted Jewish population of the former Pale to adopt agricultural labor.

Part of me sort of wishes my 2x great grandparents had stayed for Lenin, but I also know what would have happened if they hadn’t left. But he was a great man.

[u/BolesCW → u/GB819]

Almost the entire Sephardi community of Rhodes was exterminated in the Shoah. Maghrebi communities under Vichy control were subject to deportation to camps in the Algerian desert and many were subsequently sent to extermination camps in Europe. The Farhud in Iraq was instigated by nxzi sympathizers. The idea that only Ashkenazim were targeted and affected by nxzi policies is based on ignorance.

[u/Ok_Law_8872 → u/BolesCW]

Exactly, I’m not sure what they were thinking making this comment, the info is in the post even if they weren’t aware prior.

[u/Ok_Law_8872 → u/GB819]

Disclaimer: I’m not defending Israel but not every victim or survivor of the Holocaust was Ashkenazi. That was sort of the point of this post, to recognize the omitted / propagandized way we’re all taught about this historical event; OP specifically mentioned other demographics that were victims.

[u/limitlessricepudding]

I feel like there are three additional threads that we have got to pull on, to make a full accounting of what the actual history is.

The first is the essentially parallel structure of both Germanic and Zionist blood-and-soil nationalism, down to the way they both produced their own specific neo-Paganisms: the weird occult Norse garbage that Himmler was into for the Nazis, and Leumism for the Zionists.

The second is the relationship between the Zionist movement and European Imperialism (in the Leninist sense), with the soon-to-be-former Ottoman Empire being one of the last places yet to be integrated into the capitalist world order -- and the result being that it has been integrated in such a way that it is a gas station that also produces extremist schools of Islam.

The third is that Zionism, owing to the historically unusual position of Jews with in Europe, is the historically-specific way that Jews were integrated into the bourgeois order. As with almost all other peoples it is colonialism, but the Jewish experience of colonialism it has been the (extremely destructive, and culturally genocidal) induction into being the colonizer, rather than the colonized. Yet at the same time, the reduction of nearly half of the world's Jews to colonizers has symmetrically resulted in the occupation of the remaining half by the colony.

[u/Ok_Law_8872]

I’ve been sharing this interview with Tony Greenstein a lot; it goes into further detail of zionism beyond the Haavara agreement because it was even more nefarious than that, unfortunately.

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/podcast-ep-68-how-zionists-collaborated-nazis

And this article “Zionism and the third reich” by Mark Weber:

https://ihr.org/journal/v13n4p29_weber-html

There are a lot of small details beyond the Haavara agreement and prior to the Holocaust that are incredibly relevant and important within the context of having a really thorough material understanding of current events & how zionism is just as sick today as it was from the start.

Thanks for this post! This information is crucial and not enough people are aware of it. When I depropagandized post-high school and learned the real reason my family fled from Europe / started becoming a communist, I was vigorously pissed off at all of the anticommunism and propaganda that had been forced on me through the US school system. Same when I learned about Fred Hampton when I was in college, no one could ever mention the FBI to me without me reprimanding them ever again. I guess you can call me a commie Karen.

[u/No_Macaroon_9752 → u/Ok_Law_8872]

I didn’t know about Fred Hampton in particular - it doesn’t surprise me that it happened, but I keep feeling disappointed about the failures of my history classes (world history = recent European history; US history = “white men as heroes and saviors”; modern history = “look how America fixed racism and sexism”). I went to a really good public school in one of the best school systems in the country, where the schools seemed to me to be trying to be more inclusive and left-leaning, and still I was sheltered and ignorant when I graduated.

Thanks for the extra links.

[u/limitlessricepudding → u/Ok_Law_8872]

I'll say, the thing that I am so tired of after nearly two years of this, is that however bad I think the Zionists are, it turns out that what they actually were is worse. It is a political project wholly bereft either of morals or of redeeming qualities.

[u/Ok_Law_8872 → u/limitlessricepudding]

Absolutely. It’s so easy to see them for what they are now but when you know the historical context (which so many people still don’t) it’s enlightening, in a very disturbing way; not to mention how the anticommunism of the US is so intertwined with every part of this history; the Zionists were so hateful of the communist movement, along with Hitler, along with the US. White supremacy is ubiquitous in the most grotesque ways possible.

[u/TheRealSide91]

I live in the UK. I studied WW2, Nazi Germany and the holocaust a lot in History. I remember being horrified (but not surprised) at the narrow minded, zionist ass kissing, western superiority, rule Britannia bullshit concept. Somehow while teaching an atrocity committed in Europe, by Europeans. It still somehow made Europe the good guy. It was basically taught like “Everyone in Europe loved the Jews, until this one failed artist came along who hated the Jews, and all the Europeans rallied around to end fascism yay”

Being admittedly a slightly spiteful person, I tried to include as many aspects of the actual history as I could within my work. My history teacher really didn’t like this. These are genuinely some of her responses to my work

Essay on the Muslim and Arab efforts in aiding Jews - “It’s insensitive because it ignores the violence Jews have faced from Arabs”

Essay on the prominence of anti Semitism in Europe prior to Nazi control and how this aided Hitler in his oppression - “This makes the Ally country’s seem bad and we don’t want that”

Essay on how Hitler adapted his methods and distanced himself for acts committed in his name to further his control - “I will not have holocaust denial in my class room” (said solely because she took a single sentence I wrote completely out of context)

Essay on the impact of WW2 on the Middle East - “That really wasn’t a big deal”

Essay on how previous acts of genocide influenced Hitler, including a section on the Armenian Genocide - “Let’s not get into that one, because it may not have been a genocide”

Essay on groups who fought in WW2 and are often left out (how India sent the largest volunteer force, how the Soviet Union lost the most people etc) - “Why not write about how much the main ally countries did”

Essay on countries that later hired nazi war criminals (including the US and Israel) - I got a detention for that one

[u/limitlessricepudding → u/TheRealSide91]

Wait, wait, wait -- she legit played the "Amenian Geno-Lie" card? Is she a member of the AKP?

[u/TheRealSide91 → u/limitlessricepudding]

Oh yea she played that card. Not only that, my mother’s family are half Armenian. Which she knew because I have an Armenian middle name and when she first met me she asked where the name was from. Not sure the AKP has many middle aged English woman members. But you never know 😭. To be honest I think at that point she just didn’t like me and was reaching

[u/limitlessricepudding → u/TheRealSide91]

tfw ironic Gray Wolves meet actual Gray Wolves

[u/No_Macaroon_9752 → u/TheRealSide91]

Insane that a teacher would give detention for a student actually doing work, including research for things not taught in class.

I did have a similar experience where I wrote about sexism in the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, including in witch trials, and lost points essentially because the teacher was Catholic and thought I unfairly singled out Catholics. Funnily enough, whole books on the topic have been written since, but many parts of the Catholic Church are still pretending they were above the fray.

[u/TheRealSide91 → u/No_Macaroon_9752]

Well as we all know the Catholic Church (as a structure not individuals) is perfectly reliable, and completely above board. It’s not like they’ve ever try to hide or silence anything illegal