Exploiting genocide; Brendan O'Neill on how 'Holocaust relativists' on both Left and Right use the greatest crime in history for political ends

Exploiting genocide; Brendan O'Neill on how 'Holocaust relativists' on both Left and Right use the greatest crime in history for political ends
The Spectator - January 21, 2006

By: Brendan O'Neill

David Irving, the British historian and anti-Semite, is banged up in Austria, where he faces trial next month for Holocaust denial. He was arrested in November for two speeches he made in that country 15 years ago in which he allegedly denied that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz. Saying such things is a criminal offence in Austria, and if found guilty, Irving faces ten years in jail.

His case is a reminder of the contempt in which we hold those who deny the truth of the greatest horror of the 20th century.

Yet while modern Europe ostracises Holocaust deniers, it has made an art form of another dangerous pursuit: Holocaust relativism. It is now respectable to discover 'new holocausts' and to use the H-word to describe everything from grubby civil wars to the spread of HIV/Aids.

By exploiting the Holocaust for political ends, the Holocaust relativists, sometimes with the best of intentions, do terrible damage. The Holocaust is continually evoked to justify Western military interventions.

The actions of the Serbs, first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo, were frequently described by Western journalists and politicians as 'Nazi-style ethnic cleansing'.

In the spring of 1999 the then British defence secretary George Robertson described Yugoslavia as 'a regime . . . intent on genocide' and said the Nato air strikes were designed to stop the 'ethnic cleansing extermination policy'. Even the German Social Democrats got in on the act, with their then defence minister Rudolf Scharping claiming that there was 'serious evidence' in Kosovo of 'systematic extermination that recalls in a horrible way what was done in the name of Germany at the beginning of World War II'.

The media indulged these fantasies. On 29 March 1999 the Daily Mail's front page carried a picture of Kosovo Albanian children in a lorry under the headline 'Flight from genocide: their terrified and bewildered faces evoke memories of the Holocaust'. The Sun ran with the headline 'NAZIS 1999: Serb cruelty has chilling echoes of the Holocaust'. Some Jews found this cheapening of the Holocaust deeply offensive. Nazi camp survivor Elie Wiesel said, 'The Holocaust was conceived to annihilate the last Jew on the planet. Does anyone believe that Milosevic and his accomplices seriously planned to exterminate all the Bosnians, all the Albanians, all the Muslims in the world?' The final number of civilians killed in Kosovo Kosovo Albanians by Milosevic's cronies and Serbs in Nato air strikes was fewer than 3,000. There was said to have been a mass grave at Trepca in northern Kosovo, and according to the Daily Mirror the name of that place would 'live alongside Belsen, Auschwitz and Treblinka'. Following four months of investigation the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague announced that its investigators had found no bodies at all in Trepca.

Conjuring up the spectre of new Hitlers is still a trick favoured by those calling for wars of intervention. Both George Bushes evoked the spectre of Nazism to justify attacking Iraq. In 1990 Bush Senior said of Saddam, 'We're dealing with Hitler revisited.' More recently Bush Junior's administration went so far as to suggest that Saddam might be even worse than Hitler.

According to a BBC News report, Victoria Clarke, spokeswoman for the Pentagon, said in the early days of the Iraq war that Saddam was 'the worst ruler in world history'. The French decision not to back the invasion was constantly compared with its earlier capitulation to the Nazis. The New York Post asked, 'Where are the French now, as Americans prepare to put the soldiers on the line to fight today's Hitler, Saddam Hussein?' The Third Reich oversaw one of the most powerful states on earth and had clear ambitions to dominate Europe. Saddam's desert state was one of the weakest in the world, ravaged by war and sanctions, which could barely fire a few dud missiles as far as neighbouring Kuwait and which collapsed pretty much as soon as the Coalition's tanks rolled across its borders in 2003. Yet there is a tradition of describing tinpot dictators as 'today's Hitlers': before Saddam, Nasser, Ho Chi Minh, Gaddafi, Milosevic and even Mullah Omar, the one-eyed weirdo who ruled Afghanistan under the Taleban, were talked about as modern-day authors of holocausts.

By hiding behind the Holocaust to justify military interventions, political leaders seek to silence their critics. If you were against intervening in Bosnia, Kosovo or Iraq, then you were an 'appeaser' or, worse, a 'holocaust denier'. This poisonous slur of 'denial' is really an attempt to shut down debate by putting the critics of military intervention beyond the pale. The interventionists play the worst horror in modern history as their trump card.

Regrettably, anti-war activists and writers, instead of defending the memory of the Holocaust from these exploiters and relativists, have tried to outdo them. Harold Pinter says, 'The US is really beyond reason now. . . . There is only one comparison:

Nazi Germany.' Corin Redgrave has suggested that Bush might be worse than Hitler, saying of Guantanamo Bay, 'Even the Nazis allowed the Red Cross to visit their prisoners: why won't America?' During America's bombardment of Fallujah the veteran anti-war journalist John Pilger said, 'the Americans view Iraqis as Untermenschen, a term that Hitler used in Mein Kampf to describe Jews, Romanies and Slavs as subhumans'. Nelson Mandela accused Bush of 'wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust'. Sister Helen Prejean, the American nun who comforts prisoners on death row, recently compared US Supreme Court justices to Nazis. 'They do not see the people they are dealing with as human. That's how Auschwitz happened, ' she said.

The debate about terrorism has also become an unsavoury spat between two sides trying to out-Holocaust each other.

Those concerned that the war on terrorism unfairly victimises Muslims accuse the American and British governments of using 'Nazi-style' tactics. So some people claim that genocidal Islamic terrorists threaten a holocaust against Jews or Christians, while others claim, in the words of a New Statesman front cover, that 'The Next Holocaust' will be against Muslims. Either Islamo-fascism is plotting a holocaust, or Islamophobia will lead to a holocaust; take your pick.

The New Labour government best sums up the contradictory attitude to the Holocaust today. It has both tried to turn the Holocaust into a moral absolute, one point of agreement in our otherwise deeply divided and relativistic times, while also denigrating it in other ways. So the government launched the Holocaust Memorial Day as a kind of moral anchor at a time when our leaders are fairly bereft of inspiring ideas; yet at the same time it has promoted teaching the Holocaust in schools as a way of instructing children about difference, identity and self-esteem, and even the evils of bullying. Under New Labour Holocaust teaching has been taken from the history classes and lumped in with lessons on citizenship or personal and social development. Holocausts, apparently, are no longer only what happen when good men do nothing, but when bullies are allowed to nick your dinner money without reprimand.

So degraded is our historical memory of the Holocaust today that Peta People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals could launch a campaign called 'The Holocaust on Your Plate'. Its aim was to raise awareness about the meat industry.

Posters showed a picture of Jewish children imprisoned in Nazi camps next to a picture of pigs in a pen awaiting slaughter, under the headline 'The Final Indignity?' This is where Holocaust relativism gets us: to a situation where Jews are compared to pigs and the murder of six million men, women and children to the killing of animals for meat.

The Holocaust is far too important an event to be turned into a platform for moral posturing. The arguments of Irving and his cranky neo-Nazi disciples are easily dispatched by anyone with a brain and access to the facts; it is the arguments of the Holocaust relativists that we really must guard against today.