Chris Hedges — September 11, 2025
The Holocaust industry is dead. Gaza killed it. And it did not die nobly. It did not die defending truth. It did not die preserving memory. It died as a grifter dies, bloated on lies, drunk on its own sanctimony, choking on the blood of innocents it refused to see.
For decades, it posed as prophet. It claimed to speak for the dead, to warn the living, to stand guard against the abyss. In reality, it prostituted memory to power. It preached “Never Again” while blessing “Again and Again.” It draped itself in ashes while pocketing donations, whispering absolution into the ears of Western governments eager to forget their own genocides.
Now, with Gaza in flames, its duplicity is exposed. Its shrines to universal justice are revealed as temples of tribalism. Its scholars, robed in academic gravitas, are exposed as clerics of a cult. The “Holocaust” — capital H, trademarked, weaponized — has been twisted into an idol, a golden calf before which truth and morality are ritually sacrificed.
The Gospel of Uniqueness
From the beginning, the doctrine was clear: the Holocaust is unique. It cannot be compared. It cannot be universalized. It is sacred property, an inheritance for Jews alone, and its lessons must never be diluted by application to others. “Do not compare,” they intone, like a catechism. “Do not profane the holy trauma.”
And yet this uniqueness was never about respect. It was about utility. It was about immunizing Israel. It was about transforming genocide into entitlement, suffering into sovereignty, memory into a bludgeon. The Shoah was not permitted to warn humanity. It was conscripted to warn critics of Israel: Touch this sacred cow and you are an antisemite. Touch it and you are another Nazi.
Primo Levi’s Banishment
Primo Levi saw the danger. He knew the line between victim and victimizer is perilously thin, that the ghetto was not populated only by saints but also by collaborators like Rumkowski, who exploited, betrayed, and brutalized his own people. Levi knew power corrupts even the oppressed. He warned that Auschwitz taught a universal lesson: evil is not confined to Germans, nor virtue to Jews.
For this, Levi was silenced. He was persona non grata in Israel. He was not useful. Elie Wiesel was useful — the sanctified “Jesus of the Holocaust,” as Alfred Kazin put it. Wiesel’s theology was simple, Manichaean, perfectly suited to Israel’s needs: Jews suffer, Israel redeems, critics betray. One voice was heresy. The other was scripture. Guess which one was canonized.
Museums as Sanctuaries of Hypocrisy
Holocaust museums sprouted across America not as acts of memory, but as acts of laundering. They are not about the past. They are about the present. They exist to cleanse the West’s conscience, to offer redemption by proxy. Fund Israel, arm Israel, protect Israel from sanction, and you are forgiven.
You may have overseen the slaughter of Native Americans, Congolese, Armenians, Bengalis. You may have firebombed Tokyo, dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, orchestrated famines that killed millions. But stand before the eternal flame, nod solemnly, and ship another pallet of bombs to Israel — and your sins are washed away.
When Holocaust Museum LA dared to suggest that “Never Again” might apply to Palestinians too, donors revolted. The post was deleted. Memory must remain tribal. Empathy must remain fenced. Truth must remain censored.
Segal’s Exile
Raz Segal — an Israeli Holocaust scholar — broke the code. He called Gaza what it is: a textbook case of genocide. He recognized the rhetoric of extermination, the forced displacements, the demonization of Palestinians as “human animals.” He saw the signs because he teaches the signs. And for his honesty, he was punished. A job offer revoked. His career jeopardized. His name smeared.
Meanwhile, his colleagues, safe in their endowed chairs, gaze at their shoes. They denounce Hamas with righteous fury but whisper nothing of the incinerated children in Gaza. They stand silent as South Africa pleads at The Hague, as Amnesty writes its reports, as mass graves are dug. Their silence is not academic restraint. It is collaboration.
The Collapse of Credibility
The Holocaust industry cannot survive Gaza. Its bankruptcy is too blatant, its hypocrisy too obscene. It has been exposed as a racket — not memory but marketing, not history but propaganda, not justice but justification.
The West, once so fond of brandishing the Holocaust as proof of its moral authority, is stripped naked. It funds genocide in real time. It vetoes resolutions at the United Nations. It denounces the powerless while arming the powerful. Its sermons on democracy and human rights have turned to ash in its mouth.
The legal order born after World War II is shattered. The West cannot preach to Russia or China or anyone else. Its credibility lies buried beneath the rubble of Rafah and Khan Younis.
A Prophecy Fulfilled
As Pankaj Mishra writes, Gaza is the crucible of our time, the moral and political abyss into which all illusions collapse. It is our Sarajevo, our Guernica, our Srebrenica, multiplied a thousandfold and livestreamed to the world.
The Holocaust industry, once cloaked in the authority of memory, is now naked in its complicity. Its priests stand discredited. Its temples are mausoleums. Its mantra “Never Again” is revealed as a grotesque parody: Never Again — unless they are Palestinian, unless they are inconvenient, unless their blood serves no purpose.
The Final Epitaph
The Holocaust industry is dead. It died not with dignity, but with cowardice. It died not in defense of truth, but in service to lies. It died not as a guardian of memory, but as a collaborator with power.
And perhaps it is just. For memory that justifies murder is not memory. It is desecration. For an industry that canonizes suffering to sanctify apartheid, its death is not tragedy. It is release.
The Holocaust industry is dead.
And good riddance.
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