V13 in regards to the European Holocaust & Genocide in Gaza

August 12th, 2025

Here is a video in which I talk about V13 in regards to the European Holocaust and the Genocide in Gaza. I also include the transcript. I have more to say. This was based on remarks I made during a Q&A following a screening of V13 on Kinema. I am grateful for the messages of support.

Transcript:

Hi, I’m Richard Ledes, the director of V13.

August is the month when eighty years ago the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan–the first one on Hiroshima and the second one—about which I will have more to say—on Nagasaki. The use of these atomic weapons by the United States make Japan the only country against which nuclear weapons have ever been used. The German Jewish philosopher and political activist Gunther Anders wrote extensively about the significance of the use of these two bombs. Anders was briefly married to Hannah Arendt. He survived the Holocaust by immigrating first to France, where in Paris he was active in the anti-fascist movement, and then to the United States. He argued that the use of the two atomic weapons showed that warfare had become depersonalized and could be carried out virtually without human contact, following a purely technical process. He compared their use to the industrialized killing at Auschwitz. There is no doubt that we are seeing this technical process again in the Israeli ai-assisted genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. 

The work of Gunther Anders is a good example as to why it is crucial to be able to contrast and compare what happened during the European Holocaust and what Israel is now inflicting on the Palestinians. It also points to why universities must not be stopped from hosting these vital discussions by the false equation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel. The young people speaking out against the genocide and being disciplined by universities for not remaining silent are precisely the people who should be given an opportunity to engage with the European Holocaust in which more than six million Jews were murdered and with contrasting and comparing it in multiple ways to the current ongoing genocide. One vital way of doing this is through the work of Gunther Anders as well as of Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Zygmunt Bauman and others, whose profound engagements with their experience as Jews of the European Holocaust and the echoes they found afterwards in consumer society can help to clarify the present and point us towards reaching self-determination for Palestinians and security for both people and for the region as a whole. Killing journalists using drones because they do not tell the story Israel wants to hear or labeling as antisemitic students who are protesting against Israel’s genocide—as its actions have now been widely acknowledged to be by prominent scholars and major human rights organizations including within Israel—will not lead to a sustainable future for either Israelis or Palestinians.

Perhaps the most important choice I made in V13 was to shoot it in the United States, taking current New York City for Vienna on the eve of WWI. The United States is a key player in both genocides. In Mein Kampf, Hitler writes admiringly of the United States’ discriminatory practices in regards to immigration. And James Q. Whitman, as I have written before, documents in his book Hitler’s American Model the importance of the Jim Crow laws as a model for Hitler’s laws to remove citizenship from German Jews. It is also the Jim Crow laws that come first to mind for the Black American writer Ta-Nehesi Coates when he visits the West Bank and sees how access to water is segregated along religious lines that makes evident the ideology of Jewish supremacy that holds sway in Israel.

In V13 behind Freud in his office I placed a large photograph of the silhouette of a soldier standing beside a ladder. This silhouette was created by the initial bright light and intense heat of the atomic blast of Nagasaki. Greg Mitchel, the director of the recent movie Atomic Football, about the aftermath of the first two atomic bombs, commented in a recent interview on the similarity of the aerial shots of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Gaza. He described what is happening today in Gaza as an atomic bomb in slow motion. 

I put this nuclear shadow on the wall in Freud’s office partly because the ladder recalls Freud’s father whose name was Jacob and at the same time underlines a more complicated relation between the winners and losers of WWII and their relation to technology, especially the technology of cinema. 

Of course, the most important difference between the European Holocaust and the one Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians is that today we are ethically called to stop the ongoing one while at the same time preventing the rise of antisemitism that Israel and its allies are fueling. Stopping the current genocide will effect the interpretation of the end of the earlier one and this is why a significant effort has been mounted to prevent free speech in regard to thinking the two of them together. We know the official narrative ending–the classic Hollywood ending–to the European Holocaust. It has always been the creation of Israel. However the work of Gunther Anders, Primo Levi and Zygmunt Bauman among others make clear that this cure for the crimes of European ethno-nationalism and racial supremacy always carried the possibility, at the very least, of giving no rise to more European ethno-nationalism through a repetition camouflaged by colonialism, by Europe’s Heart of Darkness. This is what makes the open letter of 1948 to the New York Times signed by Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, along with other Jewish intellectuals, so prescient. They called out the fascist proclivity of Israel embedded in its treatment of the Palestinians that has now fused with the fascist proclivity within the United States. Israel has turned out not to be a conclusion but a repetition—not an exact repetition— and in the difference there remains the possibility for change but it is far from a foregone conclusion.

I am not Jewish, Israeli or Palestinian. Freud in the last article appearing in his collected works recounts his being asked to write about antisemitism. He declines, saying it would be better if someone who is not Jewish would speak about it. Similarly the Pulitzer Prize winning Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha in a recent interview calls for solidarity from the international community. We must not reduce humanity to the sum of its identities but see how we can be connected through our shared political desire-–behind which arguably can be found the unwritten law which Antigone evokes or can be found what the critical theorist Todd McGowan has called the universality of non-belonging. As human-beings, defined ineluctably as outsiders, exiled into language as speaking beings, we must find a way to take action to end the current genocide in which the United States is a full partner just as it is the location where I filmed V13.