>From David Stannard Into to "A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust
and Denial in the Americas 1492 to Present" by Ward Churchill:
1) "But debates on the subject of genocide are rarely hospitable to fair, deliberative, or reasoned discourse. Am I am not speaking here only of writings by the well-known neo-fascist crackpots and cranks who attempt to deny the reality or the magnitude of the Holocaust. Beyond them, there are those who apply the word 'genocide' so indiscriminately--claiming, for example, that legalized abortion in the United States has resulted in fetal genocide--that the term begins to lose any meaning at all. On the other hand, there are those who attempt to seize the word as their own private property and narrow its meaning to a single case--in asserting for instance, that the only 'true' genocide in the history of the world was that perpetrated by the Nazis against Jews--thus trivializing the sufferings of many other terribly damaged groups of people in both the present and the past." [Note this also trivializes the suffering of the Jewish victims themselves since concern for only Jewish victims is in reality very "un-Jewish" as evidenced by all the sacrifices of Jews who died defending justice for non-Jews and this also separates Jewish and non-Jewish victims which is exactly what the Nazis and other anti-Semites have always sought to do in order to facilitate the destruction of Jews and their non-Jewish supporters]. pxiii
2) In both of these cases the arguments almost invariably are advanced with a noisy ferocity that attempts to drown out opposing voices or to shame them into silence. Thus, those who disagree with the contention that abortion is genocide are labeled as murderers, or at least accomplices in murder. Similarly, those, including some of the most eminent scholars in the world today, who contend that the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews was not a unique event in world history are dismissed as anti-Semites or Holocaust deniers." p. xiii
3) "A society requires antecedents. Where these are not naturally at hand, where a community is new or reassembled after a long interval of dispersal or subjection, a necessary past tense to the grammar of being is created by intellectual or emotional fiat." p xv
4) "But remembering the Holocaust does remain necessary--as it should. So, apparently, do claims for the historically unrivaled magnitude of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust--which should not. Indeed, so insistent is Israel on retaining its 'official story' of the Holocaust that for decades now somw of the most outstanding works of scholarship on Jewish history and politics--including volumes by Hannah Arendt and even Raul Hilberg's monumental study, "The Destruction of the European Jews"--have not been translated into Hebrew. The reason: they critically discuss the behavior of certain Jews in Europe during the years of Nazi rule, and such criticism cannot be tolerated in the Israeli theocracy. As Segev notes, in Israel today the Holocaust, by one measure at least, has an even higher status than religion, since the maximum legal penalty for denying the existence of God is one year in prison, while the punishment for denying the existence of the Holocaust is up to five years' imprisonment." p. xv
5)"Nor can the existence of 'other' genocides be acknowledged by Israeli officialdom. Thus, the government of Israel has banned from Israeli television a documentary film on the early twentieth-century Turkish genocide against the Armenians, and it has prohibited the Israeli Education Ministry from introducing the story of the Armenian genocide into high school curricula. Moreover, in the United States, Israeli officials of the Foreign Office have joined hands with the government of Turkey in blocking Congressional efforts to acknowledge the Armenian genocide with an official Armenian day of remembrance." pp xv-xvi
6) "Thus, what began as an understandable and admirable effort to 'never forget' has evolved into official Israeli policy to undermine the efforts of others to have their own historical victimhood acknowledged. Yet, in the world of scholarship, there exists a strange paradox: while some of the most prominent opponents of this state-sponsored exclusivist agenda are Israeli scholars such as Israel Charny, the head of Jerusalem's Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, the majority of the most prominent proponents of Holocaust exclusivism are Jewish American writers." p xvi [Note this could be due to the angst and cognitive dissonance problems of Jews of the Diaspora who live the lush life outside Israel and handle the cognitive dissonance problem by being more fanatic than those living and sacrificing inside Israel in lieu of putting their bodies and lives where those inside Israel have put them].
7) "The chauvinistic motivations of this latter group are too transparent and psychologically self-evident to bother discussing here, but they have long been on display regarding the extremist positions on other Israeli issues, while the burden has often fallen on Israeli scholars themselves to offer the necessary correctives. And just as the Turkish government now openly (and self-servingly) supports the claim that only Jews have suffered true genocide--while the Israeli government accomodatingly denies the existence of the Turkish genocide against the Armenians--so too does a similar propagandistic quid pro quo operate in the United States." p. xvi
8). "It should be hardly surprising, then, to learn of the U.S. government's major support for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum--whose former executive director attempted to exclude from the museum's exhibits any mention of Nazi victims other than Jews--while the very seat of the American government is located in a part of the country where the indigenous peoples were once openly hunted and slaughtered into extinction. Of course, there is no talk of a Holocaust Museum for them."
Jim
James Craven
Dept. of Economics,Clark College
1800 E. McLoughlin Blvd. Vancouver, WA. 98663
jcraven at clark.edu; Tel: (360) 992-2283 Fax: 992-2863 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the Wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination--by starvation and uneven combat--of the 'Red Savages' who could not be tamed by captivity." ("Adolf Hitler" by John Toland, p. 702)
"Set the blood-quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed...and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens,the federal government will finally be freed from its persistent Indian problem." (Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West" p338)
*My Employer has no association with My Private and Protected Opinion* ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)