On 7 January 2021, all of us were taken aback by the same image: one of a man with an unkempt beard and long, greasy hair, inside the US Capitol building. In this mass of self-declared fascists, this man’s hoodie stood out from all others. It read ‘Camp Auschwitz’. Underneath was the camp’s slogan translated into English: ‘work makes freedom’. Arbeit Macht Frei. On the back, one word: ‘STAFF’. The jumper was a mock-up of a summer camp souvenir, the joke presumably that would have run the camps if he had been alive.

This man was a visual representation of the far-right’s changed attitude towards the Holocaust. They have stopped denying it and started celebrating it. They have realised that it does not matter so much whether people believe the Nazi genocide happened as whether they care. On this Holocaust Memorial Day, we need to remember not only what happened, but why it matters.

The familiar forms of Holocaust denial have already been publicly debunked. There is a small fringe who question the facts of whether so many people were killed or whether their murder was so systematic. Large tomes of historical writing have been dedicated to disproving deniers’ claims. Historians have excavated evidence. We have witnessed court cases and symposia that upheld the consensus of deliberate mass murder.

In the face of such explicit condemnation, the newer form of denial began as a ‘joke’. When Prince Harry or Conservative MP Aidan Burley dressed up as Nazis, it was clear that they thought they were breaking taboos. A few months ago, the US Army suspended one of its officers for making Holocaust jokes on TikTok, and an American TV chef apologised for tweeting comments that made light of concentration camps. As far as we know, none of these people were neo-Nazis. Instead, they imagined themselves making comedy out of shock value.

The trouble is that this has morphed into an explicit tactic of the far-right. Joking about genocide has become part of how Hitler’s supporters normalise it, so that people are desensitised to it. White supremacist Richard Spencer shouted ‘heil Trump’ in celebration of the last president’s victory. Images mocking the Holocaust have become normal way beyond the fringes of the far-right.

Historian Deborah Lipstadt calls this ‘soft core denial’. Those involved are not rejecting the facts, but minimising their importance. Marine Le Pen, who won the first round of the last French presidential elections on a far-right ticket, often deploys this tactic.

This form of Holocaust minimisation is much harder to counter. We can counteract misinformation with the testimonies of survivors, trips to the camps, and factual evidence. You can give people all the information in the world, but you cannot force them to care.

There is a deep question at stake here for progressives. We feel viscerally that systemic racist murder is wrong. We know that it has lasting consequences for how the world should be structured, and we see that as a summons to defeat fascism. But that is clearly not how everyone sees it. We must face not only the flippancy and indifference with which people are able to face genocide, but how easy they find doing so.

Part of the problem must lie in the way that the Holocaust is taught. National narratives have emerged about the Holocaust that make it harder to combat apathy. In a bid for empathy, educators have often pitched the Nazi genocide as if it could have happened to anyone. School students are told that this is where bullying leads. They are asked to imagine themselves inside Auschwitz, on the other side of the barbed wire.

The reality is that they probably would not have been affected by Nazi policies. This was a genocide targeted particularly against Europe’s ethnic minorities. It was aimed at Jews and Romani people, groups that had existed in Europe for over a millennium as its most notable racialised groups. During the twelve years of Hitler’s rule, over two thirds of them were murdered. It was not an accident caused by a bully who had gone too far: it was the product of targeted state-based racism.

If people are trained to imagine themselves as victims, they will not understand how the forces of state violence, racist propaganda, and institutional discrimination drive fascism. They can ignore how this systematic destruction was part of an international project of colonialism and white supremacy. This narrative allows people to compare every minor inconvenience or incursion on their desire to do whatever they want to Nazi Germany. People must understand the longstanding forces of bigotry and nationalism that facilitated Hitler, and continue to this day.

Conversely, German children are taught only to imagine themselves as perpetrators. A friend told me how she was repeatedly told not to dare think of herself as someone who could have been affected. She should only consider why her ancestors did such awful things.

This, too, is unlikely to reflect historical accuracy. The Nazis had to recruit their most dedicated and sadistic henchmen to staff the concentration camps, because most of their soldiers would not do it. True, many ordinary citizens knew what was happening, but few directly participated in mass murder. Most continued their lives out of indifference or fear.

If people only feel guilt, they will be disempowered and stripped of the agency to challenge racist structures today. From there, some will wallow in inactive self-pity. Others, in a bid to restore their own sense of self-worth, will instead try to take pride in the atrocities. Ascendant fascist groups, from Poland to the USA, have latched onto precisely that feeling. Rather than convince people the genocide never happened, they now praise it, or at least insist it should not matter. From there, they can turn jokes into policies.

Between the poles of victims and perpetrators, there is a missing category of people: resisters. Their stories were absent from my own Holocaust education. I did not know about the Jews who had camped out in woods, armed and ready to fight. I was never told about the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto or the many small rebellions in the camps.

Somehow the stories of all those people who secretly passed notes or smuggled food or blew up train lines or disrupted civic life passed me by. When I heard about opposition, it was only the genteel liberal kind, of distributing pamphlets and speaking out in pulpits. Those actions were profoundly important, but neglect so many of the ways ordinary citizens undermined fascism.

These stories of resistance are the antidote to apathy. They help people picture themselves in alternative roles: not as victims, perpetrators, or bystanders, but as powerful people with the agency to stop injustice. If people can imagine themselves capable of overturning even the worst dictators, they can see that their response to injustice matters. Solidarity is a far more potent weapon than empathy.

Perhaps it is because solidarity is so formidable that we do not learn it in mainstream schools. If we taught people to imagine themselves in resistance, we would have to conjure up images of clandestine meetings and illegal activities. Students might picture themselves not as staffers at Auschwitz or as victims in gas chambers, but as people who can bring about change today. We would have to teach them how important direct action, strikes, confrontation, and subterfuge were.

Then they might get all sorts of ideas. They might start using those techniques to oppose state racism and injustice today. They might confront their own governments and their nationalist policies. And that, of course, would be too far.

But wasn’t that why we wanted to teach them about the Holocaust in the first place?