Remembering Past Atrocities: Good or Bad for Attitudes toward Minorities?
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Abstract
Discrediting racial hatred and political extremism is one of the explicit aims of commemorating the Holocaust. And yet, remembering the difficult past does not always produce the intended consequences because political actors can challenge the narrative to advance their goals. In particular, right-wing populist movements often counter historical accounts of past atrocities in potentially damaging ways by portraying their own nations as victims rather than perpetrators. The chapter presents the results of an online survey experiment in Poland on how contestation of the Holocaust narrative affects xenophobic and exclusionist views. I find that while uncontested narratives about ingroup wrongdoing (massacre of Jews by Poles in Jedwabne) can reduce ethnocentric beliefs, countering the perpetrator narratives with a victimhood story (massacre of Poles by Ukrainians in Volhynia) weakens this effect and also lowers support for minority rights. I also find that the Holocaust narrative, contested or uncontested, does not affect anti-Semitic or pluralist attitudes.
Topics
Holocaust Holocaust Commemoration Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial Nationalism National Identity Memory Surveys
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245-266
ISBN/ISSN
9781501766749
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Link to article (paywalled), Remembering Past Atrocities: Good or Bad for Attitudes toward Minorities?
Link to article in JSTOR, Remembering Past Atrocities: Good or Bad for Attitudes toward Minorities?
Link to article in JSTOR, Remembering Past Atrocities: Good or Bad for Attitudes toward Minorities?
Bibliographic Information
Remembering Past Atrocities: Good or Bad for Attitudes toward Minorities?. . 2023: 245-266. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1515/9781501766763-015
