HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY
by Norman Finkelstein
Chapter 2
HOAXERS, HUCKSTERS AND HISTORY
"Holocaust awareness," the respected Israeli writer Boas Evron observes, is actually "an official, propagandistic indoctrination, a churning out of slogans and a false view of the world, the real aim of which is not at all an understanding of the past, but a manipulation of the present." In and of itself, the Nazi holocaust does not serve any particular political agenda. It can just as easily motivate dissent from as support for Israeli policy. Refracted through an ideological prism, however, "the memory of the Nazi extermination" came to serve — in Evron's words — "as a powerful tool in the hands of the Israeli leadership and Jews abroad.1 The Nazi holocaust became The Holocaust.
Two central dogmas underpin the Holocaust framework: (1) The Holocaust marks a categorically unique historical event; (2) The Holocaust marks the climax of an irrational, eternal Gentile hatred of Jews. Neither of these dogmas figured at all in public discourse before the June 1967 war; and, although they became the centerpieces of Holocaust literature, neither figures at all in genuine scholarship on the Nazi holocaust.2 On the other hand, both dogmas draw on important strands in Judaism and Zionism.
In the aftermath of World War II, the Nazi holocaust was not cast as a uniquely Jewish — let alone a historically unique — event. Organized American Jewry in particular was at pains to place it in a universalist context. After the June war, however, the Nazi Final Solution was radically reframed. "The first and most important claim that emerged from the 1967 war and became emblematic of American Judaism," Jacob Neusner recalls, was that "the Holocaust . . . was unique, without parallel in human history."3 In an illuminating essay, historian David Stannard ridicules the "small industry of Holocaust hagiographers arguing for the uniqueness of the Jewish experience with all the energy and ingenuity of theological zealots."4 The uniqueness dogma, after all, makes no sense.
At the most basic level, every historical event is unique, if merely by virtue of time and location, and every historical event bears distinctive features as well as features in common with other historical events. The anomaly of The Holocaust is that its uniqueness is held to be absolutely decisive. What other historical event, one might ask, is framed largely for its categorical uniqueness? Typically, distinctive features of The Holocaust are isolated in order to place the event in a category altogether apart. It is never clear, however, why the many common features should be reckoned trivial by comparison.
All Holocaust writers agree that The Holocaust is unique, but few, if any, agree why. Each time an argument for Holocaust uniqueness is empirically refuted, a new argument is adduced in its stead. The results, according to Jean-Michel Chaumont, are multiple, conflicting arguments that annul each other: "Knowledge does not accumulate. Rather, to improve on the former argument, each new one starts from zero."5 Put otherwise: uniqueness is a given in the Holocaust framework; proving it is the appointed task, and disproving it is equivalent to Holocaust denial. Perhaps the problem lies with the premise, not the proof. Even if The Holocaust were unique, what difference would it make? How would it change our understanding if the Nazi holocaust were not the first but the fourth or fifth in a line of comparable catastrophes?
The most recent entry into the Holocaust uniqueness sweepstakes is Steven Katz's The Holocaust in Historical Context. Citing nearly 5,000 titles in the first of a projected three-volume study, Katz surveys the full sweep of human history in order to prove that "the Holocaust is phenomenologically unique by virtue of the fact that never before has a state set out, as a matter of intentional principle and actualized policy, to annihilate physically every man, woman and child belonging to a specific people." Clarifying his thesis, Katz explains: "f is uniquely C. f may share A, B. D, . . . X with s but not C. And again f may share A, B. D, . . . X with all s but not C. Everything essential turns, as it were, on i; being uniquely C . . . pi lacking C is not J.... By definition, no exceptions to this rule are allowed. s sharing A, B. D, . . . X with ~ may be like ~ in these and other respects . . . but as regards our definition of uniqueness any or all s lacking C are not f.... Of course, in its totality f is more than C, but it is never ~ without C." Translation: A historical event containing a distinct feature is a distinct historical event. To avoid any confusion, Katz further elucidates that he uses the term phenomenologically "in a non-Husserlian, non-Shutzean, non-Schelerian, non-Heideggerian, non-Merleau-Pontyan sense." Translation: The Katz enterprise is phenomenal non-sense.6 Even if the evidence sustained Katz's central thesis, which it does not, it would only prove that The Holocaust contained a distinct feature. The wonder would be were it otherwise. Chaumont infers that Katz's study is actually «ideology» masquerading as "science," more on which presently.7
Only a flea's hop separates the claim of Holocaust uniqueness from the claim that The Holocaust cannot be rationally apprehended. If The Holocaust is unprecedented in history, it must stand above and hence cannot be grasped by history. Indeed, The Holocaust is unique because it is inexplicable, and it is inexplicable because it is unique.
Dubbed by Novick the "sacralization of the Holocaust," this mystifications's most practiced purveyor is Elie Wiesel. For Wiesel, Novick rightly observes, The Holocaust is effectively a "mystery" religion. Thus Wiesel intones that the Holocaust "leads into darkness," "negates all answers," "lies outside, if not beyond, history," "defies both knowledge and description," "cannot be explained nor visualized," is "never to be comprehended or transmitted," marks a "destruction of history" and a "mutation on a cosmic scale." Only the survivor-priest (read: only Wiesel) is qualified to divine its mystery. And yet, The Holocaust's mystery, Wiesel avows, is "noncommunicable"; "we cannot even talk about it." Thus, for his standard fee of $25,000 (plus chauffeured limousine), Wiesel lectures that the "secret" of Auschwitz's "truth lies in silence."8
Rationally comprehending The Holocaust amounts, in this view, to denying it. For rationality denies The Holocaust's uniqueness and mystery. And to compare The Holocaust with the sufferings of others constitutes, for Wiesel, a "total betrayal of Jewish history."9 Some years back, the parody of a New York tabloid was headlined: "Michael Jackson, 60 Million Others, Die in Nuclear Holocaust." The letters page carried an irate protest from Wiesel: "How dare people refer to what happened yesterday as a Holocaust? There was only one Holocaust...." In his new memoir Wiesel, proving that life can also imitate spoof, reprimands Shimon Peres for speaking "without hesitation of 'the two holocausts' of the twentieth century: Auschwitz and Hiroshima. He shouldn't have."10 A favorite Wiesel tag line declares that «the universality of the Holocaust lies in its uniqueness."11 But if it is incomparably and incomprehensibly unique, how can The Holocaust have a universal dimension?
The Holocaust uniqueness debate is sterile. Indeed, the claims of Holocaust uniqueness have come to constitute a form of "intellectual terrorism" (Chaumont). Those practicing the normal comparative procedures of scholarly inquiry must first enter a thousand and one caveats to ward off the accusation of "trivializing The Holocaust."12
A subtext of the Holocaust uniqueness claim is that The Holocaust was uniquely evil. However terrible, the suffering of others simply does not compare. Proponents of Holocaust uniqueness typically disclaim this implication, but such demurrals are disingenuous.13
The claims of Holocaust uniqueness are intellectually barren and morally discreditable, yet they persist. The question is, Why? In the first place, unique suffering confers unique entitlement. The unique evil of the Holocaust, according to Jacob Neusner, not only sets Jews apart from others, but also gives Jews a "claim upon those others."
For Edward Alexander, the uniqueness of The Holocaust is "moral capital"; Jews must "claim sovereignty" over this «valuable property."14
In effect, Holocaust uniqueness - this "claim" upon others, this "moral capital" - serves as Israel's prize alibi. "The singularity of the Jewish suffering," historian Peter Baldwin suggests, "adds to the moral and emotional claims that Israel can make . . . on other nations."15 Thus, according to Nathan Glazer, The Holocaust, which pointed to the "peculiar distinctiveness of the Jews," gave Jews "the right to consider themselves specially threatened and specially worthy of whatever efforts were necessary for survival."16 (emphasis in original) To cite one typical example, every account of Israel's decision to develop nuclear weapons evokes the specter of The Holocaust.'' As if Israel otherwise would not have gone nuclear.
There is another factor at work. The claim of Holocaust uniqueness is a claim of Jewish uniqueness. Not the suffering of Jews but that Jews suffered is what made The Holocaust unique. Or: The Holocaust is special because Jews are special. Thus Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, ridicules the Holocaust uniqueness claim as "a distasteful secular version of chosenness."18 Vehement as he is about the uniqueness of The Holocaust, Elie Wiesel is no less vehement that Jews are unique. "Everything about us is different." Jews are "ontologically" exceptional.19 Marking the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews, The Holocaust attested not only to the unique suffering of Jews but to Jewish uniqueness as well.
During and in the aftermath of World War 11, Novick reports, "hardly anyone inside [the US] government - and hardly anyone outside it, Jew or Gentile — would have understood the phrase 'abandonment of the Jews.'" A reversal set in after June 1967. "The world's silence," "the world's indifference," "the abandonment of the Jews". these themes became a staple of "Holocaust discourse."20
Appropriating a Zionist tenet, the Holocaust framework cast Hitler's Final Solution as the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews. The Jews perished because all Gentiles, be it as perpetrators or as passive collaborators, wanted them dead. "The free and 'civilized' world,» according to Wiesel, handed the Jews «over to the executioner. There were the killers—the murderers - and there were those who remained silent."21 The historical evidence for a murderous Gentile impulse is nil. Daniel Goldhagen's ponderous effort to prove one variant of this claim in Hitler's Willing Executioners barely rose to the comical.22 Its political utility, however, is considerable. One might note, incidentally, that the "eternal anti-Semitism» theory in fact gives comfort to the anti-Semite. As Arendt says in The Origins of Totalitarianism, «that this doctrine was adopted by professional anti-Semites is a matter of course; it gives the best possible alibi for all horrors. If it is true that mankind has insisted on murdering Jews for more than two thousand years, then Jew-killing is a normal, and even human, occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument. The more surprising aspect of this explanation is that it has been adopted by a great many unbiased historians and by an even greater number of Jews."23
The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred has served both to justify the necessity of a Jewish state and to account for the hostility directed at Israel. The Jewish state is the only safeguard against the next (inevitable) outbreak of homicidal anti-Semitism; conversely, homicidal anti-Semitism is behind every attack or even defensive maneuver against the Jewish state. To account for criticism of Israel, fiction writer Cynthia Chick had a ready answer: "The world wants to wipe out the Jews . . . the world has always wanted to wipe out the Jews."24 If all the world wants the Jews dead, truly the wonder is that they are still alive — and, unlike much of humanity, not exactly starving.
This dogma has also conferred total license on Israel: Intent as the Gentiles always are on murdering Jews, Jews have every right to protect themselves, however they see fit. Whatever expedient Jews might resort to, even aggression and torture, constitutes legitimate self-defense. Deploring the "Holocaust lesson" of eternal Gentile hatred, Boas Evron observes that it "is really tantamount to a deliberate breeding of paranoia.... This mentality ... condones in advance any inhuman treatment of non-Jews, for the prevailing mythology is that 'all people collaborated with the Nazis in the destruction of Jewry,' hence everything is permissible to Jews in their relationship to other peoples."25
In the Holocaust framework, Gentile anti-Semitism is not only ineradicable but also always irrational. Going far beyond classical Zionist, let alone standard scholarly, analyses, Goldhagen construes anti-Semitism as "divorced from actual Jews," "fundamentally not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish action," and "independent of Jews' nature and actions." A Gentile mental pathology, its «host domain" is "the mind." (emphasis in original) Driven by "irrational arguments," the anti-Semite, according to Wiesel, "simply resents the fact that the Jew exists."26 "Not only does anything Jews do or refrain from doing have nothing to do with anti-Semitism," sociologist John Murray Cuddihy critically observes, "but any attempt to explain anti-Semitism by referring to the Jewish contribution to anti-Semitism is itself an instance of anti-Semitism!" (emphasis in original)27 The point, of course, is not that anti-Semitism is justifiable, nor that Jews are to blame for crimes committed against them, but that anti-Semitism develops in a specific historical context with its attendant interplay of interests. "A gifted, well-organized, and largely successful minority can inspire conflicts that derive from objective inter-group tensions," Ismar Schorsch points out, although these conflicts are «often packaged in anti-Semitic stereotypes."28
The irrational essence of Gentile anti-Semitism is inferred inductively from the irrational essence of The Holocaust. To wit, Hitler's Final Solution uniquely lacked rationality—it was «evil for its own sake," «purposeless" mass killing; Hitler's Final Solution marked the culmination of Gentile anti-Semitism; therefore Gentile anti-Semitism is essentially irrational. Taken apart or together, these propositions do not withstand even superficial scrutiny.29 Politically, however, the argument is highly serviceable.
By conferring total blamelessness on Jews, the Holocaust dogma immunizes Israel and American Jewry from legitimate censure. Arab hostility, African-American hostility: they are "fundamentally not a response to any objective evaluation of Jewish action" (Goldhagen).30 Consider Wiesel on Jewish persecution: «For two thousand years . . . we were always threatened.... For what? For no reason." On Arab hostility to Israel: "Because of who we are and what our homeland Israel represents — the heart of our lives, the dream of our dreams -when our enemies try to destroy us, they will do so by trying to destroy Israel." On Black people's hostility to American Jews: "The people who take their inspiration from us do not thank us but attack us. We find ourselves in a very dangerous situation. We are again the scapegoat on all sides.... We helped the blacks; we always helped them.... I feel sorry for blacks. There is one thing they should learn from us and that is gratitude. No people in the world knows gratitude as we do; we are forever grateful."31 Ever chastised, ever innocent: this is the burden of being a Jew.32
The Holocaust dogma of eternal Gentile hatred also validates the complementary Holocaust dogma of uniqueness. If The Holocaust marked the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of the Jews, the persecution of non-Jews in The Holocaust was merely accidental and the persecution of non-Jews in history merely episodic. From every standpoint, then, Jewish suffering during The Holocaust was unique.
Finally, Jewish suffering was unique because the Jews are unique. The Holocaust was unique because it was not rational. Ultimately, its impetus was a most irrational, if all-too-human, passion. The Gentile world hated Jews because of envy, jealousy: resentment. Anti-Semitism, according to Nathan and Ruth Ann Perlmutter, sprang from "gentile jealousy and resentment of the Jews' besting Christians in the marketplace . . . large numbers of less accomplished gentiles resent smaller numbers of more accomplished Jews."33 Albeit negatively, The Holocaust thus confirmed the chosenness of Jews. Because Jews are better, or more successful, they suffered the ire of Gentiles, who then murdered them.
In a brief aside, Novick muses «what would talk of the Holocaust be like in America" if Elie Wiesel were not its "principal interpreter"?34 The answer is not difficult to find: Before June 1967 the universalist message of concentration camp survivor Bruno Bettelheim resonated among American Jews. After the June war, Bettelheim was shunted aside in favor of Wiesel. Wiesel's prominence is a function of his Ideological utility. Uniqueness of Jewish suffering/uniqueness of the Jews, ever-guilty Gentiles/ever-innocent Jews, unconditional defense of Israel/unconditional defense of Jewish interests: Elie Wiesel is The Holocaust.
Articulating the key Holocaust dogmas, much of the literature on Hitler's Final Solution is worthless as scholarship. Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud. Especially revealing is the cultural milieu that nurtures this Holocaust literature.
The first major Holocaust hoax was The Painted Bird, by Polish émigré Jerzy Kosinski.35 The book was «written in English," Kosinski explained, so that "I could write dispassionately, free from the emotional connotation one's native language always contains.» In fact, whatever parts he actually wrote - an unresolved question -were written in Polish. The book was purported to be Kosinski's autobiographical account of his wanderings as a solitary child through rural Poland during World War II. In fact, Kosinski lived with his parents throughout the war. The book's motif is the sadistic sexual tortures perpetrated by the Polish peasantry. Pre-publication readers derided it as a "pornography of violence" and "the product of a mind obsessed with sadomasochistic violence." In fact, Kosinski conjured up almost all the pathological episodes he narrates. The book depicts the Polish peasants he lived with as virulently anti-Semitic. "Beat the Jews," they jeer. "Beat the bastards." In fact, Polish peasants harbored the Kosinski family even though they were fully aware of their Jewishness and the dire consequences they themselves faced if caught.
In the New York Times Book Review, Elie Wiesel acclaimed The Painted Bird as «one of the best" indictments of the Nazi era, "written with deep sincerity and sensitivity." Cynthia Ozick later gushed that she «immediately" recognized Kosinski's authenticity as "a Jewish survivor and witness to the Holocaust." Long after Kosinski was exposed as a consummate literary hoaxer, Wiesel continued to heap encomiums on his "remarkable body of work."36
The Painted Bird became a basic Holocaust text. It was a best-seller and award-winner, translated into numerous languages, and required reading in high school and college classes. Doing the Holocaust circuit, Kosinski dubbed himself a "cut-rate Elie Wiesel." (Those unable to afford Wiesel's speaking fee - "silence" doesn't come cheap - turned to him.) Finally exposed by an investigative newsweekly, Kosinski was still stoutly defended by the New York Times, which alleged that he was the victim of a Communist plot.37
A more recent fraud, Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments,38 borrows promiscuously from the Holocaust kitsch of The Painted Bird. Like Kosinski, Wilkomirski portrays himself as a solitary child survivor who becomes mute, winds up in an orphanage and only belatedly discovers that he is Jewish. Like The Painted Bird, the chief narrative conceit of Fragments is the simple, pared-down voice of a child-naif, also allowing time frames and place names to remain vague. Like The Painted Bird, each chapter of Fragments climaxes in an orgy of violence. Kosinski represented The Painted Bird as "the slow unfreezing of the mind»; Wilkomirski represents Fragments as "recovered memory."39
A hoax cut out of whole cloth, Fragments is nevertheless the archetypal Holocaust memoir. It is set first in the concentration camps, where every guard is a crazed, sadistic monster joyfully cracking the skulls of Jewish newborns. Yet, the classic memoirs of the Nazi concentration camps concur with Auschwitz survivor Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner: "There were few sadists. Not more than five or ten percent."40 Ubiquitous German sadism figures prominently, however, in Holocaust literature. Doing double service, it "documents» the unique irrationality of The Holocaust as well as the fanatical anti-Semitism of the perpetrators.
The singularity of Fragments lies in its depiction of life not during . but after The Holocaust. Adopted by a Swiss family, little Binjamin endures yet new torments. He is trapped in a world of Holocaust deniers. "Forget it — it's a bad dream," his mother screams. "It was only a bad dream.... You're not to think about it any more." "Here in this country," he chafes, "everyone keeps saying I'm to forget, and that it never happened, I only dreamed it. But they know all about it!"
Even at school, "the boys point at me and make fists and yell: 'He's raving, there's no such thing. Liar! He's crazy, mad, he's an idiot.' " (An aside: They were right.) Pummeling him, chanting anti-Semitic ditties, all the Gentile children line up against poor Binjamin, while the adults keep taunting, "You're making it up!"
Driven to abject despair, Binjamin reaches a Holocaust epiphany. "The camp's still there — just hidden and well disguised. They've taken off their uniforms and dressed themselves up in nice clothes so as not to be recognized.... Just give them the gentlest of hints that maybe, possibly, you're a Jew — and you'll feel it: these are the same people, and I'm sure of it. They can still kill, even out of uniform."
More than a homage to Holocaust dogma, Fragments is the smoking gun: even in Switzerland — neutral Switzerland — all the Gentiles want to kill the Jews. |
