Conventional Holocaust accounts, although written by both hack writers intent on making a fast buck by selling amazingly lurid victimization accounts, and scholars who knew what was good for their ivory tower existence and demonstrated it with footnotes, stats and charts, were all remarkably simplistic, one-dimensional and "flat". The Nazis were sadists, the Jews suffered greatly, and the world, by and large, didn't care. One book was pretty much like the next and differed only in style and accusatory detail but not in its overall make-up. The hushed and reverential tone for the alleged victims was mandatory in these titles - and most of the writers took heed.
Now there's a change worth noting. A new wind, blowing away the cobwebs of traditional Holocaustomania, has brought to the fore a few quite remarkable titles authored by Jewish writers, who serve as the barometers of what is likely to happen in the future if there is no relief from Big H overload. These titles have a warning undertone that predict in ever so carefully clad language that it behooves the Jewish community to take a long, hard look at what is now their most important fund-raising industry and propaganda weapon.
It is interesting to watch how these writers approach and touch the "hot iron" topic of Holocaust-as-vehicle-to-less-than-noble-ends with carefully gloved hands.
* First, there was "The Seventh Million" by Israeli journalist, Tom Segev, who described with great candor how the State of Israel was conceived, born, and financed on the back of the systematically brainwashed and expertly exploited first post-war generation of Germans. That book, though very important to scholars within the Revisionist field, is little know to average Americans. It was pretty much an in-house publication meant for the Diaspora Holocaust initiates.
One of Segev's major topics and amazingly frank descriptions was how the post-war Germans, on their knees after a lost war amid the ruins of a shattered country, had the reparations racket dictated to them by arrogantly brazen Jewish players who knew how to make use of Germany's desperate situation and played Adenauer, an old, beholden man, like a decrepit fiddle - a man who was in no position to offer substantial resistance. Adenauer signed away the gains of German sweat and labor and harnessed the post-war productivity of Germany's rebuilt factories to build the state of Israel.
* When Norman Finkelstein first published "A Nation On Trial", a skinny little title (co-authored by Bettina Birn) that dealt with Goldhagen's treatment of these issues - and the disgusting industry that feeds on keeping the issue alive - it caused a storm of outrage. Strenuous efforts were made by some powerful Jewish individuals and organizations to have the book banned - or, preferably, not have it appear at all. Here was a member of the tribe calling the kettle black!
* Next, there was Peter Novick of Chicago University - iconoclastic to the hilt. He was almost immediately seen as the "enfant terrible" and quite savagely attacked in print for his book, "The Holocaust in American Life" by the spokespersons for the traditional Holocaust industry. Even though he made short shrift of "Holocaust deniers" and was appropriately deferential to the "Holocaust" per se, Novick argued forcefully that a number of reasons and motives extraneous to the Holocaust itself were responsible for its unhealthy, almost cancerous growth on the American body politic.
Here is a taste of what he said and asked:
Why was the Holocaust a non-event in the first decade or two after the war - and then became ever more of a national preoccupation the farther it moved back in time?
(One answer: Many Jews had a stake in laying low because of their association with and participation in communism, which was one of the major reasons why they were persecuted in Nazi Germany in the first place... or, as Alan Mintz, reviewing the Novick title, put it: "American Jews were especially sensitive because of the association of communism with the Jews, which, in the case of the American branch of the Communist Party and its famous spies was, alas, a canard with some truth to it.")
Novick felt that a reality tonic was needed to the hushed and reverential tones with which the Holocaust took on the coloring of a religion, especially in an America that might begin to wonder why an event so long ago and far away should be accorded such an awareness prominence.
"One will search in vain through the vast literature of totalitarianism," Mr. Novick perceptively points out, "for anything but the most glancing and casual mention of the Holocaust."
Throughout the book, he spoke of a romance with victimhood. How could it possibly be to their advantage, he asked, to be the possessors of the greatest victimhood the world had ever seen?
"Jews were intent," writes Mr. Novick bluntly, "on permanent possession of the Gold Medal in the Victimization Olympics."
* Then there were feature writers such as Podheretz and Guttenplan. I have dealt with the Atlantic Monthly Guttenplan piece before, written in the wake of the Irving-Lipstadt trial. I won't repeat it here. Similarly, John Podheretz, a writer for the New York Post, had salient things to say in an article of April 21, 1999 titled "Crimes of the Holocaustologians".
Speaking of "...the mundanities of academic life - careerism, corruption, naked ambition, and the thin-skinned inability to accept criticism. . . " Podhoretz observes:
"In the past 20 years, Holocaust studies has become a glamorous and exciting field for American academics, as money from Steven Spielberg and others earmarked for Holocaust studies is flowing like cheap wine all across the world."
"Holocaustologians have decided they are beyond reproach and that anyone who dares utter a word of criticism against them is essentially guilty of an intellectual crime against humanity."
"There is something indefinably questionable about making a permanent career out of the murder of 6 million people - especially when they themselves want to believe that they and their field of study are both beyond criticism."
Now we can expect two brand new titles - both in print, as far as I know, but about to come out any minute.
* One is by Brandeis University professor Alan Mintz, who teaches Hebrew literature at Brandeis University and who is completing another book on the Americanization of the Holocaust.
Mintz wrote an insightful article titled "Going for the Gold Medal in the Victimization Olympics: Two books look at the History of America's Ever-Growing Fascination with the Holocaust". (Forward, May 14, 1999)
His quotes are telling also:
"Never has there been an historical event whose memory has grown over time rather than faded."
"(A)wareness of the Holocaust gathered force and inserted itself at the very center, not just of the Jewish community, but of the American nation as a whole."
"It is far less obvious . . .why an event that took place long ago and far away from these shores should come to matter to the nation as a whole."
And, finally:
"Whether the Holocaust will continue to be a "hot" topic is anybody's guess, but, as these works make clear, the role played by the Holocaust in the future will be deeply affected by shifting needs and motives within the Jewish community and without that are not necessarily intrinsic to the event itself. It behooves us all to learn to read the signs."
* The second book is one that Revisionists have eagerly anticipated. Some time after the publication of "A Nation on Trial", word trickled out that author Norman Finkelstein was coming up with even heavier ammunition: this time a book that would deal with the "Holocaust Industry". Revisionists pricked up their ears because the times in which we live demand that if criticism of the Tribe there is to be, one is always safer to quote a tribal criticism.
The new Finkelstein book is about to be made available to the reading public, as announced on the following web page: http://www.versobooks.com/books/cdef/finkelstein_holocaust.shtml>
The title, it turns out, seems on first glance almost an oxymoron: "The Holocaust Industry: The Abuse of Jewish Victims". Has not Ernst Zundel, who first coined the terms "Holocaust industry" and "Holocaust racket" said over and over again that the said industry is victimizing and abusing Gentiles, particularly Germans? He has faced four years of Human Rights Tribunal hearings for far less than what Finkelstein says!
We'll have to wait and see what else he says, but we do get a glimpse of this title's content by the description posted on the above-mentioned website:
In an iconoclastic and controversial new study Norman G. Finkelstein interrogates the conventional accounts of the place the Holocaust has come to occupy in American culture. It was not until the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when Israel's evident strength brought it into line with US foreign policy, that memory of the Holocaust began to acquire the exceptional prominence it enjoys today. Leaders of America's Jewish community were delighted that Israel was now deemed a major strategic asset and, Finkelstein contends, exploited the Holocaust to enhance this new-found status. Their subsequent interpretations of the tragedy are often at variance with actual historical events and are employed to deflect any criticism of Israel and its supporters.
Recalling Holocaust fraudsters such as Jerzy Kosinski and Binyamin Wilkomirski, as well as the demagogic constructions of writers like Daniel Goldhagen, Finkelstein contends that the main danger posed to the memory of Nazism's victims comes not from the rubbish of Holocaust deniers but from prominent, self-proclaimed guardians of Holocaust memory. Scrupulously researched and closely argued, The Holocaust Industry is all the more disturbing and powerful because the issues it deals with are so rarely discussed.
"... this thoroughly documented book is guaranteed to stimulate and provoke. It will be required reading in the continuing war of historians." -- William Quandt, Foreign Affairs, on Norman Finkelstein's Image and Reality
Norman Finkelstein teaches at the City University of New York and contributes to the London Review of Books. He is the author of Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict and (with Ruth Bettina Birn) A Nation on Trial, named a notable book for 1998 by the New York Times Book Review.
For ordering please see:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/cdef/finkelstein_holocaust.shtml
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Thought for the Day:
"This 'one world' will also require a common spiritual foundation, a religious basis. According to an official of the Canadian B'nai Brith organization, Jan J. Kagedan, this will be the Holocaust faith."
(Toronto Star, November 26, 1991)