Member-only story
Holocaust Memory Distortion Has Led to Genocidal Ambivalence Today
‘Never again’ has always been a catchy slogan that billowed proudly in the post-war political winds. But an inability to truly face the civilisational failings that led to the Holocaust renders the slogan & the attached intent obsolete in view of the genocide in Gaza.
‘The Herero are German subjects no longer. They have killed, stolen, cut off the ears and other parts of the body of wounded soldiers, and now are too cowardly to want to fight any longer…. The Herero nation must now leave the country. If it refuses, I shall compel it to do so with the big cannon. Any Herero found inside the German frontier, with or without a gun or cattle, will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children.’
The extermination order that began the twentieth century’s first genocide of the Herero, whom the German settlers called ‘baboons.’ Given by the German commander, Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, in October, 1904, following a series of attacks by so-called ‘rebels’ on settlers farms in what today we call Namibia.
Omer Bertov, ‘Infinite License,’ NYR, April, 2025.
