Memory and its misuse

The late historian Lucy Dawidowicz presciently warned against the type of 'Holocaust education' that seeks enlightenment through the construction of inappropriate analogies. Former Cabinet Minister Tony Benn, who for some reason has gained a reputation over the years as a voice of conscience and sagacity, demonstrates her point and his crassness in The Independent today on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz:

The most important lesson of the Holocaust is that fear provides a power structure for political leaders. Hitler portrayed the Jews as the enemy and used it to instil fear and gain power. George Bush evokes the fear of terrorism and becomes a more powerful leader. The important thing moving forward is to look at history and understand. Only by seeing how such things develop can we be sure such atrocities will not happen again

If there is one aspect of the Holocaust that you cannot fail to observe if you have a respect for history, it is this, as expounded by Mrs Dawidowicz in her study The Holocaust and the Historians (1981, p. 14):

The immensity of the Jewish losses destroyed the biological basis for the continued communal existence of Jews in Europe. Every country and people ravaged by the war and by the German occupation eventually returned to a normal existence. All the nations, the victims now become victors, the aggressors now defeated, once again assumed their positions in the political order. Having mourned their dead, commemorated their martyrs and heroes, all the peoples of Europe, including the Germans, recovered from their wounds, rebuilt their shattered cities. London, Warsaw, and Rotterdam, as well as Berlin and Dresden, were reconstructed. They restored their factories and their marketplaces. They resuscitated their institutions of learning and culture. They reestablished their armed forces. But the annihilation of the 6 million European Jews brought an end with irrevocable finality to the thousand-year-old culture and civilization of Ashkenazic Jewry, destroying the continuity of Jewish history.

There is no 'lesson' to this, no rallying cry, and no redemptive purpose. It's just a fact - and one that disturbingly few people who portray European Jewry as the universal victim seem to recognise.

UPDATE: I wrote the comment about inappropriate analogy before reading this account in The Times of a speech by the Irish President, Mary McAleese, during a ceremony to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz:

Mrs McAleese said that anti-Semitism had existed for decades before Hitler and the Nazis. “They gave to their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred of Catholics...."

It's reminiscent of one of those eccentric assertions that have characterised the political career of the London Mayor, Ken Livingstone. When he first gained fame, as the leader of the Greater London Council in the early 1980s (a post to which the voters never elected him), he compared the sufferings of the Irish people over 800 years to the Holocaust. The Irish historian and former Cabinet minister Conor Cruise O'Brien remarked in his book The Siege (1986, pp. 328-9), that Livingstone's historical claim (emphasis in original):

... leaves out the fact that the oppression of the Jews in history vastly exceeds that of the Irish, in duration, consistency and intensity, even if no account is taken of the Holocaust at all.