I’m not surprised but Jesus Christ

A quote from the Wikipedia page of German-American Jewish scientist, Albert Einstein.

What's notable here is how academics and intellectuals raised almost no protest to the systematic purging of Jews from universities in Germany. This is because, as historian Niall Ferguson has noted, that German academics had been promulgating the intellectual basis of Nazism during the 1920's (and probably beforehand).

What we can see here is that rather than defending the dignity and liberty of the individual, academics and intellectuals were the first in line to accept, permit, and collaborate with tyranny. They believed and invented lies. They turned a blind eye to mounting crimes against humanity.

When we look at today's college campuses and see a rising sea of hatred against Jewish students; when we see thousands of non-Jewish students showing little to no concern whatsoever for the rise in antisemitic hatred; when we see academics who glorify Jew-hating mass murderers, we should not be surprised.

What has been is what will be.

The academics who have promulgated anti-Jewish hatred (or stood by and allowed it to spread) today are betraying the same spirit as the German academics who allowed German Jews to be purged and threatened with death by the Nazi regime. And, like the German academics of the 20's and 30's, they believe that their betrayal of justice and liberty are all in the public's best interests.

Of course, they have been wise enough to change their official scapegoat from the Jews to "Israel".

But the net result is the same: Jews-- no matter how great their achievements, like those of Einstein-- are being purged from academic spaces and polite society, once again, to virtually no protest from their peers.

by Matti Friedman

The failure of Holocaust education has been most sharply observed by the writer Dara Horn, particularly in a prescient essay for The Atlantic last spring and before that in a 2021 book, People Love Dead Jews. After visiting numerous museums and speaking to educators who teach Holocaust curricula, she concludes in the essay, “The bedrock assumption that has endured for nearly half a century is that learning about the Holocaust inoculates people against antisemitism. But it doesn’t.” 

By turning the Holocaust into a generic story about prejudice, Horn argues, Holocaust education left its recipients without any understanding of the specific problem facing Jews—or even much sympathy for real Jews in the present. 

This was the argument she made half a year before the Hamas attack of October 7 and its aftershocks, when any doubts about the accuracy of Horn’s hypothesis were put to rest. The well-meaning donors who’ve footed the astronomical bill for museums, memorials, classes, and films should ask for their money back.

The confusion between knowledge of the how and of the why is illustrated, inadvertently, in the figure of one of the experts interviewed in Evil on Trial, Omer Bartov, a Holocaust historian at Brown who describes himself as a “historian of genocide.” Bartov, who is Israeli, belongs to Israel’s most unfortunate export category—namely, academics who find a home for themselves on an increasingly unhinged Western left by reassuring their comrades that their dark fantasies about Israel are sane. Barely a month after October 7, Bartov wrote a New York Times op-ed accusing Israel of “crimes against humanity” and warning of a possible “genocide” in Gaza, taking the two key terms first invented to describe the Nazis and deploying them against Jews. Then, after visiting one of the college encampments where Zionists are cast as malevolent global villains, he reassured an interviewer from Democracy Now! that he’d seen nothing amiss and that antisemitism on American campuses “does not exist in any significant form.” The protesters may be trafficking in lurid stories of Jewish evil, but the Holocaust professor thinks that this time the stories are true.Prisoner shoes on display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Oświęcim, Poland. (via Alamy)

One of the blithe assumptions of Holocaust narrative has always been that no one would identify with the Nazis, but this is wrong. They’re villains, to be sure, but also strong figures, men of action. Just as the best character in Schindler’s List is the Nazi commandant played by Ralph Fiennes, the best character in Evil on Trial is Adolf Hitler, acted with deranged energy in the reenactment scenes by Károly Kozma. When I finished the series on Netflix, I saw that I could continue to Hitler’s Circle of Evil, then to Hitler: A Career, and then to five other movies with title screens featuring Nazis. All of this manages not only to bestow upon the Nazis a kind of dark glamor but also to reassure everyone that if you don’t have a red band on your arm and a skull on your hat, you’re fine. 

The Jews, on the other hand, tend to be mostly absent as real characters. They occasionally appear to be marched away with their hands up or shot into ditches in their underwear. But we don’t get a sense of who they are, or why their difference—and particularly their stubborn refusal to adopt whatever ideology is current—has repeatedly turned them into figures of hate. 

The liberal West may believe itself to be post-Christian, but it’s still the world created by an ideological system that co-opted Judaism and then developed a furious resentment toward its continued existence, thus establishing a civilizational pattern that seems destined to repeat forever.

If Holocaust stories treat Jews as props, they miss understanding what the Jews think about what’s happening to them. And what they think is worth consideration, not just out of courtesy.

Judaism is a religion with a very long memory, and Jewish texts include stories of oppression and extermination stretching back to Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus. Europe’s Jews saw the threat as a continuum that didn’t start or end with Hitler. They knew he was a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself. It is this insight, unlike the details of SS hierarchy or the sadism of Dr. Mengele, that has the power to help us make sense of the world we see right now. 

Period postcard of Adolf Hitler, date unknown, probably late 1920s. Text at bottom RH corner reads Photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, Munich, reproductions prohibited (my collection)

To all the communist transvestites, VOTE👏VON👏HINDENBURG👏

I'm just as radical as you; I'm a proud member of the great Social Democratic Party of Germany! I don't know what the crazy communists are telling you, but Paul von Hindenburg is our only hope to defeat the Nazis. After we elect him, then we can discuss other politics, but this is the BARE MINIMUM, and if you don't vote for him, you clearly have this crazy purity test that'll bring us all to fascism.

I know you might be worried about his "senility" and "failing health", and I know you may not like him because of his push to the right, and I know you may be worried about the brownshirts, and the recent persecution of Dr. Hirschfeld and his work, and maybe you STILL haven't gotten over the whole Rosa Luxemburg stuff,

but none of that really matters! We need to keep the SPD in power, or else Hitler will get in charge! This is the most important and most basic thing you could do to help Germany stay a democracy. In 6 years, then maybe we can find a better candidate, but no matter what you think about von Hindenburg, he's the best shot we have at keeping the fascists out of power. We can totally push him left!

Any vote against von Hindenburg is a vote for Hitler. #Hindenburg1932

JD Vance had a spine, then had it removed.

- Noam Chomsky

A soldier in the Jewish Brigade Group of the British Army, with an artillery shell reading "A gift to Hitler" in Italy, 1944.

JD Vance said Trump is America's Hitler and now he agreed to be Trump's running mate so I guess that makes him America's Göring.