Judenhetens motiv till att hålla förintelsen intakt och aktuell

Förintelsen ett paradigm
En fråga är den realhistoriska jämförelsen mellan Förintelsen
och andra folkmord, uttolkad av vetenskapliga specialister,
en annan den bredare historiekulturella jämförelse som rör
likheter, skillnader och påverkan i fråga om hur Förintelsen
har representerats och brukats av eftervärlden i förhållande till
andra folkmord. Också denna aspekt har tidigare berörts. Det
har framgått att Förintelsen fungerat som ett mönster eller ett
paradigm för folkmordet och ondskan i långt större utsträck-
ning än andra folkmord. Bakom den uppmärksamhet som
riktats mot Förintelsen har stått starka politiska, ekonomiska,
kulturella och vetenskapliga intressenter som saknats i fråga
om exempelvis de kommunistiska regimernas folkmord eller
ungturkarnas folkmord på armenierna. Varken i Ryssland eller
i Turkiet tar folkmorden plats i historiekulturen. Inga framträd-
ande kommunister har någonsin ställts till svars för sina brott
mot de egna medborgarna och mot mänskligheten. Intresset
för Gulag i Hollywood och på andra populärkulturella arenor
har så här långt inte varit stort, vilket sannolikt har mindre
med ett »judiskt« intresse att göra än med det förhållande
att Förintelsens intrig är så bipolär och enkel att beskriva i
svartvita kategorier, egenskaper som gör sig bra på fi
lm för en
bred publik.
Det fi
nns dock även paralleller och likheter att peka på.
Den tystnad som fanns kring folkmordet på judarna under
decennierna efter andra världskriget, och villkoren för denna
tystnad, gällde i hög grad också till exempel folkmordet på
armenierna, om än med viss tidsförskjutning, eftersom det
senare ägde rum under första världskriget. Den moderna väst-
liga staten, orienterad mot integration av minoriteter, gav lika
lite manöverutrymme åt armeniska som judiska överlevandes
intresse av att vittna och få erkännande.
143
När en omsväng-
ning så småningom kom, var den i båda fallen i hög grad
ett resultat av att frågor om etnicitet och identitet fi
ck ökat
utrymme i samhället. I båda fallen var generationsskiften en
viktig pådrivande kraft.
144
Frustration över tystnaden kring och
den uteblivna uppgörelsen med ett folkmordsförfl
utet bidrog
inte bara i
1970
-talets Tyskland till terrorhandlingar. Arme-
niers frustration över hur de osmanska ungturkarnas folkmord
på armenierna antingen förbigicks med internationell tystnad
eller möttes med explicit förnekande från representanter
för det offi
ciella Turkiet ledde vid samma tid till en lång rad
armeniska terrorattacker mot turkiska diplomater.
Den europeiska integrationens tredje våg har till sist inte
bara fört upp Förintelsen på dagordningen. I mindre utsträck-
ning har också folkmordet på armenierna blivit en europeisk
integrationsfråga, framför allt beroende på just det faktum att
kandidatstaten Turkiet sedan länge systematiskt och ihärdigt
förnekat att ett folkmord ägde rum i Turkiets »föregångarstat«
Osmanska riket. Vissa EU-länders krav på ett turkiskt erkän-
nande kan utan tvekan kopplas till frågan om Förintelsens
sentida position som en värdegrund inom den europeiska
unionen. Det mångfasetterade nutida intresset för Förintelsen
har fört med sig att också andra folkmord, förövade i det mo-
derna samhället, har blivit en verksam del av den europeiska
historiekulturen.

How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.

I called ADL Chairman Abe Foxman, who was in Santiago, Chile, where, he told me to my dismay, he was not hunting Nazis. He dismissed my whole proposition, saying that the number of people who think Jews run Hollywood is still too high. The ADL poll, he pointed out, showed that 59% of Americans think Hollywood execs "do not share the religious and moral values of most Americans," and 43% think the entertainment industry is waging an organized campaign to "weaken the influence of religious values in this country."

That's a sinister canard, Foxman said. "It means they think Jews meet at Canter's Deli on Friday mornings to decide what's best for the Jews." Foxman's argument made me rethink: I have to eat at Canter's more often.

"That's a very dangerous phrase, 'Jews control Hollywood.' What is true is that there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood," he said. Instead of "control," Foxman would prefer people say that many executives in the industry "happen to be Jewish," as in "all eight major film studios are run by men who happen to be Jewish."

But Foxman said he is proud of the accomplishments of American Jews. "I think Jews are disproportionately represented in the creative industry. They're disproportionate as lawyers and probably medicine here as well," he said. He argues that this does not mean that Jews make pro-Jewish movies any more than they do pro-Jewish surgery. Though other countries, I've noticed, aren't so big on circumcision.

I appreciate Foxman's concerns. And maybe my life spent in a New Jersey-New York/Bay Area-L.A. pro-Semitic cocoon has left me naive. But I don't care if Americans think we're running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.

The Business of Death
[...]

The Guardian
Wednesday July 12, 2000

[...]

[...]

[...]

[...]

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 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.

The Holocaust only emerged in American life after Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day war against its Arab neighbours. [Since then] too many public and private resources have been invested in memorialising the Nazi genocide. Most of the output is worthless, a tribute not to Jewish suffering but to Jewish aggrandisement. 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 US has likewise acquired victim status. Considerable dividends accrue from this specious victimhood - in particular, immunity to criticism, however justified.

[...]

The term "Holocaust survivor" originally designated those who suf fered the unique trauma of the Jewish ghettos, concentration camps and slave labour camps, often in sequence. The figure for these Holocaust survivors at war's end is generally put at some 100,000. The number of living survivors cannot be more than a quarter of this figure now. Because enduring the camps became a crown of martyrdom, many Jews who spent the war elsewhere represented themselves as camp survivors. Another strong motive behind this misrepresentation, however, was material. The postwar German government provided compensation to Jews who had been in ghettos or camps. Many Jews fabricated their pasts to meet this eligibility requirement. "If everyone who claims to be a survivor actually is one," my mother used to exclaim, "who did Hitler kill?"

Even within the Holocaust industry, Deborah Lipstadt, for example, wryly observes that Holocaust survivors frequently maintain they were personally examined by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Because survivors are now revered as secular saints, one doesn't dare question them. Preposterous statements pass without comment. Elie Wiesel reminisces in his acclaimed memoir that, recently liberated from Buchenwald and only 18 years old, "I read the Critique of Pure Reason - don't laugh! - in Yiddish." Leaving aside Wiesel's acknowledgment that at the time "I was wholly ignorant of Yiddish grammar," The Critique of Pure Reason was never translated into Yiddish. "The truth I present is unvarnished," Wiesel sighs, "I cannot do otherwise."

In recent years, "Holocaust survivor" has been redefined to designate not only those who endured but also those who managed to evade the Nazis. One contributor to a Holocaust website maintained that, although he spent the war in Tel Aviv, he was a Holocaust survivor because his grandmother died in Auschwitz. According to Israel Gutman, a former inmate of Auschwitz, director of Yad Vashem and a Holocaust lecturer at Hebrew University, "it's not that important" whether Binjamin Wilkomirski's [now discredited "autobiographical" account of childhood in the camps], Fragments, is a fraud. "Wilkomirski has written a story which he has experienced deeply; that's for sure . . . He is not a fake. He is someone who lives this story very deeply in his soul." So it doesn't matter whether he spent the war in a concentration camp or a Swiss chalet; Wilkomirski is a Holocaust survivor because "his pain is authentic."

The Israeli prime minister's office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million. The main motive behind this inflationary revision is again not hard to find. It is difficult to press massive new claims for reparations if only a handful of Holocaust survivors are still alive.

In the early 1950s, Germany entered into negotiations with Jewish institutions and signed indemnification agreements. It has paid out to date some $60bn. The German government also negotiated a financial settlement with the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, an umbrella of major Jewish organisations including the American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, B'nai B'rith, the Joint Distribution Committee. The claims conference was supposed to use the monies, $10m annually for 12 years, or about a billion dollars in current values, for Jewish victims of Nazi persecution who had fallen through the cracks in the compensation process. My mother was a case in point. A survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, Majdanek concentration camp and slave labour camps at Czestochowa and Skarszysko-Kamiena, she received only $3,500 in compensation from the German government. Other Jewish victims (and many who in fact were not victims), however, received lifetime pensions from Germany, eventually totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars. In a flagrant breach of its letter and spirit, the conference earmarked the monies not for the rehabilitation of Jewish victims who had received minimal compensation but for the rehabilitation of Jewish "communities". Indeed, a guiding principle of the claims conference prohibited use of monies for "direct allocations to individuals".

In a classic instance of looking after one's own, however, the conference provided exemptions for two categories of victims: rabbis and "outstanding Jewish leaders" received individual payments. As the conference came under attack from defrauded Jews, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg cast a plague on both sides, sneering that: "It's not about justice, it's a fight for money." When Germans or Swiss refuse to pay compensation, the heavens cannot contain the righteous indignation of organised American Jewry. But when Jewish elites rob Jewish survivors, no ethical issues arise: it's just about money.

Others involved in the reparations process have also done well. The reported annual salary of Saul Kagan, long-time executive secretary of the claims conference, is $105,000. Kagan rings up in 12 days what my mother received for suffering six years of Nazi persecution.

In recent years, the Holocaust industry has become an outright extortion racket. Purporting to represent all of world Jewry, living and dead, it is laying claim to Holocaust-era Jewish assets throughout Europe. Fittingly dubbed the "last chapter of the Holocaust", this double shakedown of European countries as well as legitimate Jewish claimants first targeted Switzerland. [After a protracted campaign which enlisted the American political establishment] the Swiss finally caved in 1998 and agreed to pay $1.25bn. "The aim ..." a Swiss bank's press release read, "is to avert the threat of sanctions as well as long and costly court proceedings."

Its solicitude for "needy Holocaust survivors" notwithstanding, the World Jewish Congress wants nearly half the Swiss monies earmarked for Jewish organisations and "Holocaust education". The Simon Wiesenthal Centre maintains that if "worthy" Jewish organisations receive monies, "a portion should go to Jewish educational centres". As they "angle" for a bigger share of the loot, reform and orthodox organisations each claim that the 6m dead would have preferred their branch of Judaism as financial beneficiary.

Meanwhile, the Holocaust industry forced Switzerland into a settlement because time was allegedly of the essence: "Needy Holocaust survivors are dying every day." Once the Swiss signed away the money, however, the urgency miraculously passed. More than a year after the settlement was reached there was still no distribution plan. By the time the money is finally divvied out, all the "needy Holocaust survivors" will probably be dead. In fact, by last December, less than half of the $200m "Special Fund for Needy Victims of the Holocaust" established in February 1997 had been distributed to actual victims. After lawyers' fees have been paid, [total attorney fee demands for the case run to $15m] the Swiss monies will then flow into the coffers of "worthy" Jewish organisations.

The staggering dimensions of Hitler's Final Solution are by now well known. And isn't the "normal" history of humankind replete with horrifying chapters of inhumanity? A crime need not be aberrant to warrant atonement. The challenge today is to restore the Nazi Holocaust as a rational subject of inquiry. Only then can we really learn from it. The abnormality of the Nazi Holocaust springs not from the event itself but from the exploitative industry that has grown up around it.

The Holocaust industry has always been bankrupt. What remains is to openly declare it so. The time is long past to put it out of business. The noblest gesture for those who perished is to preserve their memory, learn from their suffering and let them, finally, rest in peace.

Lemkin's Law Of Interest...?
‘He in Whose Interest It Was, Did It’: Lemkin’s Lost Law of Genocide


Lemkin’s law of interest demands that we do not simply offer up examples of individual involvement in genocide, as I have done with two careerist German professors.

Cui prodest

Det finns ett latinskt uttryck, ”cui prodest?”, ”vem gagnar det?”. När det inte genast framgår vilka politiska eller sociala grupper, krafter eller storheter som förfäktar vissa förslag, åtgärder etc, så bör man alltid ställa frågan ”vem gagnar det?”.
Det viktiga är inte vem som direkt förfäktar en viss politik, ty för att försvara vilka åsikter som helst kan i dagens nobla kapitalistiska system vilken rik knös som helst alltid ”hyra” eller köpa eller engagera hur många advokater, skribenter, ja till och med deputerade, professorer, präster osv. som helst. Vi lever i en köpenskapens tid då bourgeoisin inte generar sig för att bedriva köpenskap med både hedern och samvetet. Det finns dessutom fårskallar som i oförstånd eller tanklös vana försvarar åsikter som är förhärskande i vissa borgerliga kretsar.
Nej, det viktiga i politiken är inte vem som direkt förfäktar vissa åsikter. Det viktiga är vem dessa åsikter, dessa förslag, dessa åtgärder gagnar.