“The Maxim that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it applies to those Jews who refuse to come to terms with the Jewish past: they have become its slaves and are repeating it in Zionist and Israeli policies. The State of Israel now fulfils towards the oppressed peasants of many countries – not only in the Middle East but also far beyond it – a role not unlike that of the Jews in pre-1795 Poland: that of a bailiff to the imperial oppressor.”
– Israel Shahak, The Causes of Hostility Towards Jews: An Historical Overview
For seeking the truth about any controversial subject we must surely have the freedom to question everything without fear of reprisal from cherished beliefs. Otherwise, ignorance and chaos multiply instead of courageous soul-searching which promotes knowledge and awareness for all. However, getting past those beliefs so often wired in by trauma and political expediency is a huge challenge indeed…
Contrary to accusations of anti-Semitism and the label of “holocaust denier” Historian Mark Weber disputes both of these labels acknowledging the catastrophe that was visited upon Jews by Hitler. He does not deny that the holocaust took place, rather he questions the evidence of an official extermination program which admittedly has little documented evidence and when set against an historical predisposition for propaganda that has traditionally paid dividends, demands a rigorous investigation. While questions should always be asked about the beliefs and predispositions of revisionists, the vast majority do not deny the Holocaust or harbour admiration for the Nazi Third Reich, but place the onus on rigorous research which must have a place in holocaust studies without the reflex accusations of “anti-Semite!”. The facts, after all, should speak for themselves.
Professor Norman G. Finkelstein illustrated deep awareness on this matter when he commented on David Irving, historian and Holocaust revisionist: “Irving, notorious as an admirer of Hitler and sympathiser with German National Socialism, has nevertheless made an ‘indispensable’ contribution to our knowledge of World War II.” [1]
One of the most shocking and tragic events of the 20th Century was the holocaust perpetrated by Germany’s Nazi Third Reich from 1933–1945. Up to six million Jews were said to have been murdered by the regime. It was a powerful mythological event in Jewish consciousness which has continued to play a part in defining their identity as a “chosen people”. Yet, it is also true that there were Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, Romani gypsies, Slavic, Polish and Soviet civilians that were intentionally murdered by the Nazi regime with estimates reaching ten to eleven million. This is quite apart from millions of lives lost during the War as a whole. Therefore, it begs the question: why has this been eclipsed in favour of a strictly Jewish and Zionist historical narrative?
The birth of Israel in 1948 led to the joining at the hip of the nation State and holocaust victims – a loss and a legendary gain. Many commentators draw our attention to the fact that as a matter of historic record, the Zionists were more than happy to sacrifice millions of Jews as long as the creation of Israel could be guaranteed. (That part of history doesn’t generally get taught in History classes yet gives ample opportunity to make a distinction between the ordinary Jew and the extremism of Revisionist Zionism). In the intervening post war years, shock and grief still held sway and the Jewish battle lines to create the mantle of “sole sufferers” would develop over the following decades. As Professor of History at Indiana University, Edward T. Lilenthal observed: “what came to be known as the Holocaust was often indistinguishable, in the immediate post-war years, from the millions of non-combatant casualties due to terror bombings of civilian populations, epidemic illness, or starvation. It was considered by most as simply part of the horror of war.” The holocaust was barely talked about and remained a marginal topic of interest in part due to a “war-weary American public” and the understandable wishes of those who witnessed the concentration camp horrors to put it all behind them. [2]
The fusing of the holocaust and the modern state of Israel served to nourish a new and negative Jewish identity, of the martyr grafted onto an already potent ancestral legacy of fear, anger, guilt and revenge; where Jewish tribalism would once more become clearly defined. At the same time, holocaust survivors were uncomfortable in Israel since they were reminders of the depths of Nazi evil as well as the possible shame and guilt that settled upon Jewish consciousness when faced with accusations of no resistance, thus conforming to the stereotypes of passive Jews. Much of Israel did not extend sympathy to holocaust survivors, the results of which are still felt to this day. [3] By the time the victory of the1967 Arab war had been achieved a new Jewish confidence and historical identity was born anew but the industry of victimhood and its myth-making machine would continue apace at the political level.
One of Hitler’s avowed aims was to turn Eastern Europe into part of greater Germany as Slavs and Poles were seen as ethnically inferior and deemed eminently expendable for the Nazi New World Order. The issue of collaboration has had a distinctly Jewish precedent in World War II unlike many other non-Jewish prisoners of war.[4] It was not an isolated dynamic but a common phenomenon which makes the pernicious attacks from Zionists that Christians, ethnic Poles and the allies did not do enough to save Jews somewhat diluted. Polish people were treated by the Nazis as equally deserving of annihilation with up to 2.8 million ethnic, non-Jewish poles perishing throughout World War II. [5] It seems many Jewish people still harbour a hostile perception of Poles and Slavs as somehow competing for the trophy of who suffered more. Their plight has largely been forgotten as Mark Weber notes:
“… there are no American memorials, ‘study centers,’ or annual observances for the victims of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, even though it is well established that Stalin’s victims vastly outnumber Hitler’s … The Holocaust has become both a flourishing business and even a kind of new religion for many Jews.
While we are endlessly told that the Germans murdered six million European Jews during the Second World War… the public is kept largely ignorant of the conflict’s non-Jewish victims. If you ask an average, reasonably educated American: ‘How many European Jews were killed by the Nazis during World War II?’ the almost automatic answer is, of course, six million. But if you ask that same person: How many Americans lost their lives in the Second World War, or, for that matter, how many British, or Chinese, or Germans, died, the response is usually an admission of ignorance.” [6]
Israel Shahak in a letter to an editor explains how reality regarding Jewish involvement in the Second World War has been systematically ignored and obscured by myth. As a survivor of both the Warsaw ghetto in Poland and then in Bergen-Belsen, he offers: “an immediate example of the total ignorance of daily life during the Holocaust: In the Warsaw ghetto, even during the period of the first massive extermination (June to October 1943), one saw almost no German soldiers.”
Shahak continues:
Nearly all the work of administration, and later the work of transporting hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths, was carried out by Jewish collaborators.
Before the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the planning of which only started after the extermination of the majority of Jews in Warsaw), the Jewish underground killed, with perfect justification, every Jewish collaborator they could find. If they had not done so the Uprising could never have started.
The majority of the population of the Ghetto hated the collaborators far more than the German Nazis. Every Jewish child was taught, and this saved the lives of some them “if you enter a square from which there are three exits, one guarded by a German SS man, one by an Ukrainian and one by a Jewish policeman, then you should first try to pass the German, and then maybe the Ukrainian, but never the Jew”. […]
It is clear that such events were not exclusive to the Jews, the entire Nazi success in easy and continued rule over millions of people stemmed from the subtle and diabolical use of collaborators, who did most of the dirty work for them. But does anybody now know about this?
This, and not what is ‘instilled’ was the reality. […]
Therefore, if we knew a little of the truth about the Holocaust, we would at least understand (with or without agreeing) why the Palestinians are now eliminating their collaborators. That is the only means they have if they wish to continue to struggle against our limb-breaking regime. [7]
There are revisionist historians who have some interesting, if not compelling arguments regarding the statistics, numbers and logistical evidence concerning the methods of extermination that call into question a number of previously consensual conclusions. Even the existence of gas chambers and their quota of alleged deaths has been questioned not just by those whose pro-Hitler bias and right wing credentials are obvious, but by those simply interested in uncovering the truth. Professor Norman Cohn in his historical account of the Jewish Holocaust, Warrant for Genocide noted: “Only about a third of the civilians killed by the Nazis and their accomplices were Jews … Other peoples were marked out for decimation, subjugation, and enslavement, and the civilian losses of some of these [countries] amounted to 11 per cent to 12 per cent of the total population.” Other respected Jewish scholars have arrived at similar figures. [8]
This does not mean that mass extermination took place but exaggeration, distortion and even habitual deception on this issue determines the outcome of how well the mythology of victimhood stays alive.[9] This does not help anyone – least of all Jewish people.
But it does prove useful for Zionists.
More and more Jewish and non-Jewish academics are beginning to see that the Holocaust has become a lucrative industry of the most cynical kind where private mourning and genuine loss has been coerced towards a public spectacle of exploitation. How are we to challenge this distortion when our cultures are saturated in a exclusively Jewish rendering of World War II and the holocaust? As James Young so eloquently phrased it: “Instead of learning about the Holocaust through the large lens of Jewish history, many Jews and non-Jews in America now learn the whole of Jewish history through the lens of the Holocaust.”[10]
“There is no way a non-Jew could say what I did in “The Holocaust Industry” without being labeled a holocaust denier. I am labeled a holocaust denier too.” – Norman G. Finkelstein
Professor Norman G. Finkelstein’s 2000 bestseller The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering bravely addresses this very fact. Unsurprisingly, it created a firestorm of controversy on its publication which, along with his other books on Zionism and Israeli policy, led to the loss of his job at Hunter College and the denial of his tenure at Depaul University in 2007. In 2008, the Israeli government deported Finkelstein and banned him from entering the Jewish state for ten years. [11]
The professor remains a thorn in the side of Jewish extremism due to his impeachable credentials. Though his parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps, every other member of his family on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis. When his book was published in 2000 The Guardian with uncharacteristic boldness ran two lengthy extracts from the introduction.
Finkelstein opined that:
… too many public and private resources have been invested in memorialising the Nazi genocide. Most of the output is worthless, a tribute not to Jewish suffering but to Jewish aggrandisement. The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon. Through its deployment, one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a ‘victim’ state, and the most successful ethnic group in the US has likewise acquired victim status. Considerable dividends accrue from this specious victimhood – in particular, immunity to criticism, however justified.
The time is long past to open our hearts to the rest of humanity’s sufferings. This was the main lesson my mother imparted. I never once heard her say: ‘Do not compare.’ My mother always compared. In the face of the sufferings of African-Americans, Vietnamese and Palestinians, my mother’s credo always was: ‘We are all holocaust victims.’” [12]
Finkelstein outlines a number of disturbing patterns in the exploitation of suffering, one of which is the pattern of corruption and embezzlement of Holocaust victims’ financial reparations. One particular chapter of his book which caused international outrage (mostly from those who stood to lose from being exposed) was the documentation of the holocaust industry’s blackmail of European governments for supposed holocaust victims. Threats and intimidation of holocaust victims by Jewish organisations were reported, who then proceeded to purloin the “Holocaust compensation” monies. [13]
A typical example of the kind of mass programming regarding Jewish victimhood was in evidence from a video recording of a lecture given by Finkelstein in 2010 at the University of Waterloo where he was taken to task by his “offensive” remarks. The video can be viewed here and a transcript of this instructive exchange follows:
STUDENT: During your speech you made a lot of references to Jewish people as well as certain people in the audience, not Jewish people in general, but especially in the audience – to Nazis. [Begins to cry] That is extremely offensive to certain people who are German and also extremely offensive who actually suffered under Nazi war…
FINKELSTEIN: I don’t respect that any more, I really don’t. I don’t like and I don’t respect the crocodile tears … (interruptions)… the crocodile tears … (clapping and cries from audience) … listen sir, allow me to finish … I don’t like to play to a foreign audience the Holocaust card but since now I feel compelled to – my late father was in Auschwitz, my late mother … please shut-up (applause)… My late father was in Auschwitz my late mother was in Mgdonevice concentration camp – every single member of my family on both sides were exterminated, both my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto. They taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silenced by Israel over their crimes against Palestinians. I consider nothing more despicable than to use their suffering and their martyrdom to try to justify the torture, the brutalization and the demolition of homes committed against the Palestinians. I refuse any more to be intimidated, to be browbeaten by the tears. If you had any heart in you, you would be crying for the Palestinians. [14]
Over 65 million people died in World War II and it is said, up to six million Jews were killed by the Nazis, a number which is still disputed. Whether 10,000, 500,000, one million or three million – it’s an obscenity, the results of psychopaths allowed to cluster into groups and hijack the population. The point to remember is that although the persecution of the Jews by the Third Reich is a fact of history yet so too, is the appropriation of victims and the suffering of non-Jews implying that “Gentiles” deaths are somehow less significant. What about the Stalinist and Maoist, genocides that far outnumber any Jewish Holocaust deaths? Where are the multi-million dollar monuments to all those people who died?
More disturbingly, the parallels of Nazi racial supremacy and Jewish supremacy are exactly the same – both see themselves as redeemers of the world tragically mirroring each other’s fundamentalist worldview and both have proved themselves to be adept in mass propaganda by setting themselves apart from others; elevating their race and destiny to romantic, metaphysical and fascistic dimensions while asserting unassailable claims of divine rights. The root mind-set in Zionist, Jewish Fundamentalism and Nazi ideology follow the same authoritarian and racist dynamic and the consequences that stem from these psychological extremes. Could there even be the slightest possibility that there may be something in Zionism, Judaism and the direction of the Jewish race that predisposes them to acts of persecution?
The French Zionist Bernard Lazare was also exploring these questions way back in 1894 before the Nazi persecutions and the modern mythologising that has been so pervasive in the 20th century.
He candidly observed:
Wherever the Jews settled [in their Diaspora] one observes the development of anti-Semitism, or rather anti-Judaism … If this hostility, this repugnance had been shown towards the Jews at one time or in one country only, it would be easy to account for the local cause of this sentiment. But this race has been the object of hatred with all nations amidst whom it settled. Inasmuch as the enemies of Jews belonged to diverse races, as they dwelled far apart from one another, were ruled by different laws and governed by opposite principles; as they had not the same customs and differed in spirit from one another, so that they could not possibly judge alike of any subject, it must needs be that the general causes of anti-Semitism have always resided in [the people of] Israel itself, and not in those who antagonized it. [15]
If that is even partially true, expressed by a Zionist, no less, liberating insights for the Jewish collective destiny could perhaps be achieved from a psychotherapeutically-based exploration of the Jewish psyche in this context. Many Jewish academics are doing precisely this, but nowhere near enough. This would naturally enrich not just Jewish and Israeli society but indirectly, the lives of us all. Untold tragedy and its victims could be truly honoured through re-enchantment and integrative self-empowerment rather than self-deception and cynical manipulation.
I think we may have a while to wait for that one.
Notes
[1] ‘The Great Taboo Broken’ by Haim. Breseeth, Reflections on the Israeli Reception of Schindler’s List -From Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List edited by Yoshefa Loshitsky.Indiana University Press, 1997 | ’40 percent of Holocaust survivors in Israel live below poverty line’, Haaretz, December 29, 2005.
[2] p.5; Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum By Edward T Linenthal. Published by Colombia University Press, 2001 | ISBN-10: 0231124074.
[3] op. cit. Piotrowski.
[4]AFP/Expatica, Polish experts lower nation’s WWII death toll, expatica.com, 30 August 2009.
[5] ‘Debating the Undebatable: The Weber-Shermer Clash Exchanging Views on the Holocaust’ The Journal of Historical Review, Jan-Feb. 1996 (Vol. 16, No. 1), pages 23-34.
[6] ‘The business of death’ By Norman Finkelstein The Guardian, 12 July 2000.
[7] ‘Falsification of the Holocaust’ by Prof. Israel Shahak, published on 19 May 1989 in Kol Ha’ir, Jerusalem.
[8] p.15; Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Norman Cohn, Published by Harper and Rowe, 1966.
[9] ‘Wiesenthal Re-Confirms: ‘No Extermination Camps on German Soil’’ Institute of Historical Review: “…official claims of extermination and gassing at camps in Germany proper persisted until August 1960, when Dr. Martin Broszat of Germany’s semi-official Institute for Contemporary History acknowledged in a letter published in the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit that such allegations were not true. In doing so, Broszat implicitly also conceded that the “evidence” presented at Nuremberg and elsewhere for extermination and gassings in those camps is bogus.Here is a translation of the complete text of Broszat’s letter: “Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed. The gas chamber in Dachau was never entirely finished or put “into operation.” Hundreds of thousands of prisoners who perished in Dachau and other concentration camps in the Old Reich [that is, Germany in its borders of 1937] were victims, above all, of the catastrophic hygienic and provisioning conditions: according to official SS statistics, during the twelve months from July 1942 through June 1943 alone, 110,812 persons died of disease and hunger in all of the concentration camps of the Reich. The mass extermination of the Jews by gassing began in 1941-1942 and occurred exclusively in a few facilities selected and equipped with appropriate technical installations, above all in the occupied Polish territory (but at no place in the Old Reich): in Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Sobibor on the Bug [river], in Treblinka, Chelmno and Belzec.
It is at those places, but not in Bergen-Belsen, Dachau or Buchenwald, where the mass extermination facilities, spoken of in your article [in an earlier issue of Die Zeit], were built and disguised as shower baths or disinfection rooms. This necessary differentiation does not, of course, change anything regarding the criminal character of the facility that was the concentration camp. However, it may perhaps help eliminate the annoying confusion that arises from the fact that some ineducable people make use of a few arguments that, while correct, are polemically torn from the context, and that, rushing to respond to them are other people who, although they have the correct overall view, rely upon false or mistaken information. – Dr. M. Broszat, Institute for Contemporary History, Munich.
[10] p. 307; The U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: Memory and the Politics of Identity by James Young.
[11] ‘US academic deported and banned for criticising Israel’ by Toni O’Loughlin, The Guardian, 26 May 2008.
[12] op. cit. Finkelstein, Guardian article 2000.
[13] p.79; The Holocaust industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering by Norman G. Finkelstein, second edition, published by Verso Books. 2003 | ISBN: 185-984-488-X.
[14] ‘Responding to Zionist Propaganda: Dr. Norman Finkelstein on Holocaust exploitation at the University of Waterloo’ 2010.wwwpalestineremembered.com.
[15] Anti-Semitism, Its History and Causes by Bernard Lazare, Britons Publishing Co., London, 1967.
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