By Andres Kogan Valderrama
HAVANA TIMES – The shameful withdrawal by part of the Jewish Community of Chile from participating in a new commemoration of the Holocaust victims on January 27, organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the government of Gabriel Boric, not only shows the extreme ideological fanaticism of that organization but also its inability to understand memory from a much broader perspective.
Hence, abstaining from such an important activity, claiming that it was because the government of Chile did not condemn the Hamas massacre on October 7, which is not only untrue, as a statement was issued on the same day of the event (1), but it also shows a narrow and closed-minded perspective that denies the possibility of seeing the Holocaust beyond the Western interpretation we are all too familiar with.
By this, I refer to the Eurocentric and colonial idea of thinking that the Holocaust was an exceptional event in human history, as if other events before and after it were not equally abhorrent and dramatic, transforming Western history into a supposed universal history.
In other words, believing that this genocide and horror against the Jews by the German state was something unique and ahistoric