I just quoted Tony Judt's piece on the uses of the Holocaust in the NYRB, let me do it again:
Students today do not need to be reminded of the genocide of the Jews, the historical consequences of anti-Semitism, or the problem of evil. They know all about these—in ways their parents never did. And that is as it should be. But I have been struck lately by the frequency with which new questions are surfacing: "Why do we focus so on the Holocaust?" "Why is it illegal [in certain countries] to deny the Holocaust but not other genocides?" "Is the threat of anti-Semitism not exaggerated?" And, increasingly, "Doesn't Israel use the Holocaust as an excuse?" I do not recall hearing those questions in the past.
My fear is that two things have happened. By emphasizing the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust while at the same time invoking it constantly with reference to contemporary affairs, we have confused young people. And by shouting "anti-Semitism" every time someone attacks Israel or defends the Palestinians, we are breeding cynics....We have attached the memory of the Holocaust so firmly to the defense of a single country—Israel—that we are in danger of provincializing its moral significance.
Judt may be deflecting some of his own views on to those students. But who doesn't question the emphasis on the Holocaust above all other genocides? The Holocaust Memorial's annual funding from the U.S. government just went from $44 to $46 million, under Bush's latest budget. A lot more than the Kennedy Center, which loses funding, from $42 million to $33 million. As Janet McMahon wrote some time back in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, the Holocaust Memorial has had higher priority in Washington than the WW II monument, the Native American museum, and a museum to African Americans—"the latter two groups having suffered here, at the hands of this country," as distinct from "the victims and survivors of a European horror."
The issue is the use of the Holocaust as a blackmail against anyone who politically questions our relationship to the Jewish state, let alone our claim of an "axis of evil." Just now on MSNBC the eloquent Peggy Noonan said that conservative Republicans are not going to get riled up about Islamic terrorism to the point of going to war again. It's time to chill, she says. Even the conservatives are feeling "manipulated" around the Iraq war. And Jacob Heilbrunn has said that the Holocaust was a "driving" force behind the plans for the Iraq war among neocons and neolibs. A false understanding. That is the issue here, separating the veils of myth and history from the real problems that face us.
I hate to be such a broken record on the subject, but (again) there likely never would have been a Holocaust but for the Ukrainian Holodomor and other Jewish authoritarian-engineered programs like it in the former Soviet Union.
"A particularly relevant parallel to the Nazi holocaust is the Ukrainian holodomor of 1932-33, a state-created famine—not a crop failure—that killed an estimated five million people in the Ukraine, one million in the Caucasus, and one million elsewhere after the Soviet state confiscated the harvest at gunpoint. Throughout the famine, the state continued to export grain to pay for industrialization…Some Ukrainian accounts, and that of Muggeridge, who covered the holodomor for the Manchester Guardian, take the trouble to say that this mass starvation was imposed largely by Jews."
"The Holocaust Memorial's annual funding from the U.S. government just went from $44 to $46 million … A lot more than the Kennedy Center, which loses funding, from $42 million to $33 million … the WW II monument, the Native American museum, and a museum to African Americans."
No one is Congress is willing to raise these tough questions. Philip Weiss's essay is the first time I've ever seen the subject raised.
His point is indisputable — why are monuments dedicated to quintessentially American subjects being short-changed, while a museum pertaining to an event involving Europeans in Europe is lavished with official sponsorship?
To answer my own rhetorical question, this evidently is a prime example of parlaying the tragedy of the Holocaust into a 'free pass' — no one wanted to put their foot down years ago and respectfully tell the Conference of Presidents, "Sorry, but it is just not appropriate for the U.S. government to fund a Holocaust museum, although we welcome your private efforts to do so. The First Amendment prohibits us from establishing or sponsoring a religion."
No wonder Tony Judt's students ask, "Doesn't Israel use the Holocaust as an excuse?" There has been a vast overreaching in the field of 'Shoah business,' and it's becoming ever more brazen. What happens when you push too far, and tempers snap? I sure don't want to find out. But some folks evidently do.
Ed has a point. Anybody here want to tell us if there is a distinction between German Jews proper, and what they did in the first half of the 20th Century, as distinguished from East European Jews at that time? The history of East European gentiles at this time, compared to West European gentiles at the time, is very different. The usual narrative for mass world consumption treats them the same, when it is not. The usual result is that perception of East European gentiles is that they were merely rabid anti-semites. If you were, e.g., a gentile Pole, age 25, in 1935, today you'd be a negative cartoon character that has nothing to do with reality past or present.
Memory of Soviet Communism – memory of German Nazism
_____________________________________________________
Michael McFaul, Hoover fellow and associate professor of political sience at Stanford, wrote in the International Herald Tribune on June 18, 2003:
“Many of my students at Stanford have never heard of the gulag.” And:
“In visiting Poland last month, President George Bush took the time to go to Auschwitz … he remarked:’And this site is also a strong reminder that the civilized world must never forget what took place on this site. May Good bless the victims and the families, and may we always remember.’”
Fair enough. Michael McFaul goes on to say:
“The next day Bush was in St. Petersburg, Russia. While there, he did not make it up to the Solovetsky Islands, the site of the first camp of the gulag. Nor did he call on the world to ‘always remember’ the millions of people who perished in the Soviet concentration camps well before Auschwitz was constructed and well after Auschwitz was dismantled. The families of the victims of Soviet Communism – much more numerous than the families who lost loved ones in Hitler’s camps – receieved no special blessing from the leader of the free world.”
_______
The explanation why this is so is simple: The gulag doesn’t have a lobby and no ‘United States Gulag Memorial Museum’ in Washington.
Yes, Klaus. This is true.
American prisons make money off of the inmates, mostly black, who often work for less than a pittance making products that go to market.
It is understood that this is "socially constructive use of otherwise marginal labour", the reason for the gulags, and underpinning the early use of the concentration camps as well.
The deaths in the camps were first rationalized as the "necessary" deaths of those who were not perceived as "good workers".
Students are never told this.
Concentration camps in America.. you betcha, for the blacks, the immigrants, the Muslims.
"We have attached the memory of the Holocaust so firmly to the defense of a single country—Israel—that we are in danger of provincializing its moral significance."
Oh, no, the danger is far greater than you think. You have not only provincialized the moral significance of your holocaust, you have provincialized the significance of evil itself: "Students today do not need to be reminded of the genocide of the Jews, the historical consequences of anti-Semitism, or the problem of evil."
Now you are attaching the significance of evil to containment (for lack of a better word) of a single ethnicity-religion-cultural_entity-whatever which is trying very hard to prove itself the "biggest player in a global culture of violence."
So, what will be of mankind when evil is what evil fights?
One wonders why so much public funding is needed when resources are available from the interest group itself that desires that the focus be exclusively on the European Holocaust. Does the Weisenthal Center or the Shoah Foundation deal with the crimes against Palestinians or Armenians or Native Americans or Africans brought to America against their will, or other groups that should also bring cries of "never again" from humanity? If all public funding was eliminated in this area would these centers just close up shop? I doubt it. The exclusion of equally tragic historical occurences means that the bulk of the public funding is not deserved.
I am not going to say anything nice about Tony Judt until he reconsiders his views of Louis Althusser.
I suspect the real reason he hates Althusser is that he thinks that Althusser strangled his wife because she was Jewish:
Another self-hating Jew?
Here's your leaders' budget funding priorities:
1.) 2.5 billion. Smithsonian received $682.6 million for fiscal 2008. $2.5 billion proposed for 2009 (including National Zoo and National Museum of Natural History.
2.) 400 million. Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR). In another proposal, President Bush recommended substantial cuts in the 2009 and 2010 budgets of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR). He proposed eliminating $200 million from the already approved $400 million for 2009 and $220 million from the $420 million passed by Congress for 2010. The CPB, which oversees and funds public radio and other public broadcasting operations, gets funding allocations several years in advance, although those can be changed. For the past eight years, Congress has overridden the president's cuts
3.) 128 million. The proposed 2009 budget for the National Endowment for the Arts lost some of the ground it had recovered since its near-death days of the 1990s. President Bush yesterday submitted a budget of $128.4 million, which is the same amount he requested for fiscal 2008. However, Congress last year added $20.2 million for direct grants and a special program called "American Masterpieces." If the president's request stands, it would mean a cut of $16.3 million.
4.) 46.8 million. The president proposed a $46.8 million budget for 2009 for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, slightly more than last year's $44.8 million appropriation.
5.) 39.8 million. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the principal federal funnel for money to museums, received a proposed increase of $8.6 million to $39.8 million for museum programs. (The institute is the main source of federal support for all libraries and museums within the United States.)
6.) 33.3 million. Bush's proposal reduces the budget of the Kennedy Center, which would get $33.3 million for fiscal 2009, down $9.3 million.
7.) 118 million. The National Gallery of Art is slated for $118 million, a razor-thin increase of $133,000 from $117.8 million in fiscal 2008.
Oops, here's a corrected version of your leaders's budget priorities in the interest of implanting and fertilizing memory in all USA citizens:
Here's your leaders' budget funding priorities:
1.) 2.5 billion. Smithsonian received $682.6 million for fiscal 2008. $2.5 billion proposed for 2009 (including National Zoo and National Museum of Natural History.
2.) 400 million. Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR). In another proposal, President Bush recommended substantial cuts in the 2009 and 2010 budgets of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR). He proposed eliminating $200 million from the already approved $400 million for 2009 and $220 million from the $420 million passed by Congress for 2010. The CPB, which oversees and funds public radio and other public broadcasting operations, gets funding allocations several years in advance, although those can be changed. For the past eight years, Congress has overridden the president's cuts
3.) 128 million. The proposed 2009 budget for the National Endowment for the Arts lost some of the ground it had recovered since its near-death days of the 1990s. President Bush yesterday submitted a budget of $128.4 million, which is the same amount he requested for fiscal 2008. However, Congress last year added $20.2 million for direct grants and a special program called "American Masterpieces." If the president's request stands, it would mean a cut of $16.3 million.
4.) 118 million. The National Gallery of Art is slated for $118 million, a razor-thin increase of $133,000 from $117.8 million in fiscal 2008.
5.) 46.8 million. The president proposed a $46.8 million budget for 2009 for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, slightly more than last year's $44.8 million appropriation.
6.) 39.8 million. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, the principal federal funnel for money to museums, received a proposed increase of $8.6 million to $39.8 million for museum programs. (The institute is the main source of federal support for all libraries and museums within the United States, e.g., national WW II monument, the Native American museum, and a museum to African Americans.)
7.) 33.3 million. Bush's proposal reduces the budget of the Kennedy Center, which would get $33.3 million for fiscal 2009, down $9.3 million.
And the historian of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum sent misleading information to the Department of Justice on the internment of German Americans and Italian Americans in the United States during World War II.