Never Again

I am writing this article on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, a day on which the world recalls the genocide of six million Jews and over five million Poles, Russians, members of the LGBTQ community, Roma, and others whom the Nazis considered sub-humans and murdered as a policy of state.

Although they raised anti-Semitism to its most sophisticated form, the Nazis did not invent it.

Anti-Semitism has existed for over sixteen hundred years, when the Catholic Church and, later on, its Christian offspring, falsely accused the Jews of killing Jesus Christ and all but declared that they should be wiped off the face of the earth.

For centuries, this theological position became the mantra of priests in the pulpit across Europe, with the possible exception of Moorish Spain, where Christian, Muslim and Jew coexisted in peace and harmony for seven hundred years, until the Catholic Kings defeated the Moors in 1492 and expelled the Jews from Spain, dispersing them across North Africa and Turkey.

In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable type printing press. This was a revolutionary product that removed publishing from the exclusive purview pf the Church and made anyone with a press a creator and distributor of texts and print whatever truths or lies that they desired.  

Simply put, the difference was in the fact that, prior to the invention of the printing press, while there was steadily growing resentment of the Jews, isolated events in cities across the Holy Roman Empire remained just that: isolated.

Professor Amy O’Callaghan, of Oberlin College, wrote in 2008 that “Printing played a decisive role in the two main processes that led to a unified front against the Jews in medieval Germany. It first took the ideas from one region and transmitted them far from their place of origin, often even beyond the boundaries of the Empire. 

“By doing this, a single, homogenized picture of the Jews and their conspiracy to bring down Christianity emerged, as each location responded to nuances of information and ideas to which it was newly exposed. This in turn allowed individual cities in the Holy Roman Empire to act based on this newly unified representation of the Jewish people, using the alleged crimes of the Jews in one place as evidence for both prosecutions and persecutions in another. 

“It was this lethal combination that led to the mass expulsions that swept through Central Europe in the half-century leading up to the Reformation”.

This was the first example of mass communications, and the growth and expansion of anti-Semitism was exponential.

By the time the Nazis came to power, anti-Semitism was embedded in the minds of tens of millions around the world. The Nazis had only to legitimize it as a policy of state and normalize consideration of the elimination of Jews from the face of the earth and millions rallied to their cause. In many European countries, local populations participated actively in the arrest, deportation, and murder of six million Jews and five million others. 

A 1947 U.S. State Department report said that the Catholic Church under Pope Pius XII refused to speak out against the Nazis and, after the war ended, the Church helped many Nazis escape to the Arab world and Latin America, where they were received as heroes.

While the second world war and the Nuremberg Trials brought to light the awful reality of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism did not disappear.

Rather, it submerged into the subconscious of many as those in the West grappled to thrive in a liberal democratic world while, in the USSR and its satellites, anti-Semitism became an official policy of the state. Indeed, today many people deny the Holocaust and are content to argue it is another example of Jewish control over the media.

Today’s complex world has led many to look for a scapegoat for the political and economic travails that affect us all. Once again, the Jew has become the target around which this hatred and suspicion coalesces, and today’s social media brings together haters from around the world in digital communities whose reach is broad and deep, and whose philosophy is part and parcel of the policies of hate and division espoused by political parties of the extreme right and left.

It is one thing for us to say, “never again” and move on to other things.

It is another for each of us to fight this disease everywhere every day. We must demand that our education systems focus on the unity of humanity on the one hand and the benefits of diversity on the other, on the creativity of us all to make a global contribution to end this scourge, and the fundamental respect that each must have for the other.

The time for “never again” is now, and it is up to each of us to demand and ensure that our political leaders and educators pursue this with zeal. It is up to all of us to demand legislation that ensures that social media reject the politics of hatred and division, that our children are properly educated, and that those who would divide us through hatred and prejudice are deprived from platforms that provide them with easy reach to global audiences.

It is up to all of us.

Let’s commit to these goals now – ninety years after the Nazis first came to power and created what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”.

[email protected]

Keep reading: The State of the Media

Edición: Laura Espejo