Masha Gessen is Right that we Cannot Learn From the Holocaust if we’re Forbidden to Compare it With Anything Else, but Blinkered in What she Compares it to

It’s astonishing how much media attention has been given to the story of the Russian-American Jewish writer Masha Gessen and the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. Named in honour of the German Jewish political thinker Arendt, who’s best known for coining the phrase ‘banality of evil’ in her report of the 1961 trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, the prize is awarded annually by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the City of Bremen in Germany.  

At the end of last year, it was announced that Gessen had been awarded the prize, only for it then to be reported that it had been withdrawn on account of an incendiary article Gessen had written for the New Yorker magazine. Eventually it transpired that the prize had not in fact been withdrawn, but merely that the prize ceremony had been downgraded.  

Gessen then complained on Twitter that journalists hadn’t been contacting her to ask her about the story, which led to her being overwhelmed by media attention. Gessen, a LGBT campaigner who identifies as ‘non-binary’, characterised it as a free-speech issue, but wasn’t quite so keen on freedom of speech when it came to journalists’ reporting of it, because she insisted they refer to her by her chosen pronouns ‘they/them’ rather than by her biologically correct pronouns (‘she/her’). So not free speech, but ‘compelled speech’.

In one of the many interviews she’s since conducted, Gessen suggested that she’s the victim of a ‘new McCarthyism’.  

Well, it’s a funny way of trying to repress her, by spreading her opinions all over the media. Gessen has herself described the episode as “an attempt to silence me that failed”. 

In the New Yorker article that started the controversy, as part of a discussion of the ways in which the Holocaust is remembered, Gessen described Gaza as a ghetto: “Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in a Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.” She added that the ghetto is now being “liquidated”. 

In response to this article, the Chairman of the German-Israeli Society of Bremen wrote to the Heinrich Böll Foundation to complain that Gessen’s language demonstrated a “deep-seated prejudice” against Israel and to insist that the Arendt prize should be withdrawn. The Foundation pulled out from supporting the prize ceremony (as did the City of Bremen), but insisted it would still give her the award. There was still a ceremony, but a small, insignificant one. So hardly a major scandal. 

What made the story into a big one was the fact that a Left-wing writer had been denied full expression of the Left’s favourite subject, the oppression of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel. ‘Progressive’ media outlets, who had shown themselves uninterested in the question of free speech when it concerned criticism of Covid measures, the climate narrative or gender-related issues, suddenly discovered that they cared a great deal about the subject after all.  

In the Guardian, Samantha Hill, who has written a book about Hannah Arendt, commented that “the irony is almost too thick to cut”, arguing that Arendt would not herself qualify today for the prize given in her name on account of her own opinions about the State of Israel – which might be correct, but isn’t really relevant, because the prize had not in fact been withdrawn. 

In the New Statesman, the feminist commentator Susan Neiman described Gessen as a “distinguished and courageous writer [who] is prepared to call out repression where they [sic] see it”, and “the most prominent among a growing list of Jewish women who have been lambasted in Germany for criticising the Israeli Government”, among them Neiman herself. Neiman also condemned “the misogynistic tone conveyed in the media’s dismissive contempt for our arguments”. Neiman might want to ‘check her thinking’ here, since she seems to have decided that the ‘non-binary’ Gessen counts as a woman when it suits her case.

Gessen clearly thought she was being original in describing Gaza as a “ghetto”. As she said in one of her interviews about the story, “The question I had to ask when writing this was ‘Why hadn’t this comparison been made before?’”

Well, it has been. Repeatedly. Gaza was first compared to a ghetto (specifically the Warsaw Ghetto) by the Jewish Labour MP Oona King after a fact-finding trip to the region in 2003. After Israel attacked Gaza at the end of 2008 in response to rocket attacks by Hamas, there were multiple comparisons in the media with the Warsaw Ghetto. In a debate in the House of Commons, the Jewish Labour MP Gerard Kaufman compared Hamas “militants” to “Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw Ghetto”. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Richard Falk said Israel’s actions in Gaza “evoked the worst kind of memories of the Warsaw Ghetto”.  

All of which led to Al Jazeera publishing an article by Mark LeVine, a professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of California, in which he criticised the frequent comparison of Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto, which he pointed out had been a stage en route to extermination; Gaza, he insisted, is not that. “The use of highly charged historical comparisons that do not hold up to scrutiny unnecessarily weakens the Palestinian case against the occupation,” wrote LeVine, adding that they ignored Egyptian complicity and diminished Palestinian agency. 

LeVine’s criticisms have done nothing to stop continued, even constant comparisons between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto by Left-wing commentators such as George Galloway and Tony Greenstein.

So Gessen’s comparison was far from the original observation she imagined it to be. Jewish Voice for Labour – the Corbynite pro-Palestinian Jewish group within the Labour Party, as opposed to the Jewish Labour Movement, which is the pro-Israel Labour Jewish group – entitled its report on the Arendt prize affair, ‘Masha Gessen’s prize for freethinking withdrawn for freethinking about Gaza‘. Leaving aside the error that the prize was not in fact withdrawn, it’s telling that Jewish Voice for Labour should describe as ‘freethinking’ the expression of a perspective shared pretty much universally by Gessen’s fellow travellers.

What would really have been freethinking would have been for someone who describes him- or her- self as ‘progressive’ to follow Mark LeVine in arguing that Gaza was not a ghetto.  

If Gessen had really wanted to be original, she might have thought of using the term ‘ghetto’ to describe somewhere other than Gaza – for example the State of Israel (or indeed pretty much any Westernised country) when Covid restrictions were in force and the entire population were denied their freedoms.  

In her article in the New Yorker, Gessen made it clear she understood that her comparison of Gaza with a ghetto wasn’t an exact parallel and that there were fundamental differences between them – in particular, that the Nazis claimed ghettos were necessary to protect the rest of the population from diseases spread by Jews (whereas Israel has argued that it’s necessary to isolate Gaza in order to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks).  

In Nazi terminology, the Warsaw Ghetto was a Seuchensperrgebiet (‘epidemic quarantine area’). The Jews were walled in because the Germans were told they would otherwise infect them with typhus. 

Well, the Covid restrictions that prevented people from leaving their homes and from exercising their rights to freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom to protest and freedom to travel, and the ‘vaccine passports’ (in Israel, the ‘green pass’) that prevented unvaccinated people from fully participating in society, were introduced on precisely the same grounds as those adduced by the Nazis for enclosing Jews in ghettos in occupied Europe – to protect the general public from an infectious disease spread by a class of people whom they considered to stand outside the bounds of normal society. So why did Gessen and her ilk not use the term ‘ghetto’ then? Why are they only interested in using it in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?  

It’s possible to be appalled by the current situation within Gaza while at the same time criticise the Left’s obsession with it. It’s not necessary to support the State of Israel’s current military operation in order to condemn Left-wing commentators for only ever making Holocaust comparisons with the actions of the State of Israel and never with measures taken by any other country, be it Saudi Arabia, Turkey or China (or indeed the USA). Why are there mass demonstrations about the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza but not about the predicament of Afghan refugees in Pakistan or Sudanese in Chad or Venezuelans in Colombia? 

Where Gessen is correct is in arguing that because the concept of crimes against humanity emerged from World War II and the Holocaust, any reference to these crimes – and any discussion of whether or not they have been committed – is by definition a comparison of the Holocaust to current events.  

Gessen’s comparison of Gaza to a World War II ghetto is a microcosm of her main argument, that we should be allowed to compare aspects of the Holocaust with current events on the grounds that it’s only by comparing one event with another that it is possible to learn from history.  

I think that’s reasonable. I’ve said as much myself in previous articles in the Daily Sceptic.

What has offended Gessen, and riled the ‘progressive’ media commentators who have supported her, is that German organisations such as the Heinrich Böll Foundation have obstructed Gessen’s efforts to make such a comparison.  

“Where is the courage today?” asks Samantha Hill in her Guardian article, calling for the Foundation to take a moral stand. 

There’s a reason for this organisational fastidiousness. Gessen and her allies appear to be unaware of the German legislation (Section 130 of the federal German criminal code) that criminalises the ‘relativisation’ or ‘downplaying’ (in German, verharmlosen) of the Holocaust by comparing it to current events. Their ignorance of the law undermines their arguments.   

Robert Höschele is – like Gessen – a Jew who was born and brought up within the Soviet Union. They share the experience of having spent their formative years in a totalitarian society. Höschele’s family emigrated to Germany in 1981, the same year as Gessen’s family left Russia for the USA. Höschele now lives in Bavaria, which in the winter of 2020-21 imposed a ‘hard lockdown’, with much more severe restrictions than in the U.K. People were forbidden from leaving their homes to exercise, or to leave them at all between 9pm and 5am.  

In Munich in February 2021 Höschele delivered an officially sanctioned speech at an anti-lockdown protest, in which he stated that in the so-called ‘free state’ of Bavaria, three-quarters of a century since the liberation of concentration camps such as Dachau (a mere dozen miles from Munich), “laws are passed that prescribe the internment of people”.  

As Höschele has since pointed out, ‘internment’ means imprisonment without charge or without intent to file charges, so was a term that accurately described the situation in Bavaria during the winter of 2020-21.  

Nonetheless, Höschele has been prosecuted and convicted under Section 130 of the federal German criminal code for the crime of ‘relativising’ the Holocaust. Höschele has appealed his conviction: his letter of appeal currently sits with the Bavarian Supreme Court, unanswered. It might well sit there for months, even years. Meanwhile, the verdict against him remains “valid but not executed”. He’s facing 90 days in prison. As Höschele puts it, “it’s like waiting in a judicial limbo written by Kafka himself”. 

Höschele is far from alone. A number of other campaigners against the German Covid measures have been prosecuted under Section 130 for comparing them to the actions of the Nazi regime. Legislation intended to prevent Holocaust denial by neo-Nazis would appear to have been weaponised by the German authorities to silence their critics. The sword of Damocles is suspended above them in long, drawn-out prosecutions which have the effect of keeping them quiet and frightening away others from following their path. As the saying goes, the process is the punishment.

In a previous article in the Daily Sceptic I mentioned that the Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav is being prosecuted by the State of Bavaria for a speech at the commemoration in Nuremberg of the 75th anniversary of the Nuremberg Code in the summer of 2022. “Those who declare that Holocaust analogies are ‘off-limits’ are betraying the victims of the Holocaust by denying the relevance of the Holocaust,” she declared.

Sharav, who spent three years of her childhood in a concentration camp, is now back home in the USA but the case continues. A Holocaust survivor being prosecuted for ‘Holocaust denial’. Now that’s really irony that’s “too thick to cut”.

Another victim of Section 130 is the American playwright and satirist C.J. Hopkins, who lives in Berlin. (Hopkins isn’t Jewish, although his wife is.) Last summer Hopkins was convicted for displaying an image of swastika on top of a medical mask on the cover of his book The New Normal Reich, which according to the state prosecutor amounted to “disseminating propaganda, the content of which is intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organisation”. In fact, Hopkins was lampooning what he saw as the neo-Nazi tendencies of the German Covid regime. The stated grounds for Hopkins’s conviction are so clearly the opposite of the truth that it’s impossible to reach any conclusion other than that the prosecution was motivated by a desire to find an excuse to scare him into silence. Which has worked, to an extent, because he’s said that once he’s finished appealing his case, he’ll be leaving the country.

One might reasonably wonder why Gessen herself isn’t being prosecuted under Section 130, given that she repeated her Holocaust comparisons in Germany in an official context after her prize had been awarded. 

Gessen’s non-prosecution adds further weight to the argument that Section 130 is weaponised by the German authorities specifically against critics of their Covid measures.  

I’m shocked by the apparent ignorance of Gessen and her supporters about these Section 130 cases. But then, because Höschele, Sharav, Hopkins and others spoke out against the Covid restrictions, they’re regarded by mainstream media as beyond the pale; their cases remain unreported there. So we read instead about the ‘silencing’ of someone who has had her prize ceremony downgraded.  

That said, Gessen has an important point to make, and if she’s the one to get publicity for it – whatever the reason – then it would be churlish to complain. Gessen is critical of the German attitude to Holocaust memorialisation, for good reason. By forbidding any comparison of the Holocaust with current events, the German state is placing it on a pedestal, beyond the bounds of historical discussion. Germany is trying to control its own history.  

As Gessen says:

If the whole rationale for maintaining Holocaust memory is the pledge to learn from history, then how do you learn from history if you place an event outside of history, if you say that it cannot be compared to anything that is going on now?  

I would argue that the only way to learn from history is constantly to be checking back to see if that thing we swore we would never do again… is happening again. Or if we’re seeing the warning signs, the beginning of it.

And elsewhere:

In order to learn from history, we have to compare. We are not better or smarter or more educated people than [those] who lived 90 years ago. The only thing that makes us different from those people is that in their imagination the Holocaust didn’t yet exist and in ours it does. We know that it’s possible. And the way to prevent it is to be vigilant, in the way that Hannah Arendt and other Jewish thinkers who survived the Holocaust were vigilant. 

Unfortunately, Gessen hasn’t been quite so vigilant as she would like to imagine. She never noticed the comparison between the beginnings of the Holocaust and the restrictions on freedom imposed in the name of ‘combating’ Covid: the erosion of human rights, the silencing of dissent, the transformation of the media into a propagandising tool, the corruption of science and the scapegoating of the unvaccinated comparable to the discrimination against Jews (and other marginalised groups) in 1930s Germany. For someone who’s lived through and written about totalitarianism, Gessen seems remarkably unaware of its ‘warning signs’. Gessen has some good ideas, but she can’t see how they might apply outside the narrow worldview of her political bubble.

Still, if anything good has come out of the Hannah Arendt prize story and all the attention Gessen has been given, it’s that the importance of learning from the history of the Holocaust has been accorded the public attention that it deserves but has all too often been denied.  

Andrew Barr is the founder of Jews for Justice, which campaigns for freedom of speech and civil liberties from a Jewish perspective. The group can be contacted by email. Find Andrew on X and on his Substack page the Journal of a Dissident Jew.