The Holocaust Narrative Serves Western Imperial Interests

The claim approaches Holocaust denial from a left-coded direction rather than the more familiar right-coded direction. It does not directly deny the historical event; it argues that the narrative around the event has been politically instrumentalised by Western powers. The claim is found in some strands of anti-imperial and post-colonial discourse, in some currents of the international left, and in some Russian and other state-affiliated propaganda. It deserves a separate kind of response because its premise is partly true (the Holocaust narrative has been politically deployed in various ways by various Western actors over the past eighty years) but its conclusion is structurally identical to the right-coded denial: that the Holocaust as historical event is somehow less than it was, somehow not exactly what the documentary record describes, somehow at the service of present-day political projects rather than a historical fact in its own right.

The legitimate criticism of instrumentalisation

The Holocaust narrative has been politically deployed in identifiable ways. The post-war American framing of West Germany as a Cold War ally required some negotiation of the German wartime record; the resulting balance, which sometimes elevated the West German democratic transformation over the unfinished business of denazification, has been criticised by historians of the period (Norbert Frei, Tony Judt, others). The Cold War-era Western framing of the Soviet Union as morally separate from the Holocaust (the Soviets’ substantial role in the liberation of the eastern camps and in the prosecution of the killing being underplayed in some Western accounts) has been corrected by more recent scholarship. The post-1989 framing of “lessons of the Holocaust” in support of various Western military interventions (Bosnia 1995, Kosovo 1999, the Iraq War 2003) has been examined critically in the international relations literature; the invocations have varied in seriousness and have not always tracked the historical analogy closely.

The recognition that the narrative has been variously deployed is consistent with the historical event having occurred exactly as the documentary record describes. The deployment is a separate question from the underlying fact. The proper response to instrumentalisation is critical engagement with the specific deployments, not the denial of the event being deployed. The denier framing collapses the two questions into one.

The “Western imperial interests” framing

The specific framing in the denier claim suggests that the Holocaust narrative serves Western imperial interests. This requires the listener to identify which actors benefit from the narrative and how. The principal beneficiaries the deniers usually have in mind are the United States, Israel and (variously) NATO and the European Union. The argument is that these actors have promoted the Holocaust as a moral foundation for their post-war political position, with the consequence that any criticism of their conduct can be deflected by reference to the Holocaust, and that any opposition to their policies can be cast as historically continuous with the Nazis.

The empirical examination of this thesis is mixed. There are documented cases of Holocaust analogies being used in the service of Western policies (Bush’s invocation of Munich-1938 in the run-up to the Iraq War; the regular invocation of Nazi analogies in commentary on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine since 2022). There are equally documented cases of Holocaust analogies being used in opposition to Western policies (the comparison of American treatment of Native Americans to the Holocaust; the comparison of Israeli treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust by various Western critics of Israel). The Holocaust analogy is a rhetorical tool that has been deployed across the political spectrum; the claim that it specifically serves Western imperial interests requires ignoring its frequent deployment against those interests.

The claim also requires the listener to ignore the considerable Western institutional resistance to making the Holocaust morally central. The post-war French state was reluctant to acknowledge the role of the Vichy regime in the deportation of French Jewry; the formal recognition came only with President Chirac’s speech of 16 July 1995. The post-war Austrian state insisted for decades that Austria was the “first victim” of Nazism rather than a willing participant; the formal acknowledgement of complicity came in the 1990s. The post-war American state was reluctant to acknowledge its own restrictive immigration policies of the 1930s and 1940s, which had contributed to the deaths of refugees turned away (the St. Louis incident of 1939). The Western states have, on the whole, had to be brought to face their own roles, including the roles of their wartime allies and intelligence services in the post-war protection of perpetrators (the ratlines, the Intelligence Services and Protected Nazis material covered elsewhere on this site). The Western institutional record on Holocaust memory is one of partial and contested acceptance, not of enthusiastic instrumentalisation.

The structural identity with right-coded denial

Whatever the political colour of its source, denial in the form of “the narrative serves [X political purpose]” is structurally identical to denial in the form of “the narrative is invented by [X political group]”. Both move the discussion from the historical record to the present-day politics of memory. Both require the listener to treat the documentary evidence of the killing as if it were a contemporary political claim rather than a historical fact. Both serve, regardless of intent, to weaken the moral standing of the historical record. The left-coded version is sometimes packaged as critical theory or anti-imperial analysis; the underlying move is the same.

The proper engagement with the politics of Holocaust memory does not require the discounting of the historical record. The work of scholars such as Idith Zertal, Tom Segev, Peter Novick, Norbert Frei and Tony Judt examines the political deployments of memory while taking the historical event as established. The denier framing collapses this distinction.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it imports anti-imperial scepticism, much of it valuable in its proper domain, into the discussion of an established historical event. Anti-imperial criticism of Western political deployments of the Holocaust is legitimate and useful when conducted on its own terms; the same criticism becomes a form of denial when it slides from “the Holocaust narrative is sometimes politically deployed” to “the Holocaust narrative is principally a political instrument” to “the Holocaust as understood is not what occurred”. The slide is the move that converts critical theory into denial. Recognising the slide is the work; refusing it is what proper criticism of weaponised memory in fact requires.

What does it mean to say a historical narrative serves a political interest? Does that claim, even if true, tell you anything about the historical event itself? Where does criticism of memory politics end and denial of the underlying event begin?

See also

• Intelligence Services and Protected Nazis

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Sources

• Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, Columbia University Press, 2002
• Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, Penguin, 2005, with the chapter on memory and forgetting
• Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Houghton Mifflin, 1999
• Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, Cambridge University Press, 2005
• Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, Harvard University Press, 1991
• Robert G. Knight, “Contours of Memory in Post-Nazi Austria”, in Patterns of Prejudice, 34:4, 2000
• Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma: Memory and the Politics of Postwar Identity, Fordham University Press, 2016
• Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford University Press, 2009
• Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, Temple University Press, 2006
• President Jacques Chirac, speech on the anniversary of the Vél d’Hiv round-up, 16 July 1995, French government archive
• Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939 to 1945, HarperCollins, 2007
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Postwar Trials” and “Aftermath of the Holocaust”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org