On this, the 79th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Holocaust Remembrance industry stands as a colossal failure. Holocaust Remembrance Day, it turns out, successfully transfixed eyes on the rear-view mirror and diverted attention from the dangers 10 feet in front of us. And, truth be told, the rear-view mirror is growing a bit foggy, as well. Less than a century ago, the leading intellectuals of Germany—the most highly educated nation on earth—initiated, participated in, or acquiesced to mass murder on a previously unimaginable scale. And only weeks ago, intellectuals in America, Europe, and elsewhere waxed lyrical over the rape, torture, mutilation, murder, beheading, and kidnapping of innocent Jews.

An important parallel underlies both historical episodes. Both Hitler and Hamas were the cancerous outgrowths of respectable and sometimes altruistic intellectual movements that saw individuals as nothing more than avatars of demographic groups, defined by immutable characteristics.

[This is precisely the problem, and the root evil of ‘woke’. It promotes immutable characteristics as ultimately determinative, which then forces the ranking of ‘identities’ and punishing those disfavored by the ranking systems. It encourages (if not explicitly demands) blaming societal ills on those disfavored identities, and just as inevitably results in discrimination and worse. It’s the same system as what the Left calls “white supremacy,” only reoriented for the benefit of other immutable-characteristic identities. The one constant is that the Jews end up on the bottom and targeted. We didn’t ‘remember’ the Holocaust so much as recreate the systems that produced it. — Ed]