What do they mean in Germany when they say "never again," and how does that relate to what is currently happening in Gaza?
In order to understand and perhaps someday even make any progress on the notion of peace in the part of the world that the British Empire dubbed "the Middle East," it's vital to understand the role of Germany in the ongoing conflict, its beginnings, and its entire history in between.
We can begin with two facts. Then I'll spend the rest of this essay trying to make sense of them, and why they are both true, despite the apparent deep contradictions involved.
- The Israeli military is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian people, intentionally destroying their entire medical system, intentionally preventing them from having access to food and water, intentionally destroying all the civilian homes, schools, hospitals, and places of worship throughout the Gaza Strip.
- The German government is actively supporting Israeli policies of genocide, now and for most of Israel's existence as a state, with economic and military aid as well as diplomatic cover and moral justifications for genocidal policies.
How does a government whose self-proclaimed reason to exist is essentially to atone for the Nazi Holocaust then turn around and support what every UN official and humanitarian group is currently denouncing as a genocide? How does the country that many people around the world think of as the moral center of European society today, the country that welcomed 800,000 war refugees in 2015, the country that has been engaged in intense forms of self-examination in so many ways from the Nazi Holocaust to the present, how is a country like this also led by politicians both "progressive" and "conservative" who are so deeply committed to a completely uncritical support for a genocidal regime today?
It's vital to understand how these two facts can be true at the same time because understanding this reality is at the heart of understanding why the self-proclaimed Jewish State continually manages to portray itself in the minds of so many westerners and especially in their political leaders as something other than an explicitly Jewish-supremacist apartheid state located on land that was forcibly seized from its former inhabitants. How does such an obvious case of continual injustice, land theft, and collective punishment of an entire population like this somehow manage to get portrayed for so many western media consumers and by so many western political leaders as some kind of a democratic society fighting for "western values"?
The contradictions within German society, German political leadership, and German history are at the heart of understanding any of this reality, current or past.
At the center of the whole mess is the concept of Nazi exceptionalism. That is, the notion that the crimes committed by the Nazis were so staggeringly horrendous that they are qualitatively and fundamentally distinct from any other crimes committed by one group of people against another group.
To address the question of Nazi exceptionalism, let's go back a bit in history to set the stage.
As capitalism took hold, hand in hand with the industrial revolution were the continual efforts on the parts of the capitalist class and their political representatives to find new markets and achieve new heights of wealth and power. The countries ruled by capitalists across Europe, North America, etc. wanted an easily-available, low-paid, hard-working, compliant workforce both at home and abroad.
The contradictions between the notions of paying workers as little as possible while also getting as much work out of them as possible were resolved in different ways at different points in the history of different societies. Generally, the capitalists and their political henchmen nominally running the various countries of the capitalist world developed methods to exploit the workers and resources of their countries and of other countries that tended to fall along various lines of division.
Two of those lines of division have long been "here" and "there"; workers and resources within the country, and those outside of it. But within countries, stark divisions were also cultivated and used for the advantage of the ruling class in so many ways. In many different countries at many different periods of the history of the modern era, the divisions cultivated within fell along the lines of religion, national origin, caste, or other notions that become defined by amorphous terms such as "ethnicity."
The expansion of colonial empires generally involved colonial powers using their very intentionally disenfranchised and often half-starving working class to go abroad and run their empires for them, thus moving up in life in the process, adopting a higher-class lifestyle, eating better, with servants perhaps, living in a bigger house, etc., which worked out well for a lot of workers, if they managed to rationalize these crazy contradictions, and if they didn't get killed in a revolt or something. This was also the modus operandi for the westward expansion of the ever-growing United States of America throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Go west, white man, said the leaders of the free world. Go get your free land, if you can manage not to get killed out there beyond the Pale. Once you civilize the place for us, we'll move out there and take your land from you, and send you off to fight a war in the Pacific, where you can be useful.
Colonial powers employing this kind of logic consistently engaged in genocide. The systematic extermination of entire groups of people in order for their land and resources to be forcibly taken from them is not the exception in the history of settler-colonialism, it is the rule. There's lots of variation from place to place, but the intentional, systematic, mass extermination through direct physical slaughter, economic strangulation, land theft, starvation, dehydration, and many different forms of biological warfare was not the exception in the history of the settlement of the United States, Canada, Peru, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Namibia, Kenya, and so many other places, but rather it has been the norm.
Another tragic norm throughout the history of "civilization" has been the use of the "enemy within" method for winning and holding political power, profiting off of divisions within societies that were both pre-existing and especially intentionally manufactured, and scapegoating groups within a society in order to distract attention from problems or to benefit other groups. We see a bloody history of anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia, anti-Muslim riots in India, anti-Chinese mass slaughter periodically throughout the history of many other countries, anti-Black and anti-indigenous pogroms on many occasions in the history of the US. We see highly organized efforts by national governments to put certain groups of people in concentration camps, starve them to death, cause them to die of thirst, or to kill them through other means, with such methods leading to untold millions of dead on concentration camp-like places that in the US were called "reservations." In Namibia, this is exactly what the German colonists did to the people there, at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The history of the much more highly industrialized twentieth century saw the mechanization of the slaughter of human beings reach entirely new heights of destruction. The genocide of the Armenian Christian "enemy within" during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was largely carried out by asphyxiating people in caves with smoke. This mass killing method was essentially just industrialized a couple decades later by the Nazis in Europe, with man-made gas chambers instead of natural caves, and with manufactured chemicals instead of smoke.
But right alongside with these new methods of the mass slaughter of human beings came the development of such things as tanks, bombers, and nuclear weapons. New methods of killing entire urban populations all at the same time were developed by the American and British air forces, which learned that if you drop enough of the right kinds of bombs on a city, you can actually suck the air out of the whole place, killing everyone through asphyxiation. They learned about how to do this, and then they did it again and again and again, on the civilian population of Germany and Japan. Especially Japan.
When the Nazis came to power they promoted the idea that the Jewish people were collectively responsible for the defeat of Germany in World War 1 and more generally for most everything that had ever gone wrong in Germany, along with Bolshevism. At first with lots of support from the western powers, the Nazis seemed to many western leaders to be a great bulwark against the specter of communism that all the capitalists were so terrified of. Then Germany invaded France and other western countries, and calculations in places like London and Washington, DC began to quickly shift.
In the wake of World War 2 and particularly of the mechanized genocide of millions of Jews and millions of non-Jewish communists and millions of other people of every description, people around the world, and perhaps especially among the populations of the countries that had lost so many soldiers and civilians to this heretofore unprecedented industrial carnage, wanted to see things change. The notion that this sort of thing should happen never again was a very popular one, and the Nuremberg Tribunal and the United Nations were supposed to be fundamental new institutions that would put an end to this kind of thing.
Putting an end to this kind of thing quickly became a very sticky wicket, though. If we're saying "never again" to the mechanized slaughter of millions of Jews in gas chambers, what about the mechanized slaughter of millions of Japanese civilians through aerial bombardment with "conventional," chemical, and nuclear weapons and the intentional use of mass asphyxiation through the creation of firestorms? How are these two forms of the mechanized slaughter of millions of civilians to be distinguished from each other?
If putting certain elements of society into concentration camps and then starving them to death by intentionally not allowing them to eat enough to survive is to be considered an exceptionally horrific crime against humanity in the context of the practices of the Nazis during World War 2, what about the history of the US and German colonial authorities only a few decades earlier forcing large numbers of people onto barren plots of land after intentionally killing the herds of animals that the people depended on for their survival? What about this intentional mass starvation of people on such a tremendous scale, practiced systematically by so many colonial powers in so many parts of the world?
Clearly, these were problematic contradictions to contend with, unless you actually wanted to say "never again" to anyone, which none of the ruling factions of the big capitalist countries ever seemed to really want. Rather, the ruling classes in the US, the UK, and very much as well in West Germany, set out to erect a firewall between the Nazi holocaust and the rest of history.
"Holocaust education" became of paramount importance in Germany, it became what they today call Germany's "reason of state." This was by no means unique to Germany, this intense focus on that particularly horrific example of genocide that took place between 1939 and 1945, but it is only in Germany and in Israel where you'll find such an intense embrace by both the state and a large part of the population of Nazi exceptionalism.
The inability -- or complete unwillingness -- of the ruling classes in the post-World War 2 period to come to terms with the reality that the Nazi holocaust was not an exceptional phenomenon, but entirely consistent with the basic precepts of settler-colonialism and divide-and-rule capitalism practiced by so many of the countries that made up both the Allies and the Axis, is a failure that the world has had to bear ever since.
In the fantasy narrative of the self-proclaimed Jewish State, it all begins with planting trees on barren land. The land wasn't barren -- it was already full of ancient olive trees. But if we use this metaphor anyway, you could say that in 1945 a tree was planted in Palestine -- a tree rooted in the false consciousness of Nazi exceptionalism -- and it has been bearing its poison fruit ever since. Now, however, this tree of Nazi exceptionalism is fully grown, its roots deeply bored into the minds of several generations of Israelis, Germans, Americans, and others who have been raised on the fruit of this toxic tree.
In the real world, the nation of West Germany, under the occupation of American, British, and French troops, immediately began supporting genocide again, right away, by supplying these imperial armies and supporting their military bases as they engaged in the mechanized slaughter of the peoples of places like Korea, Vietnam, Kenya, and Algeria. Obviously, among the population of Germany there have been many, even most at times, who recognize genocide when they see it, such as the US wars in Korea and Vietnam, and they actively oppose it. But this has never been true of the national governments of either West Germany or reunified Germany today.
German people, much like their counterparts in the UK, the US, and so many other places, have grown up going to schools and consuming media and narratives of history that do not include much, if any, background on the history of capitalism, the exploitation of the working class at home and abroad, or on the history of settler-colonialism or the many acts of genocide that settler-colonialism all over the world has involved. Instead, Germans and Americans and British and so many others are treated to a version of history that speaks of progress, freedom and democracy spreading around the world, especially in the parts that trade freely with and otherwise have good relations with the west. All this progress and freedom and democracy was rudely interrupted by fascism in Europe, which was dealt with, and ever since then the world needs to remember that the Nazi holocaust was a singularly and exceptionally horrific event that can't be compared with any other event, and never again should Jews or anyone else be killed en masse in gas chambers with poison gas and cremated. Dropping thousands of tons of chemical weapons on southeast Asian or Arab cities and indiscriminately slaughtering their civilians, however, is no problem. That's different, and you're antisemitic for thinking it's vaguely similar. And you're totally antisemitic if you think it's morally equivalent.
Growing up for generations with this completely bankrupt narrative of history and reality will do more than warp a lot of minds. It creates the social and moral backdrop that is required for national leaders of nominally democratic countries to support genocidal policies, in the name of opposing genocide. It creates the environment for most people in most of these societies to sit silently by, aside from the occasional social media post, as the genocide goes on.
I love Germany, by the way. I've spent a lot of time there, over many years, with many German friends, comrades, and lovers. I mention this only to say that I'm writing not just about abstract history, but about a place and a people that for me are very familiar.
The extent to which the history of the rise of fascism, and the consequences of it, are studied with urgent interest by so many people in Germany is, from my experience spending time in a couple dozen other countries, unique. I have never seen a more self-reflective society, and the degree to which so many people are engaged in self-reflection and in understanding the history of the twentieth century across Germany is only matched by the intellectual capacity of so many Germans.
But contrary to the perspective that has been so successfully cultivated and so widely reflected upon by so many Germans, Germany is not, and Germans are not, in fact, the root of all evil. Germans and Germany is not exceptional in its past prosecution of genocide at home or abroad, and Germany in fact engaged in genocide both at home and abroad, across Europe as well as in Africa, just as so many other empires did at the same time they did, and before they did, and after they did.
There are, however, specific ways that the myth of Nazi exceptionalism has directly generated the conditions that have now led to a genocide being carried out by people who are, in so many cases, descendants of Jews killed in the Nazi holocaust.
The West German government, like its counterparts among the other wealthy, capitalist, and usually also imperialist nations, has never been especially concerned about the theft of the land of Palestine from the Palestinians and the violent expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians when the state of Israel was founded. Support for what was obviously a settler-colonial regime intent on further annexing more and more Palestinian land and killing more and more Palestinians continued by Germany ever since. And now that an actual, UN-declared genocide is underway, the support by the German government and a significant percentage of the German population continues.
All people in all countries should oppose genocide, of course. But for the country that is often viewed as Europe's moral compass today, where understanding history is so widely considered to be so important, and for the country that is arguably the birthplace of the most efficiently mechanized form of genocide ever practiced on planet Earth, recognizing that genocide is not unique to Germany, and recognizing genocide where it is actually now happening, seems to me to be a thing of the most desperately urgent importance.
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