TOM EATON | Holocaust and effect: ineptitude, not evil, made Dr Lushaba say that

When news broke that UCT politics lecturer Lwazi Lushaba had said “Hitler committed no crime”, the reaction ranged from outraged to approving. Which is inevitable when people are confronted with gibberish.

Dr Lushaba, most famous for physically stamping on a ballot box after an internal UCT election went against the candidate he was backing, was delivering an online lecture to his students when he made the startling remark and triggered the current controversy.

It was, however, part of a larger point he was groping ineptly towards. After he absolved Hitler, he went on. And this was where things got terribly confused and reactions on social media began to diverge wildly, as each camp focused on one of two sentences.

Some focused on Lushaba’s claim that Hitler had committed no crime, and came to the conclusion that he is either a moron or a fan of genocide.

Others, however, chose to ignore the first sentence, and instead embraced the second: “All Hitler did was to do to white people what white people had normally reserved for black people.”

This claim, they insisted, was essentially correct.

What few seemed willing to do, however, was to look at both sentences together. Because if they had, they might have realised that this isn’t about a rabid Holocaust denier but just a guy who hadn’t bothered to read through his lecture notes or get his thoughts in order before powering up that Zoom session.

This isn't about a rabid Holocaust denier but just a guy who hadn’t bothered to read through his lecture notes or get his thoughts in order before powering up that Zoom session.

Because, of course, the two sentences contradict each other entirely: if the Holocaust wasn’t a crime, then the violent oppression of black people is not a crime either, and what Hitler did to white people, or what white people did to black people, isn’t worth talking about.

But that’s not the point he’s trying to make, which, if I give him the benefit of all sorts of doubt, seems to be that it took the Holocaust – a vast crime against Europeans – to make white people see and understand the same sort of horror that black people had been feeling for centuries.

If this is the case, then I think I can just manage to reverse-engineer a motive and a meaning for that first sentence. I think he was trying to say that, just as white oppressors didn’t see the subjugation of black people as a crime, so Hitler and the Nazis felt the same way about the Holocaust.

It’s the least dicey interpretation of that sentence, but I fear it’s also fairly ignorant of the history of that immense crime.

While it is true that the most fanatical Nazis had probably dehumanised their victims to such a degree that they didn’t believe they were committing murder, the evidence is overwhelming that the Nazis understood that they were committing a crime, not least evidenced by their attempts to keep it secret.

The training of SS soldiers explicitly acknowledged that recruits would have to commit atrocities, but that these atrocities would be committed in service of a greater good; that they would be, in essence, necessary crimes.

Camp guards and officials didn’t defend themselves by claiming that no crime had been committed; they insisted they had been following orders to commit deeds that they might not normally have agreed to.

And when the camps were finally liberated, German civilians were forced to witness their horrors so that they could not keep claiming, as millions had, that they hadn’t known what was happening and therefore weren’t complicit.

So what will become of Dr Lushaba? Well, he will continue to be condemned and lauded on social media for a day or two, and then it will all go away, as such things always do, and he will continue as he always has, floating in the warm, dark womb of academia, adored by some and avoided by others, perhaps preparing his lectures, perhaps not.

As for the rest of us, let’s try to read more than one sentence, if only so that we might distinguish between villainy and incompetence.

And let’s all try to be very, very clear on a fact that apparently needs repeating: yes, Hitler committed a crime.