Universalizing the Holocaust was a Bad Idea
The choice to elevate Nazi snuff and universalized platitudes over the dialectical origins of Jew hatred has left society unable to defend itself against a new wave of antisemitism
I could, off the top my head, rattle off a dozen camps, roughly where they were in Poland, when they were operational, how big they were, who they primarily targeted, and whether they were a pure death camp or a more survivable work camp. I could tell which infamous Nazis worked at which camps, list the various methods of execution styles and how efficient each one was, and describe, in detail, the optimal gassing procedure, right down to the shrubbery. We watched Schindler’s List and Escape from Sobibor; we read Night and Man’s Search for Meaning; we saw the shriveled bodies and we know that one cannot simply give food to a starving prisoner or else they might die of some kind of glycemic overresponse.
And we were told that the “lesson” of it all was “never again.”
What is “never again” supposed to mean, exactly? Whenever we see comically evil Nazis, wearing Hugo Boss, spinning up industrial machinery of extermination…make sure to bomb the railroads this time?
Roger that. Easy enough.
What a farce!
Two things have become clear:
Secular society has decided that the “lesson” of the Holocaust is that “man is capable of unfathomable evil towards man”, instead of “man is capable of unfathomable evil towards Jews”
The elevation of death pornography in curriculums at the expense of a real dissection of how it came to happen has left us without a real mental model of Jew hatred
The combined consequence of these two results is that we are seeing a resurgence in Jew hatred with remarkable historical axiomatic parallels, we barely recognize it, and we do not know how to fight it. I don’t even think we are fully conscious of the fact that this is the first true rise of societal-scale antisemitism in the West since the German Reich!
A true inoculation would have taught us the foundational texts of European Jew hatred, the arguments and qualifications the authors made, how they persuaded, and how to recognize these structures in the future. Why was I never made to read Wilhelm Marr, or Hindenburg, or Mein Kampf, or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? What about Germany Must Perish! and Goebbels’ propaganda campaign elevating it? What exactly was “The Jewish Question”? How about a treatment on the transformation of medieval anti-Judaism and how it morphed into 19th century anti-Semitism? What do I not even know that I don’t know?
I’m a pretty well educated Jew who loves books and has been steeped in Holocaust history since elementary school. And still, Nazi evil remains incomprehensible to me. We1 have never truly attempted to understand 20th century Germans. We see the death and we conclude that they were simply an entire population of the most evil people to ever exist. Hannah Arendt did her part in negating this, but it was insufficient, and we have been left with a massive explanatory void, with some hand-wavey lip service to “scapegoats” or “the Weimar economy”.
Let me illustrate the extent of our collective failure: when researching this article, I could not even find an English translation of the seminal text of Der Judenspiegel by Wilhelm Marr, which laid the groundwork for the political identity that would eventually become proudly known as “antisemitism”.2
Having seen how the world has turned since October 7th, and having personally witnessed otherwise well-meaning people become completely insane, I feel like I finally understand: the Germans were simply gullible, uneducated, and fed a constant stream of lies through a captured media and a compromised academy by a small gang of bad faith and self-serving intellectuals. In other words, exactly the pattern we now see. One does not need to scour very far in the texts of classical Jew-hatred in order to find verbatim arguments still in use today:
I bear no hatred against this or that Jew, for all the world knows that I have intimate friends among the Jews. But I hate Judenthum [translated as Jewry].
Wilhelm Marr, Der Judenspiegel, 1862
Switch out “Judaism” for “Zionism” and you’ve just time travelled 164 years to the present. The point of anti-Semitism, for Marr, was that it was distinguished from medieval anti-Judaism. Marr had no problems with Judaism-as-religion, he had problems with Judaism-as-a-race. Today, they (Westerners) say they have no problems with Judaism-as-a-race, they have problems with Judaism-as-a-geopolitics.
No one ever has a problem with Jews per-se, they just have a problem with some fundamental facet of the Jewish identity. As Adam Louis-Klein succinctly puts it, we can see these fashions through the ages on the “phylogenetic tree of anti-Jewish hate”:
In fairness, to cover this complex dialectical history and truly give it a proper treatment is perhaps out of the scope of a general high school American education; however, we have no excuse for not educating our own people. We are, ultimately, our only defenders, and if we never study the weapons of our enemy, we will remain defenseless against them by anyone who decides to wield their civilization-altering power.
And so society universalized the Holocaust. Perhaps to make it easier to swallow. Instead of the inevitable consequence of centuries of Jew-specific hatred, the Holocaust was because of “racism” and “the economy” and “the bystander effect” and “fascism”.3
By universalizing the Holocaust, we have diluted the fact that it was perpetrated specifically against Jews, substantiated by lies against Jews, invoking ancient hatreds against Jews, and it is we, the Jews, who must defend, today, against the same lies and ancient hatreds in order to prevent yet another catastrophe to our people. There is no universal “lesson” beyond that.
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Now, it’s 2026, antizionism is here, nobody has learned anything, and we seem to be unable to stop the flood. Except this time, the cavalry is here, in the form of the Muslim hordes and the global internet.
You see, in all of our Occichauvinism, we learned plenty about our own history. We read all about how Martin Luther nailed his Ninety Five Theses to the wall of the church, triggering the growth of Protestantism, watched the Catholic Church be chipped away in its political power, piece by piece, and we followed this strand all the way through the founding of America.
But we never bothered to study up on what the Islamic world has been up to for the past 1400 years. While we in the West have comfortably left anti-Judaism deep in the past (it would be laughable for someone to go public with “the Jews eat children on Passover! they reject our messiah and must be burned at the stake”), the Muslim world has decidedly not.
Their hatred is Medieval and is contemporary with the Reformation-era Catholic Church. Martin Luther himself wrote On the Jews and their Lies, which contains quotes so heinous and taboo to Westerners - but yet are so modern that they would not be out of place in typical Shia mosque.
I suggest the following modification to the Louis-Klein’s original diagram:
Now that we see can truly see our enemy, perhaps for the first time, maybe we can start to figure out how to defeat it. How is this for a meditation?
The Germans were simply gullible, uneducated, and fed a constant stream of lies through a captured media and a compromised academy by a small gang of bad faith and self-serving intellectuals.
The Left is simply gullible, uneducated, and fed a constant stream of lies through a captured media and a compromised academy by a small gang of bad faith and self-serving intellectuals.
The Ummah is simply gullible, uneducated, and fed a constant stream of lies through a captured media and a compromised academy by a small gang of bad faith and self-serving intellectuals.
I don’t have the answers. But it feels like I am starting to see the problem.
By we, I mean me. And most likely you. If even I never absorbed real understanding, I am sure nobody else has. I would certainly hope there are some academics who have studied all these things; if they exist, they have conclusively failed to communicate their findings to the public and inform proper education.
In the case of the Germans, instead of being taught “my ancestors were good people who turned into bad people because they were retarded and they believed a lot of bullshit about the Jews, I better make sure I don’t fall for it like they did”, all they internalized was some combination of “grandpa was a racist and I’m sad about it” and “it was the government, not all Germans”, both of which morphed into “I’m going to give my country away to Muslims to prove how racist I’m not” and “I hate Zionists, not Jews”