Finkelstein Norman - The Holocaust Industry.pdf - History of Jews & Israel - MMarkMMark

The Holocaust Industry: Index Page

ONLINE EDITION

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments and Introduction

Chapter 1: Capitalizing The Holocaust

Chapter 2: Hoaxers, Hucksters, and History

Chapter 3: The Double Shakedown

Conclusion

See Norman G. Finkelsteins Website at: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com

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The Holocaust Industry: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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.

INTRODUCTION

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 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

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The Holocaust Industry: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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 Lfe, 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 aper,cus 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 Holocaust in American Lfe 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 bme, 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 only sixteen years before the trial, an

unbridgeable abyss always separated, in my mind, the parents I knew from that.

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The Holocaust Industry: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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, 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

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Finkelstein Norman - The Holocaust Industry.pdf

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