* Guilt-mongering is a serious business, Steve.
Sometimes I think that, if you were a Mossad agent deliberately trying to draw anti-Semites to comment on your board to record their IP addresses, you’d be doing precisely what you are doing – overwhelming us with posts about how pushy Jews always need to rub everyone’s noses in the notion that they’ve suffered more than anyone else in the history of the world.
(Of course, you never said “Jewish” – “Holocaust” is the code word that draws the Stormfronters to go goyim-hatin’-on-der-Juden as all get-out.)
And there is truth in your argument – it is true that some Jews say, “Oy, we’ve suffered more than anyone else!” … it is true that the Communists killed more people than the Nazis ever did … and it is true that the memorials to the Communists’ victims are dwarfed by the memorials to the Nazis’.
Do Jewish gentile-guilt-mongerers think that all of these Holocaust memorials actually do induce non-German gentiles to feel guilty about the fact that some German gentiles tried to kill all the Jews in Europe back in the 1940s? Or is it yet another way for Da Jooz to tell us that they’re our daddies?
* Double standards:
Compare how many people even recognize the word Holodomor vs Holocaust. Or which one is taught in classrooms, or depicted in Hollywood films.
Or compare how Nazi and communist purges are treated. If anyone called the Night of the Long Knives Hitler’s greatest crime, they would be considered crazy. Yet Stalin’s purge is popularly regarded as the worst of his crimes. Far more people have heard of the purges than have heard of the Holodomor even though the Holodomor killed at least 10x as many people. Stalin’s willingness to persecute other communists is what convinced many on the left that he was evil, meanwhile his killing of the kulaks actively covered up by the New York Times and The Nation. (The truth is, most of the people put on trial during the purges were guilty of enormous crimes. Not the crimes Stain accused them of, to be sure, but others much worse.)
Compare the treatment of Trotsky and Goring.
Leon Trotsky was the second most powerful man in the USSR until Stalin falsely accused him of disloyalty and exiled him. While Trotsky was living in Mexico, left intellectuals (the Dewey Commission) led by John Dewey traveled to his home and spent months going over documents and interviewing witnesses to prove that he was not disloyal to the USSR as Stalin had claimed. At no point did they raise the issue of the actual crimes he had committed, such as the thousands of summary executions he ordered after the Kronstadt rebellion, among others.
Hermann Göring was the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. In the last days of WW2, Hitler came to believe that Göring was disloyal and had him arrested. Now, imagine if his Nuremberg trial had consisted of nothing more than proving that Hitler’s suspicions were unfounded, that Goring had in fact been a loyal Nazi, and with that cleared up they shook his hand and sent him on his way. Yet that kind of whitewashing is exactly how Trotsky was treated by the Dewey commission.
Here’s another thing: in academia, there’s a longstanding program to scrutinize intellectuals who may have contributed to the intellectual climate of slavery, colonialism, or fascism. Steve has written about this with Francis Galton and his work on eugenics. You will also find anthropologists condemning early practitioners who they claim justified colonialism. Universities will have commissions which investigate every historical tie they may have had with slavery.
But you never see similar systematic scrutiny of those countless academics who helped give communism its veneer of intellectual and moral respectability. Any such inquiry would be called McCarthyism.
The left defends communist sympathies by saying communism at least had “noble ideals”. But where does this appearance of nobility come from? Is communism inherently noble, or is it because left wing intellectuals have spent centuries now idealizing radical egalitarianism at the expense of competing ideals such as loyalty to family, nation, and religion?
The left has never really been forced to confront the crimes of communism. They might vaguely indicate awareness that millions died, but the real significance of how and why that happened has never sunk in. During the 20th century, more people were enslaved and murdered in the name of egalitarianism than in the name of supremacism (racial, religious, or otherwise), How many people realize that?
The Canadian memorial is a small step to making that truth sink in.
* This is really clever of Harper. Canadian schoolchildren will be taken to visit both memorials and they’ll acquire a childhood impression that the communists were every bit as murderous and thuggish as the Nazis. When lefty college professors teach those kids later about how great the leftists were/are, those kids will remember that memorial and give their professors the stink-eye. The great rule of indoctrination is: Get there firstest with the mostest.
Also, the anti-commie memorial will be a great draw of tourist cash. No one wants to visit Ottawa in particular, so what does a country do to get its mitts on extra spending money? Bam, put up a very controversial memorial. If visitors consider it to be politically offensive, they can skip it and still see the Holocaust memorial as a consolation prize. Either way, Ottawa’s going to make money out of this. When you have a small population in a big space the way Canada does, and those citizens want all those nice social services which are becoming more and more expensive to finance, you either raise taxes or squeeze the foreign visitors, and Harper’s chosen the latter.
* Having these two deliberately oversized and brutal monuments to foreign victims of foreign wars being imposed on Canada’s capital are really monuments to something else: post-nationalism. These are monuments to the idea of the country as a giant hotel or industrial park and Prime Minister Harper is just acting as a good little hotel manager giving two groups of guests what they want to make their stay more comfortable.
* I’m building a monument to the Holocaust in my backyard, just to stay on their good side.
* The Holocaust sites aren’t so much memorials, but office space, and meeting facilities, for marketing, outreach, and political/cultural re/education. The Lincoln Memorial is a true memorial. They were not created for the eyes but for the words their dwellers will preach.
The Holocaust sites are like modern art. They are strange shapes and colors and angles that do not inspire visually, but need Clement Greenberg-style high priesthoods of docents to verbally explain and interpret. In fact, the more bizarre and strange they appear, the better, since they will require even more words and teaching and re/education too truly understand.
Read Tom Wolfe’s “The Painted Word”. Except in this case it would be ” the sculptured word” or “the architected word”.
I have often wondered why. Perhaps semitic peoples {both Jews and Arabs/Moslems) are fundamentally uncomfortable with visual inspiration [graven images, golden calves, pictures of Mohammed] and need words instead.
* How about a monument for displaced Palestinians? There are tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians and their descendants living in the Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa areas. It would be a geographically well-suited place to have it at the exact spot where the Holocaust memorial is slated to go.
* The obvious question is, why have a Holocaust monument instead of a “Victims of Nazism” monument?
Isn’t it a bit crass to shape the victimhood narrative so blatantly? Is that really what a monument like this should be about?
* The reason for the lack of nuance and compromise in modern discourse is the dominant religion is an absolutist one. Christianity, for all its faults, had built into it a way to tolerate dissent that did not necessarily lead to murder. Rousseau-ism lacks that feature, because it is Utopian. There’s only one destination and everyone has to be headed in that direction. To be otherwise is to be an obstacle to the tide of history.
The result is a world of stark choices. You either embrace homosexuality or you are a homophobe. You either embrace the latest health care schemes or you want to murder granny. There’s never a middle-ground because that implies that the one true faith may not be 100% correct. In Stalinism, everyone had to pretend that the new plan was always the plan, otherwise, they could end up in Siberia.
When it comes to public discourse, the fact that the major parties largely agree on all the big stuff means they have no choice but to hoot and bellow over the small stuff. Otherwise, how can we tell Red Team from Blue Team?
* I myself would like to see a monument to the explorers, voyageurs and bush pilots who opened up the country for us. That would be far more fitting than these competing narratives of East European history being shouted at us all in jagged slabs of concrete.
* WWII started when Britain declared war on Germany.
Germany did not want war with the British Empire.