The Holocaust Industry (11 page)

other group of provoking hostility in the everyday secular world."
(Esau's Tears
[Cambridge: 1997],

xvii)

31
Wiesel,
Against Silence, v. i, 255, 384.

32
Chaumont makes the telling point that this Holocaust dogma effectively renders other crimes more

acceptable. Insistence on the Jews' radical innocence - i.e. the absence of any rational motive for

persecuting, let alone killing, them - "presupposes a 'normal' status for persecutions and killings in

other circumstances, creating a de facto division between unconditionally intolerable crimes and

crimes which one must and hence can live with."
(La concurrence, 176)

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33
Perlmutters,
Anti-Semitism,
36, 40.

34
Novick,
The Holocaust,
351nl9.

35
New York: 1965. I rely on James Park Sloan,
Jerzy Kosinski
(New York 1996), for background.

36
Elie Wiesel, "Everybody's Victim," in
New York Times Book Renew
(31 October 1965). Wiesel,

All Rivers,
335. The Ozick quote is from Sloan, 304-5. Wiesel's admiration of Kosinski does not

surprise. Kosinski wanted to analyze the "new language," Wiesel to "forge a new language," of the

Holocaust. For Kosinski, "what lies between episodes is both a comment on and something

commented upon by the episode." For Wiesel, "the space between any two words is vaster than the

distance between heaven and earth." There's a Polish proverb for such profundity: "From empty to

vacuum." Both also liberally sprinkled their ruminations with quotes from Albert Camus, the telltale

sign of a charlatan. Recalling that Camus once told him, "1 envy you for Auschwitz," Wiesel

continues: "Camus could not forgive himself for not knowing that majestic event, that mystery of

mysteries." (
Wiesel, All Rivers,
321; Wiesel,
Against Silence,
v. ii., 133)

37
Geoffrey Stokes and Eliot Fremont-Smith, "Jerry Kosinski's Tainted Words," in
Villa,qe Voice
(22

Jume 1982). John Corry, "A Case History: 17 Years of Ideological Attack on a Cultural Target," in

New York Times
(7 November 1982). To his credit, Kosinski did umdergo a kind of deathbed

conversion. In the few years between his exposure and his suicide, Kosinski deplored the Holocaust

industry's exclusion of non-Jevvish victims. "Many North American Jews tend to perceive it as Shoah,

as an exclusively Jewish disaster. . . But at least half of the world's Romanies (unfairly called

Gypsies), some 2.5 million Polish Catholics, millions of Soviet citizens and various nationalities, were

also victims of this genocide...." He also paid tribute to the "bravery of the Poles" who "sheltered" him

"during the Holocaust" despite his so-called Semitic "looks." Jerzy Kosinski,
Passing By
INew York:

1992], 165 - 6, 178 - 9) Angrily asked at a Holocaust conference what the Poles did to save Jews,

Kosinski snapped back: "What did the Jews do to save the Poles?"

38
New York: 1996. For background to the Wilkomirski hoax, see esp. Elena Lappin, "The Man With

Two Heads," in Granra, no. 66, and Philip Gourevitch, "Stealing the Holocaust," m
New Yorker
(14

June 1999).

39
Another important "literary" influence on Wilkomirski is Wiesel. Compare these passages:

Wilkomirski ''I saw her wide-open eyes, and all of a sudden I knew these
eyes
knew
it
all, they'd seen

everytlung mine had, they knew infinitely more than anyone else in this country. I knew eyes like this,

I'd seen them a thousand times, in the camp and later on. They were Mila's eyes. We children used
to

tell each other everything with these eyes. She knew it, too; she looked straight through my eyes and

into my heart.

Wiesel: "The eyes — I must tell you about their eyes. I must begin with that, for their eyes precede all

else, and everything is comprehended within them. The rest can wait. It will only confirm what you

already know. But their eyes —their eyes flame with a kind of irreducible truth, which burns and is

not consumed. Shamed into silence before them, you can only bow your head and accept the

judgment. Your only wish now is to see the world as they do.
A
grown man, a man of wisdom and

experience, you are suddenly impotent and terribly impoverished. Those eyes remind you of your

childhood, your orphan state, cause you to lose all faith in the power of language. Those eyes negate

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the value of words; they dispose of the need for speech."
(The Jews of Silence
[New York 1966], 3)

Wiesel rhapsodizes for another page and a half about "the eyes." His literary prowess is matched by

his mastery of the dialectic. In one place Wiesel avows, "I believe in collective guilt, unlike many

liberals." In another place he avows, "I emphasize that I do not believe in collective guilt." (Wiesel,

Against Silence, v.
ii, 134; Wiesel,
And the Sea,
152, 23s)

40
Bernd Naumann,
Auschwitz
(New York: 1966), 91. See Finkelstein and Birn,
Nation, 67-8,
for

extensive documentation.

41
Lappin, 49. Hilberg always asked the right questions. Hence his pariah status in the Holocaust

community; see Hilberg,
The Politics of Memory,
passim.

42
"Publisher Drops Holocaust Book," in
New York Times (3
November 1999). Allan Hall and Laura

Williams, "Holocaust Hoaxer7" in
New York Post (4
November 1999).

43
Novick,
The Holocaust,
158. Segev,
Seventh Million, 425.
Wiesel,
And the Sea,
198.

44
Bernard Lewis,
Semites and Anti-Semites
(New York: 1986), chap. 6; Bernard Lewis,
The Middle

East
(New York: 1995), 348 - 50. Berenbaum,
After Tragedy,
84.

45
New York Times,
27 March, 2 April, 3 April 1996.
Time,
23 December 1996.

46
Yehuda Bauer
,
"Reflections Concerning Holocaust History," in
Louis
Greenspan and Graeme

Nicholson (ads),
Fackenheim
(Toronto: 1993), 164, 169.
Yehuda Bauer,
«On Perpetrators
of the

Holocaust
and the
Public Discourse,"
in Jewish Quarterly Review, no.
87 (1997), 348-50.
Norman
G.

Finkelstein
and Yehuda Bauer, "Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: An
Exchange of Views,"

in Jewish Quarterly Review,
nos 1-2 (1998), 126.

47
For background and the next paragraphs, see Charles Glass, "Hitler's (un)willing executioners,"
in

New Statesman
(23
January
1998),
Laura Shapiro, "A Battle Over the Holocaust," in Newsweek
(23

March 1998),
and
Tibor
Krause, "The Goldhagen Wars," in Jerusalem Report
(3
August
1998).
For

these and
related items, cf.
www.NormanFinkelstein.com (with a
link to Goldhagen's web site).

48
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, "Daniel Jonah Goldhagen comments on Birn," in
German Politics and

Society
(Summer 3998), 88, 91n2. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, "The New Discourse of Avoidance," n25

(www.Goldhagen.com/nda2html)

49
Hoffmann was Goldhagen's advisor for the dissertation that became
Hitler's Willing Executioners.

Yet, in an egregious breach of academic protocol, he not only wrote a glowing review of Goldhagen's

book for
Foreign Affairs
but also denounced
A Nation on Trial
as "shocking" in a second review for

the same journal.
(Foreign Affairs,
May/June 1996 and July/August 1998) Maier posted a lengthy

intervention on the H-German web site
(www2.h-net.msu.edu).
Ultimately, the only "aspects of this

unfolding situation" that Maier found "really distasteful and reprehensible" were the criticisms of

Goldhagen. Thus he lent "support to a subsequent finding of malice" in Goldhagen's lawsuit against

Birn and deplored my argumentation as "fanciful and inflammatory speculation." (23 November 1997)

50
New York: 1994. Lipstadt occupies the Holocaust chair at Emory University and was recently

appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.

51
Employing a double negative, the AJC poll practically invited confusion "does it seem possible or

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does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?" Twenty-two

percent of respondents answered "it seems possible." In subsequent polls, which rephrased the

question straightforwardly, Holocaust denial approached zero. A recent AJC survey of 11 countries

found that, notwithstanding pervasive right-wing extremists' claims to the contrary, "few people

denied the Holocaust." Jennifer Golub and Renae Cohen,
What Do Americans Know About the

Holocaust?
[The American Jewish Committee: 1993]; "Holocaust Deniers unconvincing — Surveys,"

in Jerusalem Post
[4 February 2000]) Yet in Congressional testimony regarding "anti-Semitism in

Europe," David Harris of the AJC highlighted the salience of Holocaust denial in the European Right

without once mentioning the AJC's own findings that this denial finds virtually no resonance among

the general public. (Hearings before the Foreign Relations Committee, United States Senate, 5 April

2000)

52
see "France Fines Historian Over Armenian Denial," in
Boston Globe
(22 June 1995), and

"Bernard Lewis and the Armenians," in
Counterpunch (
16-31 December 1997).

53
Israel Charny, "The Conference Crisis. The Turks, Armenians and the Jews," in
The Book of the

International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide. Book One: The Conference Program and

Crisis (Tel Aviv: 1982). Israel Amrani, "A Little Help for Friends," in
Haaretz
(20 April 1990)

(Bauer). In Wiesel's bizarre account, he resigned as conference chair in order "not to offend our

Armenian guests." Presumably he also attempted to abort the conference and urged others against

attending out of courtesy to the Armenians. (Wiesel,
And the Sea,
92)

54
Edward T. Lirlenthal, Presernng
Memory
(New York: 1995), 228ff., 263, 312 13.

55
Lipstadt,
Denying
, 6, 12, 22, 89 - 90.

56
Wiesel
All Rivers,
333, 336

57
Lipstadt, Denying, chapter 11.

58
"A New Serbia," in
New Republic (17
May 1999).

59
See, for example, Meron Benvenisti, "Seeking Tragedy," m
Haaretz (16
April 1999), Zeev

Chafets, "What Undergraduate Clinton Has Forgotten," in
Jerusalem Report
(10 May 1999), and

Gideon Levi, "Kosovo: It is Here," in
Haaretz
(4 April 1999). (Benvenisti limits the Serbian

comparison to Israeli actions after May 1948.)

60
Arno Mayer,
Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?
(New York: 1988). Christopher Hitchens,