It’s a really sick time we live in when the Holocaust is considered a “contoversial subject” and denial of the atrocity is considered a valid alternative view. ~Philip Klein

Mr. Klein is right, but then it has already been a fairly sick time when the Armenian and Ukrainian genocides have been considered in certain scholarly and political circles to have been simply unfortunate episodes or perhaps even myths propagated by enemies of the revolution. 

This latest pandering to Muslim “sensibilities” in Britain is simply the application of the same politically motivated denialism that we see in the Armenian and Ukrainian cases to the one atrocity that has normally been deemed to be just about the only absolutely undeniable thing.  (Technically, virtually no one denies the events of the Armenian genocide, but they deny their significance, which amounts to the same thing.)  The twisted road by which we have reached the point where Pakistani Muslim schoolchildren in Britain would feel sufficiently offended by the history of WWII in Europe that a significant element of that history would have to be omitted is worthy of a series of posts at some point in the future.  All of this leaves in the background unmentioned the otherwise appalling ignorance of all British schoolchildren about world history outside of that sacred time of 1939-1945.  Those who would like to know “what happened to the Brits” might consider that many of “the Brits” today have no grasp of some of the most rudimentary elements of British history, nor, thanks to official multiculti nonsense, do they have any sense of what that history has to do with their identity as part of the British people. 

It might be worth noting that this is a lesson in the importance of political expediency for promoting knowledge about past atrocities: the Holocaust became widely, publicly known because it was useful to the Allies to make it so, while the stories of the Armenian and Ukrainian genocides have had no such powerful advocates for their publicity and remembrance.  As much as I don’t like it, what is remembered from the past is tied inextricably to those who have the power to authorise and enforce official memory.  When those who have the power are more concerned to address present needs (such as avoiding Muslim discontent, riots and attacks), a new, airbrushed, revised story will be told.  When there are no victors to publicise an enemy’s atrocities, or when the victors are unable, for whatever reason, to do this, atrocities are usually softened or erased or justified as part of a founding mythology.  Then begins the talk of “necessity” and idealism, and it always sounds the same, whether it is uttered by a Benny Morris or a Turkish nationalist. 

Because of post-WWI squabbling over the carcass of the Ottoman Empire, the Allies were unsuccessful in holding most of the architects and agents of the genocide accountable.  The architects and agents of the Ukrainian genocide were heroes to people of a certain political persuasion, who might well have liked to expropriate a few kulaks in their part of the world, and were never going to be held accountable by their own government, which authorised what they were doing, nor by any other, which had no means of trying or punishing them.  Needless to say, the mass deaths of Germans following WWII are scarcely even remembered, since they are unique in having virtually no advocates for their memory and an unusual number of interested parties who would prefer to keep these events buried as much as possible.

Middle Eastern historians are, on the whole, very bad about repeating pro-Ottoman, pro-Turkish propaganda about the Armenian genocide, and only rarely does anyone bring up the genocide of the Ukrainians except as a tired debating point against people who use the Holocaust as a cudgel with which to beat political opponents.  The ‘wrong’ kind of people were doing the killing in those cases (Muslims, communists) and the ‘wrong’ kinds of people (Christians, Slavs) were the victims.  Given the decades of pervasive anti-Christian and increasingly pro-Islamic biases in U.S. and European education, teaching the Ottoman genocide against the Armenians seems not only counterintuitive but perverse (since “we” all “know” that Christians are always the oppressor, never the oppressed). 

Sympathisers with the Soviets and communism generally could never really acknowledge that Stalin’s policies towards the Ukraine were fundamentally no different in revolutionary and nationalist motivations and hideous effect from the Holocaust.  To his cheerleaders abroad, Stalin was a “liberal in a hurry,” and if a few kulak eggs got broken, well, that’s the cost of progress.  Admirers of that famed Ottoman “tolerance” and latter-day proponents of the liberalisation and reform of the Islamic world have all been too deeply invested in their respective myths to face up to the hideous realities of what the marriage of progressive politics, Ottomanism and Islam could and did create, despite ample evidence not only of mass killings and deportations but extensive evidence (detailed in A Shameful Act) of government direction and coordination of the entire enterprise.