The Holocaust Industry by Norman G. Finkelstein

Author:Norman G. Finkelstein
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9781859844885
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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.

17 See, for example, Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature (Oxford: 1991), 202ff.

18 John Stuart Mill, On the Subjection of Women (Cambridge: 1991), 148.

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