The Holocaust Industry (10 page)

Lewis of denying genocide. But Lewis denied the Turkish genocide of Armenians during World War

I, not the Nazi genocide of Jews, and Lewis is pro-lsrael.
52
Accordingly, this instance of holocaust

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denial raises no hackles in the United States. Turkey is an Israeli ally, extenuating matters even

further. Mention of an Armenian genocide is therefore taboo. Elie Wiesel and Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg

as well as the AJC and Yad Vashem withdrew from an international conference on genocide in Tel

Aviv because the academic sponsors, against Israeli government urging, included sessions on the

Armenian case. Wiesel also sought, unilaterally, to abort the conference and, according to Yehuda

Bauer, personally lobbied others not to attend.
53
Acting at Israel's behest, the US Holocaust Council

practically eliminated mention of the Armenians in the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum,

and Jewish lobbyists in Congress blocked a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide.
54

To question a survivor's testimony, to denounce the role of Jewish collaborators, to suggest that

Germans suffered during the bombing of Dresden or that any state except Germany committed crimes

in World War II — this is all evidence, according to Lipstadt, of Holocaust denial.
55
And to suggest

that Wiesel has profited from the Holocaust industry, or even to question him, amounts to Holocaust

denial.
56

The most "insidious" forms of Holocaust denial, Lipstadt suggests, are «immoral equivalencies»: that

is, denying the uniqueness of The Holocaust.
57
This argument has intriguing implications. Daniel

Goldhagen argues that Serbian actions in Kosovo «are, in their essence, different from those of Nazi

Germany only in scale."
58
That would make Goldhagen "in essence" a Holocaust denier. Indeed,

across the political spectrum, Israeli commentators compared Serbia's actions in Kosovo with Israeli

actions in 1948 against the Palestinians.
59
By Goldhagen's reckoning, then, Israel committed a

Holocaust. Not even Palestinians claim that anymore.

Not all revisionist literature — however scurrilous the politics or motivations of its practitioners — is

totally useless. Lipstadt brands David Irving "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust

denial" (he recently lost a libel suit in England against her for these and other assertions). But Irving,

notorious as an admirer of Hitler and sympathizer with German national socialism, has nevertheless,

as Gordon Craig points out, made an "indispensable" contribution to our knowledge of World War II.

Both Arno Mayer, in his important study of the Nazi holocaust, and Raul Hilberg cite Holocaust

denial publications. "If these people want to speak, let them," Hilberg observes. "It only leads those of

us who do research to re-examine what we might have considered as obvious. And that's useful for

us.
60

Annual Days of Remembrance of the Holocaust are a national event. All 50 states sponsor

commemorations, often in state legislative chambers. The Association of Holocaust Organizations

lists over 100 Holocaust institutions in the United States. Seven major Holocaust museums dot the

American landscape. The centerpiece of this memorialization is the United States Holocaust Memorial

Museum in Washington.

The first question is why we even have a federally mandated and funded Holocaust museum in the

nation's capitol. Its presence on the Washington Mall is particularly incongruous in the absence of a

museum commemorating crimes in the course of American history. Imagine the wailing accusations

of hypocrisy here were Germany to build a national museum in Berlin to commemorate not the Nazi

genocide but American slavery or the extermination of the Native Americans .
61

It "tries meticulously to refrain from any attempt at indoctrination," the Holocaust museum's designer

wrote, "from any manipulation of impressions or emotions." Yet from conception through completion,

the museum was mired in politics.
62
With a reelection campaign looming, Jimmy Carter initiated the

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project to placate Jewish contributors and voters, galled by the President's recognition of the

"legitimate rights" of Palestinians. The chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American

Jewish Organizations, Rabbi Alexander Schindler, deplored Carter's recognition of Palestinian

humanity as a "shocking" initiative. Carter announced plans for the museum while Prime Minister

Menachem Begin was visiting Washington and in the midst of a bruising Congressional battle over the

Administration's proposed sale of weaponry to Saudi Arabia. Other political issues also emerge in the

museum. It mutes the Christian background to European anti-Semitism so as not to offend a powerful

constituency. It downplays the discriminatory US immigration quotas before the war, exaggerates the

US role in liberating the concentration camps, and silently passes over the massive US recruitment of

Nazi war criminals at the war's end. The Museum's overarching message is that "we" couldn't even

conceive, let alone commit, such evil deeds. The Holocaust "cuts against the grain of the American

ethos," Michael Berenbaum observes in the companion book to the museum. "We see in [its]

perpetration a violation of every essential American value." The Holocaust museum signals the

Zionist lesson that Israel was the "appropriate answer to Nazism" with the closing scenes of Jewish

survivors struggling to enter Palestine.
63

The politicization begins even before one crosses the museum's threshold. It is situated on Raoul

Wallenberg Place. Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, is honored because he rescued thousands of Jews

and ended up in a Soviet prison. Fellow Swede Count Folke Bernadotte is not honored because,

although he too rescued thousands of Jews, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Shamir ordered his

assassination for being too "pro-Arab."
64

The crux of Holocaust museum politics, however, bears on
whom
to memorialize. Were Jews the only

victims of The Holocaust, or did others who perished because of Nazi persecution also count as

victims?
65
During the museum's planning stages, Elie Wiesel (along with Yehuda Bauer of Yad

Vashem) led the offensive to commemorate Jews alone. Deferred to as the "undisputed expert on the

Holocaust period," Wiesel tenaciously argued for the preeminence of Jewish victimhood. "As always,

they began with Jews,» he typically intoned. "As always, they did not stop with Jews alone."
66
Yet

not Jews but Communists were the first political victims, and not Jews but the handicapped were the

first genocidal victims, of Nazism.
67

Justifying preemption of the Gypsy genocide posed the main challenge to the Holocaust Museum. The

Nazis systematically murdered as many as a half-million Gypsies, with proportional losses roughly

equal to the Jewish genocide.
68
Holocaust writers like Yehuda Bauer maintained that the Gypsies did

not fall victim to the same genocidal onslaught as Jews. Respected holocaust historians like Henry

Friedlander and Raul Hilberg, however, have argued that they did.
69

Multiple motives lurked behind the museum's marginalizing of the Gypsy genocide. First: one simply

couldn't compare the loss of Gypsy and Jewish life. Ridiculing the call for Gypsy representation on

the US Holocaust Memorial Council as "cockamamie," executive director Rabbi Seymour Siegel

doubted whether Gypsies even "existed" as a people: "There should be some recognition or

acknowledgment of the gypsy people . . . if there is such a thing." He did allow, however, that "there

was a suffering element under the Nazis." Edward Linenthal recalls the Gypsy representatives' "deep

suspicion" of the council, "fueled by clear evidence that some council members viewed Rom

participation in the museum the way a family deals with unwelcome, embarrassing relatives."
70

Second: acknowledging the Gypsy genocide meant the loss of an exclusive Jewish franchise over The

Holocaust, with a commensurate loss of Jewish "moral capital." Third: if the Nazis persecuted Gypsies

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and Jews alike, the dogma that The Holocaust marked the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of

Jews was clearly untenable. Likewise, if Gentile envy spurred the Jewish genocide, did envy also spur

the Gypsy genocides In the museum's permanent exhibition, non-Jewish victims of Nazism receive

only token recognition.
71

Finally, the Holocaust museum's political agenda has also been shaped by the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Before serving as the museum's director, Walter Reich wrote a paean to Joan Peters's fraudulent
From

Time Immemorial,
which claimed that Palestine was literally empty before Zionist colonization.
72

Under State Department pressure, Reich was forced to resign after refusing to invite Yasir Arafat, now

a compliant American ally, to visit the museum. Offered a subdirector's position, Holocaust theologian

John Roth was then badgered into resigning because of past criticism of Israel. Repudiating a book the

museum originally endorsed because it included a chapter by Benny Morris, a prominent Israeli

historian critical of Israel, Miles Lerman, the museum's chairman, avowed, "To put this museum on

the opposite side of Israel - it's inconceivable."
73

In the wake of Israel's appalling attacks against Lebanon in 1996, climaxing in the massacre of more

than a hundred civilians at Qana,
Haaretz
columnist Ari Shavit observed that Israel could act with

impunity because "we have the Anti-Defamation League . . . and Yad Vashem and the Holocaust

Museum."
74

Footnotes:

1
Boas Evron, "Holocaust: The Uses of Disaster," in
Radical America
(July - August 1983), 15.

2
For the distinction between Holocaust literature and Nazi holocaust scholarship, see Finkelstein and

Birn,
Nation,
part one, section 3.

3
Jacob Neusner (ed.),
Judaism in Cold War America, 1945 - 1990, v.
ii:
In the Aftermath of the

Holocaust
(New York: 1993), viii.

4
David Stannard, "Uniqueness as Denial," in Alan Rosenbaum (ed.),
Is the Holocaust Unique?

(Boulder: 1996), 193.

5
Jean-Michel Chaumont,
La concurrence des victimes
(Paris: 1997), 148 - 9. Chaumont's dissection

of the "Holocaust uniqueness" debate is a tour de force. Yet his central thesis does not persuade, at

least for the American scene. According to Chaumont, the Holocaust phenomenon originated in

Jewish survivors' belated search for public recognition of past suffering. Yet survivors hardly figured

in the initial push to move The Holocaust center stage.

6
Steven T. Katz,
The Holocaust in Historical Context
(Oxford: 1994), 28, 58, 60.

7
Chaumont,
La concurrence,
137

8
Novick,
The Holocaust,
200 - 1, 211 - 12. Wiesel,
Against Silence, v. i,
158, 211, 239, 272, v. ii, 62,

81, 111, 278, 293, 347, 371, v. iii, 153, 243. Elie Wiesel,
All Rivers Run to the Sea
(New York: 1995),

89. Information on Wiesel's lecture fee provided by Ruth Wheat of the Bnai Brith Lecture

Bureau."Words," according to Wiesel, "are a kind of horizontal approach, while silence offers you a

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vertical approach. You plunge into it." Does Wiesel parachute into his lectures?

9
Wiesel,
Against Silence, v. iii,
146.

10
Wiesel,
And the Sea, 95.
Compare These news items: Ken Livingstone, a former member of the

Labour Party who is runnmg for mayor of London as an independent, has incensed Jews in Britain by

saying global capitalism has claimed as many victims as World War II. "Every year the international

financial system kills more people than World War II, but at least Hitler was mad, you know" . . . "It's

an insult to all those murdered and persecuted by Adolf Hitler," said John Butterfill, a Conservative

Member of Parliament. Mr. Butterfill also said Mr. Livingstone's indictment of die global financial

system had decidedly anti-Semitic overtones. ("Livingstone's Words Anger Jews," in
International

Herald Tribune,
13 April 2000)

Cuban President Fidel Castro . . . accused the capitalist system of regularly causing deaths on the scale

of World War II by ignoring the needs of the poor. "The images we see of mothers and children in

whole regions of Africa under the lash of drought and other catastrophes remind us of the

concentration camps of Nazi Germany." Referring to war crimes trials after World War II, the Cuban

leader said: "We lack a Nuremberg to judge the economic order imposed upon us, where every three

years more men, women and children die of hunger and preventable diseases than died in the Second

World War.» . . . In New York City, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation

League, said . . . "Poverty is serious, it's painful and maybe deadly, but it's not the Holocaust and it's

not concentration camps." (John Rice, "Castro Viciously Attacks Capitalism," in
Associated Press,
13

April 2000)

11
Wiesel,
Against Silence, v. iii,
156, 160, 163, 177.

12
Chaumont,
La concurrence,
156. Chaumont also makes the telling point that the claim of The

Holocaust's incomprehensible evil cannot be reconciled with dhe attendant claim chat its perpetrators

were perfectly normal. (310)

13
Katz,
The Holocaust, 19,
22. "The claim that the assertion of dhe Holocaust's uniqueness is
not
a

form of invidious comparison produces systematic doubletalk," Novick observes. "Does anyone . . .

believe that the claim of uniqueness is anything
other
than a claim for preeminence?" (emphasis in

original) Lamentably, Novick himself indulges such invidious comparing. Thus he maintains that

although morally evasive in an American context, "the repeated assertion that whatever The United

States has done to blacks, Native Americans, Vietnamese, or others pales in comparison to the

Holocaust is true."
(The Holocaust,
197, 15)

14
Jacob Neusner, "A 'Holocaust' Primer," 178. Edward Alexander, "Stealing the Holocaust," 15 - 16,

in Neusner,
Aftermath.

15
Peter Baldwin (ed.),
Reworking the Past
(Boston: 1990), 21.

16
Nathan Glazer,
Amencan Judaism,
second edition (Chicago: 1972), 171.

17
Seymour M. Hersh,
The Samson Option
(New York: 1991), 22. Avner Cohen,
Israel and the Bomb

(New York: 1998), 10, 122, 342.

18
Ismar Schorsch, "The Holocaust and Jewish Survival," in
Midstream
(January 1981), 39.

Chaumont convincingly demonstrates that the claim of Holocaust uniqueness originated in, and only

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makes coherent sense in the context of, the religious dogma of Jewish chosenness.
La concurrence,

102 - 7, 121.

19
Wiesel, Against
Silence, v. i,
153. Wiesel,
And the Sea,
133.

20
Novick,
The Holocaust, 59,
158 - 9.

21
Wiesel,
And the Sea,
68.

22
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen,
Hitler's Willing Executioners
(New York: 1996). For a critique, see

Finkelstein and Birn,
Nation.

23
Hannah Arendt,
The Origins of Totalitarianism
(New York: 1951), 7.

24
Cynthia Ozick, "All the World Wants the Jews Dead," in
Esquire
(November, 1974).

25
Boas Evron
, Jewish State or Israeli Nation
(Bloomington: 1995), 226 - 7.

26
Goldhagen,
Hitler's Willing Executioners,
34 - 5, 39, 42. Wiesel,
And the Sea,
48.

27
John Murray Cuddihy, "The Elephant and the Angels: The Incivil Irritatingness of Jewish

Theodicy," in Robert N. Bellah and Frederick E. Greenspahn (eds),
Uncivil Religion
(New York:

1987), 24. In addition to this article, see his "The Holocaust: The Latent Issue in the Uniqueness

Debate," in P.F. Gallagher (ed.),
Christians, Jews, and Other Worlds
(Highland Lakes, NJ: 1987).

28
Schorsch,
The Holocaust, 39.
Incidentally, the claim that Jews constitute a "gifted" minority is

also, in my view, a "distasteful secular version of chosenness."

29
Whereas a full exposition of this topic is beyond the scope of the essay, consider just the first

proposition. Hitler's war against the Jews, even if irrational (and that itself is a complex issue), would

hardly constitute a unique historical occurrence. Recall, for example, the central thesis of Joseph

Schumpeter's treatise on imperialism that "non-rational and irrational, purely instinctual inclinations

toward war and conquest play a very large role in the history of mankind . . . numberless wars —

perhaps the majority of all wars — have been waged without . .. reasoned and reasonable interest."

(Joseph Schumpeter, "The Sociology of Imperialism," in Paul Sweezy (ed.),
Imperialism and Social

Classes
[New York: 1951],
83)

30
Explicitly eschewing the Holocaust framework, Albert S. Lindemann's recent study of

anti-Semitism starts from the premise that "whatever the power of myth, not all hostility to Jews,

individually or collectively, has been based on fantastic or chimerical visions of them, or on

projections umrelated to any palpable reality. As human beings, Jews have been as capable as any