Political Affairs Magazine, NY
June 21 2005
Holocaust Education and the Working Class
By Norman Markowitz
Programs of Holocaust education have been established in a number of
states, monuments to both the Jewish and non-Jewish victims have been
established in the United States and many other countries and a
Holocaust Museum now exists in Washington. But, there is in my
opinion a danger that Holocaust education is in effect failing in its
mission, if its mission is to reach masses of people with an
understanding of the genocide carried out in World War II. Holocaust
education is important as part of a general program of fighting
reactionary and fascist ideology in the United States and the world.
Marxists have a valuable role to play in rescuing it from both narrow
academicism, that is, research by and for small groups of academic
specialists as part of normal careerist work, and the `mass market’
Hollywood approach, which uses melodrama to portray horrors without
any explanation of fascism and the social classes that supported it,
except that it concerned horrible German people in uniforms who
tortured and murdered mostly Jewish victims.
There were many inter-related Holocausts, but the Jewish Holocaust,
the mass murder of roughly two-thirds of the Jewish people of Europe
and one-third of the Jewish people of the world by German fascists
and their allies and collaborators, is rightly seen as the signature
crime of modern history and as one of the greatest crimes against
humanity in all history. The experiences of its victims and the
actions of its perpetrators have been analyzed in many books,
catalogued in museums, expressed painting, sculpture, and cinema, in
all of the fine arts. At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise
globally and in the United States for a variety of reasons, including
the increased influence of rightwing religious and secular forces in
the rich countries and also the increased influence clerical and
secular rightists in many Islamic countries where publications like
Hitler’s Mein Kampf and classic anti-Semitic `conspiracy’ forgery,
The Elders of the Protocols of Zion, have flourished. It is important
to relate advance Holocaust education. The view that Jewish people
are `people of privilege’ whose only political involvement is in
support for the state of Israel, the more it is spread and believed,
produces a `win’ situation for reactionaries, by both strengthening
reactionaries for whom Jewish people, even those who are their
servants, can be handy scapegoats for their failures, and
strengthening Jewish reactionaries who regularly conflate criticism
of Israeli policies with anti-Semitism and use all real examples of
anti-Semitism as a rationale to encourage Jewish people to provide
uncritical support for Israel.
Marx expected workers to do great things, to free themselves from the
dictatorship of capital, to make great efforts to change the world,
which of course meant also to make great efforts to understand it, to
master the learning and culture that their class enemies both sought
to deny them and use against them. Capitalists have deep contempt for
working class people whom they believe they can endlessly manipulate
through propaganda that, like commercial advertising, appeals to
their prejudices and emotions.
The name Holocaust, derived from the bible, is powerful and
expressive, but I think it is better to use the term genocide, the
attempt to murder a whole people – not discriminate against them,
exploit them as slaves or serfs, or laborers, even drive them out of
regions where they had lived, forcibly resettle them – but murder
them, wipe them out.
For working people, particularly, it is important to understand that
the genocide directed against the Jewish people of Europe, regardless
of whether they were religious Jews, or secular Jews, or even thought
of themselves as Jews, since some had been raised as Christians in
Christian families, was perpetrated by Fascists, the enemies of all
working people. Fascists came to power in Germany and other European
countries using rabid hatred of Jews, socialists, Communists, and in
the Nazi case with direct threats to use violence to protect
`Germany,’ by which they meant the `racially pure’ warrior country of
their imagination, superior to all others, `without social classes,’
except the racial elite, and without labor unions and modern urban
secular liberal culture. Jews were to Nazis what `liberals’ are to
the blustering American rightwing, evil phantoms who were
simultaneously the powerful wealthy elites controlling the media and
the professions and the organizers and leaders of Socialism,
Communism, and all radical movements seeking to overthrow the elites.
In Italy, where fascism as a reactionary movement and party was born
after WWI anti-Jewish racism was not a factor in its early years,
because anti-Jewish traditions on the Italian secular right were
marginal. Fascist movements everywhere appeal to and greatly extend
core prejudices of long duration used by ruling groups to divide
working people. The core prejudice can be anything, anti-Semitism in
most of Europe, anti-Chinese racism in countries like Malaysia and
Indonesia, anti-Armenian and anti-Kurdish racism in Turkey and other
countries.
For American working people, a good way to focus holocaust education
would be to compare the Nazis and the KKK. Both saw themselves as
militants, even revolutionaries, seeking to save the system from
itself, to revive mythical pasts and protect grand abstractions in
which the existing social hierarchies were preserved. For the Klan
the abstractions were the old the South, and in the 1920s Nordic
protestant America. For the Nazis they were `the Nordic Aryan race’
and the German nation as empire (Reich) fighting the `enemies within’
who had `stabbed it in the back during WWI, and preparing to fight
the external enemies, that is, the Allied powers who had unfairly
defeated it in WWI.
Both the KKK in the South and the Nazis in Germany worked to fight
unions, had connections often with conservative elements of the local
police, and had wealthy and powerful backers behind the scenes who
helped to fund their activities, not so much to bring them to power
but to keep liberals, socialists, Communists out of power, to keep
the working class divided and intimidated, acting out its
frustrations against minority scapegoats. Ironically, Germany’s
`solid South,’ Bavaria, to this day the political stronghold of
conservative forces, both harbored and nurtured the Nazi movement in
its early years.
Most importantly, Marxists should work to help teach working people
that the Holocaust is not unknowable, a view often encouraged by
`high brow’ literary critics and celebrity philosophers, not about
something dark in the human condition. If everyone is responsible
then ultimately no one is. That which we cannot understand we cannot
correct or cure.
For Marxists and for the broad left generally, the Holocaust can be
understood as a set of dialectically inter-related events that
happened, could have been prevented through different national and
international policies at the time, and can happen again, if a party
or a military group supported by powerful class interests internally
and/or internationally comes to power committed to building a war
machine, destroying workers rights, and solving the countries
economic problems by imperialist conquests.
Blaming a vulnerable minority, for example, the Nazis Big Lie
propaganda against Jews for betraying Germany in WWI and instigating
`Cultural Bolshevism’ in the 1920s worked for Hitler and his backers.
In the contemporary US uniting the religious and secular Right
condemnation of Gays and Feminists for undermining the American
family, producing the `Vietnam Syndrome,’ and creating a `political
correctness’ that always `blames’ America for everything and must be,
has been a fixture of mass media and Republican politics for decades,
like an appendix waiting to burst.
When ruling classes are in immediate crisis, they can call upon such
forces, Nazis, Klansmen, whom they have used but kept at arm’s
length, to retain their power. At least that was the background for
European fascism in the interwar period. But that is not the only
way.
As many fear in the US particularly, the mindset that leads
eventually to an open terrorist capitalist state dictatorship, the
center of the classic Marxist-Leninist definition of fascism, and
creates the conditions for genocide can become `normal’ a part of
accepted political discourse over a period of time. Rightwing
governments can `co-exist’ with and help to legitimize open terrorist
fascist parties and societies as the Rumanian monarchy did with the
Iron Guard, Horthy did in Hungary, Pilsudski did in Poland and of
course, Southern `conservative’ segregationist did when it suited
them with the KKK. When `ordinary people’ over time come to accept
pogroms or lynchings as a normal part of life, either averting their
eyes are vicariously identifying with the killers because that is
more acceptable than resistance, perspective is lost and the
ideologies and policies of fascism become `mainstream.’
When those committed to an ideology of unilateral military posturing,
return to an idealized past, secular or religious, those contemptuous
of liberalism in all its definitions, and hostile to the labor
movement in all but its most craven forms, permeate mass media as
they do in the United States today, a context is created in which the
Geneva rules of war can be buried in Iraq, the acceptability of using
torture against prisoners, regarded as both a war crime in declared
wars and occupations, can become a serious topics of discussion.
That some of the advocates of such policies are themselves of Jewish
American, African American, and Mexican American background, is a
distinction from the Fascist Axis of World War II. But it may be a
distinction without a great difference, since an `ecumenical’ fascism
open to all those who support its militarist, national chauvinist,
anti-working class and anti-humanist policies is still fascism. Even
Hitler proclaimed the Japanese, who of course did not fit positively
into Nazi race ideology, `honorary Aryans,’ since they allied
themselves with him and acted in the militarist and imperialist way
that advocated.
Karl Marx always believed that working class people could understand
socialist theory, political economy, history, because it was in their
interests. He was serious when he contended that his work was written
for workers, a point that twentieth century capitalist’s
propagandists have sneered at because of obvious difficulty in
reading Capital especially and other of Marx’s classic works. But
Marx expected workers to do great things, to free themselves from the
dictatorship of capital, to make great efforts to change the world,
which of course meant also to make great efforts to understand it, to
master the learning and culture that their class enemies both sought
to deny them and use against them. Capitalists have deep contempt for
working class people whom they believe they can endlessly manipulate
through propaganda that, like commercial advertising, appeals to
their prejudices and emotions.
Holocaust education should be aimed both in the schools and the
larger society at working class people. Workers more than non working
class people can understand why big corporations like Thyssen Steel
and the big German auto companies supported Hitler before and after
he came to power, because he would break the unions literally, take
away the rights of their organizers and the labor parties the
Communists and Social Democrats which represented the working class,
and build a war machine that would enrich German capital. Workers
more than most people can understand that great wealth is the
foundation of power and power exists to protect and expand great
wealth – something they see in the organization of their work places
and in the laws that govern them at those work places.
Workers more than non-working class people can understand that the
only real thing the German ruling class had against the Nazis was
that they lost World War II, which had far more devastating negative
consequences for German big capital than all the riches the Nazi
regime provided for them through its re-armament policies and early
conquests.
As for the Jewish Holocaust, German capital didn’t really care for
the most part about Jews or other minorities in Germany, just as they
didn’t really care about the German majority, except as their workers
and employees. In some areas of the economy, banking and merchant
capital, there were prominent capitalists of Jewish background, but
the only thing that really distinguished them from their fellow
German capitalists was the social prejudice and exclusionary policies
that many of the latter expressed toward them. The majority of Jewish
Germans were, in the popular American sense of the word, middle and
lower middle class, small business people and lower professionals,
seeking to improve their lot through increased access to education
under the liberal Weimar Republic after WWI. They neither Germany’s
`Big bad Capitalists ‘ nor were they the most important leaders of
the Communist and Social Democratic parties, the parties of the left,
as they were portrayed in Nazi propaganda although prominent Jewish
Germans did have leading positions in both parties. Although Jewish
German Communists and Social Democrats were special targets of Nazis
and other rightwing political anti-Semites, they were from my
understanding fully integrated into their parties, and committed to
the different definitions of a socialist Germany which their parties
represented.
Workers much more than non-working class people can understand why
German capitalists played no real role in the anti-Nazi resistance
and underground, very weak as it was, that existed in Germany. The
only conservative or establishment group that sought to oust Hitler
was a section of the military, and then only seriously when it was
plain to everyone save Nazi ideologues that the war was lost and the
longer Germany stayed in it, the worse things would be for all
Germans. Even then, in July, 1944, when barring some breakup of the
allies, the war was irretrievably lost and would result in Germany’s
general devastation and occupation, German capitalists sat on their
hands rather taking any action that would show the military and the
general population that they were backing the attempted coup against
Hitler.
Workers who know that there are even in the most miserable situations
relatively decent bosses, `easy bosses’ as they used to be called in
the U.S. in the 19th century, can understand that men like the Nazi
businessman OskarSchindler and the few other establishment Germans
who acted save Jewish prisoners from extermination were exceptions,
remarkable exceptions, but exceptions nevertheless.
If Hollywood, which has told Schindler’s story, were not the great
center and archive of capitalist dreams, it might take works like
Yuri Suhl’s They Fought Back and make films about Jewish partisans
who fought in integrated units with non Jewish anti-fascists in the
Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and other countries. Working class people
would understand the simple point made by Suhl and others – those
Jewish people who were integrated into larger societies had a much
better chance of surviving than the segregated ghettoized, religious
populations who had accepted their marginalization and isolation and
turned to their religious and economic leaders to act as a buffer
between them and hostile authorities and non-Jewish communities.
Separation and segregation within the working class movement has
always produced defeat and disaster.
The genocide, which the Nazis called `the final solution’ developed
out of the war, out of the war primarily in the East, against the
Soviet Union, as historian Arno Mayer, a truly distinguished
historian, has shown most powerfully in Why Did the Heavens Not
Darken. The threats to do such things long existed in both the Nazi
movement and the pre war the Nazi regime had created a form of
extreme segregation for German Jews and those Jews in Austria and
Czechoslovakia who had fallen under their control, while encouraging
anti-Semitic governments in Hungary and Rumania, satellites of
theirs, to increase their anti-Semitic activities. Italian fascist
dictator Mussolini passed anti-Semitic laws in Italy in 1938 to
ingratiate himself further with Hitler and his fellow European
fascists, the great majority of whom advocated anti-Semitic politics.
But the commitment to genocide, bureaucratically organized mass
murder accomplished in concentration camps which resembled
slaughterhouses for cattle and other animals, was a direct result of
the Nazis launching World War II, their invasion of Eastern Europe,
with large numbers of impoverished Jewish ghetto dwellers along with
a significantly smaller Jewish middle class, and particularly their
invasion of the Soviet Union, which Hitler saw as the end all and be
all of our movement, meaning a political and racial holy war, and
which Hitler had previously called a a Jewish head on a Mongol body.
In teaching the Holocaust to working class people, it is important to
emphasize the role of anti-Fascist United Front campaigns, to support
the Spanish Republic against Spanish Fascists and their German and
Japanese Fascist backer so oppose the Japanese invasion of China, to
oppose the Munich agreement, on the sound basis that fascism means
war. These mass protest movements in politics can and should be
compared to postwar peace campaigns, since the kind of broad left
people who opposed the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the present Iraq
war were and are the legitimate successors of those who fought
against fascism and war and sought to achieve peace through
anti-fascist collective security.
Those who supported and continue to support U.S. military
interventionism in both the cold war and post cold war periods and
the legitimate successors of the rightwing isolationists who didn’t
want to fight Hitler both because they agreed with his
anti-Communist, anti-labor orientation (if not his open terrorist
dictatorship) and wanted to create a `Fortress America’ in a U.S.
dominated Western Hemisphere rather than form multilateral alliances
of any kind. Today, these ultra-right elements, oddly called
`neo-conservatives’ even though they are neither new nor are they
trying to conserve anything, still think in terms of `Fortress
America’ but today they see the whole world the way their
predecessors once saw the Western hemisphere.
Had the United States, England, France, and the Soviet Union worked
together to build a collective security system and alliance against
Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and Fascist Italy, the Holocaust
against European Jews, Gypsies, Serbians, Soviet prisoners of war,
and other Slavic peoples who were low on the Nazi `race’ hierarchy
might have not happened. Had the divided anti-Nazi forces in Germany
built a popular front alliance against the Nazis in the early 1930s
it is doubtful that would have come to power. History isn’t
predestination, except for religious and some political sectarians.
Working people especially responded to the appeal of Communists
throughout the world that the struggle against fascism and war were
one and the same in the 1930s. The victory of fascism and the war it
produced were no more inevitable then than the victory of imperialism
and war is today.
Working people can understand how the divisions among anti-Fascists
in Germany strengthened the Nazis because they have seen divisions
and turf wars weaken their unions in the face of employer offensives
for decades. Workers can understand how the appeasement policy toward
Hitler launched by the conservative governments of Stanley Baldwin
and Neville Chamberlain in Britain, a policy that they thought would
enable them to do business with Hitler and work with him against the
Soviets and Communist revolutionaries, enabled the Nazis to build
their war machine without serious opposition, annex Austria and
Czechoslovakia, and then launch the war.
Trade unionists especially have seen many of their leaders give
uncritical support to Democratic party politicians who thought they
could continue to do `business as usual’ with the administrations of
Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, retreat steadily and weakly support
less draconian `welfare reform,’ and more multi-lateral wars in Iraq
and other places rather than challenging the Bush administration
directly. To defeat a government that literally is racing to military
disasters means seeking creative ways to abolish the Taft-Hartley
law, increase trade union membership, win back trillions in lost
revenues since 1980 through a policy of retaxation aimed at
corporations and the rich, and regain the momentum lost in the 1970s
when the disastrous effects of the Vietnam War and the Watergate
conspiracy led progressives in Congress to develop a `transfer
amendment’ aimed at significantly reducing military budgets in a post
Vietnam era and shifting funds to revive social programs dealing with
education, housing, health care, and transportation.
That the Soviets signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler in August
1939 is certainly true, but we should not think of that pact the way
Joseph Goebbells would want us to if he were still literally rather
than figuratively alive, That was a consequence of the appeasement,
not a cause of the war. Given the British and Anglo French policy of
the previous six years, to blame the war on that pact is, as the
British might say, rather Acheeky.
Also, working class people can understand that both genocide reached
the dimensions it did, six million Jewish people and many millions of
others in a war which in Europe claimed perhaps 40 million people,
because of the divisions among the Anglo-American allies and the
Soviets on the question of the Second Front after 1941. The delaying
of a second front for nearly two years lengthened the war, prevented
Soviet forces from liberating the death camps far earlier than they
were, and magnified the mass killing of Civilians carried out by the
Fascist Axis in Europe, China, and the Pacific.
That 11 million people perished in the concentration camps alone,
that Croatian Fascist underlings of the Nazis practiced genocide
against Serbian Yugoslavs that cost through direct mass murder as
many as 800,000 lives, that perhaps as many as 27 million Soviet
citizens, the majority of them civilians, were killed in the war,
should be factored in when workers are taught about the Fascist
Genocide against the Jewish people.
After World War II, former Nazis and conservative intellectuals in
Germany sought to develop the view that the great crimes of the
Hitler regime were the result of Volk Egoismus, mass hysteria, and
the actions of the high Nazi leaders, especially Hitler.
Thus everybody was responsible, which meant nobody, except Hitler and
a few top Nazis were responsible. In the United States the Soviet
leader Joseph Stalin was compared to Hitler and the Soviet Union was
portrayed as a totalitarian state that had to be fought as Hitler was
not fought. In the process, people were encouraged to forget about
fascism, to see history in terms of evil men and big totalitarian
governments fighting against conservatives, and to let the Nazis,
their class backers, and their mass followers, off the hook of
history.
The Holocaust became a series of facts, of numbers, and of feelings,
of the victims and the survivors, for whom one could only feel deep
pity and in a general way guilt that not more was done to save them.
Over time, this is not a way to help the working class and the whole
people understand the Holocaust since only knowledge that is applied
and updated becomes truly relevant and lives.
Understanding Fascism, its mindset, its class nature, its social
purposes, and seeing it as a process, something that develops,
happened before and can happen again, and not only from would -be
Hitlers but from Pierre Lavals, the French conservative politician
and Vichy collaborationist leader (that is particularly important
because we in America have a lot of Pierre Lavals in both parties,
although the great majority of course are in the Republican Party) is
necessary if we are to learn from the past. Fascism is much more
extreme but ultimate not qualitatively different than the
glorification of the military and the police, the hatred of
liberalism and Apolitical correctness, that permeates rightwing
establishment politics in America today and rightwing mass media, and
that such forces given the right circumstances can become fascist, is
essential to preventing war and fascism and preventing new genocides.
The old conservative philosopher George Santayana wrote that those
who learn nothing from history are condemned to repeat it. An old
German Communist in the 1920s said, `Strike the Nazi wherever you see
him.’ We can and we must teach workers to understand that without an
understanding of history, they can suffer its repetition, not in the
same form but with the same basic content and results. We can and
must teach workers to understand and fight fascism, because that is
the only way to really understand the genocide, the Jewish and
non-Jewish Holocaust, and honor its victims.
A few months ago I was involved in an Internet discussion concerning
the role of the Roosevelt administration, which has been widely
criticized over the last generation for its failure to do more to
save victims of the Holocaust. In my next article, I will discuss
these issues as a continuation of the discussion on Holocaust
education today.
–Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. He
can be reached at [email protected].