The Holocaust Industry (22 page)

The "pretense that the Holocaust is an American memory," Novick further argues, is a moral evasion.

It "leads to the shirking of those responsibilities that
do
belong to Americans as they confront their

past, their present, and their future." (emphasis in original)
5
He makes an important point. It is much

easier to deplore the crimes of others than to look at ourselves. It is also true, however, that were the

will there we could learn much about ourselves from the Nazi experience. Manifest Destiny

anticipated nearly all the ideological and programmatic elements of Hitler's
Lebensraum
policy. In

fact, Hitler modeled his conquest of the East on the American conquest of the West.
6
During the first

half of this century, a majority of American states enacted sterilization laws and tens of thousands of

Americans were involuntarily sterilized. The Nazis explicitly invoked this US precedent when they

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enacted their own sterilization laws.
7
The notorious 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of the

franchise and forbade miscegenation between Jews and non-Jews. Blacks in the American South

suffered the same legal disabilities and were the object of much greater spontaneous and sanctioned

popular violence than the Jews in prewar Germany.
8

To highlight unfolding crimes abroad, the US often summons memories of The Holocaust. The more

revealing point, however, is
when
the US invokes The Holocaust. Crimes of official enemies such as

the Khmer Rouge bloodbath in Cambodia, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iraqi invasion of

Kuwait, and Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo recall The Holocaust; crimes in which the US is

complicit do not.

Just as the Khmer Rouge atrocities were unfolding in Cambodia, the US-backed Indonesian

government was slaughtering one-third of the population in East Timor. Yet unlike Cambodia, the

East Timor genocide did not rate comparison with The Holocaust; it didn't even rate news coverage.
9

Just as the Soviet Union was committing what the Simon Wiesenthal Center called "another genocide"

in Afghanistan, the US-backed regime in Guatemala was perpetrating what the Guatemalan Truth

Commission recently called a "genocide" against the indigenous Mayan population. President Reagan

dismissed the charges against the Guatemalan government as a "bum rap." To honor Jeane

Kirkpatrick's achievement as chief Reagan Administration apologist for the unfolding crimes in

Central America, the Simon Wiesenthal Center awarded her the Humanitarian of the Year Award.
10

Simon Wiesenthal was privately beseeched before the award ceremony to reconsider. He refused. Elie

Wiesel was privately asked to intercede with the Israeli government, a main weapons supplier for the

Guatemalan butchers. He too refused. The Carter Administration invoked the memory of The

Holocaust as it sought haven for Vietnamese "boat people" fleeing the Communist regime. The

Clinton Administration forgot The Holocaust as it forced back Haitian "boat people" fleeing

US-supported death squads.
11

Holocaust memory loomed large as the US-led NATO bombing of Serbia commenced in the spring of

1999. As we have seen, Daniel Goldhagen compared Serbian crimes against Kosovo with the Final

Solution and, at President Clinton's bidding, Elie Wiesel journeyed to Kosovar refugee camps in

Macedonia and Albania. Already before Wiesel went to shed tears on cue for the Kosovars, however,

the US-backed Indonesian regime had resumed where it left off in the late 1970s, perpetrating new

massacres in East Timor. The Holocaust vanished from memory, however, as the Clinton

Administration acquiesced in the bloodletting. "Indonesia matters," a Western diplomat explained,

"and East Timor doesn't."
12

Novick points to passive US complicity in human disasters dissimilar in other respects yet comparable

in scale to the Nazi extermination. Recalling, for example, the million children killed in the Final

Solution, he observes that American presidents do little more than utter pieties as, worldwide, many

times that number of children "die of malnutrition and preventable diseases" every year.
13
One might

also consider a pertinent case of
active
US complicity. After the United States-led coalition devastated

Iraq in 1991 to punish "Saddam-Hitler," the United States and Britain forced murderous UN sanctions

on that hapless country in an attempt to depose him. As in the Nazi holocaust, a million children have

likely perished.
14
Questioned on national television about the grisly death toll in Iraq, Secretary of

State Madeleine Albright replied that "the price is worth it."

"The very extremity of the Holocaust," Novick argues, "seriously limit[s] its capacity to provide

lessons applicable to our everyday world." As the "benchmark of oppression and atrocity," it tends to

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"trivializ[e] crimes of lesser magnitude."
15
Yet the Nazi holocaust can also sensitize us to these

injustices. Seen through the lens of Auschwitz, what previously was taken for granted — for example,

bigotry — no longer can be.
16
In fact, it was the Nazi holocaust that discredited the scientific racism

that was so pervasive a feature of American intellectual life before World War II.
17

For those committed to human betterment, a touchstone of evil does not preclude but rather invites

comparisons. Slavery occupied roughly the same place in the moral universe of the late nineteenth

century as the Nazi holocaust does today. Accordingly, it was often invoked to illuminate evils not

fully appreciated. John Stuart Mill compared the condition of women in that most hallowed Victorian

institution, the family, to slavery. He even ventured that in crucial respects it was worse. "I am far

from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than slaves; but no slave is a slave to the

same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word as a wife."
18
Only those using a benchmark evil not

as a moral compass but rather as an ideological club recoil at such analogies. "Do not compare" is the

mantra of moral blackmailers.
19

Organized American Jewry has exploited the Nazi holocaust to deflect criticism of Israel's and its own

morally indefensible policies. Pursuit of these policies has put Israel and American Jewry in a

structurally congruent position: the fates of both now dangle from a slender thread running to

American ruling elites. Should these elites ever decide that Israel is a liability or American Jewry

expendable, the thread may be cut. No doubt this is speculation — perhaps unduly alarmist, perhaps

not.

Predicting the posture of American Jewish elites should these eventualities come to pass, however, is

child's play. If Israel fell out of favor with the United States, many of those leaders who now stoutly

defend Israel would courageously divulge their disaffection from the Jewish state and would excoriate

American Jews for turning Israel into a religion. And if US ruling circles decided to scapegoat Jews,

we should not be surprised if American Jewish leaders acted exactly as their predecessors did during

the Nazi holocaust. "We didn't figure that the Germans would put in the Jewish element," Yitzhak

Zuckerman, an organizer of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, recalled, "that Jews would lead Jews to

death."
20

During a series of public exchanges in the 1980s, many prominent German and non-German scholars

argued against "normalizing" the infamies of Nazism. The fear was that normalization would induce

moral complacency.
21
However valid the argument may have been then, it no longer carries

conviction. 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 exploitive 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.

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Footnotes:

1
Adam Hochschild,
King Leopold's Ghost
(Boston: 1998).

2
Wiesel,
Against Silence, v.
iii, 190; cf. v. i, 186, v. ii, 82, v. iii, 242, and Wiesel,
And the Sea,
18.

3
Novick,
The Holocaust,
230 - 1.

4
New York Times
(25 May 1999).

5
Novick,
The Holocaust, 15.

6
John Toland,
Adolf Hitler
(New York: 1976), 702. Joachim Fest,
Hitler
(New York 1975),214,650.

see also Finkelstein,
Image and Reality,
chap. 4.

7
See, for example, Stefan Kühl,
The Nazi Connection
(Oxford 1994).

8
see, for example, Leon F. Litwack,
Trouble in Mind
(New York: 1998), esp. chaps 5-6. The vaunted

western tradition is deeply implicated in Nazism as well. To justify the extermination of the

handicapped — the precursor of the Final Solution — Nazi doctors deployed the concept "life

unworthy of life"
(lebensunwertes Leben).
In
Gorgias,
Plato wrote "I can't see that life is worth living

if a person's body is in a terrible state." In
The Republic,
Plato sanctioned the murder of defective

children. On a related point, Hitler's opposition in
Mein Kampf
to birth control on the ground that it

preempts natural selection was prefigured by Rousseau in his
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.

Shortly after World war II, Hannah Arendt reflected that "the subterranean stream of western history

has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition"
(Origins of Totalitarianism,

ix).

9
See, for example, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky,
The Political Economy of Human Rights, v.

i: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism
(Boston 1979), 129 - 204.

10
Response
(March 1983 and January 1986).

11
Noam Chomsky,
Turning the Tide
(Boston: 1985), 36 (Wiesel cited from interview in the Hebrew

press). Berenbaum,
World Must Know,
3.

12
Financial Times (8
September 1999).

13
Novick,
The Holocaust, 255.

14
See, for example, Geoff Simons,
The Scourging of Iraq
(New York: 1998).

15
Novick,
The Holocaust,
244, 14.

16
On this point, see esp. Chaumont,
La concurrence,
316 18.