Before I start this piece on the proposed Holocaust Memorial in London, let’s just get one thing straight. As the Holocaust fades from living memory and becomes written and oral history, there is a need to make sure that the Holocaust and the millions of people, including some of my wife’s relatives, who died in it, is not forgotten. For the phrase ‘Never Again’ to be meaningful, the crimes of the Nazis need to be remembered.

However, I greatly dislike the proposed Holocaust Memorial that is being planned for London’s Victoria Gardens, next to the Palace of Westminster. This is because this is an extremely ugly edifice that is so off-putting as an object that it is liable to drive people away, rather than pull them in to where they might learn something. It’s very much in the tradition of modern public art in that it is designed to please the artist and the art world, rather than be something that future generations can admire or take inspiration from. It’s like some of the crap that gets put on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square writ extremely large and extremely expensive. I stand against the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which shifted to the political Left a while back, who are backing this. I don’t think that it does either the memory of those who were murdered, or Britain’s modern Jewish community, any favours whatsoever. The ugliness of this monument will be noticed by the public and fester within the public’s minds and might even poison the image of Britain’s Jews or be exploited by those who wish to poison the public’s minds about British Jewry.

This memorial is also non-historical since those in the artistic and political Establishment who are backing it seem to be linking the United Kingdom to the Holocaust, something that is plainly not the case. Such opinions fail to take into account that if it were not for Britain, for a while standing alone, unable to access the full amount of the products of Empire due to German naval operations, the Uni-Testicled Austrian would have brought the horrors that he brought to mainland Europe to the UK.

Yes of course, we can argue that Britain might have been able to do more to oppose the Nazis early on, or that the UK government of the time did not take as seriously intelligence reports about what was going on in Nazi Concentration Camps as maybe they should have done. It’s also possible to consider whether Britain treated Jewish refugees as well as they could have done, instead of interning them on the Isle of Man until they could be proven to not be a threat or German spies or saboteurs? Britain’s behaviour in refusing Jewish emigration to British controlled Palestine at the Evian Conference of 1938 which was set up to find places of refuge for displaced German and Austrian Jews, has also come in for criticism from historians.

There is also the ongoing argument as to whether the Royal Air Force could have used one of its longer range bombers such as, after 1942, the Avro Lancaster to bomb either the Concentration Camps or the rail lines leading to them. But there are also counter arguments to say that diverting valuable Lancasters from the bombing of Germany would have advantaged the Germans and also that bombing the rail lines was pointless as the Germans would have them up and running again in a few days. Don’t forget the Germans had masses of slave labour that they could use on such tasks. There’s also the fact that it was all but impossible to fly directly to a target such as Dachau in Southern Germany without having to cross hundreds of miles of enemy held territory. France was under German occupation at the time, so attacking Dachau via France was also not possible. Attacking Dachau would have merely wasted aircraft and aircrew for no real gain. Winston Churchill’s government took what I consider to be the very correct view, that to free the Jews of Europe from the nightmare that the Nazis had driven them into, the Nazis had to be beaten on the battlefield and all vestiges of Nazism removed from Germany.

It may be that Britain did make mistakes as to how the nation dealt with the monstrosity of the Holocaust, but we should feel no guilt. The decisions that British politicians and military leaders took at that time saved the UK and by beating the Nazis the UK managed to save many more Jews than if different decisions had been made. Those in charge of the UK at the time were making life and death decisions that would impact on whether the United Kingdom survived or ended up, like France, the Netherlands and so many other places, destroyed and occupied by Germany. Faced with a terrible and cruel enemy and with limited physical and human resources, can you honestly say that you would have made better decisions about what to do with the German problem, if you were in the position of making them? Would you have given the order to ‘bomb Dachau’ knowing that it would be fruitless and would remove valuable aircraft and aircrew resources that were vitally needed to disrupt Germany’s arms production? I believe not.

Britain killed Nazis, we didn’t collude with them and it’s extremely non-historical to try to insinuate that Britain did. All the Allied and occupied nations screwed up in some way with regards the Holocaust. The American government refused entry to Jewish refugees and sent a ship load of them back to Europe and to their deaths. Some French, Dutch and Belgian citizens actively collaborated with the Nazis and with the Nazi Holocaust. Britain is not uniquely guilty for the failures to stop a mass murder policy that might have seemed at the time to intelligence experts working on very little information to come out about what was going on, to be unbelievable and fantastical. I will not cast blame on those who were faced with making decisions about allocating military resources, who didn’t see a mass murder campaign that could reasonably be called ‘unprecedented’. Blame should be for those who do something wrong, not those who fail to see what at the time might have been unforeseeable. The only people who appear to me to want to blame Britain for alleged failures are the Art Establishment, the virtue signalling political Establishment and those from the Left who hate the idea of Britain. Personally I think the Board of Deputies and others organs in the Jewish community have been hoodwinked over this and their involvement in this project gives cover for the Britain hating far left to strut their stuff and promote the falsehood that there is and was very little difference between the UK and Nazi Germany.

As well as being obnoxiously ugly, off-putting and anti-historical, this memorial is also in the wrong damned place. If Britain is to have a national Holocaust Memorial, then as well as being much better designed than this monstrosity is, it should also honour those British and Empire troops who brought down the Hitler regime and be better sited. It is very poorly sited in my view. Where it is it will only attract those who were going to go there anyway and will look incongruous next to the neo gothic structure of the Palace of Westminster. It will be as Prince Charles once said about the National Gallery extension ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of an old friend’.

Siting this memorial in the Victoria Gardens will in my opinion do no good. It will do nothing to make people ask questions about Jew hatred or the Holocaust, it will only preach to the converted. It’s also in an area that does not have much of a historical association with British Jews, despite there being a great number of Jewish parliamentarians since the 19^th century. It would be far better in my mind to site a better quality national Holocaust memorial in some area of London that has a long historical association with Jews. To my mind the best place for such a memorial would be either Whitechapel or Aldgate. These were the places where British Ashkenazi Jews first arrived in great numbers in the late 19^th and early 20^th century and where they sweated and slaved in really terrible conditions in order to create for their children a better future. Not only would siting a better designed memorial in either Whitechapel or Aldgate be historically appropriate, it would also do far more good to be placed in an area where medieval levels of Islam derived Jew hatred still persist today. Siting a memorial in one of these areas where religiously inspired anti-Semitism is rife would be a great way to say that Britain stands against Jew hatred.

Why not for example site a national Holocaust memorial in Altab Ali Park in Aldgate as it already commemorates a man who died at the hands of racists and has an association with campaigns that express an abhorrence of racial attacks? Yes a Holocaust memorial there might be attacked by jihadists but the the Westminster memorial is also likely to be a massive potential target for Jew hating Jihadis. Siting the memorial in Aldgate, even if it gets attacked by the more extreme Mohammedans, and needs to be repaired now and again,sends a much more powerful message about the social unacceptability of Jew hatred than would siting it in the relatively safer environs of Westminster. East London is also where the Jews of East London faced down Britain’s proto-fuhrer Sir Oswald Mosley and sent him into political oblivion. There are a number of valid historical and political reasons why a memorial to the Holocaust, although one nothing like the Westminster one, would be rightfully sited in London’s East End.

This proposed monument needs to be moved and redesigned. As to design I believe that the Holocaust, is too big a crime against humanity to let modernism commemorate it. Modernism really isn’t good enough for this. What is needed is something more in keeping with classical tradition, something that will not look sad and out of date in 25 or more years. My suggestion is that the monument is redesigned to be a classical column with the top capital missing. This design, one that is seen on many Victorian tombs, signifies that the person who is being commemorated died before their time and as so many died before their time in the Holocaust, a truncated column would be artistically appropriate. Imagine if you will, a 75 foot high classical cut off marble column set upon a plinth with maybe a nearby screen embedded into a block of marble that displayed the names of all who died and you have some idea of what could be done and which would be better than the current proposals.

Even better would be the idea that we recognise both the racial nature of the Holocaust which claimed the lives of Jews, Roma and other groups the Nazi’s decided were ‘subhuman’ and the victims of that other evil that scarred the 20^th century, where people were murdered because of their class, which is Communism. Why not, in order to remember all those who have died because of monstrous dictatorships, have two truncated classical columns in East London: one to specifically honour the memory of those who died in the Holocaust and another to memorialise the tens of millions of people who were murdered either directly or indirectly by various Communist regimes, who were following as it was once put ‘a god that failed’. We do not create the situation where ‘never again’ is meaningful if we memorialise the victims of one 20^th century monster whilst almost completely ignoring the victims of other similar but politically opposite monsters.

We do need to remember crimes in order to prevent them happening again, but how we remember is important. One of my own ways of remembering the people whom the Uni-Testicled Austrian murdered is to look at my son and see him as not just a much loved child, for which we say ‘Baruch Hashem’ (bless the Holy Name of G-d) every day, but as a giant ‘fuck you’ to the ideology that would have prevented his birth by killing his ancestors. My child also lives because British service personnel now long dead, fought the bad guy, let’s not forget them, something that this planned memorial monstrosity appears to do.

The proposed Holocaust memorial in Westminster is a very expensive, inappropriate and pointless way of remembering a terrible crime. It’s the wrong design, it will preach to the converted, it will be massively expensive at a time when we should be cutting back and rebuilding the economy, it’s out of character with the area and it’s in the wrong place. A proper decent memorial might achieve something but this will not.

This proposed memorial is very much an architectural ‘wank project’. It will make a small group of artists, sculptors, designers and constructors very, very rich. It will give the political classes something to feel virtuous about and will signal their virtue. It will make a small group of Britain- hating left wingers feel good and might even end up being counterproductive, as more and more stressed British people become angry at the cost of it. I worry that the Jewish Left who seem to be very much in favour of this memorial monstrosity might bring opprobrium onto the entire community because of its cost, its design and its inappropriate location. I’m Jewish and I don’t want this memorial. I want something better, correctly sited and something that will make people remember and vow to make ‘never again’ a reality. How about the Government building a much more appropriate, better designed memorial in a place where it might make a difference? As well as remembering dead Jews, why not start working to repair society so that I am not again in a position where I can’t wear a Kippah on my head on the East London street I was born on, because of imported Jew hate? We should remember dead Jews but we need to think of the living as well.

I’m not the only person who is criticising the decision to build this memorial. High profile individuals such as Carl Benjamin has criticised it on the grounds that certain aspects of it such as linking Britain to the Holocaust is unhistorical and its appearance is awful. The Jewish writer Tanya Gold writing in Unherd magazine has also criticised it, although she has criticised it from a centre-left position. She said that it was incongruous to build a memorial for dead Jews whilst preventing modern refugees to enter the UK. This is not a position I agree with as the situation regarding European Jewish refugees, who were genuinely facing death at the hands of the Nazis and the economic migrants who we get today, is significantly different. However she’s dead right in her criticism of the nature of the Westminster Memorial.

There are others who are criticising this proposed memorial not on the grounds of taste or historical accuracy or because it is plainly the folly of the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, who campaigned for it, but on planning grounds. One of those who have brought up the planning implications is Dorian Gerhold writing at The Critic magazine who makes the interesting observation that the way that this plan has been pushed through the planning system despite objections creates a dangerous precedent for the future. Dorian Gerhold said that councils in the future may use the precedent created by the way this memorial has been pushed through in order to destroy public parks and open spaces. They have a point. At present there are protections on such places and spaces, removing those protections might encourage councils to destroy parks for housing or vanity projects and leave less civic amenities for later generations to enjoy.

The Westminster Holocaust memorial is the memorial that few people seem to really want. It’s ugly, aspects of what it supposed to represent are unhistorical, it’s in the wrong place and I very much doubt that it will be in anyway effective in educating people about the Holocaust. It’s an expensive mess and one that is being foisted on us from central government. There are a lot of Jews who don’t want this and neither do the local council for the area. Personally I’d rather see the tens of millions that this memorial will cost to build and run, spent on educating people about how the Nazis came to power, the nature of the crimes that they committed and the human cost of those crimes. This is because only by educating people about the crimes of the past, can similar crimes be prevented in the future. Such education will do far more good than this architectural wank project.