eBay and the Question of Holocaust Memoribilia

Image: BSkyB

The mock-horror and fake outrage that greeted the news that online auction site eBay does good business selling mementos from the Holocaust was, of course, all-too-predictable. 

When will the editors of The Mail on Sunday simply admit that such trade - just like child pornography - is inevitable in a free market in which, as Marx pointed out long ago, all values are resolved into exchange value and all objects and events are commodified and given price tags.

Capitalism doesn't care about respecting the memory of the dead anymore than it cares about the rights of the living. It is systematically amoral and inhuman: everything is permissible. To paraphrase Marx once more, under capitalism all the sensitive bonds and small kindnesses that tie us together are dissolved until all that's left is shameless greed, naked self-interest, and callous cash payment. 

Money is substituted by capitalism for the very notion of a social code and the possibility of living a good life. And whilst love of money may not be the root of all evil, it certainly doesn't seem to encourage ethical behaviour. And so it is that traders have no qualms about adding a small bar code beneath the yellow Star of David attached to the striped uniforms of death camp inmates.

It's a financial solution to the awkward question of genocide: what shall we do with the remains? Nazis everywhere will be smiling ...