Zionism Was Not Popular with American Jews Prior to June 1967 and There Was No Mention of Shoah from Spike EP on Vimeo.
"I SOMETIMES think," writes Norman G. Finkelstein, whose parents survived the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps, "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?"
That is the first bombshell in Finkelstein's acrimonious new book, in which he declares the recent successful pursuit of multibillion-dollar reparations from German industrial giants and Swiss bankers "an outright extortion racket." Finkelstein's downright pugilistic book delivers a wallop -- mostly because few authors have had the courage or nerve to say, as he does, that the Nazi genocide has been distorted and robbed of its true moral lessons and instead has been put to use as "an indispensable ideological weapon."
It's a provocative thesis that makes you want to reject it even as you are compelled to keep reading by the strength of his case and the bravura of his assertions.
What Finkelstein calls "The Holocaust" -- the packaged story as distinguished from the actual historical events -- has become a "prize alibi" for Israeli war crimes, a cudgel for money-hungry Jewish organizations and profiteering lawyers, and a spark plug for the recrudescent ranks of anti-Semites in Europe.
Nowadays such pronouncements are regarded as heresy or, worse, as "Holocaust denial" -- a charge frequently leveled at Finkelstein since the publication of The Holocaust Industry. But in making these contentions he has revived a debate that has roiled the Jewish community off and on for five decades.
Was the Holocaust unique? Or was it mundane, and all too human?
Finkelstein, who teaches political theory at New York University and Hunter College, begins with an examination of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Only after that conflict, he says, did the Holocaust become an abiding moral symbol -- not because the existence of a Jewish state was suddenly threatened (Israel trounced its rivals), but because the American Jewish establishment instinctively understood that a shroud of victimhood could immunize Israel in its atrocious acts against the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world. Before the Six Day War, Finkelstein writes, both the Holocaust and Israel were something of a liability to American Jews; the American Jewish establishment built its strength through obeisance to postwar American domestic and global ambitions.
"Doing so in effect facilitated the traditional goals of assimilation and access to power." Germany had become a key ally against the Soviets, and "dredging up the past served no useful purpose; in fact, it complicated matters." A wave of anti-German sentiment, fueled by the close memory of the Nazi extermination, could sour the budding Cold War realignment of West vs. East. The leading Jewish groups and intellectuals did not want to be spoilers -- for fear that they'd be accused of disloyalty and that they'd provoke an anti-Semitic backlash at home. This led them to "downplay the Nazi Holocaust" -- they opposed both boycotts of German manufacturers and public demonstrations against former Nazis visiting the United States (in official capacities) -- and to fall "into line with U.S. support for a rearmed and barely de-Nazified Germany."
The Six Day War, says Finkelstein, changed all that. Israel dominated and became, in earnest, a bullying, expansionist state. It was then, with the repositioning of Israel within the world, he says, that the Holocaust was "rediscovered."
In the aftermath of World War II, Jews stressed the universality -- the commonality and historical redundancy -- of the Final Solution. This was what Hannah Arendt famously referred to, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, as the "banality of evil." That changed: "The first and most important claim that emerged from the 1967 war and became emblematic of American Judaism [was that] the Holocaust . . . was unique, without parallel in human history," Finkelstein says, quoting the historian Jacob Neusner.
The Holocaust stood apart from time and circumstance. History, in this revised view, ceased to exist, and the deadly sins of the Nazis were deemed beyond rational comprehension. To think otherwise, or to compare the Third Reich to any other barbaric regime in recent memory, was "trivializing" or "Holocaust denial."
Making the Holocaust unique allowed what Finkelstein calls "Holocaust campaigners" -- most notably, Elie Wiesel (left) -- to claim sovereignty over this "valuable property." In effect, the Holocaust became a crown of virtue. "Ever chastised, ever innocent: This is the burden of being a Jew," comments Finkelstein. Or, as Israel's jocular Foreign Minister Abba Eban once quipped, "There's no business like Shoah business."
"In 1976, I went to a small town in Bavaria, Ludwigsburg, which has the headquarters for investigations of so-called National Socialist crimes, an office maintained by the provinces of the Federal Republic of Germany.
About thirty prosecutors were housed in that particular building, and I went there to study court records, various affidavits, and other materials.
But one afternoon, they said, “We’re having a party today, would you join us?”
Why, yes.
They said, “we have one bottle of wine for each person.” (laughter from the audience).
And after a while I chanced to talk to the deputy chief of that office, and I said to him this:
"I’ve been troubled by one question.
And I’m afraid that I went into print with something that isn’t entirely accurate. And that is the role of Adolf Hitler himself in the annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe.
Now, I know that you are only concerned here with live individuals, and that you do not investigate the dead.
But still … what do you think?"
“Ach,” he said, “we’ve often fantasized about drawing up an indictment against Adolf Hitler himself. And to put into that indictment the major charge: the Final Solution of the Jewish question in Europe, the physical annihilation of Jewry. And then it dawned upon us, what would we do? We didn’t have the evidence.”
http://takimag.com/article/fear_of_a_gray_planet_david_cole/print#ixzz3iXfR08Sm
"As the Nazi regime developed over the years, the whole structure of decision-making was changed.
At first there were laws.
Then there were decrees implementing laws.
Then a law was made saying, "There shall be no laws."
Then there were orders and directives that were written down, but still published in ministerial gazettes.
Then there was government by announcement; orders appeared in newspapers.
Then there were the quiet orders, the orders that were not published, that were within the bureaucracy, that were oral.
Finally, there were no orders at all.
Everybody knew what he had to do."
But in 1631, when the Swedish Protestant army of Gustavus Adolphus fought its way through Germany, reached the Alps, and seemed ready to sweep down on Rome, Urban VIII turned abruptly from a pro-French to a pro-Spanish policy. The Spanish ascendancy is the backdrop for the trial of Galileo carried out by the Dominicans with Jesuit support.
Some years earlier, Sarpi had forecast that if Galileo went to Rome, the Jesuits and others were likely to “turn … the question of physics and astronomy into a theological question,” so as to condemn Galileo as “an excommunicated heretic” and force him to “recant all his views on this subject.”
Sarpi in 1616 seemed to know very well what would happen more than 15 years later, well after his own death. It is evident that the scenario sketched here corresponded to Sarpi’s own long-term plan.
And business, it seems, is booming.
About thirty prosecutors were housed in that particular building, and I went there to study court records, various affidavits, and other materials.
But one afternoon, they said, “We’re having a party today, would you join us?”
Why, yes.
They said, “we have one bottle of wine for each person.” (laughter from the audience).
And after a while I chanced to talk to the deputy chief of that office, and I said to him this:
"I’ve been troubled by one question.
And I’m afraid that I went into print with something that isn’t entirely accurate. And that is the role of Adolf Hitler himself in the annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe.
Now, I know that you are only concerned here with live individuals, and that you do not investigate the dead.
But still … what do you think?"
“Ach,” he said, “we’ve often fantasized about drawing up an indictment against Adolf Hitler himself. And to put into that indictment the major charge: the Final Solution of the Jewish question in Europe, the physical annihilation of Jewry. And then it dawned upon us, what would we do? We didn’t have the evidence.”
And he laughed.
http://takimag.com/article/fear_of_a_gray_planet_david_cole/print#ixzz3iXfR08Sm
"As the Nazi regime developed over the years, the whole structure of decision-making was changed.
At first there were laws.
Then there were decrees implementing laws.
Then a law was made saying, "There shall be no laws."
Then there were orders and directives that were written down, but still published in ministerial gazettes.
Then there was government by announcement; orders appeared in newspapers.
Then there were the quiet orders, the orders that were not published, that were within the bureaucracy, that were oral.
Finally, there were no orders at all.
Everybody knew what he had to do."
- Raul Hillberg's explanation for the absence of documentation ordering or authorising the physical Destruction of the European Jews.
"During the first years of the pontificate of Pope Urban VIII Barberini, Galileo was the semi-official scientist for the pope.
But in 1631, when the Swedish Protestant army of Gustavus Adolphus fought its way through Germany, reached the Alps, and seemed ready to sweep down on Rome, Urban VIII turned abruptly from a pro-French to a pro-Spanish policy. The Spanish ascendancy is the backdrop for the trial of Galileo carried out by the Dominicans with Jesuit support.
Some years earlier, Sarpi had forecast that if Galileo went to Rome, the Jesuits and others were likely to “turn … the question of physics and astronomy into a theological question,” so as to condemn Galileo as “an excommunicated heretic” and force him to “recant all his views on this subject.”
Sarpi in 1616 seemed to know very well what would happen more than 15 years later, well after his own death. It is evident that the scenario sketched here corresponded to Sarpi’s own long-term plan.
For Galileo, the trial was one of the greatest public relations successes of all time."
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