Envy and Memory Holes

Envy and Memory Holes: The Disappearance of the Jews on Holocaust Memorial Day

When the Nazis were defeated at the end of WWII and the death camps were liberated, the full extent of their crimes against humanity, predominantly against European Jews, were laid bare to the world. As part of Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’, innocent Jews were intentionally targeted, hunted down, herded like animals, sent to death camps and executed. By the end of the Second World War, six million Jews had been murdered. In Auschwitz, Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, and Belzec, among other camps, Jews were exterminated simply for being Jews. In response, the worldpromised that it would never let such barbaric acts happen again. A part of this promise was to establish a day of remembrance – Holocaust Memorial Day. It would be held on January 27th, the day in 1945 which saw Auschwitz-Birkenau liberated – a camp where over 1 million Jews and one hundred thousand others had been exterminated.

When I learned about these events in secondary school 40 odd years ago, I could not believe my eyes and ears. I had so many questions, foremost of which was “why did the world look away?”.  Over the last 16 months, I have begun to understand the mechanisms that shaped this ‘looking away’, this denial, this changing of narratives. In this climate of widespread Jew hatred and antisemitism it’s been possible to see the corruption and suppression of truth unfold in front of us.

This has played out in the most grotesque of ways in relation to the Holocaust. This year, the 80th anniversary, the day was tarnished by a cast of bad actors. Amongst them are the usual suspects, the Holocaust deniers and the perennial antisemites; but there is a new breed in the mix – a component of wilful malignants who seem to want nothing less than the Jewish Holocaust to fade into history and for a new Holocaust to be pronounced. It seems excruciating for these people to be faced with the genuine atrocities of the Shoah, it creates such discomfort, such cognitive dissonance, that they have to fend it off by any means. To reawaken the reality of six million jews being intentionally massacred would break their world view apart. And so they divert attention away from it; they ignore it; they erase it; they co-opt and exploit it for their own advantage.

Why? In his book ‘After the Pogrom’, Brendan O’Neill points to envy as a significant driver for warped public attitudes towards the Holocaust. From a psychological perspective, I am inclined to agree. Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein defines envy as “the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable – the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it”. She further describes it as: “an innate expression of destructive impulses” that is present from birth, and is one of our most primitive, hardwired emotions (like sadness, joy, disgust, anger, fear, shame, curiosity). She suggests that envy plays a part in every infant’s dependent relation to the mother/breast. In favourable development, it is overcome by feelings of love and gratification in which the good experience gives rise to gratitude. When brought to consciousness, envy can be adaptive, it can catalyse growth, motivating us to strive for things that we wish for, and thereby enriching one’s life. However, envy is often maladaptive, driving people to extreme and destructive behaviours.

Where jealousy involves a triangular relationship, concerning the possession of a person loved by another, and the desired elimination of a rival, envy is activated in a two-person relationship. It is dyadic: an individual envies another for some possession, attribute, or quality residing within. Envy is a spoiling emotion, it wants to ruin, it involves hostility toward the good qualities and capacities of another, and is hugely destructive to human relations. It is dangerous to be the object of another’s envious sentiments. For Klein, envy is also understood as ‘acquisitive,’ i.e., the aim of envy is to incorporate the coveted object. Thus, inasmuch as it serves self-aggrandising needs, envy is one of the darkest human emotions, and is inherently narcissistic.

With its ‘spoiling’, ‘ruining’ and ‘covetous’ characteristics, it has been suggested that “the world is not driven by greed; it’s driven by envy” (Charles Munger). Is it possible that envy is one of the main contributors to multitudinous wars over the course of human history? Wherever one group has been seen as having wealth or privilege, another group has coveted it and declared war. For example, before the U.S. forced Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in the early 1990’s, the Iraqis set fire to Kuwaiti oil fields; is it possible that a driving force for this act of destruction was, among other things, that the Kuwaitis were so enviable, and Hussein determined to spoil their prosperity?

For decades the Palestinians have been fed lies about a ‘right of return’, about ‘evil’ Jews stealing from them, and pernicious rewritings of the history of the land. As a consequence, psychologically speaking they are overflowing with resentment and envy. Driven by this primitive and embedded envy, they have appropriated Jewish/Israeli history, ideas and products; they have quite literally ‘stolen’ from another people to self-aggrandise and/or garner pity. Not satisfied with appropriating contrivances and conceptions in the Middle East that did not originate with them e.g., Palestine, the Keffiyeh, Jesus, they see fit to stake a claim in the worst event in history for Jews, declaring that Gazans are experiencing something of equal depravity at the hands of the IDF. And for months, pro-Palestine supporters have been accusing Israel of genocide, to the point where they have started taking ownership of, and dictating the terms of use for, the term Holocaust. As if this isn’t enough of a distortion, the response of certain politicians, broadcasters, and public figures has added insult to injury.

Devaluation. Because envy is an unbearably painful state of mind, it is strongly defended against by the psyche – it is these defenses against the experience of envy that wreak harm and devastation. Devaluation is one such defense. Through degradation, the envied quality or capacity is muted into something less for the one who covets i.e., “What you have is not so good after all”. Stamped with this hallmark of envy, it is staggering how many people made statements about the Holocaust on January 27th, yet couldn’t say the word Jews.

On GB News, Ranvir Singh introduced a segment on the Holocaust by saying:

“Six million people were killed in concentration camps during the Second World War, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay, or belonged to another ethnic group.”

UK Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner posted on X:

“Tonight, I’m lighting a candle to remember all those who were murdered just for being who they were, and to stand against prejudice and hatred today. Never again. #LightTheDarkness #HMD2025.”

Ex Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted on X:

“80 years ago, the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration and extermination camp was liberated, ending the systematic murder and genocide carried out there by the Nazi regime. Tomorrow, I’ll join fellow world leaders on the grounds of Auschwitz Birkenau to honour the victims of the Holocaust, stand against rising antisemitism and Holocaust denial, andreaffirm our promise: never again”.

This process of devaluation sees the Holocaust separated from the Jewish experience, thereby severing “the memory of that most calamitous event from the lives of the very people who experienced it.” (Brendan O’Neill). Spoken of as such, the Holocaust serves only the political or strategic purposes of the mealy mouthed. It is co-opted, incorporated and mangled by pathologically envious types solely for their virtue signalling. Its true meaning is bent out of shape and rendered obsolete.

Omnipotent control. Another common defense against envy is omnipotent control. An envious person will try to ‘take over’ and ‘own’ the envy-generating qualities or attributes of another person. In Ireland on Holocaust Memorial Day, President Higgins pontificated about hatred and prejudice, thereby whitewashing the unique nature of the Shoah for Jewish people and appropriating the term to ‘impose’ upon it his own agenda:

“The lesson of the Holocaust is that we should always be on our guard against ‘cruelty and hatred’. Not only anti-Semitism but also ‘Islamophobia, xenophobia, racism and homophobia”.

Immediately after October 7th, Israel was chastised for ‘weaponising the Holocaust’. For comparing the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, with the Holocaust. A number of progressives jumped on board with assertions that Israel was ‘hijacking’ the Holocaust and weaponising it. Jonathan Glazer (Director, ‘The Zone of Interest’) famously opined in his Oscar acceptance speech:

“We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of 7 October in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza”.

Naomi Klein applauded his speech, adding:

“We are entering a new intellectual era, …one in which people are openly asking if the Holocaust should be seen ‘exclusively as a Jewish catastrophe, or something more universal”.

In the above contexts, Jews are exiled to the fringes of the Holocaust, which itself is transformed into a free floating signifier upon which any meaning can be imposed. The merging of antisemitism with the sentiments of prejudice and hatred, and the dismantling of the Holocaust for ‘universality’, is a preposterous sleight of hand, an erasure of the most significant instance of victimisation in history that is wholly unique to the Jewish experience. It suggests that the Holocaust was not specifically a Jewish calamity, and that it may be appropriated by other social groups to dress their suffering in. In this way, the Shoah is both hijacked and erased from its true context, at one and the same. The ultimate reward for the poisonous aim of envy.

At the end of WWII, Dwight D Eisenhower reportedly stated “Get it all on record now. Get the films, get the witnesses. Because somewhere down the road of history, some bastard will get up and say that this never happened”. It would seem that time is now.

In George Orwell’s ‘1984’, the protagonist, Winston Smith, who works for the Ministry of Truth, is assigned the job of reviewing old newspapers to find anything that needs to be erased from the public record (embarrassing documents, conflicting narratives). Such records are sent down a small shute (the memory hole) leading to a large incinerator where they are destroyed, giving the impression that the events in question never happened. In this way, the Party’s Ministry of Truth systematically re-creates all potentially contradictory historical documents, re-writing all of history to match the often-changing state propaganda. These changes are complete and undetectable. Orwell was known for his criticism of communism and Stalin, and it’s not hard to read 1984 in this light. I wonder what he would make of the current state of the Western world… I suspect he would be horrified to witness so much of his art being mirrored in life.

As the remaining Holocaust survivors begin to fade in number, we cannot allow their memory, or that horrific time in history to fade with them. We cannot allow the Holocaust to be reduced to a meaningless shibboleth, to be erased. We must defend against malignant forces of narcissistic, self-pitying envy. At a time when the Shoah is in danger of being cast into a memory hole, the task of repositioning antisemitism as central to the Holocaust is more crucial than ever.

Never Again

Am Yisrael Chai