Blog : Philosémitisme

"Such Holocaust-milking has the ugly effect of making Hitler look good, or rather better, by suggesting that he was a rather run-of-the-mill tyrant, the like of which is still all around us today."

Le Telegraph a publié un très bon article par Brendan O'Neill: Les personnes qui instrumentalisent la mémoire de l'Holocauste pour justifier une attaque aérienne sur la Syrie sont des relativistes moraux et des charlatans.  L'auteur a raison de rappeler que le négationnisme fut toujours le fait d'une toute petite minorité de mauvais historiens et de skinheads qui trouvent que Himmer avait l'air super-hot dans son uniforme nazi.  Hélas on s'est concentré sur ces personnages en faisant même voter des lois pour criminaliser leur discours ultra-minoritaire et qui n'était pris au sérieux que par quelques zozos.  Et l'on se retrouve maintenant avec une abondance de gens qui relativisent la Shoah. Il ne vous aura pas échappé que des atrocités et des actes barbares perpétrés de nos jours lors de confits sont régulièrement qualifiés de "holocaustes".  Ceci est d'autant plus désolant que des intellectuels juifs n'hésitent pas à utiliser cette analogie.  Elle est également très prisée par des militants anti-israéliens, par des défenseurs des animaux (par exemple l'élevage industriel de poulets), par des homosexuels etc. C'est de la pure ignorance de la part de certains et du pur charlatanisme de la part d'autres.

L' utilisation inappropriée du terme Holocauste, le plus souvent comme une forme de chantage moral pour amener les gens à soutenir une action militaire contre n'importe quel tyran de pacotille qualifié de «nouveau Hitler», a pour effet de rendre l'Holocauste banal et en rien exceptionnel, et le désigner comme événement qui arrive encore et encore au cours de l'histoire de l'humanité. Les seuls vrais bénéficiaires de ce relativisme sont les nazis eux-mêmes, dont la méchanceté est implicitement diluée et diminuée si l'on accepte l'idée que des Holocaustes comme les leurs se produisent tout le temps."

"Holocaust relativism has been in full swing during the debate on Syria. Desperate to drum up support for their threatened airstrikes against Assad's regime, American politicians in particular have been cynically marshalling the moral authority of the Holocaust to their cause. John Kerry has been the most promiscuous plunderer of the history of the Second World War in his drumbeating for an attack on Syria. He says America's stand-off with Assad is ?our Munich moment'. He describes the men, women and children who died in the recent chemical-weapons attacks in Syria as being reminiscent of those who ?lost their lives' to German gas'.

Democratic Senator Harry Reid likewise exploits the Holocaust to justify a strike on Syria, saying during a recent pro-strike speech: ?Millions and millions of civilians and prisoners of war were murdered by gas in Nazi death camps' ?Never again', swore the world.? Meanwhile, pro-interventionism commentators have gone into Holocaust-milking overdrive, arguing that ?the gassing of Syrians with vaporised sarin' is on a par with the Nazis' ?gassing of Jews with Zyklon B 70 years ago'.

All sorts of campaigners now use Holocaust imagery to whip up support for their crusade against some modern moral scourge. So last month, Stephen Fry was claiming that the Holocaust is currently being re-enacted in Putin's Russia, where the repression of homosexuals' rights is apparently an ?eerie repeat of [Hitler's] insane crimes'.

Anti-Israel campaigners are forever describing the Gaza Strip as a modern-day Warsaw Ghetto ? a repulsive comparison to make when you consider that between 1941 and 1943 the population of the Warsaw Ghetto plummeted from 380,000 Jews to 70,000, as a result of starvation, disease and, of course, deportation to death camps. Nothing even remotely like that is happening in Gaza. The cranky animal rights group PETA has said that the treatment of chickens in factory farms is just like the treatment of Jews in death camps, seeming to forget one little fact: Jews are not animals. The Muslim Council of Britain once boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day on the basis that it failed to commemorate conflicts in Bosnia and Chechnya, which apparently were Holocausts too.


[...] Auschwitz was capable of exterminating five times as many Jews in one day as Syrians have been killed with chemical weapons in the whole Syrian conflict so far. And Auschwitz was operational for five years. And it was one of 11 death camps.

Intent-wise, the Holocaust was designed to be the ?the final solution' to the alleged problem of the Jews ? that is, its aim was to kill every Jew in the world. To talk about Assad's mad lashing out at his opponents, or Putin's distaste for gays, in the same breath as a massive industrial effort to destroy an entire people is pretty grotesque. The aim of such hyperbole is to make Assad or Putin or some other rough foreigner look bad by saying ?You're just like Hitler!? ? but actually such Holocaust-milking has the ugly effect of making Hitler look good, or rather better, by suggesting that he was a rather run-of-the-mill tyrant, the like of which is still all around us today.

But that simply isn't true. The war in Syria is not like the Holocaust on any level whatsoever. Putin is not Hitler. The Serbs aren't Nazis. Gaza is not a Warsaw-style Ghetto. The farming of chickens is not like the extermination of the Jews. And the appalling but occasional use of chemical weapons by a desperate dictator is not like the daily use of gas to kill millions of people in factories of death over a period of five years. If you think it is, then you have sunk so far into the mulch of moral relativism, where every bad thing is just as bad as every other bad thing, that there is probably little hope for you.