What’s Wrong With This?

The gala opening of the enlarged and renovated Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem today is being attended by ministers and heads of state from all over Europe. Kofi Annan has come, too. The least impressively represented major country is America, which has made do with Mayor Bloomberg. But of course there’s no need to travel all the way from Washington to Jerusalem to see a Holocaust museum when Washington has its own – the competition from which, indeed, was initially the driving force behind Yad Vashem’s renovation.This may seem a cynical way of putting things, and a reprehensibly cynical one, too, the Holocaust being the last thing one should allow oneself to be cynical about. And yet given the growing “museumization” of the Holocaust that has been taking place in the world – America alone now has nearly two dozen Holocaust museums and visitors centers, with still more under construction – it is difficult not to wonder: Do we really need all this? And where does the ultimate cynicism lie: In the awful witticism “There’s no business like Shoah business,” or in the business to which it refers?For Holocaust remembrance has become a business; it would be pointless to deny it. It is one that attracts millions of tourists, creates multimillion dollar endowments, employs thousands of academics, archivists, publicists, architects, contractors, construction workers, and tour guides, and produces hundreds of books and films every year. The 2,000 guests invited by the government of Israel to the Yad Vashem reopening will fill four posh Jerusalem hotels for several days.One might ask: What’s wrong with this? Do we want the Holocaust to be remembered or not? If we do, let’s not shed crocodile tears over the commercial aspects of it. Of course, these need to be in good taste; of course, too, they must show respect for the Holocaust’s victims. But to insist, on the one hand, that the Holocaust must never be forgotten, while decrying the fact, on the other hand, that people make a living from keeping its memory alive, is sheer hypocrisy. Do we expect them to work for nothing?It seems a fair question. And yet it misses the point. The problem with the Holocaust industry is not that there’s money in it. The problem is the product that it’s selling – or more precisely, the idea that it has a product to sell.What is this “product”? It is a message characterized by three assumptions:1. The Holocaust was unique. Its uniqueness was not only quantitative, in its unprecedented scale and thoroughness of execution, but qualitative, in the nature of its evil – and it is in its being a unique revelation of evil that its true significance lies. In displaying it and talking about it, we come face-to-face with ultimate truths about human nature in ways that we cannot do in displaying or talking about other things.2.The significance of the Holocaust is universal. It is not just the story of what the Germans and their European allies did to the Jews (and to a lesser but still terrible extent, to minorities like Gypsies and homosexuals), but the story of what human beings everywhere are capable of doing to other human beings – the ultimate symbol of man’s inhumanity to man.3. Learning about the Holocaust is prophylactic. The more human beings everywhere know about it, the less likely they are to permit similar atrocities to be repeated in the future.The trouble is that each one of these assumptions is simply false.In the first place, the Holocaust teaches us absolutely nothing unique about human evil. If you multiply the behavior of a sadistic murderer 6 million times, you have learned nothing more about the depravity that makes even one such murderer possible. You may have learned a great deal about the bureaucratic planning and implementation of depravity – but your education has been in regard to the workings of bureaucracy, not the workings of evil.Secondly, apart from being one of innumerable possible illustrations of how masses of men can behave very evilly, the Holocaust has no more universal significance than any other act of genocide. What the Germans did to the Jews was sui generis, just as was what the Turks did to the Armenians, or what the Hutus did to the Tutsis. No two genocides in history have ever been the same in method or circumstance, and while some are more extensive than others, each reminds us of what one people is capable of inflicting on another.Thirdly, learning about the Holocaust has no prophylactic value at all. Widespread knowledge of the Holocaust did not help to prevent Cambodia, did not help to prevent Sudan, did not help to prevent Bosnia, did not help to prevent Rwanda – nor will it help to prevent the next genocidal atrocity. Even after half-a-century of intensive Holocaust education, the countries of Europe refuse to contemplate military action against an Iranian government that is developing nuclear weapons while calling for the annihilation of Israel. Indeed, as I have noted in this column, the more the Holocaust has become part of European discourse, the more it has become part of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel discourse as well.Would we be better off today if there remained (as there was until the 1990s) only one major Holocaust memorial in the world, that of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and if the Holocaust continued to be viewed (as it was for decades after World War II) as primarily the story of Europe’s genocidal assault on the Jews rather than as a universally marketable drama of human evil?We probably would be. At least we would still be limiting ourselves to merely remembering the Holocaust instead of competing to convey it in a series of increasingly modish and expensive installments that have turned the lives of those who perished in it into museum artifacts.Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.

What’s Wrong With This?

What’s Wrong With This?

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