The Denial of The Holocaust Is Fast Becoming Normalised

Why Has The Memory Holocaust Become A Casualty OF the Culture War?

The opportunistic transformation of the memory of the Holocaust into a cheap melodrama is responsible for the growth of scepticism regarding this singular tragedy.

Not so long ago it would have been unimaginable that 20 per cent of young Americans could believe that the Holocaust is a myth. Yet, a recent poll has found that one in five young Americans have adopted this denialist stance. Moreover, only half are convinced that the Holocaust actually happened. Despite all the cultural and educational resources devoted to enlightening people about the significance of this terrible event around  20 per cent of American people between 18 to 29 believe that the murder of six million Jews is made up.

Sadly, I am not surprised by the growth of Holocaust denial. Back in January 2006, I warned in an article in The Daily Telegraph that the memory of the Holocaust had been hijacked by moral entrepreneurs who opportunistically used it to promote a variety of causes that were entirely separate from this tragic episode. I argued that the transformation of the Holocaust into a political symbol and its constant usage threatened to deprive it of its important moral meaning. Worse still the more that the terrible experience of the Nazi era has become institutionalised through Holocaust Days, Holocaust memorials and museums, Holocaust curricula and Holocaust films, the more it has become a focus of competitive claims making.

To understand why scepticism regarding the Holocaust has gained momentum it is essential to explore the evolution of the opportunistic sacralisation of this event. To illustrate this development I examine the way that the European Union has manipulated the memory of the Holocaust.

The EU turns the Holocaust into its foundational myth

In the late 1970s it became evident to EU policy makers that it had to tackle the question of how to motivate people to develop a sense of European identity. It was at this point that they decided to embrace the memory of the Holocaust as their foundational myth. Numerous scholars contend that from the 1990s onwards the Holocaust was increasingly perceived ‘as having the potential to become the EU’s definitional myth’¹.

One of the consequences of the adoption of the Holocaust as the EU’s definitional myth was that it lost its connection with this historical tragedy. It was transformed into an ahistorical, transcendent sacred experience. The sacralisation of the Holocaust initially evolved in Western European societies in in the 1990s. In these countries, memory work on Nazi crimes had acquired an unprecedented degree of momentum and influence. Whereas in the early phase of European unification the genocide directed at European Jews was scarcely a point of reference by the 1990s the Holocaust became a central theme of EU supported memory work. From then on, however, EU elites within the European Parliament and the European Commission began referring to the Holocaust as the tragic event that changed the values of European societies.  As Klas-Göran Karlsson explained in his study of this process ‘to date the best example of a canonisation of history in the name of the European dimension is the case of the Holocaust’²

EU statements about how the values of European societies had changed in light of the Holocaust were rarely rendered explicit. European federalist used the threat of a possible descent in to the horrors of the Holocaust as a warning against the critics of their project. For example in a speech on Victory Day in 2005 in Thereisienstadt, the then Swedish EU Commisioner and the then Vice President of the European Community Margot Wallström told her audience that World War Two was caused by greedy nationalists and that the EU was founded to eliminate such evils. She warned that Eurosceptics risked a ‘return to the Holocaust’³. The ease with which Wallström made the conceptual leap from opposition to Euroscepticism to an impending Holocaust demonstrated the opportunistic canonisation of this tragic genocide.

It was during the 1990s that the EU took steps to initiate the project of Europeanising the memory of the Holocaust. EU heritage policies became increasingly devoted towards deploying resources to the memorialisation of the victims of Nazi crimes. The Holocaust was increasingly evoked as an all-purpose warning against the dangers of all forms nationalism.

The European Parliament passed numerous resolutions to support the memorialisation of the Holocaust and on 21 June 1995 it unanimously agreed to launch a Holocaust memorial day in all the member states. The different EU institutions promoted the memorialisation of the Holocaust as a sacred duty from which no member state could opt out. This de facto issuing of such an ultimatum was unlikely to win hearts and minds. In the long run the elevation of the Holocaust into the core value of official EU dogma actually undermined the authentic and genuine attempts to give meaning to this unique tragedy and to memorialise its victims.

The authors of the canonisation of the Holocaust shamelessly promoted the rewriting of history. For example Beate Winkler, former director of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia explained to her audience at a conference of the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe in June 2005, that ‘the Shoah is the traumatic experience of Europe’s recent history; it has driven the EU’s founders to build a united and peaceful Europe, and thus been at the very root of the European integration project’⁴. European integration based on the need to regulate conflict between Germany and France, the exigencies of the Cold War and the demands of the Marshall Plan was cynically reinterpreted as a therapeutic initiative designed to come to terms with the traumatic experience of the Shoah.

One of the consequences of the sacralisation of the Holocaust was that it became torn from its historical context and turned into a preachy morality play that could be opportunistically used to assist the cause of forging a shared European memory. A former European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, Máire Geoghegan Quinn justified the teaching of the Holocaust on the ground that it was a ‘good way to have future generations understand the importance of fundamental rights, which are one of the central pillars of ‘European’ citizenship’⁵. Her exhortation to adopt the Holocaust as a useful teaching aid, illustrates the instrumental and fundamentally political use to which its memory was put.

Reflections on the Memorialisation of the Holocaust

After being neglected by western historical memory in the 1950s and the 1960s the Holocaust has emerged as powerful symbol of human barbarism. As we noted above the EU’s adoption of the Holocaust as its defining value, actually politicised it. The Holocaust has been torn out of its tragic historical context and transformed into a generic metaphor of evil. Consequently often, the remembrance of the Holocaust has little to do with a genuine act of grieving or remembering. Instead it often works as an official ritual that allows sanctimonious politicians and public figures to put their superior moral virtues on public display.

The belated transformation of the Holocaust into a transcendental sacred value in Western Europe was not so much an act of sincere atonement but an attempt to come terms with the moral malaise afflicting society. The absence of moral clarity, which has led to so much conflict over values has created a demand for symbols and rituals that confer a measure of coherence on the social order. In a world where society finds it difficult to clearly differentiate between right and wrong it is important that some kind of line is drawn between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Without a moral grammar to express ideas about right and wrong ethical guidance often has a forced and artificial character. For institutions like the EU, the sacralisation of the Holocaust has served as an important resource for supporting its moral authority

The sacralisation of the Holocaust has also provided society with a powerful taboo. Not being against the Holocaust is probably the most ritualised and institutionalised taboo operating in western societies. Numerous countries now have laws against Holocaust denial. In numerous countries the denial of the Holocaust is a crime, that in some cases carries a prison term of up to ten years. Preaching about the horrors of the Holocaust helps society avoid working out its own moral view of the world. Its transformation into a universal symbol of evil has helped promote the simplistic moral formula: to be against it is good and to be for it is evil.

The Holocaust has become one of the most overused metaphors for evil in contemporary times. Animal rights activists in Canada refer to a Holocaust of seal. Anti-abortion campaigners in the United States have denounced the Holocaust of foetuses. In Australia there is talk about the Holocaust against Aborigines. Then there is the African-American Holocaust, the Serbian Holocaust, the Bosnian Holocaust or the Rwandan Holocaust. The label Holocaust can be appropriated to attack just about any target. Thus, everything from the erosion of bio-diversity to a loss of jobs can be denounced as a ‘Holocaust’. Moral entrepreneurs constantly embrace the Holocaust to lend legitimacy to their enterprise. They also insist that anyone who questions their version of events should be treated in a manner that is similar to those who deny the real Holocaust. The expansion of the usage of the Holocaust metaphor has the unintended consequence of gradually diminishing its moral impact.

The demand that we "learn the lessons of the Holocaust" has become a regular refrain that is adopted to promote a bewildering variety of causes.. Frequently, warnings about a particular problem or threat are concluded with the assertion of ‘it is just like the Holocaust’ or ‘just like the Nazis’ or ‘it may lead to a Holocaust’. Such statements offer a claim for moral authority and can be deployed in the most unlikely of circumstances. When the Australian feminist Germaine Greer walked out of Celebrity Big Brother House  in January 2005, she attacked her housemates for refusing to support her defiant stand against the "fascist" bullying of Big Brother. ‘Persecution is what happens, holocausts are what happens when good people do nothing’, she lectured the public.

Back in 2006, I noted that instead of serving as a focus of unity, Holocaust Day merely encourages different groups to develop an inflated sense of past suffering and to demand public recognition for it. It encourages different cultural groups to represent themselves as victims of historical injustices. Such a response is not surprising, since it is difficult for a single experience of barbaric violence to serve as a universal symbol of suffering. It is one thing to recognise the scale of destruction and the unique dimension of the Holocaust. It is quite another to turn it into a moral tale that can inspire all people at all times.

If Holocaust Day was just another meaningless ritual, there would be little reason for concern. But such initiatives actually help create an environment that encourages cynicism and scepticism about what actually happened during the Nazi era. False morality always incites the response of cynicism, and Holocaust-mongering is no exception. As far back as in 2004 a poll conducted in nine European countries by the IPSO research institute indicated that 35 per cent of those interviewed stated that Jews should stop playing the role of Holocaust victims.. At the time this mood of scepticism ws still unformed. But it was only a matter of time, before the obsessive institutionalisation of the cult of the Holocaust created a situation where scepticism would invite disbelief.

The concerns that I raised in January 2006 have become far more relevant to the situation today. Scepticism and even the denial of the Holocaust has grown significantly – and in parallel with the expansion public initiatives designed to memorialise it. A report circulated in January 2017 citing Dr Nicholas Terry, a history lecturer at Exeter University, estimated that there are now thousands of “low-commitment” Holocaust deniers online. In December, 2016  the top hit on Google in response to a search for the question ‘Did the Holocaust happen’ was a link that claimed that the murder of 6 million Jews was a hoax. It is inconceivable that back in the 1950s or 1960s or the 1970s – before the public sacralisation of Holocaust memory took off – there would have been such an interest in conspiracy theories that suggested that this act of genocide was a hoax. In the United States, where society is peculiarly disposed to the flourishing of conspiracy theories, scepticism towards the Holocaust has become increasingly widespread.

In recent years the growth of antisemitism in Western societies has become palpable. In previous decades Holocaust denial tended to be associated with the outlook of the far-right. More recently, leftish identitarians have embraced this standpoint. In numerous instances enemies of Israel have played the Holocaust Card in an attempt to de-legitimate its existence. The ease with which Hamas and its Western supporters have turned the memory of the Holocaust against its historic victims – Jewish people – serves as a reminder of the tragic consequence the weaponisation of this terrible event. The cultural politics of identity has become a staunch ally of Hamas. They are determined to eradicate the death of 6 million Jews from historical memory. They are also committed to dispossessing Jewish people of their memory of Holocaust. That is why in the midst of the Israel-Hamas War, the historical memory of the Holocaust has become a focus of conflict in the Culture Wars.

The arguments contained in this essay are drawn from my book Populism And The European Culture Wars; The Conflict Of Values Between Hungary And The EU.

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1. Littoz‐Monnet, A. (2013) The European Union and culture: Between economic regulation and European cultural policy, p.13

2. Karlsson, K-G. (2010) ‘The Uses of History and The Third Wave of Europeanisation’, Pakier, M., & Stråth, B. (Eds.). (2010). A European memory?: contested histories and politics of remembrance Berghahn Books: New Yorkp.40.

3. Cited in Karlsson (210)p.41

4. Cited in Karlsson (210)p.41

5. Della Sala, V, "Europe's odyssey?: political myth and the European Union." Nations and Nationalism (2016) Volume 22, Issue 3,