Norman G. Finkelstein: The Holocaust Industry - Part 5 / 5
Dr. Izzeddin Musa
Part 5 and last - Extracts:
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CONCLUSION
It remains to consider the impact of the Holocaust in the United
States. in doing so, I also want to engage Peter Novick's own
critical remarks on the topic.
Apart from Holocaust memorials, fully seventeen states mandate or
recommended Holocaust programs in their schools, and many colleges
and universities have endowed chairs in Holocaust studies. Hardly
a week passes without a major Holocaust-related story in the New
York Times. The number of scholarly studies devoted to the Nazi
Final Solution is conservatively estimated at over 10,000. Con-
sider by comparison scholarship on the hetacomb in the Congo. Be-
tween 1891 and 1911, some 10 million Africans perished in the
course of Europe's exploitation of Congolese ivory and rubber
resources. Yet, the first and only scholarly volume in english
directly devoted to this topic was published two years ago.
... Decrying the tawdry purposes to which the Holocaust is put,
Elie Wiesel declared, "I swear to avoid ... vulgar spectales." Yet
Novick reports that "the most imaginative and subtle Holocaust
photo op came in 1996 when Hillary Clinton, then under heavy fire
for various alleged misdeeds, appeared in the gallery of the House
during her husband's (much televised) State of the Union address,
flanked by their daughter, Chelsea, and Elie Wiesel." For Hillary
Clinton, Kosovo refugees put to flight by Sebia during the NATO
bombing recalled Holocaust scenes in Schindler's List. "People who
learn history from Spielberg movies," a Serbian dissident tartly
rejoined, "should not tell us how to live our lives."
The "pretense that the Holocaust is an American memory," Novivk
further argues, is a moral evasion. It "leads to the shirking of
those responsibilities that do belong to Americans as they con-
front their past, their present, and their future." He makes an
important point. It is much easier to deplore the crimes of others
than to look at ourselves. ... In fact, Hitler modeled his con-
quest of the East on the American conquest of the West. During the
first half of this century, a majority of American states enacted
sterilization laws and tens of thousands of Americans were invol-
untarily sterilized. The Nazis explicitly invoked this US prece-
dent when then enacted their own sterilization laws. The notorious
1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of the franchise and forbade
miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews. Blacks in the American
South suffered the same legal disabilities and were the object of
much greater spontaneous and sanctioned popular violence then the
Jews in prewar Germany.
To highlight unfolding crimes abroad, the US often summons memories
of the Holocaust. The most revealing point, however, is when the US
invokes the Holocaust. Crimes of official enemies such as the Khmer
Rouge bloodbath in Cambodia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Serbian ethnic cleansing in
Kosovo recall the Holocaust; crimes in which the US is complicit
do not.
Just as the Khmer Rouge atrocities were unfolding in Cambodia, the
US-backed Indonesian government was slaughtering one-third of the
population in East Timor. Yet unlike Cambodia, the East Timor
genocidedid not rate comparison with the Holocaust; it didn't even
rate news coverage. Just as the Soviet Union was commiting what
the Simon Wiesenthal Center called "another genocide" in Afgha-
nistan, the US-backed regime in Guatemala was perpetrating what
the Guatemalian Truth Commission recently caled a "genocide"
against the indegenous Mayan population. President Reagan dis-
missed the charges against the Guatemalian government as a "bum
rap." To honor Jeane Kirkpatrick's achievement as chief Reagan
administration apologist for the unfolding crimes in Central
America, the Simon Wiesenthal Center awarded her the Humanitarian
of the Year awrd. Simon Wiesenthal was privately beseeched before
the award ceremony to reconsider. He refused. Elie Wiesel was
privately asked to intercede with the Israeli government, a main
weapon supplier for the Guatemalian butchers. He too refused. The
Carter Administration invoked the memory of The Holocaust as it
sought haven for Vietnamese "boat people" fleeing the Communist
regime. The Clinton Administration forgot The Holocaust as it
forced back Haitian "boat people" fleeing US-supported death squads.
Holocaust memory loomed large as the US-led NATO bombing of Serbia
commenced in the spring 1999. As we have seen, Daniel Goldhagen
compared Serbian crimes against Kosovo with the Final Solution and,
at President Clinton's bidding, Elie Wiesel journeyed to Kosovar
refugee camps in Mecedonia and Albania. Already before Wiesel went
to shed tears on cue for the Kosovars, however, the US-backed
Indonesian regime had resumed where it left off in the late 1970s,
perpetrating new massacres in East Timor. The Holocaust vanished
from memory, however, as the Clinton Administration acquiesced in
the bloodletting. "Indonesia matters,! a Western diplomat explained,
"and East Timor doesn't."
Novick points to passive US complicity in human disasters dissimilar
in other respects yet comparable in scale to the Nazi extermination.
Recalling, for example, the million children killed in the Final
Solution, he observes that american presidents do little more that
utter pieties as, worldwide, many times that number of children
"die of malnutrition and preventable diseases" every year. One
might also consider a pertinent case of active US comlicity. after
the United States-led coalition devastated Iraq in 1991 to punish
"Saddam-Hitler," the United States and Britain forced murderous UN
sanctions on that hapless country in an attempt to depose him. As
in the Nazi holocaust, a million children have likely perished.
Questioned on national television about the grisly death toll in
Iraq, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright replied that "the price
is worth it."
"The very extremity of the Holocaust," Novick argues, "seriously
limit(s) its capacity to provide lessons applicable to our everyday
world." ... In fact, it was the Nazi holocaust that descredited the
scientific racism that was so pervasive a feature of american inte-
llectual life before World War II.
... Slavery occupied roughly the same place in the moral universe
of the late nineteenth century as the Nazi holocaust does today. ...
Organized American Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to def-
lect criticism of Israel's and its own morally indefensible poli-
cies. Pursuit of these policies has put Israel and American Jewry
in a structurally congruent position: the fates of both now dangle
from a slender thread running to american ruling elites. Should
these elites ever decide that Israel is liability or American Jewry
expendable, the thread may be cut. No doubt this is speculation -
perhaps unduly alarmist, perhaps not. (Really this is just specu-
lation, and will remain a speculation, at least for the being time,
however, the influence and power of the American Jewry are invinci-
ble inbetween.)
... If Israel fell out of favor with the United Stetes, many of
those leaders who now stoutly defend Israel would courageously
divulge their disaffection from the Jewish state and would excor-
iate American Jews for turning Israel into a religion. And if US
ruling circles decided to scapegoat Jews, we should not be sur-
prised if American Jewish leaders acted exactly as their predece-
ssors did during the Nazi holocaust. "We didn't figure that the
Germans would put innthe Jewish element," Yitzhak Zuckerman, an
organizer of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, recalled, "that Jews
would lead Jews to death."
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During a series of public exchanges in the 1980s, many prominent
German and non-German scholars argued against "normalizing" the
infamies of Nazism. The fear was that normalization would induce
moral complacency. However valid the argument may have been then,
it no longer caries conviction. The staggering dimensions of
Hitler's Final Solution are by now well known. And isn't the
"normal" history of humankind replete with horrifying chapters
of inhumanity? A crime need not be aberrant to warrant atonement.
The challenge today is to restore the Nazi holocaust as a rational
subject of inquiry. Only then can we learn from it. The abnorma-
lity of the Nazi holocaust springs not from the event itself but
from the exploitive industry that grown up around it. The Holo-
caust industry has been always bankrupt. What remains to openly
declare it so. (Rem.: Same with zionism). The time is long past
to put it out of business. The noblest gesture for those who
perished is to preserve their memory, learn from their suffering
and let them, finally, rest in peace.
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