AAARGH
[Note de
l'AAARGH: Finkelstein a un site web où l'on trouve le dossier
de son livre: http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/index.html]
Without prejudice
This Holocaust Day is a voyeuristic hypocrisy
Nick Cohen
Sunday January 30, 2000
There are, thankfully, no Dachaus in the Warwickshire greenbelt, or crumbling Treblinkas in the valleys of the Lake District. We live in a lucky country, but also a shallow and fraudulent one, which perhaps explains why the teeth of many people were on edge last week.
The intention behind Tony Blair's announcement that Britain will have its first Holocaust Memorial Day next year - 'to build a just, tolerant and multi-racial' society - was admirable. The content was, as so often, vague. The Home Office was unable to say what, precisely, will happen on the grim festival. In the absence of concentration camps for children to inspect, it is all too easy to imagine that the spirit of the New Britain would be made flesh by Spice Girls dressed in striped pyjamas dancing in the Dome on 27 January 2001 while smoke billows from the big tent's roof; by Damien Hirst cutting a gas cooker in half and being applauded for his profundity.
Have I been tasteless? I tried my best. But nothing I have conjured up can compare with the French synchronised swimming team wanting to splash to a routine inspired by the Holocaust at the Olympics. Or with the words of Gordon Burn, the most gushing 'critic' of Britart, who told Guardian readers that after Hirst had ordered the cleaners in the Groucho Club to collect all the 'cigarette butts, champagne corks, matchbooks, cocaine wraps, roaches and stinking wet ash' left after a long night on the expense account, the resulting installation in a giant plastic ashtray was 'like a horrible record of a Srebrenica, of an Auschwitz or Belsen'.
When the detritus of the silliest quarters of the West End is equated with mass murder you can suspect that the obsession with the Holocaust is not always about history, and that Hannah Arendt said more than she realised when she spoke of the banality of evil.
No one knows more about the appropriation of the unquiet dead than Norman Finkelstein, a combative professor at Hunter College in New York. Finkelstein dissected Hitler's Willing Executioners , the phenomenally popular condemnation of the Germans by the American academic Daniel Goldhagen.
They were not merely anti-semitic, like so many others in Europe, Goldhagen said, but were psychopaths who had been waiting for decades for the chance to destroy the Jews. Finkelstein and his collaborator, Ruth Birn, tore in to him with relish. If you wanted to look for evidence of a desire to exterminate before 1933 you would find many more lynchings and assassinations in the American south than in Germany, they pointed out. If the Germans were really innate serial killers, why did no Jews flee until Hitler came to power?
When Cambridge University ran Birn's criticisms, Goldhagen descended to the level of David Irving and threat ened to sue in our dreadful libel courts. When an American house agreed to publish Birn's and Finkelstein's essays, the head of Jewish America's Anti-Defamation League delivered a now notorious warning to the publishers: 'The issue is not whether Goldhagen's thesis is right or wrong but what is legitimate criticism and what goes beyond the pale.'
Few seemed to care that the attempt to suppress debate encouraged the modern far Right to shout that the 'truth' that there was no final solution had been hidden. Birn is an investigator of war crimes for the Canadian government. Finkelstein is with us because his parents survived the Warsaw ghetto and the camps. Their careers and ancestry did not prevent them being accused of purveying anti-semitism and believing that Nazism's victims deserved to die. Finkelstein holds that the Holocaust craze, which began in the Sixties after 20 years of virtual silence, is about power. It 'bludgeons' critics of Israel into submission and allows prosperous American Jewry to claim victimhood status.
You do not have to go with him all the way - studying Nazism, Stalinism or, indeed, Rwanda and Bosnia does tend to make you obsess in good faith about the hows and the whys - to suspect the 'lessons of history' are being distorted. All dictatorships are built on lies, and it might be thought that there was an inescapable intellectual duty to tell the truth as best you can about their slaughters.
Yet at the Washington Holocaust Museum there is no mention in the main exhibition of the gassing of 500,000 gypsies. Exclusion wasn't an accident but the deliberate policy of the museum's directors. If Nazism can 'teach' us anything, it is that the most disparate groups have a common interest in fighting prejudice. Yet last week Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, who knows that homosexuals and Jews died together in Auschwitz, berated the Government for coming to the aid of gay children being beaten up in the playground. (How would Sacks react if fanatics from a rival creed demanded a Section 28 ban on 'promoting' Judaism? That would be an entirely different matter, I'm sure.)
While I was chatting to Finkelstein, he let slip a telling objection to Holocaust museums and holidays. For the Anglo-Saxon countries, 'they allow compassion without moral and intellectual consequences' in a way that, for example, an examination of the New World slave trade does not. This seems to get to the heart of the queasiness the Government has induced. Holocaust Day wasn't to my knowledge the result of lobbying by sectarians anxious to block off any criticism of Israeli actions on the West Bank, but the bright idea of one Andrew Dismore, Labour MP for Hendon. I was asked to meet him before what was meant to be a spirited debate and was looking forward to a scrap. Everything about his commemoration felt shabby.
If we had to have a Holocaust Day, why 27 January, when Auschwitz was liberated by a Red Army that went on to subjugate half of Europe? What was wrong with 15 April when the British Army reached 40,000 inmates in Belsen - a moment which, whenever it is recalled, can make even my unpatriotic eyes prick? (A Home Office spokeswoman later explained that 15 April would often conflict with the Easter holiday. Once again, I heard 'banality' ringing in my ears.) Did Dismore know about the manipulation of history? No, he didn't. He wasn't Jewish or a historian. He was a quiet solicitor who, to the surprise of everyone, had taken suburban Hendon from the Tories in the 1997 Labour landslide. He hadn't thought much about Nazism until, in the course of his Parliamentary duties, he met a camp survivor in an old people's home. Her story inspired him to create an 'appropriate' ceremony so that others did not live in ignorance. He was such a nice and simple soul, I didn't have the heart to give him a kicking.
I now regret my restraint. Dismore, like Blair and Straw, sees no contradiction between wallowing in voyeuristic re-gret for what happened to people in a continent that was occupied before they were born - and the slandering and impoverishing of modern refugees from tyranny. Such lapses are commonplace. Ehud Barak, the Israeli Prime Minister, joined world leaders at a conference in Sweden on never forgetting the Holocaust and the need to compensate victims.
A Scandinavian journalist asked him if Palestinians driven from their homes by Israel should be compensated. There was no moral or legal claim against Israel, was Barak's brave reply. Not many lessons learned there. To be frank, I think the only resolution to draw from horrors old and new is to commit yourself to refining your sense of smell - to grow a Jewish nose, if you prefer. When our Government deplores the tyrannies of the Thirties while persecuting asylum-seekers who are in a miserable limbo because the incompetent Home Office can't install a computer system that can sort the genuine from the merely desperate, when trial by jury is under attack, you must be ready to catch a faint, foul smell from the past.
The stink does not tell you that the Straws and the Widdecombes are proto-fascists or Nazis or dictators - history cannot repeat itself. It just lets you know that others have smelt something similar to what you are smelling and would urge you to get serious if they could. Write like this and you meet a familiar objection. I can hear readers saying that however phoney Holocaust Day may be at least it will be 'relevant' to modern students.
I could point out that last year a survey by History Today found that about the only history the young knew was the histories of Hitler and Stalin. But the real objection runs deeper and you will only agree with it if you have a temperamental dislike of convenient piety. I would rather leave some in ignorance than see the graves of better people than our leaders will ever be robbed. I hate the thought of history as therapy; of death camps becoming a - y'know - life-affirming experience. Absolutely despise it.
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