I had originally intended to make a thread asking why there is so little interest in the Medz Yeghern, which struck me as odd considering how useful it would have been for modern anti-Muslim propaganda. For the life of me I cannot distinctly think back to a discussion where somebody casually brought up the Medz Yeghern—let alone the Sayfo—even after the WTC’s destruction, when anti-Muslim sentiment was on the rise.

I remember browsing the Richard Dawkins forum, FSTDT, and Rapture Ready back when I was an angsty atheist, yet I cannot unforget one instance where someone mentioned the Medz Yeghern. (Not to say that it must have been because nobody ever mentioned it, only that I never saw anybody who did.) My guess was that Rapture-ready Evangelicals and atheist snobs alike avoided the topic because the mere thought of displaying any solidarity with Eastern Orthodox Christians sounded utterly revolting to them, but that felt like too cynical of an explanation.

So I thought about it some more.

That was when it hit me: remembering the Shoah but forgetting about the Medz Yeghern, the slaughter of Native Americans, the slaughter of Southwest Africans, and all of the other violence that inspired the Third Reich is a political decision, not a logical one.

Before I elaborate, I want to address a few suggestions. Jew-haters propose that the Shoah is better known than other extermination campaigns because ‘the Jews’ control the mainstream media and the education system. This assertion is easily falsifiable: if indeed ‘the Jews’ controlled those phenomena, then surely they would repeatedly jump at the chance to tell us about the Polish–Cossack Wars, or more recently, the pogroms from 1917 to 1923: the proto-Shoah. On the contrary, when I asked several Jewish adults whom Symon Petliura was, none of them could answer in the affirmative.

On the other hand, the most cynical anticolonialists among us suggest that the Shoah is more familiar to people because most of the victims were ‘White’ (at least by today’s standards). Now, this proposal certainly sounds more plausible than the other, but it, too, raises questions: why the Shoah and not, say, the Haitian Revolution, the Irish potato famine, the Third Reich’s slaughter of 1.8 million Poles, or the tens of millions of other Slavs that the Axis and its collaborators massacred? Surely those victims all count as ‘White’ now, don’t they? Then why do we hear comparatively little about them?

The answer, I am sad to say, is that exploiting the Shoah is more useful to the White bourgeoisie than exploiting any other extermination campaign, because the exploitation thereof serves its interests in West Asia. Quoting controversial Norman G. Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, ch. 2:

Seven major Holocaust museums dot the American landscape. The centerpiece of this memorialization is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. […] Michael Berenbaum observes in the companion book to the museum. “We see in [its] perpetration a violation of every essential American value.” The Holocaust museum signals the Zionist lesson that Israel was the “appropriate answer to Nazism” with the closing scenes of Jewish survivors struggling to enter Palestine.⁶³

The politicization begins even before one crosses the museum’s threshold. It is situated on Raoul Wallenberg Place. Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, is honored because he rescued thousands of Jews and ended up in a Soviet prison. Fellow Swede Count Folke Bernadotte is not honored because, although he too rescued thousands of Jews, former [Herzlian] Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir ordered his assassination for being too “pro-Arab.”⁶⁴

The crux of Holocaust museum politics, however, bears on whom to memorialize. Were Jews the only victims of The Holocaust, or did others who perished because of [Fascist] persecution also count as victims?⁶⁵ During the museum’s planning stages, Elie Wiesel (along with Yehuda Bauer of Yad Vashem) led the offensive to commemorate Jews alone. Deferred to as the “undisputed expert on the Holocaust period,” Wiesel tenaciously argued for the preeminence of Jewish victimhood. “As always, they began with Jews,” he typically intoned. “As always, they did not stop with Jews alone.”⁶⁶ Yet not Jews but Communists were the first political victims, and not Jews but the handicapped were the first genocidal victims, of [German Fascism].⁶⁷

Justifying preemption of the [Samudaripen] posed the main challenge to the Holocaust Museum. The [Third Reich] systematically murdered as many as a half-million [Roma and Sinti], with proportional losses roughly equal to the Jewish genocide.⁶⁸ Holocaust writers like Yehuda Bauer maintained that [they] did not fall victim to the same genocidal onslaught as Jews. Respected holocaust historians like Henry Friedlander and Raul Hilberg, however, have argued that they did.⁶⁹

Multiple motives lurked behind the museum’s marginalizing of the [Samudaripen]. First: one simply couldn’t compare the loss of [Romani] and Jewish life. Ridiculing the call for [Romani] representation on the US Holocaust Memorial Council as “cockamamie,” executive director Rabbi Seymour Siegel doubted whether [Roma and Sinti] even “existed” as a people: “There should be some recognition or acknowledgment of the gypsy people […] if there is such a thing.”

He did allow, however, that “there was a suffering element under the Nazis.” Edward Linenthal recalls the [Romani] representatives’ “deep suspicion” of the council, “fueled by clear evidence that some council members viewed Rom participation in the museum the way a family deals with unwelcome, embarrassing relatives.”⁷⁰

Second: acknowledging the [Samudaripen] meant the loss of an exclusive Jewish franchise over The Holocaust, with a commensurate loss of Jewish “moral capital.” Third: if the [Third Reich] persecuted [Roma] and Jews alike, the dogma that The Holocaust marked the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews was clearly untenable. Likewise, if Gentile envy spurred the Jewish genocide, did envy also spur the [Samudaripen]? In the museum’s permanent exhibition, non-Jewish victims of [German Fascism] receive only token recognition.⁷¹

Finally, the Holocaust museum’s political agenda has also been shaped by the Israel–Palestine conflict. Before serving as the museum’s director, Walter Reich wrote a paean to Joan Peters’s fraudulent From Time Immemorial, which claimed that Palestine was literally empty before Zionist colonization.⁷² Under State Department pressure, Reich was forced to resign after refusing to invite Yasir Arafat, now a compliant American ally, to visit the museum.

Offered a subdirector’s position, Holocaust theologian John Roth was then badgered into resigning because of past criticism of Israel. Repudiating a book the museum originally endorsed because it included a chapter by Benny Morris, a prominent Israeli historian critical of Israel, Miles Lerman, the museum’s chairman, avowed, “To put this museum on the opposite side of Israel — it’s inconceivable.”⁷³

(Emphasis added.)

This could also explain why Herzlians seldom mention—much less discuss—the proto-Shoah that resulted in at least 115,000 Jewish deaths, as that would have been as good a justification as any for imposing a Jewish ethnostate on Palestine. However, the Herzlian declaration of independence never mentions it, and more often than not, this disaster is only vaguely implied in the ‘two thousand years of antisemitism’ McHistory lesson, where it is simply bundled together with all of the generic pogroms. Ask anybody a seriously good question like ‘What was the largest massacre of Jews before the Holocaust?’ and you’ll very probably get either a blank stare, a shrug, or their verbal equivalents.

It pains me to concede that my inspiration for taking Fascism more seriously is at least marginally indebted to mainstream Shoah education, but many of the facts that I have learned and shared with you over the years I have done so in spite of and not because of mainstream Shoah education—except in the sense that it failed to teach you about those facts. Whatever (little) credit that Herzlians can take for inspiring me shall eventually lead to their own undoing: they would be appalled to see me reference the Shoah as another incentive for abolishing capitalism rather than for supporting an apartheid régime, which is the lesson that they want you to take instead.

Unlike a certain other antiliberal, I am not going to radically suggest that we should all forget the Shoah because its memory has frequently been used, and presumably can only be used, for evil purposes. No, ignoring the upper classes when they abuse Shoah history would effectively be a capitulation to them, allowing them another concession that they do not deserve. The Shoah was primarily a tragedy that the upper classes afflicted on both lower-class Jews and their legally ‘Jewish’ relatives. Why should we let the upper classes exploit that history as if it were theirs?

The poorest people in the world devote no energy to memorialising the Holocaust. […] I have never seen any postwar example where the Holocaust inspired a person to act in an unquestionably good way.

On the contrary, the Shoah has inspired me to learn more about its causes, to teach others about Jewish history, and to share more about history in general. Plenty of lower-class people like me have called out Herzlians for abusing the Shoah as a justification for their exterminatory, neocolonial project, yet they simultaneously scold us for so much as implying that the Nakba shares any similarities whatsoever with the Shoah. What does the White establishment expect when the only extermination campaign that it cares to teach us is (almost always) this one?

The time to reclaim Shoah history from the upper classes is long overdue. We must offer an alternative to mainstream Shoah education: an education that, while not necessarily formal, nevertheless offers Jews and other learners valuable information as well as lessons that they are unlikely to find elsehow. We shall do away with all of the oversimplifications found in mainstream Shoah education and the misunderstandings resulting therefrom.

Our first task shall be to refute the misconception that the Shoah happened because Jews lacked or needed an ethnostate; on the contrary, most Herzlians were uninterested in saving ordinary Jews. Saying that Jews must be segregated from us also logically leads to the classic Herzlian conclusion that antisemitism is somehow ‘intrinsic’ to civilization. In reality, civilisations such as China simply had no antisemitism or anti-Judaism at all. Antisemitism, to quote Amadeo Bordiga, ‘directly results from economic constraints.’ In short, it is a consequence of capitalism’s deficiencies. So was the Shoah.

Next, we shall do away with the excessive Eurocentrism found in standard lessons. While some Eurocentrism is inevitable (for obvious reasons), overlooking the Shoah’s effects on North African Jews and West Asian Jews needlessly contributes to the erasure that Jews of color suffer. Worth adding is how the Shoah inevitably overlapped with the Samudaripen. Additionally, the precedents in both Afrasia and the Americas that I mentioned earlier need to be discussed in public: if so many empires could get away with their annihilation campaigns, it should be no wonder that the Third Reich and its allies thought that they could do the same.

Last but not least, all extermination campaigns should encourage us to behave inversely to the perpetrators. Merely showing compassion, respect, or (dare I say it) love to disadvantaged minorities is not enough to prevent future extermination attempts, but it can certainly help us mitigate the effects. This may seem like the most obvious lesson to take, but Herzlians typically imply (even if they now seldom say it outright) that antisemitism is a ‘fixed’ aspect of the human race that shall never disappear. While abolishing capitalism is the surest way to ensure the gradual extinction of both antisemitism and white supremacy, it also helps to show diaspora Jews compassion and give them other reasons to stay in the diaspora rather than vainly look for ‘safety’ in an unpopular ethnostate. As antisemitism shrinks, so too shall the main justification for Herzlianism.