'Holocaust Memorial Day? It's just a ready-made way of feeling grand about an issue that we don't actually have to do anything about.'
| Howard Jacobson, Jewish novelist and TV presenter, will not be joining in with the government's commemoration of the Holocaust on Saturday 27 January. 'I was confused about why Labour wanted a memorial day in the first place', he says. 'I have no idea what the Holocaust has got to do with us here in Britain, specifically in England.'
| But what about New Labour's assertion that remembering the Holocaust has lessons for us all - that it 'provides an opportunity to examine our nation's past and learn for the future', and can 'assert a continuing commitment to oppose racism, anti-Semitism, victimisation and genocide'? (1) 'Nonsense', says Jacobson, 'that's what that is. This is the story: there is an avidity of sympathy and suffering around at the moment, and remembering the Holocaust is an attempt to lock on to that. It's all so Blairite - grab hold of any grand idea of pastoral or primeval suffering and get what you can from it.'
| For Jacobson, New Labour's plans to commemorate the Holocaust fit perfectly with its image as a 'caring' government. 'Ready-made victims give you an appearance of being caring. That's what this government does - it cares about things. And of course, it doesn't have to spend very much money by caring, or expend a great deal of thought on what things it cares about, or generally inconvenience itself in any way whatsoever. Especially when there's something like the Holocaust to remember, which gives the government victims and the ability to "care" on a plate.'
| Not that Jacobson thinks we should shut up and forget about the Holocaust. On the contrary, he was initially keen on the idea of a memorial day because he thought it would help tackle the relativism surrounding the Holocaust - where today's civil wars are described as the latest 'holocaust' and where children are taught to reflect on issues such as bullying and racism through the spectrum of the Nazi genocide. 'There has been such an awful lot of relativism. People talk about genocide here and genocide there, and this idea that you can't single out one particular genocide because they're all similar.'
| But Jacobson has no truck with the idea that there have been 'many holocausts', and that holocausts are still taking place around us today. 'There was nothing small about what happened in the Balkans', he says. 'There was nothing small about what the Nazis wanted to do to homosexuals. But there was another, distinct idea in relation to the Jews - the attempt to wipe out a people, to wipe them off the face of the Earth. It was an idea of overwhelming and terrifying proportions, which I think we have to be very careful not to confuse.'
| Jacobson's hope that a memorial day would clear up such confusion and give the Holocaust its rightful place in history - as a unique and terrible crime, unparalleled in the twentieth century - has been dashed by New Labour's claim that 'the type of behaviour demonstrated in Nazi Germany was not a phenomenon limited either to Germany or to the mid-twentieth century', and that 'events in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo, to name but a few, amply demonstrate the propensity of human beings to murder en masse' (2).
| Jacobson is adamant: 'Listen, I'm not interested in hogging the grandeur of Jewish suffering or anything melodramatic like that - I'm not saying Jews have a monopoly on suffering, or that Jews' experiences during the Holocaust represent a sort of cruelty that no one else has known. But the Holocaust was a very specific event, with very specific aims and objectives, different from every other conflict. To go around comparing it and relating it to everything only does the Holocaust an injustice.'
| This is what worries Jacobson about New Labour's memorial day - not only that it's a cheap shot by a government which hides behind the mask of 'caring', but that it will ultimately denigrate the memory of the Holocaust by turning it into an all-purpose moral 'lesson for today'. 'This government is morally slippery', say Jacobson, 'and now it's making the Holocaust slippery, too'.
Brendan O'Neill is coordinating the spiked-conference Panic attack: Interrogating our obsession with risk, on Friday 9 May 2003, at the Royal Institution in London.
Read on:
The 'second generation' of Holocaust survivors, by Frank Furedi
I'm right because...you're a Nazi, by Josie Appleton
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto on the Holocaust, by Brendan O'Neill
spiked-issue: The Holocaust
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