'What a lot of weather we're having!'
In England a discussion about the weather is the usual way to fill awkward silences. It was appropriate then that the cabinet met on Thursday to discuss the weather. 'Extreme weather conditions' are supposed to have brought the country to the point of collapse, proving the warnings about global warming and demanding emergency measures from government.
In the name of tackling the crisis the government has usefully diverted support away from the threatened renewal of fuel protests, and attention from the moral collapse of the rail network operators. At a time when identification with government is at an all time low, few people see the need to pay extra fuel tax. But with the television broadcasting images of flooded Shrewsbury and the groaning river Ouse, the case for financing the vital emergency services is already made. Like the insurance industry, the state preys on fears of disaster better than it responds to positive hope for the future.
Fortunately for Britain, the disaster is wildly overstated. A few thousand homes have been damaged and no one yet has lost a life in the floods. Evidence of more extreme weather conditions is suspect: growing insurance cover increases the payout; meteorological office records are better kept and perceptions of 'crisis' are more highly attuned. The Earth is getting warmer on its own centuries-long cycle, but the human contribution to global warming is entirely speculative. For modern, post-theistic moralists, though, global warming is the secular apocalypse that puts us all in our place. Under this belief-system, we are all guilty of greedy energy use, and architects of our own suffering.
In the Middle Ages King Canute was supposed to have sat at the water's edge commanding the tide to go back, as a demonstration to his court that he was not omnipotent. Prime Minister Blair's cabinet may come to rue the day that they sat to discuss what to do to stop the rain falling in Britain.
The evil of two lessers
Al Gore's failure to capitalise on the authority of the incumbent in the US elections has stirred a panic in the Democratic Party. Surely, they argue, we cannot return to the bad old days of Republicanism. But the more that the Democratic activists struggle to paint Bush as a reactionary the more pointed it becomes how reactionary the Democrat ticket is: pro-censorship, pro-Israel and hostile to civil liberties. The Democrats blew their opportunity to make a positive case under the Clinton administration and are now reduced to scare-mongering about George W Bush. Their sights reduced to winning the Electoral College if not the country, the Democrats hope they can trick their way into power. Review: The Holocaust Industry
Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry is a short and caustic critique of Holocaust awareness in the USA, that distinguishes between the historical event of the Nazis 'final solution' in which six million Jews were exterminated and the subsequent abuse of that event as the ideological justification of the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians. Finkelstein begins by uncovering the origins of Holocaust awareness not in the historical event itself, but in the shifting relations between US foreign policy interests, the Israeli state and American Jewish leaders.
In passing Finkelstein demolishes the myth that US support for Israel is the result of a Jewish lobby which dominates Congress. On the contrary Finkelstein argues that American Jewish leaders have always 'marched in lockstep' with US foreign policy interests. And awareness of the Holocaust has always been selectively deployed in American politics accordingly.
Before 1967 when the USA was cool towards Israel and opposed its 1956 invasion of Egypt, American Jewish leaders and intellectuals echoed the criticism. They were particularly fearful during the McCarthyite 1950s of the charge 'dual loyalty', of the taint of being unAmerican, which hung around Jewish intellectuals. Only after the 1967 Six Day War when US policy shifted towards Israel did mainstream American Jews adopt Israel as their own.
According to Finkelstein, the effect of this 'windfall' for American Jews was to facilitate their assimilation into the upper echelons of American society. With Israeli Jews now fighting at the frontline of the Cold War against the Soviet-backed Arabs, Zionism and Jewishness conjured not vaguely communistic or cosmopolitan disloyalty but a 'superloyalty' to the American way. The commemoration of the Holocaust served as the lynchpin of the transformation of Jews from dubious outsiders to a trusted component of the US elite. Firstly the growth of Holocaust awareness served to immunise Israeli aggression in the Middle East from domestic criticism. But it also facilitated a shift to the right by organised American Jewry, allowing them quickly to abandon their old coalition with American blacks in the Democratic Party, while still claiming to be victims of oppression themselves - a betrayal which has resulted in lasting bitterness.
Finkelstein concentrates his polemical fire on the two fraudulent dogmas of the Holocaust Industry: the inexplicable irrationality of the Holocaust and the interpretation of the Holocaust as the culmination of a timeless hatred of Gentile for Jew. In this he is extremely effective and leaves the reader in no doubt as to the cynicism and bankruptcy of Holocaust studies and memorials. American Jews pioneered the victim politics that has since become the norm. Finkelstein notes that the alleged uniqueness of Jewish suffering promoted by the Holocaust industry is logically premised on a sense of Jewish moral superiority over Gentiles. Moreover the cultivation of Holocaust awareness by privileged American Jews, not even born in the 1940s, has permitted them to make 'compensation' claims on European states and banks in what Finkelstein describes as a 'double shakedown'.
But Finkelstein writes as a participant in a family fight. He is authoritative on what he regards as the chauvinistic abuse of the Holocaust by his fellow American Jews but only, it seems, to advocate the 'proper' use of the Nazi genocide - not as a Zionist 'ideological club' but as a universal 'moral compass'. But this perspective is potentially more irrational and mystifying than the Zionist myth that Finkelstein has demolished. In the 1990s the twin dogmas of the Holocaust industry were often divorced from the idea that the Jewish suffering was unique, and could become the basis for inventing Nazi- style genocide wherever it was needed by those who supported US military intervention in the Balkans or Africa. Unfortunately Finkelstein barely comments on this tendency to relativise the Holocaust.
The Holocaust Industry is nonetheless an excellent exposé of the prehistory of the Holocaust as the 'moral compass' for the human rights imperialism of our age.
Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Verso, 2000 -- James Heartfield