It's Holocaust Remembrance Day, And Everyone Is Forgetting the Lessons
From teenagers having their brains poisoned by algorithms pushing denialism to the nations of the Earth forgetting what Never Again meant, we are closer than ever to another mass genocide
Eighty years ago, the most famous of the Nazi extermination camps, Auschwitz, was liberated by the Soviet Red Army in its march to Berlin. Eighty years. That’s within the memory of many living people on this planet, even as the survivors themselves dwindle in numbers. Right now, despite that relatively short period of time, we are on the cusp of repeating the political-historical trajectory that brought us fascism, a second world war, and the extermination of a third of the world’s Jews.
Italy’s prime minister refuses to distance herself and her party from its fascist roots, making bland denials of fascism within the ranks while promoting the same message as her European fascist pals Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orban. “Dio, patria e famiglia, [God, fatherland, and family]” is her refrain, whereas Orban proclaims, “Keresztény, magyar Magyarországot akarunk [We want a Christian, Hungarian Hungary].” Le Pen has been harder to pin down because she regularly changes her public positions, but it should be stated that she allied her Rassemblement Nationale [National Rally] party with the German neo-Nazi party Alternative für Deutschland [Alternative for Germany] in the European Parliament until just under a year ago. One does not ally themselves with Nazis if one does not agree with Nazis.
While these groups, save for AfD, have worked to establish friendships with Bibi Netanyahu and his own fascist government in Israel, thereby erasing (to the average observer) the taint of anti-Semitism, they have also endorsed policies that are anti-Semitic in ways both large and small. Hungary’s ban on kosher/halal butchers is one way of marginalizing Jews and Muslims in a nation that Orban explicitly declares to be a Christian nation. Orban’s regular declarations that to ignore Christianity’s primary role would be to ignore all of the achievements of Europe’s history completely whitewashes that same Europe’s history of pogroms, racism, and marginalizing of Jews. Prime Minister Meloni has also reached her hand out to Israel’s government while decrying multiculturalism in Italy—the sort of actions that emboldened Elon Musk to declare “Italy for Italians” at a conference last year (the video of that is making the rounds afresh). The Italian speaker to his right lifted her chair and moved away from him as he said it, for it sounded much like Mussolini’s declarations of a uniform Italy, and came mere days after his Nazi salutes at a Trump rally.
Marine Le Pen’s father, while in charge of the predecessor party Front Nationale [National Front], was a Holocaust skeptic who minimized Nazi war crimes in his speeches. Le Pen la fille has shifted gears, trying to unite Jews and LGBTQ ethnic French in her struggle against the “hordes” of Islamic immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. One cannot help but wonder if she succeeded as to whether she would hold that coalition or throw them into the same uncertain, likely violent, future. Because, again, Rally Nationale, just like Orban’s Fidesz, was allied with AfD in the European Parliament. AfD is the most dangerous of all of these.
Expressions of sympathy with the Nazi party, Nazi slogans, swastikas, et cetera, are all banned by German law. Despite this, in its twelve years of existence, Alternative für Deutschland has managed to both slide by most of the laws while some leaders have gone too far and been convicted of criminal charges for their use of Nazi-inspired language, election signs, and slogans. They have to legally declare they are not Nazis, but the bulk of the German electorate (79%) continues to understand the truth that at the heart of their proclamations is the same darkness that propelled Nazism. AfD has been most successful in its efforts recruiting in the old heartlands of Nazism, Saxony, Thuringia, Bavaria, and Brandenberg, playing on centuries-old bigotry and economic stagnation (many of these places were inside the old communist East Germany) to win support.
Which brings us back to Elon Musk again. Musk, fresh off his turn towards the MAGA movement last summer, has been propping up Britain’s Reform Party (born out of the ashes of the United Kingdom Independence Party [UKIP]), Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia and, especially, AfD. It therefore seems incomprehensible that the Anti-Defamation League (established, in part, ensure we don’t forget the Holocaust) would simultaneously declare AfD to be an anti-semitic, anti-democratic threat guilty of using Nazi slogans and trivializing the Holocaust, while saying AfD’s keynote speaker on Saturday, Elon Musk, did not use the Nazi salute we all saw with our own eyes.
Putting aside my past disputes with the ADL regarding the horrors in Gaza, if even they cannot add up 2 + 2 and get the answer of 4 when it comes to a neo-Nazi party and its very wealthy benefactor, we have a major problem. There is a deep rot in global society, an inability to declare certain facts. It is fact that the heart of every dominant right-wing political movement today is fascism. It is fact that there is an inability to call out the coded anti-Semitism that fuels everything from the two decades long assault on George Soros to complaints about “cosmopolitanism” and “control of the media and Hollywood” with the less coded stuff in between (Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comments about Jewish space lasers causing wildfires, desecration of synagogues, and the need for Jews to still receive police protection in Germany from groups like AfD). It is fact that tolerance and acceptance of other cultures, other ethnicities and races, is falling to levels last seen in the 1930s. It is a terrifying fact that, thanks to the algorithms of Silicon Valley’s tech monopolies, everything from YouTube to Twitter/X to Facebook are driving people towards denialism of historical events.
In Canada, long a bastion of multiculturalism, eighteen percent of the 18-24 age group and fifteen percent of the 25-34 age group believes the history of the Holocaust is exaggerated. It was half of that a year ago in the 25-34 age bracket, which suggests a rapid disconnect between people and facts.
We stand upon a precipice right now, the same one that our ancestors looked at a century ago. They chose to ignore what they saw, reveling in their comforts, declining to fight once more because they had fought the Great War on what were essentially political disputes between empires and watched most of their generation be broken by that war. Their failure to combat these issues in their ideological cradle led to the deadliest war and genocide of all time.
Here we are, eighty years after the horrors of Nazism were exposed to the world, and more than ever, the world is forgetting the lesson. They are forgetting that cooperating with fascism and tolerating fascism are not virtues of a free society, but vices of privileged peoples who will not suffer from the impending atrocities. Whether it be the promise of concentration camps for undocumented migrants in America or the “one-way plane tickets” that AfD is promising for non-ethnic Germans, the crackdown on LGBTQ+ people’s very existence in all of the above named nations, or the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few oligarchs while shredding our civil rights, we are willingly ignoring the danger. The acquiescence of the ADL, billionaire Jews like Mark Zuckerberg, and right-wing Zionists to this movement will not protect them any more than cooperation with the Nazis protected Europeans. In the end, these ideologies come for everyone who isn’t in their protected classes, and there will be another Holocaust.
Wake up. Don’t ignore the facts any longer. Time is not on our side.