Holocaust:

By Charles Krauthammer

Anyone who has visited the Vietnam Memorial on the Mall in Washington knows the feeling of being overwhelmed, defeated, by its mass of names. There are just too many to bear.

Now imagine a hundred Vietnam Memorials arrayed on the Mall. The earth would sink beneath the weight of such sorrow. Yet it would take that many Vietnam Memorials to list the names of those killed in the Holocaust. And it would still not be enough. There would still be nearly 200,000 left uncommemorated, more than have died of AIDS in America in all the years of the plague.

The Holocaust is a malignity of such dimensions that one must resort to mental tricks to appreciate its scale and scope. Yet, one is compelled to confront its scale and scope -- and single-mindedness -- in order to understand its uniqueness.

The atrocities of ethnic conflict -- today, Bosnia -- are described in terms of death camps and genocide. But this use of terms borrowed from the Holocaust betrays a poverty of language. The Nazi achievement lay not in building barbaric prison camps or seizing villages through expulsion and terror. That is an old story, terrible but old: the story of ethnic war. The Nazi achievement lay in constructing an industry of death never before -- or since -- seen. An industry of continental size complete with railways, death camps, gas chambers and crematoria. An industry whose raw material was Jews and whose product was corpses.

In an age when victimhood carries high status, the Jews are much and grotesquely envied for having suffered the greatest crime in history. Hence the common attempt to universalize the Holocaust: "It was a war against the Jews, but it could have been against any other nation."

Well, it wasn't. Yes, the Germans considered the Poles an inferior race. They invaded, abused, violated and socially decapitated the Poles. But they did not issue a death sentence and track down for gassing every child of Polish descent. That treatment was reserved for the Jews.

Why is this important? For the lessons one draws from the Holocaust. With the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the air is full of lessons: lessons about man's capacity for evil, about the dangers of intolerance, about the redemptive power of democracy.

These lessons are important, but in the shadow of the Holocaust rather banal. They do not require the authority of Auschwitz. They follow easily enough from Soweto and Howard Beach, from Sarajevo and Nagorno-Karabakh.

To approach Auschwitz, one must begin by understanding its uniqueness. All the easy universalisms bow before this particular fact: Auschwitz was the apex of a campaign by one people, the Germans, to exterminate another, the Jews. They almost succeeded. They killed 6 million, 2 out of every 3. They annihilated a civilization more than a thousand years old. They even managed to murder a language. Soon Yiddish will go the way of Latin and Greek.

A crime of such particularity creates particular moral obligations. One (to borrow from philosopher Emil Fackenheim) above all: Hitler must be allowed no posthumous victories. Hitler's singular project -- the destruction of the Jewish people -- must not be permitted its final success.

It must be admitted that the project's success was considerable. The Jewish people had survived 2,000 years of persecution not just by faith and courage but also by geographic dispersion. Decimated here, they would survive there. Until Hitler. Hitler managed to destroy most everything from the Pyrenees to the gates of Stalingrad, the heart of the Jewish world. Amid the ruins, the Jews made a collective decision that their future lay in self-defense and territoriality, in the ingathering of the exiles to their ancient homeland where they could finally acquire the means to defend themselves.

Today the hinge of Jewish history, the guardian of Jewish destiny, is Israel. After Europe, there was no other choice. It is a terrible irony, however, that the relocation of the heart of Jewish life to a tiny patch of land hard by the Mediterranean makes possible the final realization of Hitler's project. Now it will take but a few nuclear missiles or a battery of poison-gas Scuds to complete the final solution.

Israel today lives with the specter of annihilation. Saddam threatened to "burn up half of Israel." The Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas, some of whose leaders Israel famously deported to Lebanon, declares that "every Jew and settler will be a target for murder; his blood and possessions are expendable." Meanwhile, Hamas' patron, Iran, is urgently acquiring ballistic missiles and nuclear materials. The destination of these instruments of mass murder is no mystery.

Denying Hitler posthumous victories means denying his successors. It means sustaining the new center of Jewish civilization, where many survivors found refuge and on whose success Jewish survival now depends. Anti-Zionists, however -- particularly those of the left -- discovered that while physically or morally arming those bent on the annihilation of Israel, they could pose as philo-Semites with a show of anti-Nazism and a nod to the Holocaust.

) It is a cheap and perverse maneuver because the Nazis are dead and gone. It means nothing to oppose an enemy that is no more. It means everything to oppose a real set of enemies that would complete the Nazi project. The test of one's solidarity with the people of the Holocaust is whether one is prepared to help defend that people against the destroyers of today, not the destroyers of yesterday.