FRIEND GOOD MAN: It is Democracy now!Democraticnow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” My name is Amy Goodman, I broadcast from PBS12 in Denver. Nermeen Shaikh is in New York.

NERMEEN SHEIKH: We end today’s show with the famous historian Enzo Traverso, author of the new book Gaza faces history. One reviewer said the book offers, quote, “a devastating indictment of the rhetorical subterfuge by which Israel and its supporters in the West justified the massacre in Gaza.”

FRIEND GOOD MAN: Enzo Traverso joins us from Ithaca, New York, where he teaches at Cornell University. His other books include The origins of Nazi violence And The new faces of fascism: populism and the far right.

Professor Enzo Traverso, welcome to Democracy now! Your area of ​​study has been fascism, the Nazis. Talk about why you are attacking Gaza now.

ENZO CROSSER: THANKS. Thank you for having me.

Yes, I am a historian of modern European history. I have been deeply affected by what is currently happening in Gaza, like everyone else, but I am not an expert on the Middle East. And at the beginning, I didn’t think I would write a book about this war and this genocide. But I quickly understood that history, and even many words, semantics, was linked to the history of wars, to the history of violence and genocides, and that European history itself was enormously mobilized to interpret the Gaza war. And I was shocked by how many words, many concepts were abused and misunderstood, and misled concepts like pogroms, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Zionism. And so, faced with such a misunderstanding of reality, I thought it was important to clarify the meaning of such concepts.

NERMEEN SHEIKH: Professor Traverso, you begin the book by citing the extraordinary work of Sebald, On the natural history of destructionin which he attempts to understand, in part, why, after the devastating aerial bombardments of German cities at the end of World War II, the German survivors of those aerial assaults barely uttered a word. Could you explain to us how you use that as a sort of premise and how one should interpret what happened after October 7 through that lens, how the victims and the perpetrators represented — how the victims and the authors were represented in the conflict?

ENZO CROSSER: Yeah. I open my book by quoting this great German writer, WG Sebald, who pointed out how, at the end of the Second World War, the Germans kept silent about their own suffering, which was indisputable. German civil society was therefore destroyed by Allied bombing. But this silence was linked to the awareness that while Germans were suffering these war crimes, Nazi Germany was perpetrating the Holocaust and even worse crimes in Europe, particularly on the Eastern Front. Well, at the end of World War II, the Nuremberg Trials tried Nazi crimes. And it was only several decades later that German suffering during the Second World War was recognized, without appearing as a sort of exoneration or relativization of Nazi crime.

We now face a paradoxical situation in which the perpetrators are Hamas and the Palestinians, and the victims are the Israelis. And it’s a reversal of reality. It is like a Nuremberg trial in which, instead of Nazi crimes, Allied atrocities perpetrated by American and British planes would be judged.

NERMEEN SHEIKH: And, Professor Traverso, could you explain why you think that this memory of the Holocaust, the way in which the Holocaust has unfolded since October 7, is actually a desecration of the Holocaust itself? If you could expand on this and why you think it has been used for these purposes by so many people?

ENZO CROSSER: Yeah. The memory of the Holocaust was subterranean and subterranean, a memory obscured for decades after World War II. But thanks to a very difficult and painful process of working on the past, the memory of the Holocaust has become a central element, a pillar of the memory landscape, not only in the West, but worldwide. We cannot think of the 20th century without placing the Holocaust at the center of this picture. And the memory of the Holocaust was — so I write in my book that it became a sort of civil religion of our liberal democracies and used to celebrate human rights and certain fundamental values ​​of our democracies. The memory of the Holocaust was extremely important as a kind of paradigm for elaborating the memory of other forms of violence and genocide.

But over the last decades – I would say the last two decades – the memory of the Holocaust has undergone a paradoxical metamorphosis, and it has been weaponized by Israel and most Western powers into a policy of unconditional support. to the Israeli occupation of the territory. Palestinian territories. And this has extremely dangerous consequences, because today we are faced with a dramatic, tragic situation, in which the memory of the Holocaust is invoked and claimed to justify a war in Gaza which is taking on genocidal aspects. And this means that the memory of the Holocaust is completely perverted.

And think about the possible consequences of this. Those who protest against this genocidal war are accused of anti-Semitism. But if the memory of the Holocaust is mobilized to unconditionally defend a genocidal policy, perhaps one could think that the memory of the Holocaust is intrinsically evil. If criticizing genocide is anti-Semitism, many people would think that anti-Semitism is not that serious. And finally, many would begin to think that the Holocaust itself is a myth invented by Israel to justify its policy of occupation of the Palestinian territories and oppression. So I fear, I fear that in the long term, maybe not immediately, but those who demand an unconditional defense of the Israeli occupation and war in the name of the fight against anti-Semitism and in the name of memory of the Holocaust are preparing for a new wave of anti-Semitism.

FRIEND GOOD MAN: Professor Enzo Traverso, before we end today’s show, I wanted to ask you about Trump’s victory. You said that what surprised you was not his victory, but the magnitude of his victory. One of your previous books is called The new faces of fascism: populism and the far right. If you could expand on this?

ENZO CROSSER: Yes, in this book I proposed the category of post-fascism in order to depict this very vast and heterogeneous constellation of radical right, far right, fascist and radical nationalist movements and parties, which are developing in the global scale. And Trump is no exception. Trump is part of this global phenomenon. And I used this concept of post-fascism because, for obvious reasons, we live in a different context than classic fascism, and because there are many undeniable differences between Donald Trump or Milei in Argentina or Navy Le Pen in France. or Giorgia Meloni in Italy and classical fascism, from this point of view, it is therefore something different compared to fascism. But at the same time, we cannot approach and interpret this new political phenomenon without comparing it to classic fascism. It is something of transition between fascism and something unknown, which is taking shape. Well, there is a debate in the United States about…

FRIEND GOOD MAN: We only have 20 seconds, I hate to tell you. Professor, we only have 20 seconds left.

ENZO CROSSER: Yeah. So I said I have no problem portraying Trump as a fascist. He demonstrated that he was willing to transgress the fundamental principles of democracy by contesting the election results. But this kind of fascism is not a meteor that suddenly falls:

FRIEND GOOD MAN: We have to leave it at that, but we look forward to doing a long interview when you come to New York. Cornell Professor Enzo Traverso is the author of the new book Gaza faces history.

And that’s it for today’s show. We broadcast here in Denver, at the PBS12 studios at the Five Points Media Center, which is also home to Free Speech TV. Thanks to the folks here at PBS12: Bobby Springer, Mary Latsis and the entire team. Next week we will broadcast from Baku, Azerbaijan, the United Nations climate summit. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.