Perhaps this is a tactless way to address the question in Germany but Finklestein as I understand it, is battling against the control by the "holocaust industry" particularly within Jewish American circles.
What needs to be addressed is only just beginning, with the very selective widening of the holocaust commemorations over the last week, to include victims other than the jews.
Whether the Armenians are included for example is a very hot potato, that almost everyone significantly would like to drop.
For many understandable reasons about the horrors of the camps in the last stages of the war and the mindless killing of jews as well as the total numbers, the jews have symbolised an attack on bourgeois democratic rights that actually developed in a more complex way.
Dachau, held up as the model concentration camp, in Himmler's Bavarian back yard, had hardly any jews until the arrival of large number of jews from Austria after the Anschluss.
The very important point that left wingers need repeatedly to try to get across, and the capitalist media is quite content to ignore in favour of the symbolic horror of the slaughter of the jews, is that the slaughter of the jews was only possible because for the first five years Dachau and the other camps were full of socialists and communists.
Many of them were unfortunately for the dramatic message, not killed, and many of them were released, after their ability to keep civil society was crushed. In many ways the anti-Jewish laws in the early days were valuable as a symbol that proclaimed the abolition of universal bourgeois democratic rights, and as a way of flushing out any committed left wing defenders of such democratic rights. What were the chances of fighting against the Jewish marriage laws, in say 1936, if it just meant you were immediately going to be rounded up for very hard labour for a year and a half *and be unable to rally any public support for resistance on that basis*.
Similarly I suggest it is significant that the first mass deaths of jews only occurred as the Nazi forces drove into the Slav lands. At a crazy psychotic level this was the first opportunity for the Nazi's to kill their symbolic enemy. But it had a deeper political purpose for the occupied Slav population: by ruthlessness towards a detested minority it was a clear warning of the possibility of future ruthlessness towards their own race, if they did not submit.
It was consistent with the strict principle of the concentration camp ruthlessly to break any sign of collective solidarity and compassion.
Thus to restrict the commemoration of the crimes of the Nazi's to the holocaust of the jews alone, at an emotional level successfully symbolises the horror, but at an analytical level which would enable us to learn anything useful, it conceals the inner workings by which the Nazi regime was an attack (not to be doctrinaire, but to deal the real organic truth) on the German working people as much as on all other victims of Nazism.
It was of the English that Marx said a nation which oppresses another cannot itself be free. That should also be said of the Germans.
Among the victims of Nazism were the German war dead too, and the 12 to 14 million who were ethnically cleansed from the eastern lands (perhaps 3 million of whom died) because of the violence the Nazi's committed in their name.
Maybe Finklestein's approach is not the right way to tackle this problem of continued distorted consciousness in Germany. However there is enough evidence coming to light quietly, such as subtle reflective evidence of witnesses who have not yet died, in a series of television historical documentaries available on German and UK television, that should lay the basis of a more meaningful analysis than total horror. It is not that evil is banal, it is that a brutally repressive regime also needs subtle ways of maintaining and developing itself.
After all the Nazi's could not have lasted in power for even 12 years if they had been totally crazy.
But at some stage the story must come forward much more loudly about the suppression of the communists and socialists. Some of this was their fault, but that story must still be told, because without it there is no understanding possible of how the Nazis overthrew the young and fragile German bourgeois democracy.
The story must also be told again of the economic horror of the global financial system, which is also systematically suppressed by the holocaust industry.
This is not about dead history, but living danger of new holocausts, as christian and muslim communities slaughter each in eastern asia today in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
I am not calling for a reversion to mechanical formulae of the 30's by way of explanation of fascism. The real understanding must come out of a detailed and inflected rediscovery of history.
The topic is perhaps too hot to handle as presented by Finklestein. But it is urgent to handle it. Not least for the sake of the Middle East.
Chris Burford
London