The Holocaust Industry

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering
by Victor Sebestyen

(http://www.thisislondon.co.uk)

Doctor Norman Finkelstein, a humanities professor at Columbia University in
New York, claims some Jewish leaders are exploiting the Holocaust and
peddling deliberate lies about Nazi atrocities.

He argues that the pursuit of reparations from Swiss banks and German
industrialists for survivors of the death camps is "an outright extortion
racket" which will result in an increase of anti-semitism in Europe and
America; that the majority of people who claim to have survived the
concentration camps are fakes, and that it is time to call a halt to
building new Holocaust memorials and museums, such as the exhibition opened
by the Queen at the Imperial War Museum last month.

But his most controversial challenge to world Jewry is an attack on the
article of faith held by Jews and gentiles throughout the West - that the
Holocaust was a unique event that cannot be compared with anything else in
history. This belief, argues Finkelstein, which few people dare to
challenge, is ruthlessly being used by Jews to justify Israel's appalling
human rights record and create an environment of fear where nobody, either
in academia or politics, can discuss the Holocaust honestly and rationally.

Only a Jew could have written this book and found a reputable publisher for
it. Only a Jew could have been brave enough to call it The Holocaust
Industry, a title which in itself will cause offence. If David Irving had
made these claims, he might have found himself once again appearing in the
Royal Courts of Justice; the leader of US Muslims Louis Farrakhan would
have been placed by American public opinion even further beyond the pale
and if Jörg Haider had spoken like this, he would have ensured yet harsher
EU sanctions against Austria.

Yet it is hard to level against Finkelstein one of the vilest charges that
can be made against anybody in a liberal democracy: Holocaust denial. His
father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and Nazi death camps
and all the rest of their family were exterminated at Treblinka. He is a
product of the Holocaust, which, he claims, is why he is battling against
its use "not to remember Jewish martyrdom, but for the purposes of Jewish
aggrandizement".

Finkelstein's tone is often angry and scathing. Sometimes he over-states
his case or uses language so far removed from normal academic discourse
that some might be tempted to doubt his credentials. But he deserves to be
heard, and not only because of his background. He is making some profound
points that many younger and more thoughtful Jews have quietly been
attempting to debate, but whose voices have been stilled by the
establishment, particularly in the US.

History Lessons

The Holocaust, he argues, was barely mentioned in America, or anywhere
outside the Jewish State, for the first two decades after the war, when
memories were freshest. "I do not remember the Nazi Holocaust ever
intruding on my childhood. The main reason for this was that no one outside
my family seemed to care about what happened," he says.

It was only after the Six-Day War in 1967 that the Holocaust "industry"
began to boom. "I sometimes think that the worst thing that ever happened
to the Nazi Holocaust was that American Jewry discovered it."

This "discovery", insists Finkelstein, had nothing to do with fear for the
survival of Israel, which after all had spectacularly smashed its enemies
in under a week and occupied land along its borders seven times its own size.

The Holocaust was "reinvented" mainly to underpin US strategic interests.
Israel became America's surrogate in the Middle-East and the Holocaust was
used to justify the alliance and, later, Israel's policy towards its Arab
neighbours.

"The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon.
Through its deployment, one of the world's most formidable powers, with a
horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a 'victim state' and the
most influential 'ethnic group' in the US has likewise acquired victim
status.

"Considerable dividends accrue from this specious victimhood - in
particular immunity to criticism, however justified. Those enjoying this
immunity have not escaped the moral corruptions that typically attend it."

Holocaust ideology

It was the US Jewish elite which turned the Nazi holocaust into the
Holocaust. Here Finkelstein enters his most controversial waters and treads
on the most tender sensibilities. Jewish leaders, led by people such as
Simon Wiesenthal and Elie Wiesel, argue that the Nazi extermination of the
Jews was a unique event - and uniquely irrational. Weisel, for example, has
maintained that it is a "religious mystery " unknowable and inexplicable.
That, Finkelstein claims viciously, doesn't stop Weisel charging a standard
$25,000 plus a chauffeur-driven car on the lecture circuit in an attempt to
explain it.

So entrenched is the belief in the uniqueness of Hitler's crimes against
the Jews that even to challenge it, according to some powerful academics
such as Deborah Lipstadt - victor over David Irving in the libel courts -
amounts to Holocaust denial. Yet the conviction is itself irrational,
argues Finkelstein. No historical event is unique. And, dangerously, it
leads to myth-making and distortion.

The uniqueness claim also gives Jews an undeserved "sovereignty over
suffering" and Hitler a place in demonology categorically different from
Stalin, Mao Tse Tung or Pol Pot. This political correctness has become so
extreme on some campuses that to compare the Nazi death camps with an
atrocity such as the slaughter of 10 million Africans in the Congo as a
result of the Belgian ivory and rubber trade, is met with accusations of
Holocaust denial.

The "industry" has built dozens of Holocaust memorials and museums
throughout the world, yet there isn't one to the handicapped victims of
Nazism. A higher proportion of Europe's gipsies than Jews were slaughtered
claims Finkelstein, and there's no memorial to them. Washington DC has a
big Holocaust museum, but nothing for victims of the slave trade or of the
genocide against American Indians.

Holocaust Fraud

Among the reams of schlock (Finkelstein's word) in Holocaust literature,
there are lies - most notoriously Benjamin Wilkomirski's book Partings,
written in the Seventies, which became a huge best-seller and a vital text
in the "industry". Wilkomirski claimed to have been a child survivor of
Auschwitz, when in fact he isn't Jewish and spent the war growing up
quietly in Switzerland.

Thousands of others falsely claim to be survivors of death camps, claims
Finkelstein. There were, he says, about 100,000 when war ended, and about a
quarter died within two months. Yet the "industry" has claimed that since
the early Nineties, 10,000 have been dying a month. "It would mean there
were eight million in 1945, but there were only seven million Jews in
German-occupied Europe before the war."

Blood Money

Finkelstein is most scathing about the business end of the industry. "The
current campaign...to extort money from Europe in the name of 'needy
Holocaust victims' has shrunk the moral stature of their martyrdom to that
of a Monte Carlo casino," he writes. Switzerland and Germany were the
target of a "shakedown". After a 15-year battle, the Swiss banks last year
agreed to pay more than $200million in compensation for "blood money"
allegedly looted from Jewish Holocaust victims before and during the last
war. The figure, he argues, was far less than the $7 billion to $20 billion
victims had claimed in a series of court actions and probably five times
higher than was actually due.

Finkelstein says little of the money will ever be seen by victims; like
much of the $12billioncompensation paid by Germany over the past 50 years,
Jewish organisations will use it to open more museums and set up more
departments of Holocaust studies at universities.

In the US, maintains Finkelstein, the Holocaust is "taught" at schools and
colleges in far greater depth than the Civil War, the defining moment of US
history. The pursuit now of compensation from former Eastern bloc countries
such as Poland shows the "industry" has "gone berserk". It could fuel
antisemitism that already shows dangerous signs of increasing.

Finkelstein concludes: "The challenge today is to restore the Holocaust as
a rational subject of inquiry. Only then can we really learn from it. The
abnormality of the Nazi Holocaust springs not from the event itself but
from the exploitative industry that has grown 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."

It's a stirring call. But peace is the last thing that will break out among
Jewry with the publication of this book.

(The Holocaust Industry, Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish
Suffering, is published by Verso on 20 July.)


Louis Proyect

The Marxism mailing-list: http://www.marxmail.org