BRENDAN O’NEILL: The rise and rise of Holocaust envy.
Britain’s Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is not famed for its astuteness. These omnipresent public-school leftists, who rock up to every radical demo to holler facile chants in fake accents they learnt from EastEnders, are about as far from scholarly as you can get. Yet a few years ago they did something that was world-beatingly dumb, even by their famed low standards. They handed out a leaflet about the Holocaust that described it as an unspeakable tragedy in which ‘thousands of LGBT people, trade unionists and disabled people were slaughtered’. Spot the omission?
Yes, they forgot the Jews. They forgot the Jews. It was 2008 and the SWP was skulking around a festival organised by the far-right British National Party (BNP). They handed their leaflets to anyone who’d take one. The leaflet denounced the BNP for ‘deny[ing] the Holocaust’, which was apparently an act of mass murder against gay people, trans folk and the disabled. No one else. Just them. The irony of the SWP slamming the BNP for ‘denying the Holocaust’ while simultaneously erasing from the record the six million souls obliterated by the Nazis was too much to take.
Their omission of the very people the Holocaust was designed to destroy did not go unnoticed. Even other radical leftists were appalled. The SWP seems to have discovered a ‘Jew-free Holocaust’, swiped the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Perhaps the SWP is keen to appeal to people who think it was ‘all right that Hitler killed six million Jews, but think it too much that he also killed LGBT people’, the AWL said. Then came the AWL’s keenest observation: yes, the omission of the Jews was probably ‘a slip’, it said, ‘but for such a slip to pass unnoticed through writer, typesetter, printer, organisers and distributors, without anyone at any stage picking it up, must say something’ (my emphasis).
Read the whole thing.
Related: A hollow Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Flashback: Whoopi Goldberg’s Ignorance About The Holocaust Is What Happens When Intersectionality Rots People’s Brains.