Commentary
Remembrance Day: The paradox of cross-eyed memory
Our leaders have even twisted the Shoah into a pawn in the game of the powerful, and reduced its moral imperative to a political shield for any new heinous acts, as long as the culprits are on “our” side.
It was January 27, 1945, when soldiers of the 60th Infantry Division of the Red Army reached Auschwitz in southern Poland. Primo Levi had been deported there a year earlier, and he was in the Buna-Monowitz camp, with the other survivors.
“The first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp about mid-day on 27 January 1945. Charles and I were the first to see them: we were carrying Sómogyi’s body to the common grave, the first of our roommates to die ... It seemed to us, and so it was, that the nothing full of death in which we had wandered like spent stars for ten days had found its own solid center, a nucleus of condensation: four men, armed, but not against us; four messengers of peace, with rough and boyish faces beneath their heavy fur hats. They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene” (Primo Levi, The Truce).
Perhaps it is enough to conjure up the scene of the meeting between those two shadows that emerged from the “nothing full of death” and those four veterans of the battles fought by Russia, survivors among the more than 20 million dead that had been the cost of victory in the “Great Patriotic War,” to get a sense of the enormity of the paradox before which we find ourselves today.
If what Domenico Quirico (La Stampa, Jan. 23) called “hypothetical universal law” were less hypothetical, neither the prime minister of Israel, the state “born from the ashes of the Shoah,” nor the president of the Russian Federation would be allowed to attend the commemoration ceremony, in Auschwitz, on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the most infamous of death camps, because if they did so they would both be arrested for crimes against humanity, under the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court: in November for Benjamin Netanyahu (and his former foreign minister Gallant, as well as three Hamas leaders, only one of whom might have survived the extermination of Gaza's population), and on March 17, 2023 for Vladimir Putin (and also for Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's commissioner for children's rights, accused of the war crime of deporting children from the occupied Ukrainian territories to the Russian Federation).
Putin will certainly not go to Auschwitz. (Editor’s note: Neither Putin nor Netanyahu traveled to Poland for the ceremony). In Putin’s case, international law is certainly less hypothetical, even while the double standard makes it worse than merely an abstraction, making its injustice obvious. But in Netanyahu’s case, there has been no shortage of reassurances from European leaders, first and foremost from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who announced as early as January 9 that “anyone who comes to Oswiecim for the Auschwitz celebrations will have their safety guaranteed and will not be detained.” Did he really mean “anyone”? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. His statement continued by specifying: “whether it is the prime minister, the president or the minister of education of Israel.”
It was a wink and a nod to the allies in Israel (suggesting a loophole was being set up), and, in the bigger picture, a spit in the face directed at the ICC. Of course, the execution of arrest warrants is the responsibility of the courts, not the heads of state or government. This, however, is cold comfort: these days, in a spectacular tragicomedy, the Italian authorities have demonstrated how easy it is to evade that responsibility, with just a few uses of pretzel logic and alternative facts.
For the criminals of a higher caliber than the Tripoli torturer General Elmasri, our foreign minister had already taken care of the matter with a preemptive spit in the face of the Court, even worse than the Polish one, because it was amplified by the absurdity of the so-called immunities invoked in Netanyahu's case. After all, the International Criminal Court was born in none other than Italy, established in 1998 with the Rome Statute, thanks to great jurists such as Giuliano Vassalli and Antonio Cassese, heirs to the Kantian principle that the personal criminal responsibility of statesmen and politicians in the exercise of power cannot be “shielded” from their institutional office.
On January 26 of last year, the other Hague-based court, the International Court of Justice, ruled on the case brought by South Africa against Israel alleging genocide in connection with its response to the Oct. 7 massacre, finding that the charge could not be dismissed and was supported by the facts. Back then, many people complained about the near-coincidence between that ruling and Remembrance Day. They were wrong to do so, as seen from the even more tragic perspective we have today. Because that ruling, however disregarded in its consequences, redeemed the universality of Holocaust remembrance and the absoluteness of its moral mandate: Never again. Against anyone. While today's contempt of the ICC snuffs out any remaining light of reason in the face of the unbridled force that rules the world.
It has even twisted the Shoah into a pawn in the game of the powerful, and reduced its moral imperative to a political shield for any new heinous acts, as long as the culprits are on “our” side.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/il-paradosso-della-memoria-strabica on 2025-01-26