Time To Let The Holocaust Go So We Can Move On To The Next One

By Tim Willcox, British Broadcasting Corporation

The last Nazi concentration camp was liberated seventy years ago, but judging from contemporary rhetoric, one would think the atrocities occurred just last week. Social progress will never happen if our society is mired in the past, which is why our news organization firmly believes that we must lay the Holocaust to rest in order to get on to the business of planning and executing another one.

Europeans know better than any other civilization what it’s like to have one’s government and society taken over by antisemitic fascist movements. We’ve elevated to an art form the practice of seeing ourselves as the victim, and never the accomplices to, or perpetrators of, the worst crimes in the history of humanity. In other words, the decades of Holocaust education have accomplished nothing but assault the European ego, and few Continentals, if any, have taken the message to heart. It is time top end the charade, and stop letting our repressed guilt over the crimes of our parents and grandparents stop us from moving forward. We have to finish the job.

At the very least, even if we Europeans lack the political will to genuinely leave the Holocaust behind, there are plenty of Middle Eastern societies willing to engage in the requisite hard work. We would do well to emulate the enlightened peoples of the Levant, who do not let Nazi behavior during the Second World War encumber their clarity of thinking. Perhaps their distance from the horrors of the conflict has given them the objectivity necessary to develop the proper attitude, since they have not been buffeted, as Europe was, by questions of complicity, culpability, condoning, and taking pleasure in seeing those Jews finally get what they deserved.

Letting go of the Holocaust does not, as Jewish organizations keep telling us, necessarily mean that we would try to get back to the business of industrialized mass murder of Jews. Undermining Israeli legitimacy and self-defense might be our favorite pastime, but there is no reason that laying the Holocaust to rest as an event of contemporary relevance has to specifically inform our treatment of Jews: Europe would be just as, if not more, likely to stand idly by as wholesale ethnic cleansing takes place in Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and elsewhere. Our ongoing love-hate relationship with Christianity can take center stage, as we continue to do nothing about the Christian populations of the Muslim world shrinking under oppression, murder, discrimination, mass rape, expulsion, and forced conversion. Leaving the Holocaust behind means broadening our focus to include turning a blind eye to the horrific treatment of all peoples, not merely those on the Continent.

This network will continue to highlight important challenges our society faces, chief among them how to escape the shackles of the Holocaust and pursue the right policy, doing what we can not to be distracted by jaded media treatment of the Führer.

Furor! We meant furor. Honest.