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‘benchmark’ 65 of the putatively relatively minor significance of local persecution, by which
attention is detracted from those responsible for comparable crimes.
Borrowed history in a former colony: By focusing on French collaboration and resistance
rather than deportation, the authors of Ivorian textbooks adopt the viewpoint of, and thereby
affirm a degree of loyalty to, the former colonial power. The Ivorian textbook, for example,
adopts a ‘French’ reading of the Second World War by emphasizing collaboration and
resistance, and by subsuming Jewish victims to the legend of a nation united in resistance
which pervaded public perceptions of the role of France during the Second World War until
the 1980s.
Political expediency of the Holocaust: In extreme cases, textbooks evoke the Holocaust
marginally in a history which focuses entirely on the Second World War. One Indian textbook
produced during the mandate of the government coalition led by the Left Front, for example,
marginalizes the Holocaust in favour of the history of resistance to the Nazi war effort
as an analogy to the struggle for Indian independence. Likewise, the total disregard for
the Holocaust in another textbook may be ascribed to the fact that its authors appear to
sympathize with the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and with its radical nationalism
and the goal of territorial unity akin to that of the National Socialists. By contrast, liberal
authors present Gandhi’s attempts to negotiate with Hitler in the hope that the regime may
abstain from its racial policy.
Generalization and abstraction: While no textbooks in the sample overtly question the history
of the Holocaust, some present it in partial or abstract terms, such that the reader learns
little about the event. A Syrian textbook, for example, refers to the event as ‘conditions of
oppression by the Nazis in Europe’; an Iraqi textbook similarly describes the violation of
human rights and crimes against humanity committed under the National Socialist regime,
but conceptualizes the event in purely legal terms as one which ended once perpetrators
had been tried, punished or exculpated by the Nuremberg Tribunal. Jewish victims of Nazi
oppression are named in these textbooks in association with the alleged lack of resolve of
the British Mandate to stem Jewish immigration to Palestine.
Selective reductionism: South African and Rwandan textbooks are examples of selective
narratives which partly reduce the Holocaust to a form of racism, illustrated with images
of Hitler and Darwin side by side, or evoke analogies between life under apartheid and
persecution carried out by the National Socialists.
65 Buettner, A. 2011. Holocaust Images and Picturing Catastrophe. The Cultural Politics of Seeing. Burlington, Ashgate, p. 146.
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