“What he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.” (Aimé Céssaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 1955: 36-7)
Today, comparing anything to the Shoah is considered at best a grave error, at worst a crime. Aimé Césaire is still often quoted as the voice of anti-colonialism, but his remarks on the Holocaust have also been condemned by scholars who wish to uphold – not by means of reference to facts or logic but by virtuous self-valorization or moralization – the historical uniqueness of the Shoah. Some critics highlight that Césaire’s framing — that Europe only condemned genocides once similar violence was brought to whites by the Nazis, i.e. the uniqueness of the Shoah is only derived from the whiteness of its victims — risks downplaying the unique dimensions of the Holocaust when conflated with colonial histories. Clemens Heni (director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism), for example, cites the journalist Alan Posener who contends that equating antisemitism with colonial genocide can inadvertently minimize the Holocaust’s singular horror. Heni himself went even as far as calling Césaire an anti-Semite. This is such is not a big deal as he has accused many people of being antisemites.
Even though there is no good reason to take such accusations seriously, we have to acknowledge that in a world governed by cynical opportunism (often also mystified as “cancel culture”), such accusations are often enough to silence reasonable arguments. This is how perfectly reasonable analyses such as those by Achille Mbembe, Masha Gessen and Slavoi Zizek are being erased in Germany by being labelled anti-Semitic. The label itself is now so inflated, that it is nothing more than a cynical instrument in the hands of those who have lost the argument.
Heni’s assertion, that the Holocaust is an incomparable event and that references to genocides in India, Africa and the Americas cannot be compared because that would be a Verharmlosung (making it seem less harmful) of the horrors of the Shoah, implies a racist mind-set. He exactly confirms Césaire’s point. Referring to the killings of non-Europeans as a reduction of the unique significance of the Shoah implies that the lives of these non-Europeans is indeed worth less. By invoking the specific point that the Shoah is indescribable, beyond words and meaningless, also suggests that these other genocide are describable, semantically recoverable and meaningful. For example slavery was an economic system, the slave trade made profits, killing rebellious slaves is an economic necessity and so on. Indeed, the racisms simply drips off the digital pages as I type these words.
By framing antisemitism as the sole explanation for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Heni reveals his deeply and unacknowledged racist mind-set. It is however more than merely ironic that quasi-intellectuals such as Heni and Posener exactly perform what Césaire had criticized: racism. Anyone who asserts that the Shoah cannot be compared to anything else because it is historically unique, is by default a racist. Rather than scientific inquiry, critical analysis or logical reflection such racists can only maintain that the Shoah is unique because it was directed against European (yes indeed white) Jews. This is exactly what Césaire had demonstrated.
That those who oppose any comparison are racists should come as no surprise since they are also Zionists and Zionism is by definition a racist ideology. Why else would Zionism have strived towards establishing a Jewish majority state? Why else would Zionism uphold the anti-Semitic claim that Jewishness is a race rather than a religion? Zionism had swallowed whole the entire ideological framework of anti-Semitism as the bedrock of European nationalism and merely copied it.
The fact that Zionism is now potentially going to be the major force instigating a nuclear war with global impact is indeed proof of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. The negation of negation has become an affirmation of the worst. Zionism was never a really intelligent answer to anti-Semitism as it was only focused on the preservation of the interests of wealthy Jews. Like all other forms of European nationalism, it was a bourgeois-ideology that primarily functioned to integrate elites and stop them from competing against each other. Only after it had been established and funded, it was rolled out as a programme of inculcating the poor to embrace their poverty, ignore their class-interests and sacrifice themselves for the interests of “their nation” (which was merely an invented, imagined community).
It is of course going to be very hard to uphold the argument about the incompatibility of the Holocaust when listening to the protagonists of the genocide in Gaza. Spending months stating that the attacks by Hamas on Israel on October 7 are like a repetition of the Holocaust seems, objectively speaking, the perfect candidate as an example of diminishing the importance of the Holocaust.
After the October 7th attacks, writing or the Times of Israel, the same Dr. Clemens Heni himself described the event as ““an unprecedented massacre against Jews… not seen since the Shoah and Babi Yar” . So he must believe that these attacks can be compared to the Shoah. His explanation was: “because the intention of Muslims and the Hamas was exactly the same like the German intention 85 years ago”. This exposes him straight away as a complete fraud. Suddenly, what he described one year earlier as “the unspeakable, senseless horrors of the Shoah” can be identified in terms of intentions?
We could of course indulge him a little more and ask (1) how to identify intentions? And (2) In case of different statements of intent, whose identification of intentions prevail as “true”? Here, Clemens Heni seems very sure: he knows the intentions “the complete annihilation of the Jewish people”. He would of course have difficulties explaining the Haavara agreement of 1933 and the fact that the Nazis did not actively stop the German Jews from leaving until well after the start of the Second World War. Ascribing intentions to the actions of others without any context or factual base, however, is exactly why the lessons of the Holocaust are not being learned by those who procleam to teach them.
The only thing that allows Heni to compare the Hamas attacks and the Shoah is the fact that they are directed against people who have been identified as Jewish. That is, his entire framing of the uniqueness of the Holocaust is the uniqueness of anti-Semitism which itself derives from the uniqueness of the Jewish people. Heni understand antisemitism in exactly the same way as Zionists understand themselves: both are derived from the assumption that Jews are an exceptional people (either as murders of Christ or as chosen by God). As a result, Heni sees antisemitism everywhere, which is of course useful as he is the director of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. The bigger the problem, the more need for additional funding. Cancel culture always derives from opportunism.
For Heni, the uniqueness of the Shoah cannot be compared to the slave-trade for example, because the former was completely “sinnlos” (meaning: it did not make sense). The absence of sense invokes that the meaning of the Shoah remains beyond semantics. Hence, by logical inversion, the slave trade did make sense and can be semantically recuperated. Of course it made sense, because it was part of European imperial capitalism. The very affirmation that the violence of imeprialism is thus not completely senseless implies a racist mind-set. it is the same “sense-making” that justifies genocide in the name of self-defence, which – ironically – was also the Nazi-justification of the Holocaust.
Now what Heni does not say is, one the one hand, why he thinks that the Shoah was meaningless and, in the other hand, why he thinks that semantic recuperation of sense makes an evil act less evil. One could argue that violence that makes sense, for example, in pursuit of an ethno-nationalist state, is more evil. This is a symptom of what is generally wrong with Holocaust Education in Germany. Its purpose is to contribute to what is referred to as “Erinnerungskultur” (Culture of Remembrance): “never forget”. Its purpose is not to identify the deep historical-material structural conditions that produced it. Instead, it forecloses analysis by stating that the violence was senseless and needs no further exploration; it only needs condemnation. Exactly this is the purpose of the question: “Do you condemn Hamas?” One could also have asked: “Can you explain why Hamas attacked Israel?”
However., exactly by sticking to slogans such as “never forget” instead of asking why, Erinnerungskultur forgets a lot. I treats antisemitism as a wide-spread mental affliction, exacerbated by propaganda. It does not talk about the political and economic conditions, in particular the relationship between the state and major corporations and the institutionalized criminalization of political representations of the interests of the working class, women and gay and lesbian people. It certainly does not talk about the inherent neuroses of nationalism and liberal angst for actual democracy. Holocaust Remembrance is a moralistic programme of de-politicization and whitewashing of the “normality” of fascism, not as an ideology but as inherent in the operational logic of the capitalist state and its neurotic conditioning of identity thinking, which is also deeply rooted in Zionism and perfectly explains how it justifies the current genocide in Gaze.
Disaffected Sociology 
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