The Holocaust as unfinished history: notes

“[T]he feeding-through of the memory of 1918 into Nazi ideology is a textbook example of the power of traumatic memory, of what has been called ‘the perpetrator's '‘never-again” syndrome’.”

Nazi ideology employed “the classic genocidaire’s tactic of attributing to one’s putative enemy one’s own fantastical schemes — in this case, extermination and [world] conquest.”

From Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History

The Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim famously said that after the Holocaust, Jews have a duty "to not give Hitler posthumous victories.” I would say everyone has a duty to try to understand and oppose those tendencies in our global society and culture whose continuation of some of the kinds of things that were done in the Shoah are hardly posthumous. Fackenheim said that Jews can do that by just being Jewish, continuing the Jewish tradition, and thus resisting a destructive modernity whose destructiveness cannot be overturned or stopped. Only, if one’s desire is to “be Jewish,” that could mean promoting not only Jewish communitarianism but a Jewish state, which might indeed be the logical outcome of the former. And, unfortunately, that is not enough to avoid continuing tendencies that have far too much in common with the Holocaust for our purposes. Israeli bombs are adding daily to Hitler’s posthumous victories.