4 Comments
Dec 11, 2023Liked by Frank Furedi

An excellent if troubling piece, this event has been copted by the powerful and ambitious and now it is being dismissed or ignored.

There seems to be a clear link between the instrumentalization of History and robbing the events of their moral importance. I wonder to what extent that the EU elites lit upon the Holocaust as a foundational myth in the 1990's was driven by changes in the geo political order, following the end of the cold war, and to what extent it was driven by longer term cultural changes in the West in terms of the decline of traditional political authority (Nation, family, class) and the rise in the celebration of the 'victim' as the centre of social thought and policy?

Expand full comment
author

I think it was driven by the EU's crisis of legitimacy -which was and still is the consequence of this institution's authority deficit. In recent decades the quest for legitimacy became intertwined with cultural politics and hence the explosion of competitive claims making regarding the Holocaust

Expand full comment

The Imperial War Museum in London has a very sobering but dignified permanent exhibition. Although not recommended for children under the age of 14, it deserves to be seen by everyone https://www.iwm.org.uk/events/the-holocaust-galleries

Expand full comment
Dec 11, 2023Liked by Frank Furedi

Looks like that exhibition is part of the problem insofar as it presents it as being exclusively Jews who were killed. German memorials and presentations close to the Bundestag honour a number of persecuted groups, so immediately this looks like glaring BS. A second issue with this presentation would be the lumping together of all of these camps. In Germany, there is generally a distinction between KZ (KoncentrationCamps) and Vernichtungslager (Extermination camps). (I was surprised just how many KZ there were.)

Expand full comment