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VERSO
London -- New York
First published by Verso 2000
(C) Norman G. Finkelstein 2000
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1V 3HR
USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014 4606
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN 1-85984-773-0
Typeset by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex
Printed in the USA by R.R. Donnelley & Sons
"It seems to me the Holocaust is being sold -- it is not being taught."
Rabbi Arnold jacob Wolf, Hillel Director, Yale University 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments.........................ix
Introduction.........................1
Chapter 1 Capitalizing The Holocaust....................9
Chapter 2 Hoaxers, Hucksters, and History..............39
Chapter 3 The Double Shakedown...........................79
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Conclusion.............................................................141
Colin Robinson of Verso conceived the idea of this book. Roane
Carey molded my reflections into a coherent narrative. At every
stage in the book's production Noam Chomsky and Shifra Stern provided
assistance. Jennifer Loewenstein and Eva Schweitzer criticized
various drafts. Rudolph Baldeo provided personal support and encouragement.
I am indebted to all of them. In these pages I attempt to represent
my parents' legacy. Accordingly, the book is dedicated to my two
siblings, Richard and Henry, and my nephew, David.
This book is both an anatomy and an indictment of the Holocaust
Industry. In the pages that follow, I will argue that "The
Holocaust" is an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust.1
Like most ideologies, it bears a connection, if tenuous, with
reality. The Holocaust is not an arbitrary but rather an internally
coherent construct. Its central dogmas sustain significant political
and class interests. Indeed, 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 United States has
likewise acquired victim status. Considerable dividends accrue
from this specious victimhood in particular, immunity to criticism,
however justified. Those enjoying this immunity, I might add,
have not escaped the moral corruptions that [4] typically attend
it. From this perspective, Elie Wiesel's performance as official
interpreter of The Holocaust is not happenstance. Plainly he did
not come to this position on account of his humanitarian commitments
or literary talents.2
Rather, Wiesel plays this leading role because he unerringly articulates
the dogmas of, and accordingly sustains the interests underpinning,
The Holocaust.
The initial stimulus for this book was Peter Novick's seminal
study, The Holocaust in American Life, which I reviewed
for a British literary journal.3 In these pages the critical dialogue
I entered in with Novick is broadened; hence, the extensive number
of references to his study. More a congeries of provocative aperçus
than a sustained critique, The Holocaust in American Life
belongs to the venerable American tradition of muckraking. Yet
like most muckrakers, Novick focuses only on the most egregious
abuses. Scathing and refreshing as it often is, The [5]
Holocaust in American Life is not a radical critique. Root
assumptions go unchallenged. Neither banal nor heretical, the
book is pitched to the controversial extreme of the mainstream
spectrum. Predictably, it received many, though mixed, notices
in the American media.
Novick's central analytical category is "memory." Currently
all the rage in the ivory tower, "memory" is surely
the most impoverished concept to come down the academic pike in
a long time. With the obligatory nod to Maurice Halbwachs, Novick
aims to demonstrate how "current concerns" shape "Holocaust
memory." Once upon a time, dissenting intellectuals deployed
robust political categories such as 'Power" and "interests,"
on the one hand, and "ideology," on the other. Today,
all that remains is the bland, depoliticized language of "concerns"
and "memory." Yet given the evidence Novick adduces,
Holocaust memory is an ideological construct of vested interests.
Although chosen, Holocaust memory, according to Novick, is "more
often than not" arbitrary. The choice, he argues, is made
not from "calculation of advantages and disadvantages"
but rather "without much thought for... consequences."4 The evidence
suggests the opposite conclusion.
My original interest in the Nazi holocaust was personal. Both
my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the
Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family
member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis. My earliest
memory, so to speak, of the Nazi holocaust is my mother glued
in front of the television watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann
(1961) when I came home from school. Although they had been liberated
from the camps [6] only sixteen years before the trial, an unbridgeable
abyss always separated, in my mind, the parents I knew from that.
Photographs of my mother's family hung on the living-room wall.
(None from my father's family survived the war.) I could never
quite make sense of my connection with them, let alone conceive
what happened. They were my mother's sisters, brother and parents,
not my aunts, uncle or grandparents. I remember reading as a child
John Hersey's The Wall and Leon Uris's Mila 18,
both fictionalized accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto. (I still recall
my mother complaining that, engrossed in The Wall, she
missed her subway stop on the way to work.) Try as I did, I couldn't
even for a moment make the imaginative leap that would join my
parents, in all their ordinariness, with that past. Frankly, I
still can't.
The more important point, however, is this. Apart from this phantom
presence, I do not remember the Nazi holocaust ever intruding
on my childhood. The main reason was that no one outside my family
seemed to care about what had happened. My childhood circle of
friends read widely, and passionately debated the events of the
day. Yet I honestly do not recall a single friend (or parent of
a friend) asking a single question about what my mother and father
endured. This was not a respectful silence. It was simply indifference.
In this light, one cannot but be skeptical of the outpourings
of anguish in later decades, after the Holocaust industry was
firmly established.
I sometimes think that American Jewry "discovering"
the Nazi holocaust was worse than its having been forgotten. True,
my parents brooded in private; the suffering they endured was
not publicly validated. But wasn't that better than the current
crass exploitation of Jewish martyrdom? Before the Nazi holocaust
became The Holocaust, [7] only a few scholarly studies such as
Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews and
memoirs such as Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning
and Ella Lingens-Reiner's Prisoners of Fear were published
on the subject.5
But this small collection of gems is better than the shelves upon
shelves of shlock that now line libraries and bookstores.
Both my parents, although daily reliving that past until the day
each died, lost interest by the end of their lives in The Holocaust
as a public spectacle. One of my father's lifelong friends was
a former inmate with him in Auschwitz, a seemingly incorruptible
left-wing idealist who on principle refused German compensation
after the war. Eventually he became a director of the Israeli
Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. Reluctantly and with genuine disappointment,
my father finally admitted that even this man had been corrupted
by the Holocaust industry, tailoring his beliefs for power and
profit. As the rendering of The Holocaust assumed ever more absurd
forms, my mother liked to quote (with intentional irony) Henry
Ford: "History is bunk." The tales of "Holocaust
survivors" -- all concentration camp inmates, all heroes
of the resistance -- were a special source of wry amusement in
my home. Long ago John Stuart Mill recognized that truths not
subject to continual challenge eventually "cease to have
the effect of truth by being exaggerated into falsehood."
My parents often wondered why I would grow so indignant at the
falsification and exploitation of the Nazi genocide. The most
obvious answer is that it has been used to justify criminal policies
of the Israeli [8] state and US support for these policies. There
is a personal motive as well. I do care about the memory of my
family's persecution. The current campaign of the Holocaust industry
to extort money from Europe in the name of "needy Holocaust
victims" has shrunk the moral stature of their martyrdom
to that of a Monte Carlo casino. Even apart from these concerns,
however, I remain convinced that it is important to preserve --
to fight for -- the integrity of the historical record. In the
final pages of this book I will suggest that in studying the Nazi
holocaust we can learn much not just about "the Germans"
or "the Gentiles" but about all of us. Yet I think that
to do so, to truly learn from the Nazi holocaust, its physical
dimension must be reduced and its moral dimension expanded. Too
many public and private resources have been invested in memorializing
the Nazi genocide. Most of the output is worthless, a tribute
not to Jewish suffering but to Jewish aggrandizement. 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. No
doubt historical distinctions must be made. But to make out moral
distinctions between "our" suffering and "theirs"
is itself a moral travesty. "You can't compare any two miserable
people," Plato humanely observed, "and say that one
is happier than the other." In the face of the sufferings
of African-Americans, Vietnamese and Palestinians, my mother's
credo always was: We are all holocaust victims.
Norman G. Finkelstein
April 2000
New York City
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