Sweden and the Holocaust
BS”D
The Good Jew versus the Bad Jew
Contrary to what the title of this article might suggest I do not cover the wide topic of Sweden’s role in the actual Holocaust during the Second World War, of which much has been written and discussed already, but rather I wish to highlight the role that the Holocaust has in Sweden today.
The Holocaust conference in Stockholm in 2000
Sweden is a country which has invested quite substantially in Holocaust education. The main push to further the aim of educating about the Holocaust was made by then prime minister Göran Persson, who organized his Holocaust conference in the year 2000. The conference gathered heads of state from Europe and Israel and launched an aim to educate the coming generations about the Holocaust. Schools were equipped with highly qualitative education materials and educating about the Holocaust has become a standard feature in the Swedish education system ever since this conference.
Understanding the Swedish push for Holocaust education
Recently a Holocaust Museum (Förintelsemuseet) was established in Stockholm, Sweden, and is funded by the Swedish state. Another museum aimed at educating the general public about genocide and intolerance in general and Sweden’s national minorities (of which the Jews are one) in particular is up and running (Forum för Levande Historia).
All of the initiatives above have as a guiding principle and/or a general assumption that the weak in society need to be protected. This is a laudable aim, and it cannot be stressed enough how important this is. But even a laudable aim such as this carries with it a potential for misunderstandings or moral mistakes, as it were.
The moral mistake that does not need to occur but indeed may occur in this endeavor, is that you fetishize victimhood.
Idealizing suffering-the ideological roots
Judaism as a religion, and Judaism as a living culture, does not idealize suffering. That is rather a Christian ideal whereby suffering is noble, and ennobling. This is one of the reasons Christians latched on to Isaiah’s prophecy of “the suffering servant” in the Bible, where the despised and long-suffering servant of G-d will be ultimately vindicated in the Messianic Era.
Christianity’s very symbol is a person hanging on a cross and tells the story of “the passion of the Christ” in uplifting Jesus’ suffering ordeals, and making it the focal point of that religion.
By and large, Christians throughout the ages did not wish to suffer the same fate themselves but were rather intent on having other people suffer that same fate, chiefly the Jews (at least in the European lands) (which ultimately led to the suffering of G-d’s real servant – Jacob!).
In the post-religion era, which is more Hellenistic than Christian, the religious credo has disappeared but many of the values have survived.
One value that seems to have survived and thrived and has since been co-opted by Sweden’s Social Democratic Party in particular (and Socialism in general), is that suffering is noble, and to be weak is noble. What’s important to remember here is that suffering and weakness is only laudable when it happens to someone else, because then we – who are not weak – can show our goodness by helping “those poor people”, whether it’s persecuted minorities or impoverished populations in “the Third World”.
The good Jew versus the bad Jew
Fetishizing the Jew as a noble and suffering victim is a substantial part of many liberal Westerners’ preoccupation with everything Jewish. The suffering Jews are the good Jews in the view of many Westerners.
But who then is “the bad Jew”?
The short answer is that the bad Jew is the state of Israel who drops 80 tons of bombs on the arch-terrorist Hassan Nasralla in Lebanon, to make sure he cannot continue to terrorize Jewish civilians anymore. The bad Jew has the strongest military in the Middle East. The bad Jew has nuclear weapons.
The state of Israel used to be the good Jew before it became a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East, prior to the Six Day War, when everyone could see its real power. Indeed Sweden’s Social Democratic Party was a fond friend of the state of Israel before the Six Day War in 1967.
But now the gulf between the good Jew of the Holocaust and the bad Jew of the state of Israel is simply too wide, and therefore a clear division has to be made between the two.
The gulf indeed needs to be addressed by Jews who find themselves and their livelihoods dependent on Western Liberal institutions.
There is no better example of this than the Jewish filmmaker Jonathan Glazer who earlier this year received an award for his Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest”. The background is that this filmmaker just received the highest prize possible within his field for commemorating the good Jew of the Holocaust. But the timing was bad.
The award was given at the very same time that the bad Jew was waging war against his enemies and killing them by the thousands and having the upper hand in that conflict. This had to be addressed.
It was solved in the following way, in the words of Glazer:
“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present…Right now 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 October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”
The solution intimated here is that the enemy is given the role of the good Jew! The Palestinians are oppressed, and the Holocaust is linked to the occupation of the oppressed.
The enemies of the Jews who long for the days of the good and weak Jew, sometimes try to embody it themselves. That’s why on the national Holocaust Day in January of this year you had pro-Palestinian marches and hecklers outside of the synagogue, decrying the Israeli “genocide” of the Palestinians. The Palestinians long to embody the role of the good Jew in the West, and in the eyes of large parts of the Western Left they are already there. They are the new (good) Jews!
How Holocaust Education and Anti-Semitism co-exist
Holocaust education does not influence the modern variant of Anti-Semitism, which has Israel as its focal point, and anything that is associated with it. The Jews here come into the crossfire by association with Israel.
Large swathes of Muslims, who carry the torch of mass-Anti-Semitism today, are indeed preoccupied with “the bad Jew” and cannot take seriously any talk of the good and suffering Jew. This is not the reality that they see. The reality that the Muslim countries and the Muslim Diaspora in the West see today is that of a wealthy and influential Jewish minority, close to many important seats of power and influence in Western society, and a small but strong country in Israel which is a close ally of the most powerful country on earth – the United States of America.
What Muslims and Arabs lack is not “an understanding” of the Holocaust; they don’t care enough about what happened to the Jews in Europe 80 years ago. Moreover, they don’t see themselves as responsible for what happened there (even though the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a great ally of the Nazis and befriended Hitler and the other leading Nazis). Many Muslims find the Holocaust tragic and sad and lamentable, I would assume, but still see it as unconnected to their claims on “Palestine”.
The appellation Palestine is not vague, it denotes a view of Israel as belonging to the Muslims. Since October 7th one of the key phrases being used was “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”. The River is the Jordan River to the east and the sea is the Mediterranean sea to the west. In between the river and the sea you have the state of Israel which shall be freed from the Jews and on its ruins a glorious Palestinian state shall be erected (much like the one in Gaza one might suspect). Therefore, the invocation of the term “Palestine” is properly understood as a denouncement of the state of Israel’s right to exist.
All the above explains why Holocaust education in Sweden (and in the West at large) hasn’t helped. This has been made abundantly clear in view of the Anti-Semitism in the world since October 7th.
The cause of the bad Jew
What the noble Westerners of culture fail to admit is that you need to be strong to survive. The price you pay for defending yourself is that you might not be inducted into the cultural hall of fame of persecuted ethnic minorities anymore. You might indeed be expelled from there by the very communities who are being slaughtered by your enemies, like the LGBT+ people who support “Palestine”. But you will survive, without great literature being written about you and without interesting art exhibitions devoted to your memory, and without the Christ complex being foisted upon you. You will survive, and the only thing the world respects fully, in the end, is strength. Maybe it doesn’t like the look of strength, but it respects it in the end.
The uncomfortable truth for many Jews is that even the talk of the good Jew of the Holocaust is connected to another kind of strength. This is cultural strength, so called soft power. In the postwar era Jews have built enormous societal clout through the exercise of soft economic, academic and cultural power in the West: in literature, academia, some parts of the media and in Hollywood, to name just a few examples. Would we even be able to tell our stories of persecution without this cultural strength? Look at the Roma (previously denoted “gypsies”) and answer that question. How many times have people told the story of their Holocaust?
In any case the bad Jew is uninterested in that kind of soft power, because it is indeed only soft. The bad Jew doesn’t want museums dedicated to his memory but rather prefers to live in the present, and to survive to tell the story. The bad Jew prefers to be despised and alive than to be revered and extinct.