Decolonizing the Memory of the Holocaust
By Andres Kogan Valderrama
HAVANA TIMES – The shameful withdrawal by part of the Jewish Community of Chile from participating in a new commemoration of the Holocaust victims on January 27, organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the government of Gabriel Boric, not only shows the extreme ideological fanaticism of that organization but also its inability to understand memory from a much broader perspective.
Hence, abstaining from such an important activity, claiming that it was because the government of Chile did not condemn the Hamas massacre on October 7, which is not only untrue, as a statement was issued on the same day of the event (1), but it also shows a narrow and closed-minded perspective that denies the possibility of seeing the Holocaust beyond the Western interpretation we are all too familiar with.
By this, I refer to the Eurocentric and colonial idea of thinking that the Holocaust was an exceptional event in human history, as if other events before and after it were not equally abhorrent and dramatic, transforming Western history into a supposed universal history.
In other words, believing that this genocide and horror against the Jews by the German state was something unique and ahistorical, and not the result of other genocides and previous processes where racism and dehumanization of the other also occurred, only outside the boundaries of the European continent.
This does not mean that the Holocaust is not the most terrible and painful historical moment in the history of the Jewish people, but rather that the West, represented by the states of Europe, the United States, and Israel itself, has made invisible other modern holocausts and genocides, such as the conquest of Latin America and the Caribbean since 1492.
Consequently, it seems that the West uses the Holocaust to absolve itself of its own guilt in the face of other death events, justifying invasions, colonizations, and genocides, as is happening precisely in the Gaza Strip at this moment, supporting a massacre of thousands of civilians, many of whom are children.
Therefore, what I propose is to decolonize our Westernized idea of the Holocaust memory that we have, which not only omits the foundations of a civilization of death that marginalized, displaced, and massacred others since 1492 but also seeks to erase the same hatred generated against the Jews, originating from Christianity.
As an example, when the German Jewish philosopher from the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, eurocentrically stated that poetry could not be written after Auschwitz because the Holocaust generated by Nazism occurred in one of the centers of modern thought, such as Germany, it was simply denying other holocausts as terrible as that.
Therefore, we must be able to connect different humanitarian tragedies from a plural perspective that does not prioritize some over others, only then can we avoid repeating history over and over, which manifests itself in different places, justified in the name of different ideologies.
Having said all of the above, the memory of those millions of Jews murdered by Adolf Hitler’s Germany should stop being instrumentally used by some to connect it with other genocides, other war crimes, and allow us to empathize with injustice and pain wherever it occurs, so that the defense of human rights is for everyone equally.
If we are not capable of that regarding something as basic as human rights, we will be even less capable of it concerning the care of life and nature, which continues to suffer from an ongoing ecocide and a permanent holocaust to satisfy a completely unsustainable model of production and consumption that seems to have no brakes.