Background and Context

I was thinking of the entire sequence of events that was set off when Hamas invaded and kidnapped those 100+ Israelis in October, ’23. Since then, in response, Israel has practically wiped out Hamas, bombed Gaza to the ground, attacked Lebanon, weakened Hezbollah enormously, and most recently, attacked Iran’s military leaders and its nuclear sites. A righteous war taken too far?

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All this reminded me of a point the standup comedian, Trevor Noah, makes in his autobiography, Born a Crime. The Holocaust was a terrible and evil act, no doubt. But there have been plenty of other terrible and evil acts through history, many of which are not even disputed. Why is it that the Holocaust gets so much disproportional attention?

 

A key point, he says, is that the Nazis maintained meticulous records of the numbers and methods they used to exterminate Jews. When the perpetrator maintains records, well, the data cannot be disputed. No such luck for the Africans of Congo under that evil Leopold of Belgium, or the men kidnapped and sold as slaves. Without records, the numbers are open to dispute and the conversation changes from the evil acts to debates on the numbers impacted.

“(White Europeans) weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered (during imperialism). How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal?”

How many know the Transvaal? How many know of Auschwitz? Guess the color of the victims in the two? Not a coincidence.

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In another blog, I’d talked of why black South Africans often took names like Mussolini and even Hitler. Well, Noah had this friend named Hitler who was a great dancer. This was the time when the Internet was starting to take off, where Internet speeds were still slow and there were no smartphones, so you needed a PC to access the Net.

 

Noah was a bit ahead of the curve, so had started downloading pirated music off the Net, which he played at others’ parties as the DJ/RJ as a way to earn money. But this sometimes created a problem – he’d have the latest popular (and pirated) songs from America, but local folks didn’t know the song! If the party folks didn’t know the song, well, they couldn’t dance to it the first time they heard it. Which is where Hitler’s dancing skills came in. On-stage, Hitler would show the dance to the new, unknown songs, and the crowd would follow and chant:

“Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler!”

 

One time, Noah and his band got invited to a school named King David School. It started off well, the band playing the latest songs, the kids and teachers dancing and having a great time. Then the inevitable happened – a song that the kids hadn’t heard. So Noah and his band started the chant in such situations:

“Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Go Hit-ler! Put your hands in the air for Hitler, yo!”

What they didn’t remember was that this was a Jewish school!

“The whole room stopped. No one was dancing.”

The audience looked aghast. But Noah and his band were in the flow – they just kept going. Then one teacher ran on stage, pulled off the plug for the music system from the wall. She was livid, “How dare you? Disgusting!”, she screamed.

 

Noah had no idea what had set her off. Then it struck him – some of Hitler’s dance moves were sexual, provocative, inappropriate perhaps for school kids. But those moves were part of African culture. How dare she call our culture “disgusting”, he thought. Now he was angry too!

 

Now both the teacher and Noah were furious. How dare you come here and insult us, she yelled. Who’s insulting you – it’s who we are, he screamed back. No, you cannot do this, she fumed. Just because we’re black doesn’t mean you can tell us what to do or not to do, we are free and we will do what we want – he was very angry now. Oh yeah? The last time people like you (she meant Nazis) tried, we stopped you. We will stop you again, she was almost frothing. Stop us? Because we are black and need to be put in our place? Too late, lady, now we have Nelson Mandela on our side, he shouted back. What the hell, what’s Mandela got to do with this, she was thoroughly confused. With that, the encounter and performance ended.

 

Looking back at that now, Noah can see what the encounter was all about. But on that day, he says, the way he (and most blacks) viewed the world was different:

“Jews in South Africa are just white people.”

And white people were the oppressors, the perpetrators of apartheid.

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Humour of the above aside, in the West, the Jews get to carry the Holocaust tag all the time, question Israeli policy and you get branded a Holocaust-denier or a neo-Nazi. Perhaps the Jews are heading in the direction of that famous line from the Batman movie:

“You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”