Remembrance and Appropriation

Steyn On-line ^ | January 30, 2020 | Mark Steyn

[Twotone]

This week began with the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and ends with the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. These two events are not unconnected, for per yours truly on page 105 of America Alone the EU is "a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem". They shouldn't really be quite so entwined, but as I said to Laura Rosen Cohen on the seventieth anniversary:

I think they drew the wrong conclusion from 'Never Again'. The Jews were sort of peripheral to the meaning of that. I think what 'Never Again' means to a Continental European is never again, as they saw it, the nationalism that led to war. So their response to 1939-1945 was to undermine their own nationalism. At the time of the European Constitution, so-called, a decade ago, you had these apparatchiks from the European Commission standing up and warning the Dutch and the French that if they didn't sign on to this Euro-superstate they would be on the path to Belsen and Auschwitz.

In other words, it's one or the other. You've the European Union or you've got ovens. That was the lesson they drew - that nationalism was bad, that nation states were bad, that national identity was bad. And, as part of that, they imported the next generation of anti-Semites to Europe.

Nevertheless, several readers asked why SteynOnline didn't join in Monday's observances. The short answer is that I have a semi-official policy of sitting out Holocaust Memorial Day, on the grounds that in Europe formal veneration of dead Jews grows ever more fulsome in direct proportion to formal indifference to living Jews, and the extinguishing of what remains of Jewish life on the Continent.

[Gman]

Today, 55 years ago, Sir Winston Churchill was laid to rest. Also important.

[Rummyfan]

...the EU is "a 1970s solution to a 1940s problem"...

True.

Don't look to Europe for political and societal solutions. In the last one hundred fifty years the supposedly enlightened Euros have given us communism, fascism, Nazism, and now national welfare states that are collapsing under a native population too enamored of social benefits to even reproduce and an immigrant class openly and actively hostile to the host culture. Where it all ends I don'y know; the usual European solution involves boxcars.

[Rummyfan]

...in Europe formal veneration of dead Jews grows ever more fulsome in direct proportion to formal indifference to living Jews, and the extinguishing of what remains of Jewish life on the Continent.

True too....

[Rummyfan]

A delegation of imams and other Muslim leaders visits Auschwitz

I wonderr if they were there to get construction ideas...

[workerbee]

formal veneration of dead Jews grows ever more fulsome in direct proportion to formal indifference to living Jews

Virtue signaling by the virtueless?

[Rummyfan]

But Germany was the most advanced civilized culture in Europe, and so even its extermination procedures were advanced and civilized: bureaucracy, paperwork, official government identification numbers, massive streamlined processing facilities... That is the unique evil of the Holocaust, and it's different from some guy opening fire on a mosque or taking his machete to the neighboring village.

Yes. Twentieth century industrialized mass annihilation, with all the required bureaucracy and administrative structure and logistics and management. Unprecedented and unique in history.

[Rummyfan]

I'm not one for philosophical meditations on Zionism. Had I been British foreign secretary ninety years ago, I doubt I would have issued the Balfour Declaration. Nor am I much interested in whose land was whose hundreds or thousands of years back. The reality is that the nation states of the region all date back to the 1930s and 1940s: the only difference is that Israel, unlike Syria and Iraq, has made a go of it.

A great Steyn thanks for the post.

[Rummyfan]

Just as an aside I’ve walked through that gate myself. The entire place was chilling and sickening.

[kearnyirish2]

“You’ve the European Union or you’ve got ovens. That was the lesson they drew - that nationalism was bad, that nation states were bad, that national identity was bad.”

I read the situation today very differently; the European Union is what Hitler envisioned (continental Europe led by Germany), and they’ve fulfilled his dream without ovens. England seemed to understand that from the start, refusing to join the common currency, maintaining its relations with the Anglosphere, and eventually leaving.