While po-mo is rightly hammered on this list, it seems to me that here is an issue that really could do with some clearly written (if that's a possibility with po-mo), factually grounded work on how this whole narrative has been constructed and why it has had such ascendancy in more recent times -- all these Holocaust Studies programmes, Holocaust memorials, etc. have had a very short history, haven't they? in fact dating from a time when most survivors are gone. One wonders what Primo Levi made of it all.
It's by now pretty well-established that the holocaust narrative was hardly of much concern in the 1950s and 1960s, when people were indeed much closer to the events and there were any number of living witnesses, from survivors to soldiers who entered the death camps at the end of the war. Indeed, the narrative itself was not much present even within Israel itself.
Additionally, the facts of US (and many others, including zionists) recalcitrance in doing something for the victims during the events themselves is also well-established; yet this is something that does not evoke much guilt. Perhaps the clearest recent instance of this would be the contrast with going after the Swiss banks or Deutsche Bank (conveniently, for the latter, at a time when they were looking to buy up Bankers' Trust), and the silence over IBM's collaboration with the Nazis. Thus, there has been no attempt to seek compensation from IBM for their facilitation of the infrastructure of terror, death and mass extermination, while going after the Swiss banks for their silence, venality and greed. Ford remains a folk hero in the US, his anti-semitism and support for Hitler glossed over. Etc., etc.
There was a proposal to bomb Auschwitz and the railway line leading to it. But it was turned down as impractical -- although, in fact, part of Auschwitz got bombed by mistake! Why is there no guilt about that?
IIANM, the fact was that in mid-1943, 80% of the Jews who finally perished were still alive; by mid-1944, 80% of them were dead. The mass extermination occurred at a time when the Nazis had lost the war, when the allied powers had command of the air, when information was available, when something could have been done to save many. As it emerged during the so-called "Kastner trial" of 1955 in Israel, the bulk of Hungarian Jewry perished in 1944, with the complicity of the local zionist organisation -- they essentially exchanged 2000 'leading' Jews for assisting in the 'peaceful' transportation of 400,000 to their death!
Arendt, covering the Eichmann trial, with the memory of the Kastner trial still fresh in her mind and with her own experiences, pointed to the complicity of at least some local zionist organisations and the judenräte in the extermination of the Jews -- and those few pages were subjected to villification, on-going to this day, and that despite the fact that work since then, including Lenni Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, largely confirm her view. Meanwhile, it seems that a counter-offensive was launched in order that the zionists, with their mixed and dubious record in relation to the 'final solution', could lay claim to being the rightful representatives and heirs of the holocaust. I guess it's easy enough to ask around who knows or recalls anything about the role of the Polish Bund in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
In brief, whatever guilt there may be vis-a-vis Jews and the holocaust, rather than being a cause of the American public's [surely few believe that this is what's behind US government support?] support for Israel is instead a measure of the success of the zionists in foisting a particular narrative. Yet, it seems that that narrative has lost its power in Europe. So what accounts for its stranglehold on American public opinion -- or does it have such a stranglehold? Yesterday's Washington Post report on a recent opinion poll suggests that it may not be so, which is perhaps why there's now a link up between the zionists and the christian ultra-right. Well, I guess the irony of that is that the christian ultra-right or christian zionists are the anti-semites to trump all anti-semites -- they see the Jews in purely instrumental terms, as needing to fulfil their historical destiny so that the 2nd coming can occur. And how are the Jews to fulfil that historical destiny? By bringing about Armageddon -- the ultimate holocaust, the final solution to end all final solutions!!! And there are people who can't bear to hear Gotterdammerung, yet willing to collaborate with those who take Gotterdammerung with its salvation by fire ("holocaust", in its original sense) most literally...
kj khoo