Moving right along the Schulman essay that talks about the ever-present "Holocaustology" - and how it fosters, rather than diminishes, the much-feared "Antisemitism" on the contemporary scene:
Schulman:
In the world of Ms Ringelheim, the Holocaust becomes a means to other ends. It's important for Holocaustology to show, for example, that the Nazis were sexists as well as butchers; that the extermination of the Jews has to be put in historical context with other persecutions; that persons of color and members of the working class lived in Auschwitz-like conditions before and after the historical Holocaust. More recently, another feminist scholar has re-examined Anne Frank's diaries and discovered that had Ms. Frank escaped the crematorium, she might well, with luck, have become a lesbian.
Zundelsite:
The Anne Frank Diary in the German language for years censored out Anne's sexual awakening, sexual escapades etc. because it ". . . would offend German readers." The Swedish version contained far more sexually explicit passages. And recently there was a newer version with padded passages of older ones with content I was told is mildly pornographic. How many "Anne Franks" are there?
Schulman:
In America, in one "mission statement" after another, universities advertise their "Holocaust and Genocide Studies" programs as specific remedies for Holocaust relapse. The University of Minnesota declares that the basic purpose of Holocaust studies is "to educate people to be sensitive and vigilant toward behavior with potential for a Holocaust." (as if genocides lurked around unlit alleys in downtown St. Paul).
Zundelsite:
Can you not feel the paranoia on display in some of these mission statements? Or is it that minds guilty of lies fear being exposed? Thus, better to stifle all criticism with a pre-emptory ". . . if you talk like that, you will create another Holocaust"?
Schulman:
A Minnesota instructor, Lucy Smith, is actively opposed to the role of history in this enterprise. She wonders, I think rather unfairly, whether "teaching about, for example, The Night of St. Bartolomy in France, ever prevented any other genocide? If our purpose in teaching is to prevent such occurrences, then we need to reach the emotions of the students before teaching them historical facts." As a way, perhaps, of reaching emotions before worrying about facts, the Web site of the Minnesota program offers electronic buttons to press for "educational resources", "visual resources", and the like, in the shape of little ovens built into a brick chimney, which light up when you press them. Perhaps this is to sensitize one to the incineration of a cyber-Holocaust-victim.
Zundelsite:
Click here, and you'll be holocausted! I say that is obscene!
Schulman:
The success of the Holocaust has terrible consequences. It undermines memory of the Holocaust, it puts irresistible pressure on other groups to demand their time in the Holocaust sun: gays, members of the working class, women, descendants of African slaves. It provokes many traditional anti-Semites smilingly to deny that it happened at all, or that it was part of a wider war against civilians of all kinds (and despite their preening, the dry academicism of the Holocaust boffins can do nothing effective to counter this odd propaganda).
Steadily focusing on the Holocaust without its historical accidental origins produces a whole new set of myths --- quite apart from the myth that the Holocaust did not happen.
Zundelsite:
This is getting pretty close to becoming a Revisionist piece if the writer keeps it up!
Schulman:
But these myths have all become more prevalent not less as Holocaustology has taken root: That Churchill or Roosevelt or Pope Pius XII or the American Jewish community could have done something substantial to rescue the Jews from Hitler, but deliberately declined; that the second world war was undertaken on behalf of the Jews; that Germany was occupied and dismembered in order to punish her for her treatment of the Jews (an idea advanced--horrifyingly-- by Professor Goldhagen of Harvard this spring), that eternal vigilance against something called fascism will prevent future holocausts, when in fact one might argue, that genocide - or massacre of whole classes - only becomes a necessary part of the ideology of class warfare, and has taken place - and will yet take place - wherever radical socialist regimes take sway, as in China, Russia, and Cambodia; that the Nazi holocaust was, far from being the conclusion of an historical inevitability, as accidental a disaster as has ever befallen the Jewish people; that nothing like the Nazi holocaust has ever happened before to the Jews.
Zundelsite:
Accidental disaster? Nothing like the Nazi Holocaust ever happened before to the Jews? That man is one step away from seeing the light.
Schulman:
Again, it is a sad fact of Jewish history that near-complete extinction of Jewish communities within greater or lesser areas is a commonplace. That "no G-d could have permitted Auschwitz" is falsified by the other horrors the Jews have horribly endured, from almost the beginning of their history, at the hands of greater powers, most of whom have utterly perished.
Zundelsite:
So why not ask the obvious question: Why do these Holocaust, ever recurring in different times, eras, cultures, empires, always only happen to Jews? Why not to the Egyptians? The Persians? The Babylonians? The Romans? Why for 5000 years - always to the Jews? What is the one constant there? Could it not be their own behavior which is offensive to their host nations?
Schulman:
Finally, there is the awful end-point of Holocaust studies: In an unintended imitation of the Nazi butchers, holocaust historians engage in the intimate examination of the unspeakable lives of Jews in the death camps before they were butchered as if they were scientists observing gnats or flies. If ever there was a way to re-dehumanize the victims of the Nazis, this is it. But such is the logic of the professionalization of "Holocaustology": First perish, then publish-or-perish.
Zundelsite:
Why not consult John Sack's book, An Eye for an Eye? It is a typical and shocking proof of this thesis.
Schulman:
The Talmud vividly warns that the Torah must not be made merely into an instrument for something other than itself: "Do not make the Torah a crown wherewith to magnify thyself, or a spade wherewith to dig." The Holocaust, which should be held sacred, is in danger of becoming used as such an instrument.
Zundelsite:
It's not in danger of being used as such an instrument. The whole Holocaust story was created as just such a blunt instrument, suitable for beating all opposition to Jewish ethnocentric striving into compliant silence and submission! The Holocaust is at once the shield and the sword of internationally organized Jewish organizations and the Jewish Lobby.
Schulman:
An American official in Macedonia crowed when Elie Wiesel visited a refugee camp during the Nato bombing campaign, "You need a person like Wiesel to keep your moral philosophy on track." Well, no, you don't.
Wiesel didn't suffer - and millions of his fellow Jews didn't die - in order merely to keep anyone's moral philosophy from going off the rails. And if the Holocaust is subjected to such a feeble purpose, then its point and its very reality may well in time be forgotten and its victims mocked.
Zundelsite:
Wiesel's moral philosophy made him invent geysers of blood springing up and shooting 14 feet into the air from graves of so-called victims months after an equally invented massacre occurred. He is hardly a model to follow.
Ingrid
=====
Thought for the Day:
"A wonderful bird is the pelican
His beak will hold more than his belican."
(Dixon Lanier Merritt)