{"id":43170,"date":"2026-10-24T18:48:43","date_gmt":"2026-10-24T17:48:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/?p=43170"},"modified":"2026-10-24T18:48:46","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T17:48:46","slug":"the-holocaust-was-the-work-of-the-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2026\/10\/24\/the-holocaust-was-the-work-of-the-state","title":{"rendered":"The Holocaust was the work of the state"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photographs of genocide victims displayed at the\u00a0Genocide Memorial Center<\/a>\u00a0in Kigali<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Suzanne Moore, a former Guardian columnist who now writes for the Daily Telegraph, had a quite absurd piece<\/a> published two days ago, claiming that antisemitism “has become an everyday quasi-acceptable form of racism that has been ignored for too long”, which predates but has been exacerbated by the ‘situation’ (genocide) in Gaza:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As Marian Turski, a survivor and historian, said: \u201cAuschwitz did not fall suddenly from the sky.\u201d And the anti-Semitism that fuelled these atrocities sadly does not belong to the past. It is a virus that may lay dormant for a while but is so easily activated, as it has been in recent years.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Examples include the tendency to turn lessons about the Holocaust into lessons about the Rwanda genocide: “we talk of genocides in plural to deny the specificity of what happened to Jews in Europe”, and exclude children from Holocaust memorial commemorations as a punishment. She flits from mention of the walled ghettoes (which she inaccurately claims were established years before the death camps) to the heavy security at synagogues and Jewish schools in Europe now. Teachers teach children about “the Nazis” while “denying, ignoring or even encouraging the hatred that the Nazis fed on”. The piece echoes an interview with Melanie Phillips<\/a> with the Guardian in 2006, where the former Guardian writer, by then promoting an anti-Muslim and anti-multicultural tirade called Londonistan<\/em> (reviewed here<\/a>), claimed that the climate and in particular the prejudice against Jews to be “resonant of Weimar”, referring to the Weimar Republic, or pre-Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It always feels weird rebutting claims that are this absurd and which plainly overlook very obvious differences between two situations. Doubtless some of Moore’s friends will accuse me of ‘mansplaining’ for explaining these things to her as if she were a halfwit. She’s not, of course; she’s a columnist who does not let the facts get in the way of a good story, or a good rant, and is encouraged by influential, like-minded friends (like, for example, Julie Bindel). The Nazis were the government. Nazi Germany was a dictatorship. Germany was an occupying power and while the spokes of the genocidal wheel stretched to all corners of Hitler’s empire, the hub was in occupied territory, mainly Poland. You can do things as a dictator that you can’t do as a prime minister in a democracy. You can keep things quiet to some extent where the only mass communication is a censored print and broadcast media that you can’t do in a country with a free press and an army of citizen journalists and open and flourishing international social media. The Holocaust was not the work of a few prejudiced people, or kids in playgrounds, or unruly yobs in the street, or even a terrorist organisation. It was the work of a dictatorial government which used the levers and resources of the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s also not true that prejudice against Jews today bears any resemblance to that of pre-war Germany, in terms of its ideological nature or its intensity. Nazi ideology was based on racial pseudoscience and eugenics which were popular then (which also led to sterilisation, incarceration and other restrictions on the lives of disabled people and justified discrimination against Black people) and are long since discredited. The British government is sympathetic to British Jews and to Israel. Demonstrations have been restricted or banned to avoid perceived risks to Jews or synagogues. British public media censors discussion of what Israel does: in particular, any mention of genocide will result in push-back, if not immediately then shortly afterwards. As previously mentioned, the chief antisemites in Nazi Germany were in government. Besides some lingering prejudice about Jews being mean and stereotypes connected to moneylending, most of what passes for antisemitism in the UK consists of anger at the actions of the state of Israel over many years, in particular, the mounting oppression of the Palestinians of the West Bank and the slaughter of those of Gaza. While it’s true that not every Jew supports everything Israel does and there is no shortage of professed dislike for Netanyahu, mainstream British Jewish organisations provide free advocacy for the state of Israel. There is always a Jewish leader, rabbi or columnist ready to make excuses, to deny well-documented facts, to blame victims, or to use official complaints and legal action (or threats thereof) to hound anyone who is too strident about Palestine, or who just reminds people that Palestinians exist, out of their job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We do, of course, have violent racism in Britain today. It is mostly targeted at minorities visible by skin colour, wilfully conflated with illegal immigrants and migrants arriving by boat. They are habitually stereotyped as rapists and as an invading army. Two years ago, there were several days of racial riots in the UK after a Black teenage boy who was wrongly identified as a Muslim killed three young girls in a senseless attack; over the next 18 months or so, similar riots occurred any time a ‘migrant’ was accused of anything. How many such riots have taken place in the same period, provoked by Israel’s behaviour? Not one. For a while, it looked as though Reform UK, a party riddled with the race rioters’ sympathisers and led by a lifelong racist, would win the next general election, though this threat has receded as Restore Britain has eaten into their voter share and activists and councillors have fallen away for various reasons, and a change of leadership has increased Labour’s popularity. There has been some demand from people adjacent to the Reform\/Restore trend to outlaw both halal and kosher slaughtering practices on ‘cruelty’ grounds and some grumbling about Netanyahu’s alleged support for an Argentinian takeover of the Falkland Islands, but there have also been shows of support for Israel, proclamations of ‘Zionism’ and “standing with Israel” from some of the same people. None of the outbreaks of violence over the past two years have involved the targeting of Jews.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moore also complains about the broadening of Holocaust education to cover other genocides, noting the Rwandan genocide. “This has become fashionable; we talk of genocides in plural to deny the specificity of what happened to Jews in Europe. There is an effort to make the suffering equitable somehow. There can never be anything special about Jews or what happened to them.” In a world that has witnessed three further genocides and countless other examples of racial oppression since then, why should we teach children that the Holocaust is of such magnitude as to make all these other events not even worth bothering to discuss? Some of them did not take place in totalitarian dictatorships, nor in countries we were at war with. Eugenics and racial segregation, for example, persisted in the United States for more than 20 years after the end of the war. European powers sat and looked the other way as massacres, mass rapes and an outright act of genocide took place in Europe in the early 1990s. Today, both liberal and conservative governments freely supply Israel with weapons and intelligence as it slaughters native Palestinians on camera, and columnists and TV and radio personalities make endless excuses. The Rwanda genocide employed something we have seen much of on the streets of the UK in the past couple of years: the baying mob, which played little part in the Holocaust. Antisemitism is not a hatred apart; it is “the oldest hatred” from a European point of view only because Jews are Europe’s longest-established minority. Moore’s remark “there can never be anything special about the Jews…” echoes a remark I saw Melanie Phillips make on TV: that antisemitism is “not like other forms of racism”; it’s all based on lies and demonisation, as if other racisms are not. It seems to be widely believed that antisemitism is a particularly heinous form of racism because Jews are good people, that they do not deserve it even if other victims of racism do, and that the Holocaust stands out because the victims were mostly Jewish, not because there were millions as opposed to merely hundreds of thousands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, if Jews are being attacked, threatened or discriminated against, or Jewish children bullied at school, because people assume they are responsible for what Israel is doing, that is to be condemned, but Jewish Zionists do not have a right to be unaware that people are outraged at it. Peaceful protests in the streets, Palestinian flags and other signs of support for the victims of Israel’s oppressions and mass murders are not inherently antisemitic nor are they forms of violence against British Jews. We are not living in a time remotely similar to that of Nazi Germany or the period leading up to it; that is an absurd suggestion, but we do have the potential for further racial violence, and if the last two years are anything to go by, Jews are unlikely to be its targets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image source: Yamen<\/a>, via Wikimedia. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) 4.0<\/a> licence.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Suzanne Moore, a former Guardian columnist who now writes for the Daily Telegraph, had a quite absurd piece published two days ago, claiming that antisemitism “has become an everyday quasi-acceptable form of racism that...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":43174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New post at Indigo Jo Blogs -- The Holocaust was the work of the state (response to Suzanne Moore on Nazi Germany vs antisemitism today):","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-racism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-bei","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/rwanda-genocide-memorial-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43170"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43175,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43170\/revisions\/43175"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}