Posted on 01/17/2002 10:36:20 PM PST by FreeSpeechConservative
Maybe your posse can explain. I know your own delicate modesty forbids it, but I think they should know what you've done today to help the cause.
STOP, IN THE NAME OF THE HOLOCAUSTBryan Appleyard, Sunday Times (UK), July, 2000
I sometimes think," writes the American academic Dr Norman Finkelstein, "the worst thing that ever happened to the Nazi Holocaust was that American Jewry discovered it." The quotation comes from Finkelstein's explosive and bitterly angry book The Holocaust Industry, to be published here next month. It accuses those who exploit the Holocaust of telling lies, conniving in Israeli atrocities, and of naked greed. The pursuit of reparations from Swiss bankers and others is damned as "an outright extortion racket". The ruthless industrialisation of the Holocaust has encouraged the rebirth of anti-semitism in Europe and the United States. And, in conversation with me, he said the fascination with Holocaust memorials and museums - the latest being the permanent exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum, opened by the Queen last week - was "a kind of circus".
If any of this had been written or said by a non-Jew with no direct experience of the Holocaust, it would have been savaged as anti-semitism or, worse, Holocaust denial. But Finkelstein is a Jew - though non-observant - both of whose parents were survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and concentration camps. All the members of their families were wiped out by the Nazis. Even so, his views make him an outcast among the American Jewish establishment and define him, for many, as an enemy of Israel. So why has he done it?
"I will not have," he shouts down the phone from New York, "the suffering of my parents used for any ulterior purpose, whether it be the prevention of the assimilation of Jews or the defence of Israel."
Finkelstein's father never spoke of his experience, but his mother spoke of little else. Yet, he recalls, even she was disgusted at the rise of the Holocaust industry in America. There were, he says, only 60,000 Jewish survivors of the camps and 20,000 of those died in the first week after liberation. Yet in the 1960s and 1970s many of his parents' friends started claiming to be survivors. Soon everybody was a victim of the great martyrdom.
"I'm not exaggerating when I say that one out of three Jews you stop in the street in New York will claim to be a survivor. And, since 1993, the industry has been claiming that 10,000 survivors have been dying every month. That is completely impossible. It would mean that there were 8m survivors in 1945, but there were only 7m Jews in German-occupied Europe before the war."
Finkelstein says the Holocaust industry was born at the time of the six-day war in June 1967 - before that both the Holocaust and Israel were scarcely mentioned in American public life. But it was not born, as many have said, out of fear for the survival of Israel; rather it sprang from American strategic interests. Israel became the American surrogate in the Middle East and the Holocaust was evoked morally to justify the alliance. Israel became the defender of US values and, since America at that time was losing the Vietnam war, it was a more effective defender than America herself.
The American Jewish elite embraced the cause of Israel and created the contemporary image of the Holocaust. Finkelstein highlights the power of this elite by pointing out that Jewish income is almost double that of non-Jews, 16 of the 40 wealthiest Americans are Jews, 40% of Nobel prizewinners in science and economics are Jewish, 20% of professors at main universities are Jewish, as are 40% of partners in law firms in New York and Washington.
Led by campaigners such as Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Wiesel - Finkelstein claims the latter gets a minimum lecture fee of $25,000 plus chauffeured limousine - the industry insists on the unique nature of the atrocity. It can be compared, they say, to nothing else. Finkelstein - rightly, I believe - identifies this as the intellectual heart of the matter.
Wiesel and others insist that the Holocaust stands outside history and rational discussion. The only final response is silent incomprehension. This position has become so extreme that any attempt to compare it with other episodes of human cruelty - Finkelstein mentions the deaths of 10m Africans in the Congo as a result of the Belgian ivory and rubber trade - is often met with accusations of anti-semitism and Holocaust denial.
The result is that America is dotted with Holocaust museums and memorials, but there is none for the many more victims of communism. There is not one even for the gypsies and the mentally and physically disabled who died under Nazism. Finkelstein says that a higher proportion of the gypsy population of Europe died than of the Jewish.
And, at his most scathing, Finkelstein points out that there are no memorials to the millions who died in the slave trade or in the genocidal campaign against the American Indians. The presence of the Holocaust Museum in Washington "is particularly incongruous in the absence of a museum commemorating crimes in the course of American history".
"My parents would never have claimed that the Holocaust was unique," he says, "they would have said that it made them sympathetic to the suffering of other oppressed people."
The danger of the uniqueness argument is that it blinds us to the possibility of other forms of evil. People see the Holocaust museums and memorials, they see the face of Hitler, and they think that that is what evil is like. The truth is that evil also wore the masks of Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot. And, if we are convinced that evil must wear jackboots and a little moustache, we may not recognise it the next time round.
Finkelstein adds that the leaders of the Holocaust industry use the uniqueness argument to convince themselves of their own virtue. If this particular suffering and martyrdom were worse than any other for the victims - including indirect victims such as contemporary Jews and the whole state of Israel - then who dare say a word against the moral stature of those who daily remind us?
So is he right? Well, in one key sense, he must be. The Holocaust cannot be unique. Every starved, tortured and murdered person, of any race, has something in common with the victims of Auschwitz. The idea that one historical event is different from all others is plainly irrational. It is also dangerous because it silences discussion and analysis of the Holocaust, and when that happens we lose our ability to learn anything.
"The challenge today," writes Finkelstein, "is to restore the Nazi Holocaust as a rational subject of inquiry . . . The abnormality of the Nazi Holocaust springs not from the event itself but from the exploitive industry that has grown up around it . . . The noblest gesture for those who perished is to preserve their memory, learn from their suffering and let them, finally, rest in peace."
But is he right that the Holocaust industry is entirely self-serving, corrupt and destructive? It is true that it has produced absurd fantasists like Binjamin Wilkomirski, who have persuaded publishers and scholars of the truth of their fabricated tales of survival under the Nazis. Many of the claims of those who pursue reparations are plainly outrageous, and I do not doubt that the political ruthlessness with which many of these claims have been enforced is, as Finkelstein says, encouraging a new wave of anti-semitism.
But there is, in his book, a serious problem of tone. It is a rant, and Finkelstein is a man obsessed. Those who know nothing of these matters are likely to doubt the scholarship that underpins such savagely expressed conviction. They may also feel that there cannot be that much wrong with the desire to remember the 5.1m - Finkelstein's figure is typically fewer than the 6m claimed by others - who were unquestionably murdered by the Nazis. However questionable the intellectual climate that inspired it, the Imperial War Museum's exhibition is an impressively sombre experience that cannot be gainsaid. It happened, and this is how it happened. It is a fair criticism to say that other awful things happened, and they should be remembered, but that does not in itself deny the legitimacy of the exhibition. Finkelstein would have been more persuasive if he had accepted that much of his opposition's case.
Nevertheless, his attack on the Holocaust industry could well have far-reaching effects. An acceptance of his broad case would, ultimately, weaken American support for Israel, as it would undermine the sympathy created by the idea of the unique suffering of the Jews. It might also, by removing the cultural adhesive of the Holocaust experience, accelerate the process of assimilation - the dilution of Jewish identity primarily by "marrying out" - which has already resulted in the "loss" of millions of diaspora Jews in the United States and elsewhere.
Finkelstein is not too concerned about either of these outcomes. He would like the Israeli case to be more rationally considered and, though he acknowledges the ethnic loss involved in assimilation, he prefers the Martin Luther King position that people should come together irrespective of the colour of their skin, their race or their beliefs.
I'm not so sure. I like the Jews and I like Israel and I do not have to close my eyes to its shortcomings. If the Holocaust has become a brand name - which, I agree, it has - then that is a big problem. But there are some babies you really don't throw out with the bathwater, and Jewishness is one of them.
I'll see what I can find.
If I remember correctly, we were in support of Israel at this UN confab of some sort but -- due to some dust-up or crisis -- it was cut short before they managed to christen, so to speak, this bit of Newspeak.
It is self-justifying and self-authenticating. It submits to no proof, and its moral authority is absolute, annihilating all qualifiers. IOW, it is god.
Best regards to the both of you.
Pius XII was praised by many of those instrumental in establishing Israel. Golda Meir, for example, may not be conservative, but she was hardly anti-Israel. Most of the criticism started in the 60s and was inspired by a fictional play called The Deputy. I can't remember the author's name, but he was definitely no conservative.
The most revealing and true post you have even made, tex! Tells us all what we need to know.
LOL. Defending a Holocaust denier. Amazing...!! A man who is on the fringe, a nutball.
Just as I have no problems pointing out when conservatives are dead wrong, I have no problems recognizing when leftists are absolutely correct.
It's an operation of human conscience that, indeed, folks from entirely different countries (as far as politics or faith or culture or intelligence or education are concerned) can indeed together both apprehend and defend the truth.
I don't expect you to understand that at all.
Just as I don't understand why you and your more hateful fellows are allowed to continue polluting this board with the lies and hate you spew ... supreme in your confidence that there are special rules for Victims and that Victims -- be they women who avail themselves of a mother-only right to homicide or blacks who rely on quotas and the race card to be "equal" -- can never be held to the same standards of fair play or justice the rest of us must follow as we lower the bar for you.
"As most scholars acknowledge, the Church's shameful trafficking in anti-Semitism was based on an ancient theological rejection of the tenets of Judaism. The Nazis' anti-Semitism, in contrast, was based on a modern racial notion of Aryan superiority. Did the one feed the other in the popular discourse? Of course. Are they morally indistinguishable? Of course not. To believe that Jews should be converted is not the same as believing they should be exterminated. Hitler understood this, which is why he tried to use the Church's social conservatism before aiming to destroy the Church itself. The Church itself articulated this distinction in its own Encyclical, read from every German pulpit. It argued that race, no different from "time, space [and] country," could never be a basis for morality. Did some Catholics traffic in racial anti-semitism? Yes, they did, and it even infected some formal publications. But was this ever Catholic doctrine? No. Goldhagen both concedes this point at the beginning of his screed and then, by rhetorical sleights of hand, insists upon it by the end. Then, perhaps realizing that an intelligent reader will note that he is having it every which way, he concedes that the overlap is a "figurative ninety percent," which "made little difference." I think that means that there was no relevant difference. What else can it mean?
"Perhaps this smear springs from righteous anger - and, heaven knows, such anger is justified. The Church's cowardly acquiescence in evil warrants anger on a great and enduring scale. But why then does Goldhagen want to go one step further and argue that there is no moral difference between sins of omission and commission, that, in his words, "not to choose is to choose"? It is here that one notices the ugly tropes in the piece. Although German Protestantism was in many ways more viciously anti-Semitic than German Catholicism, and, in contrast to Catholicism, a few Protestants actually fused themselves with the Nazis, Goldhagen all but ignores them. The Pope is a more tempting target, especially in a culture where anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice. Nor will any Catholic be unaware of the ancient slur that the papacy is an instrument of the anti-Christ. It is a staple of street bigots. Goldhagen deploys it more than once. In fact, he argues that the Church was actually "serving" a human anti-Christ, i.e. Hitler, and that "any evaluation of the Catholic Church as a moral institution must centrally" take that into account. The anti-Christ, huh? The last time I heard that was when I was being jeered in my Protestant high school in England. The sources change. The smears remain the same. But now they call them scholarship."
How can one claim that he thinks that the jews are to blame for the holocaust and at the same time claim that he is a holocaust denier?
On a seperate note, Holocaust denying is a serious charge. If you can, please post any article or quote by him that denies the holocaust. Thanks.
She accomplishes what the real Jew-haters could never do; too bad you--like her--cannot see that. Sad.
Enlighten me. I am interested in what you have to say.
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