The Message of Holocaust

What then is the message of Holocaust? Quite simply it is that it must not happen again. Two very diverse camps take off from this mutual premise; Zionism and what can be generalised as anti-fascism.

The anti-fascist stance sees Nazism as one manifestation of a militaristic, chauvinist, hierarchal, anti-democratic system and a cruel view of fellow man and the world at large. Its victims are minority groups who are either an impediment to the fascist aspirations or an innocent target which is readily indentifiable and made to appear as the threat. Students, 'trade unionists. Communists and liberal clergy are the articulate opposition while Jews, Gypsies, Asians, "mixed bloods" foreigners or blacks are the visible "them".

In Britain for instance, the National Front retains its anti-semitic rhetoric but effectively this is only peripheral and commemorative as there are over a million "coloured immigrants" in Britain; much more obvious as a racist target. If in the 1930s Germany had such a population the Jews may well have been left alone.

So for the anti-fascist, any racist doctrine is an anathema and the lesson of Holocaust is not so much the persecution of Jews by the Nazis, but instead that in any society, no matter what civilicsed, cultured gloss and sensitivity, the Dorffs and Heydrichs can so pervert and rationalise, especially in times of economic crisis, barbarous acts of atrocity. Apart from discerning what Zionism means, a more valid lesson of the Holocaust would be to anticipate the eventual cumulative social effects of exercises like our Prime Minister's brandishing of "Polynesian" TAB slips in Parliament.

So [unclear: than] is nothing unique about the anti-semitism or even the classical fascism. In their wars the United States's governments since 1941 have probably been directly responsible for more civilian deaths than Hitler could total.