The American Spectator

Special Report

Why the Shoah Still Matters

By Patrick O'Hannigan on 9.13.07 @ 12:07AM

(Page 2 of 2)

STEPPING FROM THE SUNLIT MEADOW of salvation history into the dark valley of the secular landscape that we habitually foul, the early 20th century Armenian Genocide, awful as it was, will never be as well known as what befell the Jews starting about twenty years afterward. The persecution of Turkish Christians by Turkish Muslims happened under cover of a cataclysmic world war, and before cameras gave photojournalism more immediacy by shrinking down to portable sizes.

Similarly, Nazi crimes are better known than Communist crimes because Nazis were on the losing side in World War Two. Tough guys like General George S. Patton vomited when they saw emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood in the death camps American troops had liberated, and high-profile camp survivors like Simon Wiesenthal started hunting former Nazis more than fifteen years before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn found a Western publisher for The Gulag Archipelago.

Because the Berlin Wall was pulled down in 1989, the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, and the Venona Transcripts were not released until 1995, Joseph Stalin and his successors had more time to suppress evidence of Communist brutality than Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists ever did.

The Shoah also makes a strong imprint on the world because its atrocities were more localized than the comparable crimes of the Communists. While localized does not mean unique, it is easier to decry inhumanity in Germany and occupied Poland than to catalog atrocities in what The Black Book of Communism rightly observes is four times that many countries on four different continents.

Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia was horrible, but derivative, and it happened at a time when Communism still appealed strongly to many opinion makers in the West.

Another reason for recurring emphasis on Jewish suffering is that it continues. The ravings of Iran's president, the transcripts of Friday sermons in too many mosques, and the pathological fondness for suicide bombing among militant Palestinians all throw the Shoah into stark relief, changing the punctuation on "never again" so that it ends with a question mark rather than with the period or exclamation point it should have.

If there are agendas to be found, they're wielded not by Jews, but by single-minded enemies of Jews.

Letter to the Editor

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Abortion, Movies, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Israel, Africa, Communism