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?
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
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
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.)
Already a small number of young people are rejecting parts or all of Woke pieties, in which the horrors of mostly American (and to a lesser extent British and Western European) history have been used to gain and bolster power for educated elites, ironically mostly white and fairly wealthy ones.
I have long predicted a backlash that would potentially set racial and other social relations back decades. My predictions were drawn from instinct and a basic knowledge of psychology and sociology. Having spent some time studying an actual example of such a cynical misuse of historic tragedy and its aftermath what would you predict?
And perhaps more importantly, how do we avoid both those extremes and return historic tragedies to their correct place in our collective memories?
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?
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
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
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.)
Already a small number of young people are rejecting parts or all of Woke pieties, in which the horrors of mostly American (and to a lesser extent British and Western European) history have been used to gain and bolster power for educated elites, ironically mostly white and fairly wealthy ones.
I have long predicted a backlash that would potentially set racial and other social relations back decades. My predictions were drawn from instinct and a basic knowledge of psychology and sociology. Having spent some time studying an actual example of such a cynical misuse of historic tragedy and its aftermath what would you predict?
And perhaps more importantly, how do we avoid both those extremes and return historic tragedies to their correct place in our collective memories?