Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

I had already prepared today's ZGram when I read the BBC News, 26 January article titled "Is there a Holocaust 'Industry'"? And what an article that is! I am saving that one for tomorrow.

There is a sea change of major proportions in mainstream media since David Irving took on the Holocaust Lobby. It is astonishing what's being said. More and more Jewish writers are suddenly discovering what Revisionists have said all along - and they are doing so in the world's mainstream papers.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, for instance, writes for Britain's Guardian, and his last book, The Controversy of Zion, won an American National Jewish Book Award. So you can assume he is definitely ***not*** a Revisionist - though you would never know it by some (though not all) of his statements.

In today's Guardian article, "There's no business like Shoah business: Now New Labour wants to get in on the act," he writes the following:

Wheatcroft:

When that not-very-good dramadoc called Holocaust was showing in 1978, a survey of American high-school children found that many of them believed "Holocaust" to be a Jewish festival, like Hanukkah or Purim. That bleak memory comes back with the news that we are to have an annual Holocaust day, "a day when the country reflects on the terrible and evil deeds in the world," in the words yesterday of Tony Blair.

Zundelsite:

Young Tony Blair, the former rock band member, is already a fossilized specimen, politically speaking. He merely parrots what the Lobby wants him to say. Many call him the Clinton at #10 Downing Street which few will take as a compliment. Ever since NATO - well, never mind!

Wheatcroft:

This is the latest episode in a strange story: not of that appalling event itself, but what has become of it since. For more than 10 years after 1945 there was a period of "denial", when the extermination of the European Jews was undiscussed to a degree which is now hard to believe. Events, notably the Eichmann trial and Israel's 1967 war, when it was thought that there would be a second Jewish catastrophe, changed our consciousness. Today, the Holocaust holds the centre of our attention, with varying consequences. One was the war crimes bill. One old man has been prosecuted, another escaped to Australia, and a third who stood accused has just died.

Zundelsite:

The paragraph above is grazing the heart of the matter: War Crimes bills and such are political bludgeoning clubs, used on old men to fulfill the agenda, fill the coffers of the Lobby and teach the unbelievers they better not step out of line. Note what is glaringly obvious: "The appalling event" is, as the two Zundel trials and now Irving's trial clearly prove, a non-event - as every reasonably well-informed reader by now knows.

Wheatcroft:

Then there is the increasingly weird libel action at the High Court, in which David Irving is suing an American historian. Before the last election the idea of a "Holocaust denial law" was floated with Tony Blair's approval. Had it become reality, it is possible that writers like (possibly) Irving would face criminal prosecution.

Zundelsite:

That's right! For - for not denying but merely doubting or questioning the Holocaust taboo! In neighboring Germany the situation has grown so bizarre that defense attorneys now fear defending the men and women accused of Holocaust denial, because defending them makes them into "deniers" themselves. Some lawyers have actually been told in open court that if they continued casting doubt on the taboo, they would face charges - which is why Dr. Fredrick Töben's lawyer refused to speak in court for his client.

Wheatcroft:

Most striking of all is the boom in Holocaust museums. Washington's museum, where the mechanics of mass-murder are made into what Ian Buruma calls "a rather-too-pretty shrine", with cattle trucks and victims' shoes tastefully lit. There are now such museums in hundreds of American cities, all part of what Peter Novick calls, in the title of his important new book published next month, The Holocaust in American Life. Another museum is in Berlin, and there are plans for one in Manchester.

Zundelsite:

These places stick out like sore thumbs - and are just as exceedingly unpleasant. These horror places will become the visible proof in every city of the most brazen, in-your-face, mendacious groups of liars - with terrible repercussions for its current beneficiaries.

Wheatcroft:

To skeptics, all of this is "the Holocaust industry", or Holocaust chic, or even "Shoah business" (there's no business like ...). Those are harsh phrases, but not unjust when one thinks of the worst examples. Ours is an age when a Taiwan restaurant can decorate its walls with pictures of camp inmates, and when, at the last Olympics the coach of the French synchronized swimming team could announce a new routine "inspired by the Holocaust".

Zundelsite:

The Holocaust exploitation is in full swing - and will sink the racket more surely than six million Revisionist leaflets.

Wheatcroft:

What's so curious about Holocaust consciousness is that timelag. To put it in perspective, imagine that it was the late 1950s, the age rock'n'roll, "never had it so good", Sputnik and beatniks. And then imagine that, at that time, there was a hue and cry to prosecute men for crimes committed during the Boer war. That is the same distance of time as between now and early 1940s, when the great murder took place.

Zundelsite:

This is a mighty useful comparison and shows the utter perversion involved in this grotesque, artificially fostered memory hysteria.

Wheatcroft:

Perhaps there was a case for a memorial day in the immediate shadow of the murder, but why nearly 60 years' afterwards? There is, one must say, something painfully Blairite about the idea. It reeks of gesture politics, form rather than substance, words - "terrible and evil" - rather than action. Perhaps Blair thinks Holocaust day will be a consolation to those fleeing tyrannical persecution here and now, who will be denied refuge by his government's asylum bill.

Zundelsite:

The entire Holocaust business reeks. The persecution of Holocaust deniers reeks. The reparations racket reeks. The politicians' genuflections reek. Denial laws reek. Holocaust memorial days reek. Most of all, the persecution on drummed-up charges of old men in wheelchairs and on stretchers reeks. Shame on our non-Jewish leaders in politics and in the media to lend a hand to such crimes - such extortion, loan sharking, bribery, and obstruction of justice in furtherance of unconscionable "business activities" - all in the name of the ever-present "Holocaust!"

Wheatcroft:

Some writers on this subject have warned of a possible antisemitic reaction. If these things - war crimes bill, denial law, holocaust day - were unarguably just, then calculations about malign side-effects would be irrelevant. But that is not the case. Nor is it the case that critics of those laws were racist bigots (or alternatively "self-hating", for the Jewish critics).

Zundelsite:

For a textbook case of all of the above, we recommend that interested parties study the Human Rights Tribunal Trial in Canada against the Zundelsite - now running for over three years!

Wheatcroft:

And it is not true, either, that only crypto-antisemites, or timorous assimilationists, or Trotskyite anti-Zionists, dislike the whole tenor of "Shoah business". Whatever else Isaiah Berlin was, he was an acutely conscious, self-affirming Jew and Zionist. And, in the words of his biographer Michael Ignatieff, "he actively despised the Holocaust industry and kept his distance from rhetorical invocations his people's horrible fate".

Zundelsite:

Ah yes. But where were such useful folks when people like Ernst Zundel needed them to speak out against this abuse? Sipping champagne with the enemies of freedom?

Wheatcroft:

So did Chaim Bermant, the writer and columnist for the Jewish Chronicle, who died two years ago. He had grown up in a Latvian shtetl, and "could speak with certainty of 22 members of my own family who were done to death". And yet he too despised the industry. He disliked the fashion for Holocaust museums, which gives "a perverse view of Jewish experience, perpetuates Jewish fears, and has a pernicious effect on Jewish life". He criticized both the war crimes bill and the proposed denial law, and would have been contemptuous of Blair's Holocaust day.

Zundelsite:

Who has the courage of Chaim Bermant today? Who supports the words of Norman Finkelstein? Who comes to Irving's aid?

Wheatcroft:

So might Primo Levi, the noblest witness of Auschwitz, whose name is often invoked by toilers in the industry, but who deplored the very word "Holocaust". He had no illusions that human nature had been changed for ever, that it would "not happen again", or that his own great books would rid the world of what Tony Blair mawkishly calls terrible and evil deeds.

"I never like this expression Holocaust," Levi used to say. "It seems to me inappropriate, it seems to me rhetorical, above all mistaken." That is not a bad description of Holocaust day.

Zundelsite:

People like Primo Levi are drowned out by the Holocaust profiteers in a torrent of abuse for all critics. Did you hear Mr. Berenbaum whine in the LA Times today?