This is a moment in the timeline when many people are throwing around fairly lazy comparisons with various other historical moments, particularly 1930s Germany. Each person you ask will assign the chief villain roles – namely Hitler, the Nazis generally, and the enabling bystanders who looked away – to members of factions opposite to the speaker’s deeply-held ideology.
But to truly cultivate nuance, a different approach is called for. Namely, rather than attempting to draw comparisons to history in order to simplify and predict the outcome of the present, we must instead use the present moment to recognise history’s complexity.
The overly-corporate phrase ‘lessons learned’ gets bandied about glibly within the context of the Holocaust. ‘Why haven’t X learned from this past moment in history?’ The assumption is that the lessons from that war are set and straightforward, that they’re simple, universally applicable and easily learned.
This is a particularly egregious assumption when applied to modern Jewry, and Israel in particular. As though Israel is perpetrating something on anything touching the sides of the scale of the Shoah, when cattle-cars full of Jews were shunted to concentration camps, tattooed with identifying numbers devised by IBM, and were summarily executed in horrifically cruel gas chambers formulated by Bayer or else literally worked to death in factories for German companies which are still household names today, such as Volkswagen (who admitted to using 15,000 slaves sourced from concentration camps during the war).
It becomes worse when drilling down to the factional infighting of diaspora Jews. In my town it at times feels very much like the Judean People’s Front versus the People’s Front of Judea.
I am a leftwing zionist Jew, and my WhatsApp chats are getting ridiculous. On the one hand I support Jewish-Arab Israeli solidarity movements attempting to win hearts and minds within the PSC, and many people in those chats hold pro-Palestine views I find hard to engage with. Yet on the other hand I have, on the back of some ribbon-tying efforts, been added to various regional chats in which some Jewish people are questioning whether Tommy Robinson is really that bad (yes, he is, ffs) and spouting off about the latest Muslim Immigration Panic.
Naturally, the more extreme members of each group would accuse each other of being bystanders at best and Nazis at worst. ‘Why haven’t you learned the lessons of the Holocaust?!’
But what if we took a different approach. What if we could acknowledge the complicated truths from that time, in a level-headed and non-judgemental way. That the landscape, the moment, was complex. That many people were just trying to keep their heads down and get by. That people didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, or else didn’t know what to do. That young idealists like Hans and Sophie Scholl got murdered. That Germans or Poles thought it sensible to relocate Jews to ghettoes ‘for their safety’. That this occurred on the back of centuries of oppression at the hands of the Catholic Church, who maintained that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus until 1965 – two decades after the end of the war.
Acknowledging the complexity of history is the only real counter to presentism because it makes us humble in the face of uncertainty. We can see ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ from our vantage point today, but those living through such times did not have the benefit of our hindsight.
This is, incidentally, also a counter to those arguments disparaging the character and methods of early zionists such as Theodor Herzl, who was doubtless problematic as a person and political theorist but was working within the confines of his time with the information available to him. Many zionists spent the Second World War attempting to convince Jews to immigrate to British Mandate Palestine rather than fight their condition in Europe, not because they wanted European Jews dead but because they were convinced that establishing a homeland in the Levant was the only sustainable guarantee of Jewish safety in the longer term. Whether their actions were right or wrong, they acted in full belief that history would bear them out.
Many people in our time also feel they are acting rightly, and have thrown the entire weight of their convictions behind one camp or another. Palestine has become the omnicause of the Left, which has adopted it with the zeal of the Crusades. Israel has the questionable support of the likes of Tommy Robinson and the Christian zionists who largely sit on the Right. Such binary thinking helps no-one, and belies the immense complexity of this moment in the unfolding of the World.
Sonya Blanck writings 