Mature Debate

Among the many complex managerial issues raised by the Holocaust, one of the most challenging is, of course, how to get across the all-important distinction between the despicable racist authoritarianism of the Nazis and the desirable racist authoritarianism of the merely strong, stable and patriotic. In less advanced societies, the means of keeping the record straight must necessarily be a little clumsy; hence the Polish government is seeking to make any use of the phrase Polish death camps a criminal offence, thereby implicitly admitting the Nazi claim that Upper Silesia with its pleasant town of Oświęcim is really part of Greater Germany. In highly developed democracies such as our own, this sort of conundrum is easily solved, because the rules of civilised discourse are more thoroughly internalised. What civilised English people have against the Nazis is that they were foreign, and what they have against the Holocaust is that its most mentionable victims were non-Communistic white Europeans: the British Empire's systematic use of slave labour, mass starvation and concentration camps elicited barely a squeak of protest when used for the moral improvement of Asians and Africans (although it did earn Hitler's enduring respect) and is even now simply ignored or shrugged off among the more urbane types of patriot.