Yom Hashoah and the return of the permissive lie

For many non-Jewish readers, Yom Hashoah may require explanation. It is the Hebrew term for Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day on which Jews and their allies around the world remember the six million Jewish men, women and children murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, while also honouring acts of Jewish resistance and moral courage.

In 2026, Yom Hashoah began on the evening of 13 April and continued through 14 April. It is not merely a memorial date. It is a day of moral reckoning. It asks not only what was done to the Jews of Europe, but what conditions made such evil possible in societies that once considered themselves civilised.

The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with a descent in language, standards and truth. Jews were caricatured, isolated, lied about, blamed, and recast as the source of social decay. Long before mass murder came the gradual creation of what might be called the permissive lie: the distortions, evasions and respectable falsehoods that made persecution easier to justify and harder to resist. The lie gave ordinary people permission to minimise what they were seeing, excuse what they were hearing, or persuade themselves that the Jews somehow had it coming.

That is why Yom Hashoah matters now.

If the Holocaust teaches anything beyond its singular horror, it is that civilised societies do not collapse all at once. They erode. They learn to tolerate ugliness when it is dressed up as sophistication. They accept double standards when those standards are politically useful. They permit intimidation when it is directed at unfashionable minorities. Above all, they grow comfortable with euphemism. Hatred rarely announces itself at first in its most naked form. It more often appears as moral vanity, selective outrage, intellectual theatre, or the insistence that one people alone may be denied the protections routinely granted to others.
In recent years, that pattern has become harder to ignore.