The Holocaust is everywhere

All massacres resemble each other when one deliberately decides to dispense with the analytical precision that would make it possible to differentiate between them. But where does this love of hackneyed comparisons, so common today, have its roots? Stephan Malinowski sets out to identify the intersecting and paradoxical intellectual lineages that give rise to this great confusion.

 

 

At the award ceremony for science prizes in Ankara in December, Turkish President Erdoğan spoke of Israel’s “Nazi camps” and of the difference between Netanyahu and Hitler, which he said lay solely in Netanyahu’s wealth. Netanyahu, on the other hand, had made headlines in 2015 with the claim that Hitler had only been persuaded to murder the Jews by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. At the other, academic end of the spectrum, influential genocide historian A. Dirk Moses recently announced at a lecture in Berkeley that the telos of German remembrance culture this time around is not merely the deportation of “Semites,” but approval of their mass murder in Gaza. Wide-ranging comparisons that lightly traverse centuries, millennia, civilizations, and continents, for which individual elements of Nazi history are dragged through all possible contexts, are currently in vogue.

In addition to political, polemical, journalistic, and activist battlegrounds, the academic field is also affected by a pseudo-methodology that is essentially based on reducing complexity and decontextualization. Since students and graduates at elite universities in the Western world began praising Hamas as a liberation organization and denouncing Israel as an apartheid regime ruled by “white” colonial masters, German media outlets have also stepped up their efforts to explain to their confused readership a worldview that is influential in academic circles and is labeled postcolonial or labels itself as such. These so-called amorphous, immensely influential and at least fifty-year-old currents are composed of academic, activist and political sources.

The latter two shine in a somewhat more distant scene that protects against viewing this development as new and makes it particularly worthwhile to rescue it from oblivion these days: In a crowded courtroom in the heart of Lyon, an unusual quartet of lawyers appears, whose performance is aimed more at the reporting world press than at the bench. Alongside a Bolivian lawyer who serves as decoration, an Algerian and a Congolese lawyer deliver pleas that assist the charismatic and actual star of the defense.

The Holocaust was a crime of the past, but colonial crimes extended far beyond it into the present.

This man, Jacques Vergès, born on the outer edge of the French colonial empire, the son of a French doctor and a Vietnamese mother, had defended and married an icon of the Algerian independence struggle twenty-five years earlier – in addition to joining the Communist Party, converting to Islam, being received by Mao, publishing an anti-colonialist magazine, and defending various left-wing terrorists on a global scale.

The shining team of lawyers “in the colors of the human rainbow”, as it describes itself, commented in the courtroom on the murder of forty-four Jewish orphans who had been deported from near Lyon to Auschwitz in 1944, pointing out that many more people had been murdered in the Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982 under the responsibility of the Israeli army. An “Israeli Babyn Jar” was said to have taken place in these camps.

Alongside the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime, he cited the victims of the anti-colonial uprising in Madagascar in 1947, the construction of the Congo Railway in the 1930s, the slums of Soweto, and the one million Algerian victims killed by the French “Nazis of today” since 1954. There were no fundamental differences between Auschwitz and the use of incendiary bombs. The Holocaust was a crime of the past, but colonial crimes extended far beyond it into the present, and the international legal construct of crimes against humanity should not be used solely to punish Nazi crimes, but also to address the far more comprehensive crimes of European colonialism.

In recent years, the empirically poor but theoretically strong postcolonial grand comparison has gained ground in academia, politics, and the media.

The scene described here took place thirty-six years ago, in the summer of 1987. The context is astonishing. In Lyon, Vergès and his global team are defending SS officer Klaus Barbie, who was head of the Gestapo in Lyon during the occupation of France. The team’s circle of supporters is also surprising: the defense is financed and partly organized by the Swiss Nazi and antisemitic organizer François Genoud, a follower of the antisemitic Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The controversial financier had previously served as treasurer of the Algerian independence movement FLN.

The Congolese lawyer on the team, Jean-Martin Mbemba, argues in court that Barbie had grasped his hand, the hand of a black man, with both hands. The elderly SS officer Barbie had thus shown redemption, while racism remained a murderous reality in all corners of the postcolonial world. Maître Vergès adds that his Vietnamese mother did not need a Jewish star to be excluded, because she was yellow from head to toe.

The spectacle in Lyon, which unfolded at the same time as the historians’ dispute^[1], can be seen on the one hand as an early and caricatured culmination of the postcolonial worldview. On the other hand, its mixture of left-wing and right-wing radical sources represents a cross-front that has since gained immense significance and momentum. Interpreting the Holocaust as one element in a millennia-old chain of extreme colonial violence is likely to be one of the most radical challenges facing Holocaust research. The ideological soundscape, composed of various building blocks of the 20th century, combines fragments of left-wing and right-wing traditions and links anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, antisemitic, anti-Zionist, and anti-Western set pieces, which are remixed here in a unique, unmistakable sound.

To understand the appeal and power of this interpretation, one must first look at its historical depth. Since the 1920s, communism had been working against the allegedly imperialist character of Zionism, which it believed to be led by the bourgeoisie and capital. In other centers of gravity around the world, leaders of anti-colonial movements contributed additional elements. In late November 1938, for example, Mahatma Gandhi claimed in an anti-Zionist text that Jews in Germany were not treated any worse than Indians in South Africa. At around the same time, Pan-Africanists such as Jomo Kenyatta, a student at the London School of Economics and later the first prime minister of independent Kenya, argued that British “colonial fascism” treated the subjugated no differently than the Nazis.

The idea, made famous by intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, that “the Nazis” treated their victims no differently than European colonialism had treated its victims for centuries, is already smoldering here. But even at the other end of the political spectrum, there are sources to consider that have been forgotten in the current debate. Ernst Nolte, for example, the old master of free-standing historical comparison, discovered Islam for himself in 2009 as an old man and sought to portray its “defensive aggressiveness” against the colonial oppressor state of Israel. Nolte’s constructions reflected parts of the right-wing tradition, as did the top Nazis who fled and held advisory positions in Cairo under the pan-Arab leader Nasser, for example.

The pieces of the puzzle scattered across time and space will have to be gathered and rearranged in order to properly classify the appeal of the postcolonial grand narrative, which is fed by various roots. There are no direct links between today’s Harvard students, Nolte, Gandhi, the Red Flag, Vergès, the RAF members trained by the military in Jordan, and some postcolonial theorists. What these fundamentally different sources have in common is their anti-Zionist moment, their anti-colonial tone, and their largely empirically unfounded linking of Nazi crimes to other scenarios of violence.

Added to this is their virtually global dissemination, which encompasses not only seminar rooms between Harvard, Humboldt, and Hofuf, but also significant parts of the so-called Global South. The pig heads with Star of David symbols, which made their way from Jakarta to a plastic tarpaulin hung in Kassel in the summer of 2022, have vividly reminded us of the global and timeless applicability of these images.^[2] Furthermore, the recycling of individual set pieces cut out of world history has a kind of contemporary relevance that historical partial analyses cannot offer. For while the Nazi perpetrators are history, phenomena of racist and postcolonial inequality, oppression, and violence continue to exist in countless places around the world to this day.

Postcolonialism is poised to become the most important new grand narrative. Like all modern ideologies, it is successful because it follows the rules of product advertising.

The pose of standing alongside the “wretched of the earth,” as the powerful title of Frantz Fanon’s iconic 1961 book puts it, is only made possible by this contemporary relevance. Ultimately, global-sounding “comparisons” of this kind offer one thing above all else: simplification. The gas chambers of Auschwitz, the war in Gaza, Dresden, the fall of the Aztecs, Vietnam, Algeria, the Spanish Conquista, slavery, the extermination of the Native Americans, the Romans—behind it all stood the white colonizer, the expansion of “state power,” and the colonial quest for “permanent security.” In this mishmash, the term colonialism loses all analytical value.

In a famous text from 1979, French thinker Jean-François Lyotard proclaimed the end of grand narratives, describing the collapse of systemic designs and ideologies that is still valid today, replaced by a confusing multitude of smaller discourses. Forty years after this diagnosis, it is clear that postcolonialism is poised to become the most important new grand narrative. Like all modern ideologies, it is successful because it follows the rules of product advertising. It offers radical simplification, the creation of new terms, and the endless repetition of relatively simple messages.

Vergès, anti-colonial lawyer for the anti-Zionist struggle, left-wing terrorism, and various genocidal figures, was called upon ten years after the Barbie trial to defend Roger Garaudy, a former communist who, after converting to Islam, was accused of Holocaust denial. In 1988, Vergès had published a treatise entitled “I Defend Barbie”. It bears the following dedication: “To the martyred children of all wars: Jews, Palestinians, Vietnamese, Algerians . . . without forgetting the sixty-six German children who died in the [French] camp at Montreuil-Bellay as a result of neglect.”

“Everything will perish,” Jean Améry predicted in 1966, referring to the conflation of different historical contexts, “in a sweeping ‘century of barbarism’.” In recent years, the empirically poor but theoretically strong postcolonial grand comparison has gained ground in academia, politics, and the media. This has led to the disappearance of the analytical precision without which neither the devastation of colonialism nor that of Nazi rule, nor the similarities and differences between the two, let alone the Middle East conflict, can be meaningfully portrayed. What remains is a generalized lamentation over all the dead. Where radical decontextualization prevails, the pseudo-progressive blurring of the boundaries between political propaganda, activism, and scholarship will contribute little to clarifying historical and contemporary scenarios of violence.

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Stephan Malinowski

Published in the FAZ in January 2024.