By John Pickard
This week marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp by the Russian Red Army and it is appropriate that the date is commemorated as it is. It is estimated that over a million people died in what was a vast complex of buildings and facilities, but which was mostly designed for the destruction of human lives, the vast majority of them Jews.
The number of those surviving the camp is dwindling year on year, but there were still around 200 at the official ceremony of remembrance in Poland, where there were warnings from survivors, amid a fear that anti-Semitism is increasing again across Europe and the world. Last October in Halle in Germany, a gunman killed two people as he attempted to shoot his way into a synagogue and in December in New York, five people were stabbed at the house of a rabbi.
Detailed and comprehensive history
Martin Gilbert’s authoritative 1985 book, The Holocaust, The Jewish Tragedy, grimly details all the horrors of the concentration camps set up by the Nazis and the genocidal policies they pursued across Europe for more than a decade. A few paragraphs from Gilbert’s book, probably one of the most detailed and comprehensive histories of the Holocaust, vividly illustrate why the Nazi atrocities have a special place in the history of Jewish people across the world.
“…Among those murdered were as many as a quarter of a million Gypsies, tens of thousands of homosexuals and tens of thousands of ‘mental defectives’. Also murdered, often after the cruelties of tortures, were several million Soviet prisoners-of-war, shot or starved to death long after they had been captured and disarmed.”
“As well as the six million Jews who were murdered, more than ten million other non-combatants were killed by the Nazis. Under the Nazi scheme, Poles, Czechs, Serbs and Russians were to become subject peoples; slaves, the workers of the New Order. The Jews were to disappear altogether. It was the Jews alone who were marked out to be destroyed in their entirety…” (emphasis added)
The novels of Primo Levi
Supplementing Gilbert’s book, which methodically and painstakingly details the scale of the genocide, the novels and memoirs of Primo Levi add a poignant and haunting personal flavour to the horrors of the period. Levi was an Italian chemist, taken to Auschwitz to work in the chemical works there and it was for that reason only – because he was ‘useful’ – that he managed to survive. His books are a testament, on one side, to extreme brutality and inhumanity and, on the other, to the almost unbelievable resilience of the human spirit to survive. They might make sombre reading, but Martin Gilbert’s book and Primo Levi’s works, If this is a Man, The Periodic Table, The Wrench and If not Now, When, should be essential reading for all socialists.
This is not the place to describe the rise of Nazism in Germany. But it is worth noting that Martin Gilbert’s book confirms, although in passing, that the destruction of the organisations of the German working class was a pre-requisite for the later policies of the Nazis. “To terrorise political opponents, churchmen, Communists, homosexuals and Jews,” he wrote, “the new government set up concentration camps at Esterwegen and Sachsenhausen, in addition to Dachau…by the beginning of April 1933 [then only weeks in office – JP] at Dachau there were less than a hundred Jews among the thousand German citizens being held without warrant or trial.”
This would have been the equivalent, in British terms, of trade union leaders, shop-stewards, Labour councillors and Labour MPs having been rounded up. Many were tortured and killed without any recourse to legality or law. Had the Communist and Socialist Parties and their allied trade unions not been utterly obliterated and their leading cadres murdered in 1933-34, the entire history of Germany, as well as that of European Jews, would have been different.
It is important that the labour movement marks events like these and the Holocaust in general, but as socialists we also have a wider view, one that encompasses the meaning of the Jewish Holocaust and its place in history.
The Holocaust Industry
Within the left of the labour movement today there is a justified sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian population, faced with the repressive policies of an extreme right-wing government in Israel. However, we must make it clear that Gaza and the West Bank today are not Auschwitz and comparisons between the two are at best facile and, at worst, are even offensive to Jewish people.
But while comparisons between Gaza/West Bank and Auschwitz are completely unreasonable, neither can the horrors of Auschwitz be used to justify Gaza and the West Bank today.
The national and democratic rights of the Palestinian people are being deliberately strangled, and economic life suffocated. On the West Bank, Palestinians, men women and children, are treated to a daily fare of casual brutality, indignity and humiliation, meted out by teenage IDF soldiers with powerful rifles on their arms. In Gaza, Palestinian demonstrators, including children, disabled people and paramedics, are shot down by sniper fire from the Israeli side of the fence. This is an absolutely appalling policy for any country, much less one like Israel, steeped in the bitter memories of the Nazi Holocaust.
The latest so-called ‘peace plan’ for the Palestinians (see article here) is no more than an attempt to put a legal gloss on what is seen by many – including Israeli commentators – as a new apartheid arrangement. For an entire people to be stripped of any possibility of economic development, to be reduced to non-existent or second-class political rights, in a word to be denuded of all hope, is utterly unacceptable and intolerable.
Norman G Finkelstein’s book, The Holocaust Industry, is precisely a polemic against those who exploit the Holocaust to justify the policies of the extreme right wing government in Israel. “The Holocaust proved to be the perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel.”, he writes. Finkelstein is himself the son of survivors from the Warsaw Ghetto and the concentration camps, so he takes his subject seriously. He argues, for example, against the policy of the Israeli right to play down the significance of modern-day genocides other than the genocide of Jews by the Nazis. Even the word ‘holocaust’ has been capitalised as the Holocaust and is used exclusively for what Jewish people call the Shoah in Hebrew.
The murder of six million Jews by the Nazis was in one sense unique, as Martin Gilbert explains. But in another very real sense it is not, and it stands alongside, for example, the genocide of Armenians in Turkey and other modern-day genocides, not to mention historic crimes like slavery. It in no way diminishes or minimises the horrors inflicted on the Jewish people of Europe to point out that there have been other holocausts in modern times. Yet a section of the right in Britain and Israeli argue that it does. We even see that Orla Guerin, a respected BBC journalist, has caused outrage and elicited charges of “anti-Semitism” from the Israeli right and its supporters in Britain, for daring to make a remark about Israel “occupying” Palestinian territories. Her ‘crime’ was to make the comment, in passing, in the context of reporting a Holocaust Day memorial in Jerusalem.
Allegations of anti-Semitism
Not the least consideration for British Labour activists is the way allegations of anti-Semitism have been used against the left of the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn in particular. Finkelstein has argued – and we agree one hundred percent with him – that the charge of anti-Semitism has been used as a means to attack Jeremy Corbyn and has nothing to do with real anti-Semitism: “The British elites suddenly discovered ‘we can use the antisemitism card in order to try to stifle genuine… leftist insurgencies among the population’. And so what used to be a kind of sectarian issue waged by Jewish organisations faithful to the party line emanating from Israel vs critics of Israel, now it’s no longer sectarian because the whole British elite has decided they’re going to use this antisemitism card to stop Jeremy Corbyn and the political insurgency he represents.”
More recently, on his own blogsite, Finkelstein has hosted an article on the demands put to Labour leadership candidates by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. In Ten Commandments to the Labour Party, Deborah Maccoby writes that the ‘tenth commandment’ should be written as, “Thou shalt elect a leader who shall “go down on hands and knees” to us and doth not have the guts to stand up to us. We will limit free speech and criticism of Israel; and anyone who accuseth us of this will be cast out from Labour for antisemitism.”
Norman Finkelstein’s book, when it was first published in 2003, was reviewed in The Jewish Quarterly. In it, the reviewer wrote: “Finkelstein has raised some important and uncomfortable issues”. Yet unfortunately, such is the atmosphere generated by Labour’s right wing, that to raise these issues today might be to open oneself to a charge of “anti-Semitism.” We have to fight against an atmosphere in the Party that diminishes and stifles debate and discussion of such issues.
Nazis used all the concerted skills of a modern state
It is right that socialists should commemorate the Holocaust, not only to remember but to discuss the lessons. Martin Gilbert makes an important point about the ‘industrial’ scale of the Nazi genocide against European Jews. “Against the eight million Jews who lived in Europe in 1939, the Nazi bureaucracy assembled all the concerted skills and mechanics of a modern state: the police, the railways, the civil service, the industrial power of the Reich; poison gas, soldiers, mercenaries, criminals, machine guns, artillery; and over all, a massive apparatus of deception.”
For socialists, ‘never again’ should be more than a slogan; it should reflect an iron determination to fight against all forms of racism and anti-Semitism where we find them, but especially to fight against the capitalist system that spawns such monstrous ideologies. We may live in different times, but across Europe and the world, quasi-fascist and nationalist ideologies and movements are on the march again, waving their flags, beating their drums and blaming someone else. As ever, these reactionaries are sustained by a modern “apparatus of deception”. We do not want our past to be also our future. Socialism for us is not just a nice idea for Sunday speechifying. It is the only possible future for human civilisation, if we are to avoid the kind of inhumanity and horror that we commemorate this week.
January 30, 2020
