On Holocaust Memorial Day, expert after expert went onto the airwaves to insist that what happened to the Jews started with the “othering” of them as a minority by the Nazis. Othering is a ghastly world created by Guardian reading sociologists, like my wife, but essentially it means depicting as distinct as a precursor to demonisation.
Of course, such an interpretation of the holocaust is false. In the 1890s in Bavaria openly anti-semitic parties secured more than 50% of the vote. To suggest that Nazi othering kickstarted the holocaust is to give a clean pass to a nation with a long-entrenched history of antisemitism. That is not to deny how evil the Nazis were but to suggest that the wider German nation was not culpable and steeped in a long history of Jew hatred, is just a whitewash. But then we can’t be beastly about the Germans can we. This is 2023. We all know who we must hate now.
The experts on January 27th insisted that we must fight “othering” wherever we see it. Except that is, of course, where those being othered are the folks who liberated Auschwitz but were banned from attending events there last week, that is to say the Russians.
And so, we see that in Lithuania, where almost 10% of the population are Russian speakers, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė, one of the darlings of the Western press, says that teaching Russian in schools should be banned. Instead kids should be taught Polish as a second language even though less than 1 in 20 Lithuanians speak Polish. Russian has been spoked in Lithuania for centuries. Now it is on its way to being erased.
How is this not othering? How will the Russian minority feel about it? Perhaps the same way that the much larger Russian minority in Ukraine felt in 2014 when Russian was banned as an official language.
This is not to apologise for Putin or to say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not wrong. It is. But just to point out that such rank hypocrisy can have consequences.