Meeting of the Parliament 28 January 2020
As others are, I am grateful for the opportunity to mark Holocaust memorial day in Parliament, and that a full afternoon has been allocated to the debate this year to recognise the significance of the anniversary.
The Holocaust was a singular evil—an act of calculated barbarity with which few others, if any, can ever compare. The number of victims is difficult to comprehend—two in every three Jews in Europe were murdered, alongside millions of Slavic people, Roma, disabled people, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender—LGBT—people, prisoners of war, communists and other political and religious opponents of the Nazis. More Jews—far more—were killed than there are people in Scotland today. Entire communities were eradicated; people were murdered and all trace of their existence destroyed. Before the second world war, there were 3.5 million Jews in Poland; after the war, there were a few hundred thousand.
The scale of the atrocities is so vast that it makes remembrance harder. The sheer number of deaths carries the danger of depersonalisation—that we remember only the numbers, and not the names, the faces, the people and their stories. As the Holocaust moves out of living memory, we have a duty not to let that happen.
The industrial, military and political capacity of a European superpower was for the first time in history directed to the purpose of genocide—to the annihilation of the Jewish people not as a by-product of conflict, or as a means to some other end, but as the end: It was the objective in and of itself.
But evil like that does not emerge unannounced—it festers and grows. The Nazis were in power for nine years before their “final solution” was agreed to. It was the culmination, in their case, of years of antisemitic laws and systematic oppression by all available levers of the state and, before that, not by decades but by centuries of anti-Jewish hatred. That hatred, which often manifested itself in conspiracy theories, was not destroyed alongside the Nazi regime. From one end of Europe to the other, we see it today—whether it is in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, or in the challenges that are faced by our Jewish community in Scotland and across the UK.
Nazi propaganda was not true or rational, but that did not matter. The Nazis spread lies about Jews being responsible for Germany losing the first world war and about them plotting world domination. The Nazis relished in fake science to justify their claims that certain groups of people were inferior. That the claims were lies did not halt the advance of fascism. Instead, the fascists created their own reality and made many people in their society believe it. They built on the prejudice and intolerance that already existed and turned them into something even more murderous.
Whether it is Rothschild or Soros conspiracies—accusations about control of the media or dual loyalty—that same underlying hatred continues to fester in European society, and 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we have not truly vanquished the ideology that drove it.
In the past few years, it certainly feels like the people who voice hatred, whether it is against Jews, Muslims, Roma or other groups in our society, have become not just more confident, but have regained a level of legitimacy that many people had hoped would never come back.
Major newspapers in this country print articles that describe refugees as “cockroaches” who should be met with gunboats. Last year, The Ferret found that an openly fascist group had plans to infiltrate community councils to try to establish a network here in Scotland. Late last year, The Sun managed to publish an article—for which it has still not apologised—whose sources included the neo-Nazi website Aryan Unity. In Poland, cities and entire provinces have declared themselves to be LGBT-free zones, and the ruling party has sought to present the LGBT community as western European ideology that is alien to Poland and a threat to Polish families. The Prime Minister of Poland—a European leader—is currently engaging in historical revisionism around the Holocaust. Across the Atlantic, in the capital of the defeated Confederacy, hundreds of Neo-Nazis felt confident enough to march in the open, their identities unobscured, chanting that Jews “will not replace” them.
It is not enough for us—especially those of us who are in public life—simply not to be racist. We need to be actively anti-racist and anti-fascist. We must remember the history of anti-fascism in this country, including events such as the battle of Cable Street in 1936, when the Jewish community in the east end of London, alongside communists, socialists and other anti-fascists, defeated Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists blackshirts.
One of those anti-fascists, Leslie Spoor, was known to a number of people in this Parliament. He went on to be a long-time member of the Scottish Labour Party and close friend of Robin Cook, before going on to found my party, the Scottish Greens. However, again I say that simply remembering anti-fascism is not enough. We must actively continue that struggle, every day.
I was honoured to be invited by the European Jewish Association to join its delegation to Auschwitz this week, and it is a source of deep regret that I was unable to do so. However, I am—as we all are—incredibly grateful for the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust and others who ensure that hundreds of young people across Scotland have that valuable experience.
At Auschwitz, you can witness the infrastructure of evil—the unsettling mix of administrative banality and murderous horror. The stories of Auschwitz—especially those of Scottish victims and survivors; people who later settled here—are ones that we must never stop telling. They are the stories such as that of Jane Haining, who has already been mentioned. She was a Church of Scotland worker who refused instructions to return to the UK, thereby denying herself safe passage, and was murdered at that camp for refusing to abandon the Jewish girls for whom she cared. They are stories such as that of Judith Rosenberg, Scotland’s last Auschwitz survivor, who told her story to the BBC again this year. As Jane Haining’s story has gradually been uncovered in recent years, I have been pleased to see momentum growing behind proposals for a statue or other fitting memorial to her, to join the cairn in her native Dumfriesshire and the stained-glass windows in Queen’s Park parish church in Govanhill. It is our responsibility never to forget, and to never stop telling those stories.
However, it is also fitting to celebrate those who are with us today—the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of survivors who simply would not exist if Nazism had not been defeated. The horror of what the Nazis did cannot be undone—but they did not win. Our Jewish and Roma friends stand testament to that. The very least that we can do for them—and for those who did not survive—is to never stop telling the story, never stop educating those who come after us of the horror and what led to it, and never stop opposing the forces of hatred, wherever they emerge.
The Greens support the motion.
15:28