Rather than actually explore the history of the Holocaust, Holocaust studies have always been about manufacturing the exceptionality of the Jewish people and the sanctity of Israel.
So, if I follow this Raz Segal's theory, and the endlessly qualification language isn't easy to decipher.......a nation state project that made the Holocaust a one time horror is now wearing thin because it is becoming obvious that the Nakba and its culmination in the current genocide is showing us that 1. the Holocaust wasn't a unique event but can be a reoccurring one, wherever a nation state sets up its exclusionary systems and 2. that the genocide in Gaza is showing the world what could happen to any sub set of the human population if they get in the way of an expanding national state project.
Yes. Racial purity is a bogus concept. Yes. Cultural superiority is a Swiss cheese phenomena also and Yes. Hatred of the other is framed so as to justify that other's removal from life, liberty and the possibility of a future.
What stops me in my old woman's intellectual tracks though......is how complex we tend to make something very simple. The west is an imperial colonial project. Everyone living in North and South America is either a descendant of racist genocidal belief systems........or we're a minority that survived inspite of all the settlers could do to eradicate our blood lines.
Which is why we're so passive in the face of a genocidal crime against all humanity, playing itself out in plain view from a concentrated part of the earth where an unbelievable people have persevered for over 80 years..........and are continuing to do so inspite of everything Israel.....AND LET'S BE HONEST FOR A FEW SECONDS....and the complicit western powers, can throw at them.
Shame on the lot of us. If I hear one more simpleton of good heart blame Hamas for the situation we're all watching on prime time I might be tempted to take up arms myself.
Calling the oppressed and disempowered people terrorists..........and the actual armed to the teeth terrorists defenders of their exclusive 'right to exist' is disgusting. I'm losing my faith in the human intellect......so easy is it for so many to fall into spouting double standard none sensical garbage.
I didn't finish reading the entire interview....the language was too entangled in many places. But Yes. There's more than one way to eradicate a people......all genocides are holocausts.
The intelligent human should be against all of them..because its true. IF ISRAEL CAN DO THIS IN GAZA, TRUMP CAN DO THIS IN......................(you fill in the blank).
And spare my your Putin phobias.......Russia isn't the threat to world peace. America won that contest decades ago.
Today (9/9) Jonathan Cook has on his site a piece "In Gaza, western colonialism has been unmasked." In the body of the post is a link to a resolution passed by holocaust scholars on exactly this subject. Well worth reading the list of reasons what's happening in Gaza is genocide. Link is to genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS-Resolution-on-Gaza-FINAL.pdf Or go to IAGS, the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
I don't think what is going on in Gaza, that is the genocide, can be explained in terms of the past history of the Jewish people, including the holocaust. There is a colonial mindset that set up shop in Palestine after the fall of the Ottoman empire, and was seen as a land without a people. During those pre-holocaust years many thousands of Jews immigrated there illegally. From the beginning the Jewish population that laid down roots in a country that belonged to another brought their own prejudices to this land long before the holocaust. To me the Nakba was predictable as well as their treatment of the Palestinians through the following decades. The holocaust is too often used to justify Israel's genocidal behavior toward the Palestinians, which didn't start on Oct 7.
Thank you for putting the Gaza genocide in the larger context of Western colonialism over the past 500 years, though I recall reading of the Mongols laying waste to entire peoples to teach the world a lesson on the cost of resistance to their power. This one interview justifies the annual subscription!
Holocaust studies? Have they studied the massacres in the Congo? And was it with any other aim than to try to lower the numbers (which embarrassingly for them, dwarf that of WWII union leaders, gays and Jews)?
Are they the same people who have shanghaied the TV channels Smithsonian, Cottage Life, History etc. and have relentlessly weaseled public money into their own personal victimhood promotion?
It is amazing to me........and a bit depressing as well........that anyone would major in such a single subject. Of course it was awful, and carried out in gob smacking detail....but it is one of many efforts to remove populations ruling mandarins didn't see any use for.
Seems to be the poster child for that dread 'specialization' that has helped so many to know more and more about less and less.
Thank you for this interview! As a non-Jew I find it difficult to say what your guest has said without being accused of Jew-hatred.
When one considers the very long and deeply rooted history of human genocide the "exceptionalization" of the Holocaust (even calling it by that name) seems obvious. If one sees the Holocaust as the culmination of 20 centuries of European Jew-hatred what makes it exceptional is the technological infrastructure that made it possible. One third of the world's Jews were killed in just 6 years. The ferocity of the mania that drove the Holocaust is also exceptional.
The victims and survivors of the Holocaust should never be forgotten. But what I see happening now is a vicarious traumatization of people who never lived through that horrible event. I believe there is such a thing as cultural and societal PTSD. But using that as a justification for traumatizing "others" is not how such a disorder is healed.
The object of making the Holocaust unique and without any competitors.....may be to give the west (not simply Jews) the high ground when it comes to genocide.
Like.....'WE'RE THE EXPERTS ON THE REAL GENOCIDE......SO HOW COULD WE BE COMMITTING IT NOW, IN VASTLY DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES?"
It allows the west to dominate the term..........while winking at a sea of atrocities similar in their outcomes........but done differently.
The west has done the same with Semitism............so they can harass and persecute Semitic people not of the Jewish faith....and lord knows, it's been working. My voice is one lone old teacher gal...........saying over and over.........PALESTINIANS ARE MORE SEMITIC THAN MOST EUROPEAN JEWS.....Zionist supporters have no trouble treating that truth like water off a duck's back.
While continuing to deplatform folks like Jeremy Corbyn, who's been on the side of humanity for decades.
So, if I follow this Raz Segal's theory, and the endlessly qualification language isn't easy to decipher.......a nation state project that made the Holocaust a one time horror is now wearing thin because it is becoming obvious that the Nakba and its culmination in the current genocide is showing us that 1. the Holocaust wasn't a unique event but can be a reoccurring one, wherever a nation state sets up its exclusionary systems and 2. that the genocide in Gaza is showing the world what could happen to any sub set of the human population if they get in the way of an expanding national state project.
Yes. Racial purity is a bogus concept. Yes. Cultural superiority is a Swiss cheese phenomena also and Yes. Hatred of the other is framed so as to justify that other's removal from life, liberty and the possibility of a future.
What stops me in my old woman's intellectual tracks though......is how complex we tend to make something very simple. The west is an imperial colonial project. Everyone living in North and South America is either a descendant of racist genocidal belief systems........or we're a minority that survived inspite of all the settlers could do to eradicate our blood lines.
Which is why we're so passive in the face of a genocidal crime against all humanity, playing itself out in plain view from a concentrated part of the earth where an unbelievable people have persevered for over 80 years..........and are continuing to do so inspite of everything Israel.....AND LET'S BE HONEST FOR A FEW SECONDS....and the complicit western powers, can throw at them.
Shame on the lot of us. If I hear one more simpleton of good heart blame Hamas for the situation we're all watching on prime time I might be tempted to take up arms myself.
Calling the oppressed and disempowered people terrorists..........and the actual armed to the teeth terrorists defenders of their exclusive 'right to exist' is disgusting. I'm losing my faith in the human intellect......so easy is it for so many to fall into spouting double standard none sensical garbage.
I didn't finish reading the entire interview....the language was too entangled in many places. But Yes. There's more than one way to eradicate a people......all genocides are holocausts.
The intelligent human should be against all of them..because its true. IF ISRAEL CAN DO THIS IN GAZA, TRUMP CAN DO THIS IN......................(you fill in the blank).
And spare my your Putin phobias.......Russia isn't the threat to world peace. America won that contest decades ago.
Hear here !!!
Shocking is it not, how often we have to restate the Obvious
Beyond my moral comprehension Ingamarie. Thank you for knowing and sharing your perspective(s).
Good teachers never retire......they just go on and on......working to increase the collective IQ of the population.
Quixotic.....but it passes the time.
It seems so simple, so blindingly obvious: "Never Again" can't just mean "Never again for Jews."
Today (9/9) Jonathan Cook has on his site a piece "In Gaza, western colonialism has been unmasked." In the body of the post is a link to a resolution passed by holocaust scholars on exactly this subject. Well worth reading the list of reasons what's happening in Gaza is genocide. Link is to genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS-Resolution-on-Gaza-FINAL.pdf Or go to IAGS, the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
I don't think what is going on in Gaza, that is the genocide, can be explained in terms of the past history of the Jewish people, including the holocaust. There is a colonial mindset that set up shop in Palestine after the fall of the Ottoman empire, and was seen as a land without a people. During those pre-holocaust years many thousands of Jews immigrated there illegally. From the beginning the Jewish population that laid down roots in a country that belonged to another brought their own prejudices to this land long before the holocaust. To me the Nakba was predictable as well as their treatment of the Palestinians through the following decades. The holocaust is too often used to justify Israel's genocidal behavior toward the Palestinians, which didn't start on Oct 7.
Hear here !!!
Thank you for putting the Gaza genocide in the larger context of Western colonialism over the past 500 years, though I recall reading of the Mongols laying waste to entire peoples to teach the world a lesson on the cost of resistance to their power. This one interview justifies the annual subscription!
Holocaust studies? Have they studied the massacres in the Congo? And was it with any other aim than to try to lower the numbers (which embarrassingly for them, dwarf that of WWII union leaders, gays and Jews)?
Are they the same people who have shanghaied the TV channels Smithsonian, Cottage Life, History etc. and have relentlessly weaseled public money into their own personal victimhood promotion?
It is amazing to me........and a bit depressing as well........that anyone would major in such a single subject. Of course it was awful, and carried out in gob smacking detail....but it is one of many efforts to remove populations ruling mandarins didn't see any use for.
Seems to be the poster child for that dread 'specialization' that has helped so many to know more and more about less and less.
Thank you for this interview! As a non-Jew I find it difficult to say what your guest has said without being accused of Jew-hatred.
When one considers the very long and deeply rooted history of human genocide the "exceptionalization" of the Holocaust (even calling it by that name) seems obvious. If one sees the Holocaust as the culmination of 20 centuries of European Jew-hatred what makes it exceptional is the technological infrastructure that made it possible. One third of the world's Jews were killed in just 6 years. The ferocity of the mania that drove the Holocaust is also exceptional.
The victims and survivors of the Holocaust should never be forgotten. But what I see happening now is a vicarious traumatization of people who never lived through that horrible event. I believe there is such a thing as cultural and societal PTSD. But using that as a justification for traumatizing "others" is not how such a disorder is healed.
The object of making the Holocaust unique and without any competitors.....may be to give the west (not simply Jews) the high ground when it comes to genocide.
Like.....'WE'RE THE EXPERTS ON THE REAL GENOCIDE......SO HOW COULD WE BE COMMITTING IT NOW, IN VASTLY DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES?"
It allows the west to dominate the term..........while winking at a sea of atrocities similar in their outcomes........but done differently.
The west has done the same with Semitism............so they can harass and persecute Semitic people not of the Jewish faith....and lord knows, it's been working. My voice is one lone old teacher gal...........saying over and over.........PALESTINIANS ARE MORE SEMITIC THAN MOST EUROPEAN JEWS.....Zionist supporters have no trouble treating that truth like water off a duck's back.
While continuing to deplatform folks like Jeremy Corbyn, who's been on the side of humanity for decades.
Why is Norman Finkelstein’s not mentioned?