Why Never Again is Redundant: There Will Never be a Second Holocaust

Never Again.  The well-known motto of the Jewish Defense League.  The Hoover Institution’s Policy Review publication tells the history of this phrase. “According to the great historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, the phrase “Never Again” first appeared on handmade signs put up by inmates at Buchenwald in April, 1945, shortly after the camp had been liberated by U.S. forces.” It is a phrase trotted out on January 27th every year, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and it  has begun to draw the ire of certain segments of the population.

The phrase is viewed with suspicion, not because these segments disagree with its explicit premise, but because it so often seems to have an implied object: “Never again… will the Jews suffer a genocide.” It is a clause which whitewashes the rest of history.  The victims of the Holodomor¹ are forgotten; so are those of the Armenian genocide.  The Bosnian Serbs and the Rwandan dead have at least been acknowledged by the mainstream press, albeit without much depth, but so many others are swept under the rug.  The mention of ongoing genocides, or pointing to societies on the brink of becoming openly genocidal, such as the White population of South Africa, is often viewed as tantamount to Crimethink; proof of sinister motive on the part of the speaker.

This is a generation raised on ceaseless accusations of historical guilt.  White, Christian men are named as the architects of racism, slavery, sexism, and murder; even the Crusades are held up as proof of European barbarism.  And yet, when these claims are investigated one usually finds that they are without merit.  White, Christian men were instrumental in eliminating slavery, defending the rights of women, and protecting innocent people against a rampaging horde of religious zealots fomented in the Middle East.  And even when these accusations prove true, they nonetheless pale in comparison to what was happening elsewhere in the world.  Time and again Europe has proven herself to be a shining beacon of civilization (however imperfect), which leads one to suspect that the accusations of historical guilt are nothing more than a subversive attempt to use our better nature against us; to use our desire to become better as a lever to crush our will.

Yet amongst all of these false accusations of European villainy, the Holocaust stands apart; it was a shocking horror.  As, too, were the atrocities described in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago; while the top-level organizers of that sadistic machine were almost entirely Jewish,² those who carried out the day-to-day cruelties – and those who failed to speak up against them – were of European ancestry.

Even those who question the Soviet evidence of gas chambers nonetheless acknowledge the horrors which the Nazi government engaged in: branding people with serial numbers, cramming them into cattle cars where death by suffocation or freezing was inevitable, and the sadistic camp practices suffered by the Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs.  These events revealed a darkness within modern ‘civilized’ man, which few of us are willing to admit to.

How did things go so wrong?

Never Again doesn’t ask that question, however.  It doesn’t confront the abyss with eyes wide open, demanding How? and Why? from that substratal pit, but instead it boldly asserts an answer –  and thus it begs the question as to what might be done to prevent another such slaughterhouse from developing.

The eminent John C. Wright proffers one suggestion from a reader:

Read your piece “Point Deer, Make Horse” and really enjoyed it. A level of lucidity not often seen in our world.

Let me tell you a story.

Went to the Holocaust Museum here in Los Angeles. Have you seen it? You are given a picture card of a Jew from that era, but you would not know if they lived or died until you got through the exhibit. The exhibit consisted of dioramas of pre-war Jewish neighborhoods with period music playing, as they told the story of these lost places. As you would advance through the exhibit, things got grimmer, and then you ended up in a camp. And then in a gas chamber, where they locked you in and played the sound of gas being pumped in. But by the time I got out of the “gas chamber”, I did not feel sorrow, nor sympathy, but a black rage that almost cannot be described.

Just then a wizened little old man with a number on his forearm came out to speak to us. He asked several us about our experience and then asked the following:

“Do you think this could happen again?”

Yes, said almost everyone.

“Do you think it could happen in America?”

Yes, answered almost everyone. I was shaking my head “no” and I noticed another man was too.

The old Jew pointed at me and asked me “Why do you think this could not happen here?”

And the rage within me spoke:

Because I will rise up with my rifle and take the life of anyone who tries such a thing here…

I was expecting a stern lecture on non-violence, “love” and such, and instead, appearing to lose 40 years, standing on his tiptoes, he shouted:

“If this does not happen here, THAT IS THE REASON WHY!” While pointing at me…

It was a transformative moment for me. I am certainly not the reason a holocaust does not happen here, but the collective spirit of the Minutemen certainly is.

I think I lost the last of my sympathy for the Left that day.

Thanks for what you do.

With all due respect, this is nonsense.  Despite allegations to the contrary, the Nazi party did not restrict the firearms of their citizens; it had been the previous government, the internationally created Weimar Republic, which had distrusted its citizens so.  Gun control measures were repealed under the Nazis.  While this did nothing to help the Jews, who largely remained disarmed, even if these specific restriction has been lifted one wonders how a group which made up less than 1% of the total German populace could have successfully achieved an insurrection against the German people.  For that matter, Solzhenitsyn himself was an artillery officer who presumably had access to high ordinance, and yet he too fell into the maws of that terrible machine.  While the Second Amendment of the United States serves many just and noble purposes, a bulwark against Leviathan’s hunger it is not.

Never Again boldly accuses, but silences speech.  It becomes an inversion of the Blood Libel.  In the face of such a crime, contrition is insufficient.  No forgiveness – only demands of continued prostration.  And by prostrating himself, by offering apology, the European confirms his guilt.  Thus he justifies – thus he demands that genocide be committed upon him in return.³

All of this when the statement has become unnecessary.  The Jews are already free of the Holocaust – at the hands of the Germans, and other Europeans, anyway – they have no more need to worry.  Even if the spectre of rabid antisemitism were to rise again, there would be no death camps.  There would be no pogroms.  There would be no burnings of Jewish ghettos.  There is a far better, easier, faster, and cheaper pressure release valve for Jewish/European conflict: the fact that every man, woman, and child of Jewish descent has been granted the Right of Return by the nation of Israel.

Perhaps it is time to stop lecturing Europeans about the Holocaust.  To let go of the phrase Never Again.  Not because we should forget history – far from it – but because the phrase obscures history, privileges one genocide over all others, and addresses a problem which has long been solved.  If any existential threat to the Jewish people remains, it’s not coming from Europe, but from the Middle East.  Our mutual enemies, the Muslims, follow a man who demanded the violent suppression and elimination of all other faiths, who endorsed sadism and barbarity, and who gleefully murdered innocents and considered it justice.  And yet despite this common enemy, we still see those within European Jewry who are eager to seek vengeance for crimes both real and imagined.

H/T Vox Day

At the Conference of European Rabbis, President Pinchas Goldschmidt stated:

We see ourselves fighting together with our Muslim brothers, who want free Europe, who want a peaceful Europe, who want to integrate like our forefathers integrated in Western Europe 100, 200 years ago, and they are our natural allies [against old Europe].

He certainly has a unique definition of ‘integration’, given that after two centuries he still sees himself as an outsider – and as for ‘peace’, I can only assume he means the peace of the grave.

Perhaps it is time for Western societies to demand integration – that is, Western style integration, where you not only conform to, but adopt the cultural norms of our countries, rather than trying to subvert them.  This goes for all who have immigrated to the West.  You cannot call colonialism a cultural crime, while simultaneously demanding the right to colonize in reverse.

This should not be seen as a radical proposition.  There are some Jews who have integrated already; one of the few voices of reason in Canada is Ezra Levant, the owner of Rebel Media, and a stalwart defender of the Canadian Bill of Rights.  In many ways he is a better Christian than the majority of the Christians in this country.  Furthermore, many of the Jews in Israel share the sentiment expressed above, which is why they have chosen to live amongst their own people where they can practice their own culture; they are likewise disgusted by voices such as Rabbi Goldschmidt.

But voices like Goldshmidt’s remain numerous, they claim citizenship in Western countries without offering loyalty in return.  Many of them even masquerade with European names, pretending to share our heritage, while using that position within the flock to ridicule and subvert.  They hate the society they live in, while refusing to return to their own.

Never Again is a redundant phrase, and we never need to hear it again.  Jews have their country of Israel – a gift given to them by Europe – and every other immigrant likewise has a country to return to, should Europe not be to their liking.  Europeans, however, have nowhere else to go.

Assimilate or emigrate.  It really is that simple.

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1. The Holodomor was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine, in which 2.5-7.5 million farmers were starved to death over the winter of 1932-33.  As Professor Jordan Petersen has pointed out, if you have never heard of the this atrocity – or the millions worked and tortured to death in the Soviet Gulags over the decades, many of whom were loyal communists, innocent of the crimes they were accused of – you should be asking yourself Why?  Why do you know so much about the Holocaust (in actual fact, you probably know less than you think), and yet these other crimes from history – which are are just as close to you historically and culturally as the Holocaust – remain a cipher?  Why the one and not the other?
2. In the follow-up to Gulag Archipelago (which is available as a free audiobook on YouTube) Solzhenitsyn outlines the Jewish culpability for the millions of Russian dead.  It was a fact which he omitted from his first book, because it would have distracted from his main point: a study in human evil.  Ethnic conflict is not a sufficient explanation for the horrific evils of the Gulags, the Holocaust, the Killing Fields, or the Cultural Revolution, and allowing emphasis to shift towards it – as do many of those who promote the Never Again slogan – clouds understanding and undermines prevention.  The Jews have been the victims of genocides in the modern era, but they have also been the perpetrators.
3. To see an example of this, look no further than the supposed anti-war movie Saving Private Ryan, with its subtle justification of war crimes – see Colative Learning’s video on the topic.  The Germans in the film are demonized, represented as treacherous sadists who do not feel pain, and are cast as hard-faced older men, when the history books tell us that most of the German soldiers would have been young boys incapable of growing beards, pressed into service by their government, and just as terrified of dying as their American counterparts.  It’s worse than Inglorious Bastards, which at least doesn’t hold the pretension of being anything other than a sadistic murder flick.  It shows the atrocities of war – but only for the side which current history deems as “good”.

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