The fatal flaw in Holocaust education

Instead of teaching liberal values, educators should have asked why liberalism failed to stop Hitler in the first place.

For decades, the Jewish community’s primary strategy for fighting antisemitism was education. Antisemitism, it was almost universally believed, was the product of ignorance. Once people were taught the truth about the Jews, they would realize the Jews’ essential humanity and centuries of hate would simply melt away.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this was Holocaust education. By teaching the extent of Jewish suffering, the educationalists were convinced, people would develop an inherent sympathy for the Jews. More than that, students would embrace liberal values of tolerance, justice toward “the other,” and pluralism and diversity. This alone would prevent the rise of another Nazism.

Moreover, the educationalists quietly believed that such Holocaust education would not only save the Jews from antisemitism but, in its way, contribute to a kind of tikkun olam, a “repair of the world.” It would redeem a fallen humanity through the messianic power of liberal values.

Given the current eruption of antisemitism, we now know all of this was utterly futile. The most violent and genocidal form of antisemitism has now arisen not among the uneducated but among the most educated.

This antisemitism not only does not respect the legacy of the Holocaust but blasphemously appropriates it for the purposes of antisemitism itself.

Worst of all, it perverts those liberal values so sacred to the educationalist ideology in order to demonize the Jews and Israel. It draws up its writ of genocide in the name of “the other” himself.

There are several reasons for the abject failure of the educational approach to antisemitism. Foremost among them was a misunderstanding of antisemitism, which is not and has never been a product of ignorance. It is a mass psychosis, an expression of the darkest aspects of the human psyche, hardwired into the human soul by millions of years of evolution. As such, it cannot be fought by education; it can only be resisted by force.

The second reason, especially regarding Holocaust education, was the naïve reliance on the power of liberal values. Liberal values, the educationalists believed, were the only cure for the forces that created the Holocaust. By fostering and instilling them, a second Nazism would become impossible. In effect, liberal values were the only way to say “never again” and mean it.

The problem with this was that liberal values were bound to fail in this task because of liberal values themselves. The truth is that a reliance on liberal values to fight antisemitism was an ahistorical and, ironically, ignorant approach.

If Holocaust history had been accurately taught, it would have revealed that liberal values were widespread in early 20th-century Europe. Ever since the Enlightenment began the tradition, they had been a major part of European society, leading to such things as the Emancipation of the Jews.

Revanchist and reactionary ideologies existed as well, of course, but these were regarded as relics soon to disappear. Liberalism was the wave of the future, the destination of the arc of history, and would inevitably triumph.

Indeed, many European Jews believed this so devoutly that they continued to embrace it even as fascism and Nazism came knocking at their doors in the dead of night to take them away to oblivion.

Moreover, the liberal tradition proved decidedly useless against Nazism. The policy of appeasement that enabled Hitler was largely based on it. Even though America, Britain, and France all more or less embraced liberal values, it was only when France was prostrate, Britain in mortal danger, and America attacked by Japan that the real fight finally began.

The Allied crusade in World War II was, among some, fought in the name of liberal values, especially by the United States. But it included other forces as well, such as Churchill’s mythic form of English patriotism, Charles de Gaulle’s unapologetic nationalism, and the Soviet Union’s communist ideology.

Moreover, the means by which the Allies won the war were of a decidedly illiberal variety. Massive state-run mobilization of manpower and industry, the fostering of an intense patriotism bordering on chauvinism, and such tactics as saturation bombing—with which liberals were and are deeply uncomfortable—destroyed the Axis and put an end to the Holocaust.

Thus, a truly historically informed Holocaust education would not have asked: How can we foster the liberal values that will stop another Hitler? It would have asked: Why did liberal values fail to stop Hitler in the first place?

This, however, would have demanded a very difficult and uncomfortable reckoning with the legacy of the Holocaust, especially among liberals. It would have demonstrated that fostering tolerance, pluralism, and diversity are useless against a psychotic ideology of absolute hate. The basic ineffectiveness of liberalism against certain forms of evil would have to have been confronted. Active resistance would have to have been taught as the only true remedy.

This fatal flaw in Holocaust education resulted in the total failure to teach antisemitism accurately to non-Jews. But it also had a profoundly detrimental effect on Jews. It made them dependent on an ideology that was impotent in the face of their enemies. It gave them faith in a catechism that cannot save them. And it reinforced a culture of quiescence that left them—especially their useless leaders—almost helpless when the monsters finally arrived.

The only remedy for this failure is to abandon the educational approach and cultivate an active resistance to antisemitism. A resistance that suffers from no delusions but which, by finally facing the truth, also finds itself with no despair. This, and this alone, can slay the beast.