1y ago

‘“Never again for anyone” is an offensive phrase.’

[Transcript]

Jews 'appropriating' "Never again"
One of my most favourite pet peeves of any discussion regarding Antisemitism and issues regarding Israel: Jews appropriating the slogan "Never again" for themselves, never gets old.
I genuinely love it.It immediately shows me that if the person has never even bothered to open any encyclopedia to look the term up before claiming it as their own they likely also have never done actual research about other such topics regarding Jews and Israel.
For those not knowing: "Never again (shall Masada fall)" is a slogan by Yitzhak Lamdan from his poem "Masada", I will leave his mysterious ethnic background in the shadows for you to decipher.
I think it is because non-Jews have been raised around this phrase their entire lives without really knowing its origins, beyond some vague reference to Nazi Germany.
So, they grow up and go through life not really understanding where this phrase came from and what it represents and then incorrectly evoke its sentiment without knowing what it's referring to.
Probably the most offensive things I have seen in my life came from a former “friend” like this. A goy like me who I think did actually know better, but used it in a blatant motion towards Israel: “Never again means never again for anyone”—just pure Holocaust inversion. There are some of us at least who do actually know history.
Personally, I view “never again” and “never again for anyone” as two separate concepts.
“Never again for anyone” is an empty promise made by ignorant people. Since ~1960, 3.6 million people (low end estimate) have died because they belonged to a group that was being genocided. Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, China, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, DRC, Zimbabwe, to name a few locations. Some locations have experienced more than one genocide.
I mean, the Sudanese civil war is currently happening ffs. “Never again for anyone” is an offensive phrase. I wish it wasn’t, I wish it were true.
“Never again” was a vow made by Jews, for Jews, and will be upheld by Jews. The world doesn’t mean it when they promise “no more genocide”, we mean it with every fibre of our being when we say “Am Yisrael Chai”.
This concept might be offensive to those who wish it was a promise that could be broken, but it’s not an offensive phrase. Even when someone attempts to use it as a stick to beat Jews with (maliciously or out of ignorance), it’s a powerful reminder that it means nothing to them, but everything to us.
Although it would be nice if people stopped using the Shoah against us lol

(Source.)

First of all, it is impossible to trace the origin of the phrase (let alone the sentiment) ‘never again’ to any specific individual, as it has existed long before 1927.

For example, this is from a 1918 issue of The Armenian Herald:

Doctor James Barton, the foreign secretary of the American Board and the chairman of the American Committee for the Near East, stated, in an interview published in all the papers on September 14, 1918, that “there is a universal demand that never again shall the thrice-martyred Armenia pass under the Turkish yoke. The United States must see that hereafter Armenia is free.”

Excerpt from a 1919 editorial titled ‘Never Again’:

With all the force of his official position and with all the power of his unanswerable logic, he declared to the Allies and to the world that never again shall a single nation or group of nations be able to build up a military autocracy to menace the world; that never again shall weak nations be exploited by the stronger ones; that never again shall the doctrine that might makes right be countenanced in any nation; that never again shall secret treaties between nations be internationally legalized; that never again shall there be Armenian massacres or Central African persecutions; that never again shall democracy and justice be forced to fight so long and so sacrificingly for their existence.

From a 1920 periodical:

“They all said ‘ Never Again,’ and we believed them; but now they are preparing for us new wars.”

Published in a 1922 congressional record:

He came back from there and brought the Versailles treaty with him, There were many things in it which I did not like; there are many things that the people did not like; but it contained the great central idea that was uttered by a British battalion when they were charging successfully a nest of German guns: “Never again! Never again! Never again!” They destroyed the German nest; they won a glorious victory; but the victory was not in destroying the German nest; it was in the utterance that those atrocious, contemptible, inhuman, uncivilized conditions of actual warfare in the air and on the earth and in the waters beneath the earth should never be revisited upon this world again if they could prevent it; and they uttered to God the words that they were dying that day to prevent it if they could.

I could go on, but I won’t test your patience. Suffice to say, this is another classic example of Herzlian snobs pretending that they invented all of the good things in the world. Lamdan was not even referring to the Shoah when he reused the phrase: he wrote his poem in 1927 and the Shoah had not yet happened.

Second, it is interesting to note that the earliest instance that I found of the phrase ‘never again for anyone’ (with regards to extermination) is this 1984 benediction by Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk, a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council:

Of the unspeakable, we are commanded to speak. Of what was witnessed, of horror, we must give evidence, so that never again, for anyone, for any people, anywhere, will there be a recurrence of the Holocaust.

The phrase recurs throughout the 1990s, usually in Jewish contexts (along with the less common variation ‘never again for anybody’).

One byspel from Anima, vols. 17–18, dated 1990, pgs. 14–15:

And I heard the words, “Never again,” but they had a different meaning. “Never again for anyone” was what was meant. Whatever it was that Auschwitz caused such a break from the human spirit, it must never happen again. No one ever again must be drawn into committing such evil and brutality, no one must be permitted to have such crimes upon their souls, nor can anyone be allowed to suffer it again. Never again for the victimizer and the victim; never again for Jews and everyone else. “Do what you can to find the sources of this suffering which so many, not only Jews experienced. Look everywhere in history, in others and in yourself, and address it as best you can. Never again, for anyone,” it repeated and I found myself reeling also with the understanding of the suffering which occurs from an alliance with evil.

Painting the Towns, dated 1997, pg. 75:

There are many pieces of the San Francisco mural that are from the murals we painted in the West Bank. We added some portraits of people we met there. The woman in black was part of a group that protested against the occupation every Friday afternoon at many sites around Israel. This woman in particular lost her whole family at Auschwitz. She believes that ‘never again’ means never again for anybody anywhere.

Confronting the Holocaust, dated 1997, pg. 140:

But, indeed, what I think survivors in those early months and years understood in the mission of the survivors (and of course, Yehuda Bauer and some of his students have written about those early days of the survivors) was that it really was a mission that really said never again for anyone, anywhere. And I really never understood that until we began to look at the sources at the Yiddish writings of the newspapers and letters of the camps.

More here.

Thirdly, what these Herzlians are either forgetting or choosing to overlook is that multiple demographics became victims of the Axis’s extermination campaigns, not only Jews and legally ‘Jewish’ people. Their fates were usually closely linked with Jews’. For example, there were Roma in the Warsaw ghetto, the Third Reich tested ‘euthanasia’ methods on disabled humans, and it first tested Zyklon‐B on Soviet POWs. There is plenty to lose and very little to gain by attempting to completely separate the Shoah from the rest of the Axis’s violence (and, I would argue, from imperialist violence in general).

Lastly, calling me ‘ignorant’ and insinuating that I don’t ‘actually know history’… do I even need to comment on that? I see anticommunists tell us all the time to ‘read history’ when their own understanding of history is so painfully shallow and uninteresting, and it utterly baffles me. It reminds me of the bores who like to repeatedly gripe about ‘stupid people’ when they don’t come across as sophisticated either. It’s just embarrassing.