ZGram - 8/19/2004 - "Paul Eisen: Jewish Power" - Part III

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

August 19, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Part III of Paul Eisen's essay gets to the crux of the Revisionist 
struggle that ought to become the crux of not only America's but the 
world's struggle if ever there is to be an end to the spiritual 
blackmail hitched on the so-called "Holocaust".

[START]

Jewish America

In Washington, D.C. is a memorial to a terrible tragedy. Not a 
memorial to a tragedy visited on Americans by a foreign power as at 
Pearl Harbour or 9/11, nor to a tragedy visited by Americans on 
Americans such the sacking of Atlanta. Nor is it a memorial of 
contrition to a tragedy inflicted by Americans onto another people, 
such as to slavery or to the history of racial injustice in America. 
It is to none of these. The Holocaust memorial is to a tragedy 
inflicted on people who were not Americans, by people who were not 
Americans, and in a place a very long way from America. And the 
co-religionists or, even, if you like, the co-nationals, of the 
people on whom the tragedy was visited and to whom the memorial is 
built make up around two percent of the American population. How is 
it that a group of people who make up such a tiny percentage of the 
overall American population can command such respect and regard that 
a memorial to them is built in the symbolic heart of American 
national life?

The Jewish narrative is now at the centre of American life, certainly 
that of its cultural and political elites. There is, anyway, much in 
the way that Americans choose to see themselves and their history 
which is quite naturally compatible with the way Jews see themselves 
and their history. What more fitting paradigm for a country founded 
on immigration, than the story of the mass immigration of Jews at the 
end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? For many 
Americans, the story of those Jews who came to their Goldenes Medina, 
their Golden Land, with nothing and, through hard work and 
perseverance, made it to the very top of American society, is also 
their story. Similarly, what greater validation for a country founded 
on a narrative of conquest and ethnic cleansing than the Biblical 
narrative of the conquest and ethnic cleansing of the Promised Land 
with the addition of the equally violent settlement of modern 
Palestine with its own ethnic cleansing and then "making the desert 
bloom"? And what could be more inspirational for a country, if not 
officially but still viscerally, deeply Christian than the story of 
the Jews, Jesus' own people and God's chosen people, returning to 
their ancient homeland and transforming it into a modern state. And 
for a nation which sees itself as a beacon of democracy in the world, 
what better international soul-mate than the state of Israel, widely 
held to be "the only democracy in the Middle-East"?


  "The Jews"


Most resonant, of course, is the notion of Jews as a suffering 
people. The fact that this "suffering people" is now enjoying a 
success beyond the dreams of any other ethnic group in America seems 
irrelevant. Also ignored is how American Jews have made it to the 
very top of American society whilst, every step of the way, 
complaining about how much they're being discriminated against. 
Nonetheless, to America, Jews have an enduring and ongoing history of 
suffering and victimhood. But this history has rarely been examined 
or even discussed.

A Suffering People

That Jews have suffered is undeniable, but Jewish suffering is 
claimed to have been so enduring, so intense and so particular that 
it is to be treated differently from other sufferings.

The issue is complex and cannot be fully debated or decided here but 
the following points may stimulate thought and discussion.

- During even the most terrible times of Jewish suffering such as the 
Crusades or the Chmielnitzky  massacres of seventeenth century 
Ukraine, and even more so at other times in history, it has been said 
that the average peasant would have given his eye-teeth to be a Jew. 
The meaning is clear: generally speaking, and throughout most of 
their history, the condition of Jews was often far superior to the 
mass of the population.

- The above-mentioned Ukrainian massacres took place in the context 
of a peasant uprising against the oppression of the Ukrainian 
peasantry by their Polish overlords. As has often been the case, Jews 
were seen as occupying a traditional position of being in alliance 
with the ruling class in their oppression of the peasantry. 
Chmielnitzky, the leader of this popular uprising, is today a 
Ukrainian national hero, not for his assaults on Jews (there are even 
references to his having offered poor Jews to join the uprising 
against their exploitative co-religionists - the Jews declined) but 
for his championing of the rights of the oppressed Ukrainians. 
Again, the inference is plain: outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence, 
though never justified, have often been responses to Jewish behaviour 
both real and imaginary.

- In the Holocaust three million Polish Jews died, but so did three 
million non-Jewish Poles. Jews were targeted but so were Gypsies, 
homosexuals, Slavs and Poles. Similarly, the Church burned Jews for 
their dissenting beliefs but then the church burned everyone for 
their dissenting beliefs. So again, the question must be asked: 
what's so special about Jewish suffering?

The Holocaust, the paradigm for all anti-Semitism and all Jewish 
suffering, is treated as being beyond examination and scrutiny. 
Questioning the Holocaust narrative is, at best, socially 
unacceptable, leading often to social exclusion and discrimination, 
and, at worst, in some places is illegal and subject to severe 
penalty.  Holocaust revisionist scholars, named Holocaust deniers by 
their opponents, have challenged this. They do not deny a brutal and 
extensive assault on Jews by the Nazi regime but they do deny the 
Holocaust narrative as framed by present day establishments and 
elites. Specifically, their denial is limited to three main areas. 
First, they deny that there ever was an official plan on the part of 
Hitler or any other part of the Nazi regime systematically and 
physically to eliminate every Jew in Europe; second, they deny that 
there ever existed homicidal gas-chambers; third, they claim that the 
numbers of Jewish victims of the Nazi assault have been greatly 
exaggerated.

But none of this is the point. Whether those who question the 
Holocaust narrative are revisionist scholars striving to find the 
truth and shamelessly persecuted for opposing a powerful faction, or 
whether they are crazy Jew-haters denying a tragedy and defaming its 
victims, the fact is that one may question the Armenian genocide, one 
may freely discuss the Slave Trade, one can say that the murder of 
millions of Ibos, Kampucheans and Rwandans never took place and that 
the moon is but a piece of green cheese floating in space, but one 
may not question the Jewish Holocaust. Why? Because, like the rest of 
the Jewish history of suffering, the Holocaust underpins the 
narrative of Jewish innocence which is used to bewilder and befuddle 
any attempt to see and to comprehend Jewish power and responsibility 
in Israel/Palestine and elsewhere in the world.

[END]

Tomorrow:  Part IV of Paul Eisen's treatise.