If the Holocaust was seen the same way black history is in America, people would make excuses for it, play it down, cast doubt on it, avoid talking about it and shame people out of taking it seriously. Holocaust deniers would no longer be seen as nut cases but as “part of the debate”.

Jews would be told to get over it, stop complaining, stop living in the past, stop playing the victim, stop trying to take advantage of people’s guilt for their own ends. It is Ancient History, it has Absolutely Nothing To Do With The Present. No one alive took part in it. “My family never killed any Jews!” And so on.

Jews need to concern themselves with the here and now, with things they can change. All this talk about history is a huge waste of time. So shut up already.

Jews would be told that genocide is natural: the Turks did it, the Rwandans did it, the Cambodians did it – everyone does it!

In high school history books there would be no pictures of bodies, no pictures of skin-and-bone Jews, nothing about Anne Frank’s diary or Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”. Just the bare events. It would seem like a one-off thing, not something rooted in hundreds of years of hatred and prejudice. There would be nothing about anti-Semitism, its history or its causes. Nothing about it being a sick frame of mind.

To “teach the debate” there would be a part on Holocaust deniers. It would be used to cast doubt on the whole thing and leave the reader to suppose that “the truth is somewhere in the middle”: that, sure, “some Jews were killed” during the excesses of war, but certainly not millions.

Hitler would not be seen as evil. The general public would not even know about his anti-Semitic views. And whenever those views were made known, like on some PBS documentary at ten o’clock at night, they would be quickly dismissed out of hand by saying that Hitler was a man of his times, that he was not perfect.

Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky would certainly tell us the truth, but they would be dismissed as Jews who have every motive to make it sound worse than it was. Meanwhile Jews who cast doubt on the Holocaust would be called “thoughtful” and appear on television as experts.

Of course it is nothing like that. It is almost the opposite. Because:

Americans did not do it, so there is no need to shift blame, make excuses, avoid the subject or anything like that. In fact it was carried out by an enemy state whose misdeeds are patiently taught to schoolchildren – as A Part of History. It was Jews who were being killed. In America they count as Almost Real People, certainly Real enough that their deaths seem like a terrible thing, a crime that must never be forgotten.

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