The Next Holocaust

It will require a war—a big, long war, the kind that causes millions upon millions of deaths and uproots and disperses many millions more besides. You can’t have a Holocaust without these things.

But first, let me clarify exactly what I mean by a “Holocaust.” I’m not talking about whatever happened to so many of the Jews who lived in Europe as of the late 1930s, nor am I talking about anything the Germans did or did not do to the extensive human populations under their sway in the early 1940s. Rather, what I mean to address here is a related series of developments, including the allegation of “events” that may or may not have transpired quite as alleged, just before the Holocaust I mean to address. I mean to address the period from 1945 to the present—the Holocaust Institution that has encompassed the entire lives of most people alive today. It is characterized not by genocide, but by allegations of genocide, and ensuing generations of reparations, re-education, education, and monuments and memorial enterprises in a plethora that defies enumeration.

A Holocaust, then, is a successful claim that a (large, powerful, at least formerly rich) militarily defeated regime or nation that has lost control of its territory systematically abused some demographic segment distinguished by race, religion, language, whatever, and that the people on the former territory of the nation/regime must be made to pay people who claim to have been harmed by it at least until all the people able to mount such claims are dead. And those claims must be broad, encompassing, and easy for a great number of people to assert. But not too great a number.

How, then, does a group become the beneficiaries of a Holocaust such as the one that contributes such richness to Jewish life today? There is unavoidably the question of purpose: did “the Jews,” or more-precisely, the motivating subgroups among them along with “fellow travelers” such as today’s Millenarian Evangelicals, engineer or contrive anything to win the group pension that the survivors (again, along with numerous non-victim and even non-Jewish impostors) have enjoyed these seventy years on? The Jewish hand in precipitating both world wars has been extensively explored in such works as Henry Ford’s The International Jew and more-recently by Thomas Dalton in two articles in Inconvenient History. But the Holocaust lay in the future at the time of Ford’s work, and even Dalton’s work makes no charge that Jews encouraged the wars so as to enjoy Holocausts in their aftermaths (it suggests other motives for the various actors in the chronicle). So for this analysis, let us dismiss the notion of bringing about a global conflagration so as to enjoy unimpeachable victimhood for uncounted generations in the ensuing peace.

The effort, ingenuity, deceptiveness, treachery and sheer persistence that has gone into establishing, strengthening, exploiting, enforcing and perpetuating the institution that survives today in rude health as The Holocaust, however, cannot be denied, though, of course, it is denied by both its beneficiaries and its architects. Regardless of this often-literally vicious campaign that continues unabated today, various conditions, or prerequisites, may also be seen, and duly credited, in a contemplation of this historically unprecedented Tower of Victimhood that, unlike its predecessor in Babel, would seem indeed to have reached all the way, if not to Heaven, then at least to unassailable strength in Western society today.

Besides the unimaginably horrible war, there is another seemingly indispensable ingredient in the concoction of a Holocaust for a victim group, and that is the explicit condemnation, persecution, and possibly even forcible dispossession and removal of most, if not all, members of the group by the polity that ultimately is to receive the blame for the crimes, and the burden of compensating them. Further requirements, in fact, impinge on the perpetrator group, which must not only decisively lose the war (and thus be blamed for having started it), but must survive in sufficient numbers and vitality to struggle free of its own rubble and regain at least the strength to serve as a rewarding host to the parasite that the victim/beneficiary group will become to it. In this respect, Germany was a godsend to today’s Holocaust—a more-suitable “cash cow” would seem impossible to find among the economies of 1930s Europe. Only the United States itself could have been more abundant, and that potential goose’s golden eggs were needed more for the purpose of subjugating Germany than for funding the ensuing Holocaust, though it has served the later purpose in a thousand essential ways as well. In the event, Germany’s National Socialists quite sufficiently nominated their country to support the welfare of world Jewry for much of the thousand-year future that their vaunted Reich was supposed to endure.

In a sordid emulation, the United States subjected its Japanese minority in the western reaches of its territory to a program that bears considerable comparison to the initiating events and allegations thereof that characterize the Holocaust. But differences both of scale and arising from America’s victory in the war combined with the innate characteristics of members of the victim group to limit their Holocaust (as defined in the present essay) to a paltry $20,000 stipend awarded the survivors in 1988. Perhaps this was “proportionate” to the injustices the Japanese-Americans underwent; no one but God could plausibly render any such judgment.

As one casts about the world today for candidates for the victims of the next Holocaust (again, not necessarily the victims of genocide, but the victims of a credible charge of “extreme prejudice”), many possibilities are evident. Thomas Sowell in The Economics and Politics of Race and other writings[*] made a comparison between the “Overseas Chinese” in Southeast Asia and elsewhere and Jews, particularly Jews outside Israel. Chinese cadres in Europe and particularly the United States have adequate strength, but its members have so far displayed neither enduring devotion to Chinese religion or language nor have they evinced much propensity to involve themselves in political processes, even in places where anti-Chinese sentiment poses little to no barrier. But because there are over a billion Chinese in the world, and hundreds of millions might survive the next world war at least in China, the game might be spoiled for the Overseas Chinese by the existence of so many of their apparent co-ethnics in places not greatly distant from where the Overseas Chinese live at present in their greatest numbers. But it might not; a Holocaust is a lucrative prize to any group (or persons claiming to represent such group), and the challenge it offers to ingenuity, not to say duplicity, has in the past inspired truly spectacular feats.

The Armenians are an eminently qualified group for victimhood in the next Holocaust, but among other drawbacks, they (a) have “already” had their Holocaust in their eviction from Turkey during the First World War; and (b) have long had their “own” country in the Transcaucasus, while the Jews had “no homeland” of their own during the events on which their own institution is founded. All this is small consolation to the Armenians who survived their “actual” Holocaust, as they have collected from it hardly one percent of the reparations or sanctification that their Hebrew successors attained. That they “earned” their Holocaust as much as the Jews of Europe did a quarter-century later can be argued quite forcefully. Such ethnic cleansings as the Armenians have suffered in the past have produced an Armenian Diaspora whose members would greatly benefit any future drive to acquire a Holocaust better resembling the one that has been erected in behalf of the Jews. The thus-far-failed efforts of the Armenians to gain Holocaust status for their undeniable misfortunes may in fact pose little hindrance to a future full-court press: Jews “warmed up” to get their Holocaust for close to fifty years prior to 1945, as documented in Don Heddesheimer’s The First Holocaust.

The Kurds of the Middle East were jilted out of their promised homeland around 1923 when the Treaty of Lausanne was negotiated among Turkey and the European victors of World War I, and the group, whose intrinsic qualities nominate them emphatically as potential beneficiaries of a Holocaust, thus lacks the homeland that Israel constitutes for the beneficiaries of the present Holocaust. The goal of attaining such a homeland may energize Kurdish drive in winning a Holocaust for themselves, and its future attainment might in turn enable their drive to enhance their Holocaust, but there remains the requirement of that stupendous military conflict in which at least tens of millions of third parties must die. If it happens near Kurdistan, the Kurds are very much a group to watch, despite the present relative weakness of their cadres in countries that might win (or even, like Switzerland, survive) the mandatory world war.

And lastly, what about “the Jews,” all over again? The Jews, as a group, have an ace-in-the-hole that the other groups so far mentioned do not have: a notional religious commonality. This avails the Jews a branding option not so potently available to the other groups: religious persecution—a rubric especially resonant with Americans, what with the embroiderment of their European forebears’ invasion of the North American continent as having been inspired by a search for “religious freedom” (a concept that they notably failed to institute even among themselves, much as today’s Israelis decline to scruple against ethnic cleansing of the lands they wish to occupy). Despite the “same” group’s having already reaped the harvest of the world’s greatest guilt trip of all time, some of Abraham’s children stand proud among those who might be the beneficiaries of the next Holocaust, if only because those in Israel, massively enabled by the taxpayers of America, have so long, so viciously, so relentlessly oppressed and disadvantaged their Arab neighbors and captives that the backlash, building from before the times of the initiating events of their present Holocaust, must be savage, cruel and, yes, quite likely genocidal in a very real sense of the oft-misused word. It is to be feared that, regardless of the justifications of today’s Holocaust, the Jews of Israel may truly earn the next Holocaust, if it falls to them to receive its seminal events.

Holocausts, we might with reason conclude, may be a consequence—and by no means the greatest consequence—of future global conflagrations. The institution of democracy as practiced in America and Europe since even before 1945, along with the popular media, academia, and other influences on popular opinion, render populations that survive world wars hostage to the emergence of future Holocausts. As with other abuses of the populace by elites among it, it is critically enabled by ignorance and gullibility on the part of those who bear the costs of Holocausts, especially, of course, the populaces of defeated powers, whom no amount of sagacity or connivance could possibly save.

We shall have to await the particulars, secure in the expectation that the devastation of the required world war will, to those millions, or billions who experience it firsthand, render whatever Holocaust it engenders, in the words of Jean-Marie LePen, “a mere footnote” to the larger event, at least to those outside the favored group.

[*] Amy Chua dedicates the first chapter of World on Fire (Doubleday, New York, 2003) to vivid accounts of her relatives among the Overseas Chinese in such places as the Philippines.