The Holocaust, understanding it, its memory and Yad Vashem
February 5, 2021
Research about the causes and reasons for the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust, based on documentation has gone on for dozens of years, and has ascertained a variety of long-range processes that coalesced in certain historical circumstances. Yet Dr. Hanan Shai, in the article that was published this week under the auspices of the BESA center (Jan. 15, “A serious moral failure at Yad Vashem”) instructs us, without a flutter of an eyelid, that there were “two central reasons.”
The first reason: “that in contrast to the scientific revolution, whose founders replaced the narratives and delusions of the Middle Ages with logically and empirically proven truth and strove ceaselessly to disseminate that truth, the liberal revolution denied and continues to deny the existence of any one truth.” No more and no less. But the truth is that fundamental axioms in Nazism were racial principles based on the concepts of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest,” coined by Charles Darwin. Academic research) and pseudo-research( in the entire scope of scientific disciplines (for instance eugenics and demography) was central to Nazi Germany’s practices. These concepts and practices could only have grown out of scientific research that claimed that the truth of nature is equally valid and applicable to human society. Liberalism - which was the product of the Enlightenment that engendered modernity and its belief in “progress” — claimed, counter to what Shai assumes, that moral, ethical and principled truths exist at the level of thought and in the various walks of political and social life. The challenge to the existence of non-relative truth came in fact from the side of post-modernism, which emerged only in the second half of the last century.