Selecting the past

Last week the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commissioner, Kathleen 
McEvoy, found that an organisation called the Adelaide Institute, headed by 
an individual by the name of Frederick Toben, had breached Australia's 
Racial Discrimination Act with a website claiming the Jewish Holocaust 
perpetrated by the Nazis never happened. Toben refuses to remove the 
material from the site. The increasing incidences of Holocaust denials are 
a part of the rise of the extreme right and, as STEVE SILVER reports, it 
raises the importance of how we view history, including how coming 
generations are educated.

Britain now has an official remembrance day for victims of the Holocaust. 
Perhaps we should be pleased that memory of the greatest example of fascist 
barbarism plays a central role in many countries' understanding of last 
century's events.

However, what we might expect to be remembered and what is meant by the 
cry, "Never again!", are not always the same. Surely it is obvious that the 
lesson — or more accurately, one of the lessons — of the Holocaust is 
that fascism needs to be combatted.

History teaches us that even when fascists are small in number, they need 
to be monitored, opposed and stopped at every opportunity. One would 
imagine that this is a fairly obvious statement, but it is not one of the 
central lessons coming from the various arms of Holocaust education that 
are flourishing in Israel, the United States and parts of Europe.

Outside Israel and Germany, the US must be the most Holocaust-conscious 
country in the world. Looking at the history of the country, it is not 
difficult to see why anti-fascism does not feature as a major lesson of the 
Holocaust.

One lesson drawn from the Holocaust in the US, like in Israel, is strong 
support for the Jewish state. The Israeli lesson of the Holocaust — the 
need for Israeli national defence — is one that fits well, not only with 
north America's large Jewish community, but also government policy itself.

In a country thousands of miles away from where the Nazi atrocities were 
carried out, what has emerged from the Holocaust seems to be more about 
underpinning the "democratic" values of the US than anything else.

However, the reality of that democracy was the suppression of anti-fascists 
in the wake of World War II — an act that still has a powerful legacy to 
this day.

With the advent of the Cold War, anybody who had associated with communists 
was hounded and condemned. The playwright Arthur Miller famously compared 
the events of that period to the witch hunts of previous centuries in his 
play The Crucible.

The despised political movement in the US for some five decades has been 
communism, not fascism. Anti-communism was the key ideological factor 
defining what was "American". To bring this about, cold war academics took 
the concept of totalitarianism and made it a crucial weapon.

The theory argues that political systems that are controlled by a single 
political party are the same regardless of ideology. Through the use of the 
theory of totalitarianism, the US was able to portray the Soviet Union as 
the same as Nazi Germany.

The enemy that nations had banded together to crush during World War II was 
no longer fascism but totalitarianism and the only totalitarianism of 
concern was the left-wing variety.

For example, whereas fascist Spain existed until 1975, the US intelligence 
services interfered in the Italian post-war elections to ensure that the 
Communist Party did not come to power.

The "containment" experiment in Italy was developed and put into practice 
wherever it was believed that the left might have a chance of taking power.

The result of this included support for fascistic military dictatorships in 
Latin America. The big problem in the US during the Cold War was that, 
wherever there were anti-fascists, inevitably there were left-wingers.

This rather embarrassing fact meant that anti-fascist organisations were 
deemed to be communist front organisations during the McCarthyite witch 
hunts and beyond.

This legacy lives on — in the US anti-fascism is an unrehabilitated victim 
of the Cold War, too closely associated with the left to qualify as a 
lesson from the Holocaust.

For obvious reasons Germany is a country that is very conscious of what was 
perpetrated by the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s. The division of 
Germany into the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic 
of Germany (FRG) saw two narratives emerge along ideological grounds.

Like Israel, the GDR was founded in the wake of World War II. If the 
Holocaust underpinned Israel's identity, then it was anti-fascism that 
underpinned the GDR.

Communists who had spent the war in exile in the Soviet Union or had 
survived the concentration camps proudly declared their country to be anti-
fascist.

In the propaganda war between East and West, the GDR taunted the West for 
not dealing with the post-war fascist revival.

When it came to looking at Nazi atrocities, the GDR perspective was in line 
with that of the rest of eastern Europe's socialist alliance.

Particular emphasis was placed on resistance — the resistance of 
communists and their allies — and the founding of eastern European 
governments on anti-fascist roots.

The extermination of European Jewry, though acknowledged, did not play a 
key role when it came to education about the Nazi era. There was no 
Holocaust education in the sense that it was understood in the West — 
learning about the annihilation of European Jewry — but more general 
teaching about Nazi atrocities.

This was because one third of those killed in World War II — 20 million 
people — were Soviet citizens.

Communists were ruthlessly persecuted, often executed, and whole villages 
were wiped out by the Nazis as revenge for partisan attacks or as a warning 
to the population.

The FRG was also keen to portray itself as a country that had made a break 
with with the Nazi past. Like the US it supported Israel, materially, in 
terms of reparations to the Jewish state for the crimes of the Nazi era.

At a glance, it appears that the FRG also drew an anti-fascist lesson from 
the Holocaust. The symbols of the Nazi era were outlawed and it became 
illegal to constitute a Nazi party.

In reality Nazis carried on organising, but often without the swastika and 
other symbols. (In the GDR they were prosecuted and many of those who did 
the prosecuting are now facing prosecution themselves in the "unified" 
Germany — Ed.)

On the occasions when their organisations were shut down, new ones sprang 
up, so the Nazi activist base remained bolstered by the fact that the 
senior Nazis were able to retain high office.

When the Berlin Wall came down and Germany was reunited under the auspices 
of the FRG, the question of whether it had learnt an anti-fascist lesson 
from the Holocaust was put to the test.

The answer was a swift NO. Fascist groups mushroomed, racial murders 
increased and Germany's racist citizenship laws remained.

As in the US, anti-fascists were often persecuted during the cold war. 
Anti-fascists found themselves isolated and labelled as extreme left 
subversives.

As a result, the popular-front type of anti-fascist coalition that could be 
brought into play in most west European countries was not possible in 
front-line Germany.

The difficulties that that anti-fascists in Germany face was brought home 
to me at a recent conference in Berlin organised by Action Reconciliation 
Services for Peace on the theme of Holocaust education.

One speaker told me, after I had used the term anti-fascist, that it is a 
discredited concept in Germany because it is associated with the GDR.

It is clear that the legacy of cold-war anti-communism, which at best 
encourages people to condemn fascism, not combat it, lives on.

"Never again!" should mean that never again should fascism be allowed to 
rise unchecked. The huge resources that are put into Holocaust education 
are wasted unless the main lesson is that fascism must be fought.

The day when Holocaust education and anti-fascism education are synonymous 
will only come about when the cold war freezer starts to defrost.

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Acknowledgements: anti-fascist magazine Searchlight