Auschwitz's Finale: racism and holocausts

Abstract

It is passing strange that the existence of Auschwitz has not lessened racism. In fact quite the reverse: it has unleashed surplus racism on the ‘Third world’ and its ‘natives’. As I contend here, this is the Auschwitz finale, its abject truth, the dialectical residue of the Holocaust. Jacob Neusner calls it the Holocaust ‘myth’ and ‘mythic theology’. It now constitutes the ruling narrative in the West. This article dissects the Auschwitz discourse and its denial of other holocausts. It critiques the claim that it was the only ‘real’ genocide. It advances a contrary thesis on colonialism, racism and holocausts in history. I clarify the affinity between colonialism and fascism and Israeli tactics in Occupied Palestine. It is undeniable that Auschwitz fuels anti-Arab anti-Semitism and anti-Islamism. In my conclusion I analyse Jewish criticism of the Auschwitz finale.

Notes

1 I Kant, The Philosophy of Kant: Immanuel Kant's Moral and Political Writings, ed CJ Friedrich, New York: Modern Library, 1949, pp 3–4.

2 Sound scholarly estimates indicate that at least 1.2 million Iraqi civilians were killed mainly by the US–UK occupation forces. The USA and UK erased a modern society and culture and left behind a legacy of gross violence, instability, economic devastation and terrible cancers by using depleted uranium and uranium ordnance. In brief, the USA and UK inflicted a holocaust, deliberately, on Muslim/Arab Iraq. J Holland, ‘Iraq death toll rivals Rwanda genocide, Cambodian killing fields’, AlterNet, September 16 2007 (http://www.alternet.org/story/62728/iraq_death_toll_rivals_rwanda_genocide%2C_cambodian_ killing_fields). See also A Arnove (ed), Iraq under Siege, Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002.

3 M Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, London: Verso, 2001, pp 6–9.

4 H Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Meridian Books, 1958, p 185.

5 RG Weisbrod, ‘The King, the Cardinal and the Pope: Leopold II's genocide and the Vatican’, Journal of Genocide Research, 5(1), 2003, pp 35–45.

6 P Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999, p 195.

7 J Neusner, Strangers at Home: ‘The Holocaust’, Zionism and American Judaism, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp 6–9.

8 G Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans D Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books, 1995, p 19.

9 H Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, New York: Viking, 1965, p 125.

10 Ibid, pp 131–134, 12–13.

11 M Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interview and Other Writings, ed C Gordon, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, p 131.

12 H Arendt, The Jew as Pariah, ed R Feldman, New York: Grove Press, 1978, pp 138, 183–184.

13 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp 190–192.

14 L Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide, London: Zed Books, 2000, p 4 passim, emphasis added.

15 S Lewis, ‘Rwanda ten years ago: how the world stood back and watched a genocide’, Democracy Now, 1 April 2004, at www.democracynow.org.

16 R Fanfair, ‘West more racist than colonial powers: Daillare’, Sharenews, 12 March 2005, at www.sharenews.com (2005_Archives/3-17-05).

17 S Weil, ‘East and West: thoughts on the colonial problem 1943’, in Weil, Selected Essays, trans R Rees, London: Oxford University Press, 1962, p 199. See also NG Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict, London: Verso, 1996, pp 89–94.

18 S Kuhl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp 54–55.

19 RL Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future, New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1978, pp 17–18.

20 Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict, pp 93–98.

21 H Freidlander, The Origins of Nazi Violence, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1995, p xiii. See also S Milton, ‘The context of the Holocaust’, German Studies Review, 13(2), 1990, pp 269–283; Milton, ‘Holocaust: the Gypsies’, in S Totten, WS Parsons & IW Chamy (eds), Century of Genocide, New York: Routledge, 2004.

22 R Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp 2–6.

23 Cited in S Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, trans Y Lotan, London: Verso, 2009, p 267.

24 Ibid. In this text, Tel Aviv University historian Sand cogently shows that Euro-Jews are not related to Biblical, to Palestinian (Arab) Jews, and that there has never been a Jewish people. The Zionist and Israeli narratives about the ‘Jewish people’ constitute ‘conventional lies about the past’ (p xi).

25 Cited in E Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989, p 55. Shohat incisively details the racist contempt for the Arabs even in Jewish films made well before the founding of Israel, as far back as 1902. See pp 26, 35–36, 44–50.

26 G Steiner, ‘Night words: high pornography and human privacy’, in Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman, New York: Atheneum, 1982, pp 68–77.

27 Ibid, p 61.

28 G Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle (TS Eliot Memorial Lectures 1970), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971, pp 34–35.

29 Ibid, pp 36, 42, 45.

30 Ibid, pp 22, 16–20, 11, 21.

31 Ibid, p 42.

32 Ibid, p 41.

33 Ibid, pp 88–89.

34 RR Reuther, ‘Anti-Semitism and Christian theology’, in E Fleischner (ed), Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era?, New York: ktav Publishing House, 1977, pp 79, 89, 85.

35 Ibid; and Y Yerushalmi, ‘Response to Rosemary Reuther’, p 99.

36 Bruno Bettelheim notes that the exact number killed by the Nazi regime is unknown: ‘the estimates vary from 11 000 000 (which official East German sources consider the lowest reasonable estimate) to well over 18 000 000; according to the most reliable estimates, between 5.5 and 6 million of these were Jews’. Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays, New York: Vintage Books, 1980, p 46. Zygmunt Bauman estimates that the Nazis killed ‘more than about 20 million’ overall. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989, p x.

37 RL Rubenstein, ‘Religion and the uniqueness of the Holocaust’, in AS Rosenbaum (ed), Is The Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996, pp 11, 16.

38 D Stannard, The American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp x–xii; and RL Rubenstein, The Age of Triage, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1983, pp 152–153.

39 Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle, pp 36, 54, emphasis added.

40 Milton, ‘The context of the Holocaust’, p 271.

41 J Noakes, ‘Social outcasts in Nazi Germany’, History Today, December 1985, pp 15–19; and C Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp 7, 15.

42 J Forster, ‘The German army and the ideological war against the Soviet Union’, in G Hirschfeld, The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany, London: Allen & Unwin, 1986, p 21; and T Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler—How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold, New York: Routledge, 1999, pp 106–108, ch 4.

43 R Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, three vols, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003, p 1296.

44 Stannard, The American Holocaust, pp 178–179, 169–170.

45 ST Katz, ‘The uniqueness of the Holocaust: the historical dimension’, in Rosenbaum, Is The Holocaust Unique?, pp 19, 37.

46 I Hancock, ‘Responses to the Porrajamos: the Romani holocaust’, in Rosenbaum, Is The Holocaust Unique?, pp 41–42; and Stannard, The American Holocaust, pp 185, 188.

47 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol II, pp 414–415, 422, 467.

48 Milton, ‘The context of the Holocaust’; Milton, ‘Gypsies and the Holocaust’, The History Teacher, 24(4), pp 375–387. 1991; and Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol II, pp 410–413.

49 Lemkin held a racist view of Africans; he labelled them ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’ and even blamed them for killing fellow Africans on the orders of their Belgian masters. It testifies to the resilience of chauvinism in Ashkenazi culture that a man like Lemkin could succumb to its vile charms. DJ Schaller, ‘Raphael Lemkin's view of colonial rule in Africa’, Journal of Genocide Research, 7(4), 2005, pp 531–536.

50 H Mommsen, ‘Anti-Jewish politics and the implementation of the Holocaust’, in H Bull (ed), The Challenge of the Third Reich (The Adam Von Trott Memorial Lectures), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, pp 188,123.

51 Milton, “The context of the Holocaust’, p 73.

52 Jacob Neusner, cited in Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, pp 10, 196–198.

53 P Lopate, ‘Resistance to the Holocaust’, in D Rosenberg (ed), Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal, New York: Times Books, 1989, p 287.

54 Rubenstein, The Cunning of History, p 7.

55 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p 288.

56 J Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980, pp 60,178, 183.

57 Steiner, Language and Silence, p viii.

58 G Steiner, Errata, London: Phoenix, 1998, p 106.

59 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Vol III, p 1296.

60 Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle, preface.

61 Steiner, Language and Silence, pp, vii–xi, 5, 66.

62 Ibid, pp ix, 146.

63 Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle, pp. 64, 66, emphasis added.

64 Steiner, Language and Silence, pp 143, 154.

65 Finkelstein, The Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict, pp 95–98; S Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths And Realities, New York: Pantheon Books, 1987; and E Said, The Question of Palestine, New York: Vintage, 1980, p 11.

66 Steiner, Language and Silence, p viii.

67 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp 123–134; and E Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, New York: New Press, 2003, ch 2.

68 T Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans R Howard, New York: Harper Perennial, 1992, pp 132–134.

69 Stannard, The American Holocaust, pp x, 150–151, 317–318.

70 D Stannard, ‘Uniqueness as denial: the politics of genocide scholarship’, in Rosenbaum, Is The Holocaust Unique?, pp 176–179.

71 Said, The Question of Palestine, New York: Vintage, 1980, pp 42–43.

72 A Horowitz, L Ratner & P Weiss (eds), The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (The Goldstone Report), New York: Nation Books, 2011, pp 289–315, emphasis added.

73 LB Brayer, ‘Judge Goldstone's bogus test of war time culpability’, Counterpunch, April 29–30, 2011. ‘War crimes’ isn't an entirely appropriate term in this context. It wasn't a war as usually understood. It was a planned slaughter of defenceless civilians by vastly superior military forces. In Lemkin's terms, this was a form of genocide.

74 Goldstone Report, pp 289–315, emphasis added.

75 Said, The Question of Palestine, pp 26–29.

76 NG Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, London: Verso, 2000, ch 3.

77 B Whitaker, ‘Lying is cultural trait of Arabs, says Barak’, Guardian, 23 May 2002, emphasis added.

78 A Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans J Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000, p 36.

79 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p 440.

80 Todorov, The Conquest of America, pp 127–145. See also R Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building, New York: Meridian, 1980; and A Maalouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes, London: Saqi Books, 1984.

81 J Barzun, Race: A Study in Superstition, New York: Harper and Row, pp 6, 17.

82 GM Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, pp 8–13.

83 E Balibar & I Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London: Verso, 2002, pp 17–18, 38–39.

84 Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle, pp 81–82.

85 P Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, pp vii, 21, 19–23.

86 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp 6–8.

87 Yerushalmi, ‘Response to Rosemary Reuther’, p 103.

88 J Conrad, Heart of Darkness, New York: Bantam, 1971, p 6.

89 Drinnon, Facing West, pp xvi–xvii.

90 M Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans D Macey, New York: Picador, 2003, pp 255, 276.

91 J Slater & M Walzer, ‘On Michael Walzer, Gaza and the Lebanon war’ (http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=743) and ‘Response to Jerome Slater’, (http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=744) Dissent, Winter 2007.

92 I Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006.

93 Ynet News, ‘Israeli minister warns Palestinians of “holocaust”’, Reuters, 29 February 2008, emphasis added.

94 Y Laor, ‘Is “Jewish pride” abetting racism?’, Haaretz (Israel), 24 January 2010.

95 A Burg, The Holocaust is Over: We must Rise from it Ashes, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp 153, 166, 174.

96 P Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans S Woolf, New York: Collier Books, 1961, pp 80–82.

97 A Deger, ‘80 refugees are rounded up as Israel's Interior Minister declares, “this country belongs to the white man”’, Mondoweiss, at www.mondoweiss.net, emphasis added; A Abunimah, ‘Israel will collapse unless Africans and Palestinians are expelled, fenced, says legal advocate’ (blog), Electronic Intifada, 23 May 2012.

98 A Badiou, Polemics, trans S Corcoran, London: Verso, 2006, pp 168–171.

99 Ibid, pp 227–229.