I wanted to share Thomas Keneally’s article, PERSPECTIVE ON RACE HATRED: For Gentiles, Too, the Holocaust Is Never to Be Forgotten – This singular crime is not a Jewish problem but a European problem, the apex of centuries of cross-cultural hatreds. Published on January 31, 1994, in the LA Times. 

Thomas Keneally, author of the book “Schindler’s List,” is a Distinguished Professor in UC Irvine’s department of English and comparative literature.

Read the full article here:http://articles.latimes.com/1994-01-31/local/me-17214_1_jewish-problem

From the article: 

Racism is as human as love. In defining ourselves, the tribe we belong to, its mores, we are tempted to believe in the inferiority of the culture and mores of other groups. Prejudice is the hairy backside of what we all need: a sense of identity. Sometimes, the more grand the cultural identity, the greater is the temptation to racism. The officers of the Einsatzgruppen, the SS killing squads, all loved their Mozart and their Goethe.

Over every question of race or group hate lies the shadow of the Holocaust. . . As a Gentile, an Australian of Irish Catholic background, I have no hesitation in saying that the Holocaust should be talked about again and again and should not be forgotten. The reason is that the Holocaust is the most extreme version of rootless race hate in European history. Classic European anti-Semitism was based more on the idea that the Jews had killed Christ and were engaged in an anti-European philosophic and financial conspiracy than on any measurable harm done to Europe. No one could point to Jewish massacres of Christians, though in Poland and Germany vague but intense hate was able to be engineered into blaming Jews for the economic problems of both countries. But who could say, my mother was raped by a Jew, my father hanged by one?

…the Holocaust remains for me not a Jewish problem but a European one. The Germans themselves are grappling with a conflict about this among their historians–how to fit this unique event into German history, into the German and European imagination. And that is not the Jews’ fault. It is the fault of Europe, which has pursued anti-Semitism consistently since the Middle Ages and has still not yet repented of it. It is the grand Europe that all us people from the new world love to visit and rightly admire that brought race hate to its ultimate conclusion. That is why it is important for Gentiles to retain the memory of the Holocaust, and to receive the warnings inherent in it.