6-21-05,9:16am
Programs of Holocaust education have been established in a number of states, monuments to both the Jewish and non-Jewish victims have been established in the United States and many other countries and a Holocaust Museum now exists in Washington. But, there is in my opinion a danger that Holocaust education is in effect failing in its mission, if its mission is to reach masses of people with an understanding of the genocide carried out in World War II. Holocaust education is important as part of a general program of fighting reactionary and fascist ideology in the United States and the world. Marxists have a valuable role to play in rescuing it from both narrow academicism, that is, research by and for small groups of academic specialists as part of normal careerist work, and the “mass market” Hollywood approach, which uses melodrama to portray horrors without any explanation of fascism and the social classes that supported it, except that it concerned horrible German people in uniforms who tortured and murdered mostly Jewish victims.
There were many inter-related Holocausts, but the Jewish Holocaust, the mass murder of roughly two-thirds of the Jewish people of Europe and one-third of the Jewish people of the world by German fascists and their allies and collaborators, is rightly seen as the signature crime of modern history and as one of the greatest crimes against humanity in all history. The experiences of its victims and the actions of its perpetrators have been analyzed in many books, catalogued in museums, expressed painting, sculpture, and cinema, in all of the fine arts. At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise globally and in the United States for a variety of reasons, including the increased influence of rightwing religious and secular forces in the rich countries and also the increased influence clerical and secular rightists in many Islamic countries where publications like Hitler’s Mein Kampf and classic anti-Semitic “conspiracy” forgery, The Elders of the Protocols of Zion, have flourished. It is important to relate advance Holocaust education. The view that Jewish people are “people of privilege” whose only political involvement is in support for the state of Israel, the more it is spread and believed, produces a “win” situation for reactionaries, by both strengthening reactionaries for whom Jewish people, even those who are their servants, can be handy scapegoats for their failures, and strengthening Jewish reactionaries who regularly conflate criticism of Israeli policies with anti-Semitism and use all real examples of anti-Semitism as a rationale to encourage Jewish people to provide uncritical support for Israel. The name Holocaust, derived from the bible, is powerful and expressive, but I think it is better to use the term genocide, the attempt to murder a whole people – not discriminate against them, exploit them as slaves or serfs, or laborers, even drive them out of regions where they had lived, forcibly resettle them – but murder them, wipe them out.
For working people, particularly, it is important to understand that the genocide directed against the Jewish people of Europe, regardless of whether they were religious Jews, or secular Jews, or even thought of themselves as Jews, since some had been raised as Christians in Christian families, was perpetrated by Fascists, the enemies of all working people. Fascists came to power in Germany and other European countries using rabid hatred of Jews, socialists, Communists, and in the Nazi case with direct threats to use violence to protect “Germany,” by which they meant the “racially pure” warrior country of their imagination, superior to all others, “without social classes,” except the racial elite, and without labor unions and modern urban secular liberal culture. Jews were to Nazis what “liberals” are to the blustering American rightwing, evil phantoms who were simultaneously the powerful wealthy elites controlling the media and the professions and the organizers and leaders of Socialism, Communism, and all radical movements seeking to overthrow the elites.
In Italy, where fascism as a reactionary movement and party was born after WWI anti-Jewish racism was not a factor in its early years, because anti-Jewish traditions on the Italian secular right were marginal. Fascist movements everywhere appeal to and greatly extend core prejudices of long duration used by ruling groups to divide working people. The core prejudice can be anything, anti-Semitism in most of Europe, anti-Chinese racism in countries like Malaysia and Indonesia, anti-Armenian and anti-Kurdish racism in Turkey and other countries.
For American working people, a good way to focus holocaust education would be to compare the Nazis and the KKK. Both saw themselves as militants, even revolutionaries, seeking to save the system from itself, to revive mythical pasts and protect grand abstractions in which the existing social hierarchies were preserved. For the Klan the abstractions were the old the South, and in the 1920s Nordic protestant America. For the Nazis they were “the Nordic Aryan race” and the German nation as empire (Reich) fighting the “enemies within” who had “stabbed it in the back during WWI, and preparing to fight the external enemies, that is, the Allied powers who had unfairly defeated it in WWI.
Both the KKK in the South and the Nazis in Germany worked to fight unions, had connections often with conservative elements of the local police, and had wealthy and powerful backers behind the scenes who helped to fund their activities, not so much to bring them to power but to keep liberals, socialists, Communists out of power, to keep the working class divided and intimidated, acting out its frustrations against minority scapegoats. Ironically, Germany’s “solid South,” Bavaria, to this day the political stronghold of conservative forces, both harbored and nurtured the Nazi movement in its early years.
Most importantly, Marxists should work to help teach working people that the Holocaust is not unknowable, a view often encouraged by “high brow” literary critics and celebrity philosophers, not about something dark in the human condition. If everyone is responsible then ultimately no one is. That which we cannot understand we cannot correct or cure.
For Marxists and for the broad left generally, the Holocaust can be understood as a set of dialectically inter-related events that happened, could have been prevented through different national and international policies at the time, and can happen again, if a party or a military group supported by powerful class interests internally and/or internationally comes to power committed to building a war machine, destroying workers rights, and solving the countries economic problems by imperialist conquests.
Blaming a vulnerable minority, for example, the Nazis Big Lie propaganda against Jews for betraying Germany in WWI and instigating “Cultural Bolshevism” in the 1920s worked for Hitler and his backers. In the contemporary US uniting the religious and secular Right condemnation of Gays and Feminists for undermining the American family, producing the “Vietnam Syndrome,” and creating a “political correctness” that always “blames” America for everything and must be, has been a fixture of mass media and Republican politics for decades, like an appendix waiting to burst.
When ruling classes are in immediate crisis, they can call upon such forces, Nazis, Klansmen, whom they have used but kept at arm's length, to retain their power. At least that was the background for European fascism in the interwar period. But that is not the only way.
As many fear in the US particularly, the mindset that leads eventually to an open terrorist capitalist state dictatorship, the center of the classic Marxist-Leninist definition of fascism, and creates the conditions for genocide can become “normal” a part of accepted political discourse over a period of time. Rightwing governments can “co-exist” with and help to legitimize open terrorist fascist parties and societies as the Rumanian monarchy did with the Iron Guard, Horthy did in Hungary, Pilsudski did in Poland and of course, Southern “conservative” segregationist did when it suited them with the KKK. When “ordinary people” over time come to accept pogroms or lynchings as a normal part of life, either averting their eyes are vicariously identifying with the killers because that is more acceptable than resistance, perspective is lost and the ideologies and policies of fascism become “mainstream.”
When those committed to an ideology of unilateral military posturing, return to an idealized past, secular or religious, those contemptuous of liberalism in all its definitions, and hostile to the labor movement in all but its most craven forms, permeate mass media as they do in the United States today, a context is created in which the Geneva rules of war can be buried in Iraq, the acceptability of using torture against prisoners, regarded as both a war crime in declared wars and occupations, can become a serious topics of discussion.
That some of the advocates of such policies are themselves of Jewish American, African American, and Mexican American background, is a distinction from the Fascist Axis of World War II. But it may be a distinction without a great difference, since an “ecumenical” fascism open to all those who support its militarist, national chauvinist, anti-working class and anti-humanist policies is still fascism. Even Hitler proclaimed the Japanese, who of course did not fit positively into Nazi race ideology, “honorary Aryans,” since they allied themselves with him and acted in the militarist and imperialist way that advocated.
Karl Marx always believed that working class people could understand socialist theory, political economy, history, because it was in their interests. He was serious when he contended that his work was written for workers, a point that twentieth century capitalist’s propagandists have sneered at because of obvious difficulty in reading Capital especially and other of Marx’s classic works. But Marx expected workers to do great things, to free themselves from the dictatorship of capital, to make great efforts to change the world, which of course meant also to make great efforts to understand it, to master the learning and culture that their class enemies both sought to deny them and use against them. Capitalists have deep contempt for working class people whom they believe they can endlessly manipulate through propaganda that, like commercial advertising, appeals to their prejudices and emotions.
Holocaust education should be aimed both in the schools and the larger society at working class people. Workers more than non working class people can understand why big corporations like Thyssen Steel and the big German auto companies supported Hitler before and after he came to power, because he would break the unions literally, take away the rights of their organizers and the labor parties the Communists and Social Democrats which represented the working class, and build a war machine that would enrich German capital. Workers more than most people can understand that great wealth is the foundation of power and power exists to protect and expand great wealth—something they see in the organization of their work places and in the laws that govern them at those work places.
Workers more than non-working class people can understand that the only real thing the German ruling class had against the Nazis was that they lost World War II, which had far more devastating negative consequences for German big capital than all the riches the Nazi regime provided for them through its re-armament policies and early conquests.
As for the Jewish Holocaust, German capital didn’t really care for the most part about Jews or other minorities in Germany, just as they didn’t really care about the German majority, except as their workers and employees. In some areas of the economy, banking and merchant capital, there were prominent capitalists of Jewish background, but the only thing that really distinguished them from their fellow German capitalists was the social prejudice and exclusionary policies that many of the latter expressed toward them. The majority of Jewish Germans were, in the popular American sense of the word, middle and lower middle class, small business people and lower professionals, seeking to improve their lot through increased access to education under the liberal Weimar Republic after WWI. They neither Germany’s “Big bad Capitalists ” nor were they the most important leaders of the Communist and Social Democratic parties, the parties of the left, as they were portrayed in Nazi propaganda although prominent Jewish Germans did have leading positions in both parties. Although Jewish German Communists and Social Democrats were special targets of Nazis and other rightwing political anti-Semites, they were from my understanding fully integrated into their parties, and committed to the different definitions of a socialist Germany which their parties represented.
Workers who know that there are even in the most miserable situations relatively decent bosses, “easy bosses” as they used to be called in the U.S. in the 19th century, can understand that men like the Nazi businessman OskarSchindler and the few other establishment Germans who acted save Jewish prisoners from extermination were exceptions, remarkable exceptions, but exceptions nevertheless.
If Hollywood, which has told Schindler’s story, were not the great center and archive of capitalist dreams, it might take works like Yuri Suhl’s They Fought Back and make films about Jewish partisans who fought in integrated units with non Jewish anti-fascists in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and other countries. Working class people would understand the simple point made by Suhl and others—those Jewish people who were integrated into larger societies had a much better chance of surviving than the segregated ghettoized, religious populations who had accepted their marginalization and isolation and turned to their religious and economic leaders to act as a buffer between them and hostile authorities and non-Jewish communities. Separation and segregation within the working class movement has always produced defeat and disaster.
The genocide, which the Nazis called “the final solution” developed out of the war, out of the war primarily in the East, against the Soviet Union, as historian Arno Mayer, a truly distinguished historian, has shown most powerfully in Why Did the Heavens Not Darken. The threats to do such things long existed in both the Nazi movement and the pre war the Nazi regime had created a form of extreme segregation for German Jews and those Jews in Austria and Czechoslovakia who had fallen under their control, while encouraging anti-Semitic governments in Hungary and Rumania, satellites of theirs, to increase their anti-Semitic activities. Italian fascist dictator Mussolini passed anti-Semitic laws in Italy in 1938 to ingratiate himself further with Hitler and his fellow European fascists, the great majority of whom advocated anti-Semitic politics.
But the commitment to genocide, bureaucratically organized mass murder accomplished in concentration camps which resembled slaughterhouses for cattle and other animals, was a direct result of the Nazis launching World War II, their invasion of Eastern Europe, with large numbers of impoverished Jewish ghetto dwellers along with a significantly smaller Jewish middle class, and particularly their invasion of the Soviet Union, which Hitler saw as the end all and be all of our movement, meaning a political and racial holy war, and which Hitler had previously called a a Jewish head on a Mongol body.
In teaching the Holocaust to working class people, it is important to emphasize the role of anti-Fascist United Front campaigns, to support the Spanish Republic against Spanish Fascists and their German and Japanese Fascist backer so oppose the Japanese invasion of China, to oppose the Munich agreement, on the sound basis that fascism means war. These mass protest movements in politics can and should be compared to postwar peace campaigns, since the kind of broad left people who opposed the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the present Iraq war were and are the legitimate successors of those who fought against fascism and war and sought to achieve peace through anti-fascist collective security.
Those who supported and continue to support U.S. military interventionism in both the cold war and post cold war periods and the legitimate successors of the rightwing isolationists who didn’t want to fight Hitler both because they agreed with his anti-Communist, anti-labor orientation (if not his open terrorist dictatorship) and wanted to create a “Fortress America” in a U.S. dominated Western Hemisphere rather than form multilateral alliances of any kind. Today, these ultra-right elements, oddly called “neo-conservatives” even though they are neither new nor are they trying to conserve anything, still think in terms of “Fortress America” but today they see the whole world the way their predecessors once saw the Western hemisphere.
Had the United States, England, France, and the Soviet Union worked together to build a collective security system and alliance against Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy, the Holocaust against European Jews, Gypsies, Serbians, Soviet prisoners of war, and other Slavic peoples who were low on the Nazi “race” hierarchy might have not happened. Had the divided anti-Nazi forces in Germany built a popular front alliance against the Nazis in the early 1930s it is doubtful that would have come to power. History isn’t predestination, except for religious and some political sectarians. Working people especially responded to the appeal of Communists throughout the world that the struggle against fascism and war were one and the same in the 1930s. The victory of fascism and the war it produced were no more inevitable then than the victory of imperialism and war is today.
Working people can understand how the divisions among anti-Fascists in Germany strengthened the Nazis because they have seen divisions and turf wars weaken their unions in the face of employer offensives for decades. Workers can understand how the appeasement policy toward Hitler launched by the conservative governments of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain in Britain, a policy that they thought would enable them to do business with Hitler and work with him against the Soviets and Communist revolutionaries, enabled the Nazis to build their war machine without serious opposition, annex Austria and Czechoslovakia, and then launch the war.
Trade unionists especially have seen many of their leaders give uncritical support to Democratic party politicians who thought they could continue to do “business as usual” with the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, retreat steadily and weakly support less draconian “welfare reform,” and more multi-lateral wars in Iraq and other places rather than challenging the Bush administration directly. To defeat a government that literally is racing to military disasters means seeking creative ways to abolish the Taft-Hartley law, increase trade union membership, win back trillions in lost revenues since 1980 through a policy of retaxation aimed at corporations and the rich, and regain the momentum lost in the 1970s when the disastrous effects of the Vietnam War and the Watergate conspiracy led progressives in Congress to develop a “transfer amendment” aimed at significantly reducing military budgets in a post Vietnam era and shifting funds to revive social programs dealing with education, housing, health care, and transportation.
That the Soviets signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939 is certainly true, but we should not think of that pact the way Joseph Goebbells would want us to if he were still literally rather than figuratively alive, That was a consequence of the appeasement, not a cause of the war. Given the British and Anglo French policy of the previous six years, to blame the war on that pact is, as the British might say, rather Acheeky.
Also, working class people can understand that both genocide reached the dimensions it did, six million Jewish people and many millions of others in a war which in Europe claimed perhaps 40 million people, because of the divisions among the Anglo-American allies and the Soviets on the question of the Second Front after 1941. The delaying of a second front for nearly two years lengthened the war, prevented Soviet forces from liberating the death camps far earlier than they were, and magnified the mass killing of Civilians carried out by the Fascist Axis in Europe, China, and the Pacific.
That 11 million people perished in the concentration camps alone, that Croatian Fascist underlings of the Nazis practiced genocide against Serbian Yugoslavs that cost through direct mass murder as many as 800,000 lives, that perhaps as many as 27 million Soviet citizens, the majority of them civilians, were killed in the war, should be factored in when workers are taught about the Fascist Genocide against the Jewish people.
After World War II, former Nazis and conservative intellectuals in Germany sought to develop the view that the great crimes of the Hitler regime were the result of Volk Egoismus, mass hysteria, and the actions of the high Nazi leaders, especially Hitler.
Thus everybody was responsible, which meant nobody, except Hitler and a few top Nazis were responsible. In the United States the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was compared to Hitler and the Soviet Union was portrayed as a totalitarian state that had to be fought as Hitler was not fought. In the process, people were encouraged to forget about fascism, to see history in terms of evil men and big totalitarian governments fighting against conservatives, and to let the Nazis, their class backers, and their mass followers, off the hook of history.
The Holocaust became a series of facts, of numbers, and of feelings, of the victims and the survivors, for whom one could only feel deep pity and in a general way guilt that not more was done to save them. Over time, this is not a way to help the working class and the whole people understand the Holocaust since only knowledge that is applied and updated becomes truly relevant and lives.
Understanding Fascism, its mindset, its class nature, its social purposes, and seeing it as a process, something that develops, happened before and can happen again, and not only from would -be Hitlers but from Pierre Lavals, the French conservative politician and Vichy collaborationist leader (that is particularly important because we in America have a lot of Pierre Lavals in both parties, although the great majority of course are in the Republican Party) is necessary if we are to learn from the past. Fascism is much more extreme but ultimate not qualitatively different than the glorification of the military and the police, the hatred of liberalism and Apolitical correctness, that permeates rightwing establishment politics in America today and rightwing mass media, and that such forces given the right circumstances can become fascist, is essential to preventing war and fascism and preventing new genocides.
The old conservative philosopher George Santayana wrote that those who learn nothing from history are condemned to repeat it. An old German Communist in the 1920s said, “Strike the Nazi wherever you see him.” We can and we must teach workers to understand that without an understanding of history, they can suffer its repetition, not in the same form but with the same basic content and results. We can and must teach workers to understand and fight fascism, because that is the only way to really understand the genocide, the Jewish and non-Jewish Holocaust, and honor its victims.
A few months ago I was involved in an Internet discussion concerning the role of the Roosevelt administration, which has been widely criticized over the last generation for its failure to do more to save victims of the Holocaust. In my next article, I will discuss these issues as a continuation of the discussion on Holocaust education today.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. He can be reached at pa-lettes@politicalaffairs.net.
