From the UK Left journal, What Next. http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Newint/Main.html
Eclectic are they, THE DREAMER OF THE DAY: FRANCIS YOCKEY AND AMERICAN NATIONAL BOLSHEVISM Loren Goldner (From Vol.10 No.4, 2001)
HURRICANE KATRINA: THE POLITICAL FALLOUT – Louis Proyect
http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages////////Newint/Finkel.html Finkelstein's Follies: The Dangers of Vulgar Anti-Zionism
Tobias Abse
NORMAN Finkelstein's new book, The Holocaust Industry, does no service to the left, to Jews or to genuine anti-fascists of any variety. Objectively, this book, whose very title echoes the rhetoric of Holocaust denial rather in the way that the phrase 'race relations industry' is a hallmark of all British racists, provides considerable comfort to every Holocaust denier, neo-Nazi and anti-Semite on the face of the planet. It was no accident that the Evening Standard I bought on my way home from Finkelstein's book launch in Bookmarks (where his presentation had somewhat disingenuously barely mentioned his third, longest and most controversial chapter) in July contained a 'Diary' item in which David Irving expressed his pleasure that Finkelstein had vindicated him against his critics.
To say that Finkelstein's work, published in England in the immediate aftermath of the Irving trial and, despite the court judgement, and more importantly for someone claiming to be a serious historian, the conclusions of Richard Evans, Britain's leading historian of modern Germany, both of whom Finkelstein ignores, containing some qualified praise for Irving, drawn at second-hand from the non-Jewish conservative historian Gordon Craig (pp.70-1), was bound to be seized upon by the far right, is not to argue that the predominant interpretation of the Holocaust in the USA, memorialised by the US Holocaust Museum in Washington and similar institutions, should not be criticised. Far from it. A memorialisation of the Holocaust that adopts a narrow Zionist focus rather than a universalist and anti-fascist one has many problems.
The questions that Peter Novick raised in his much longer and far more carefully considered work first published in 1999 in the USA as The Holocaust in American Life, and reissued a year later in Britain under the slightly misleading title of The Holocaust and Collective Memory, are perfectly legitimate ones, and deserve serious discussion. It is indeed very far from self-evident why the Holocaust, which only directly affected a very small fraction of the three per cent of the US population ultimately descended from European Jewry, should have assumed such a central place in American life, probably achieving greater cultural prominence than it has in either Israel or Germany, the two countries most directly affected by the event in terms of links with the victims in the former case, and the perpetrators in the latter. Moreover, it is doubly strange that this focus on the Holocaust should have occurred in the USA so belatedly, not in the late 1940s or early 1950s in the aftermath of the US liberation of Western Europe which brought the first pictures of Belsen and Buchenwald to the world, but in the last three decades.
Novick's book is a serious and scholarly attempt to answer these questions, resting on years of research and reflection, in sharp contrast to Finkelstein's hastily-written pamphlet which from internal evidence seems to have been cobbled together between January and April 2000 in response to Novick – whose book Finkelstein had reviewed for the London Review of Books (6 January 2000) – rather than out of some longstanding interest in the phenomenon. Some criticisms of Novick's position, which is left-liberal and non-Marxist, or of his views on particular issues, can of course be made, and it could be argued that Finkelstein raises some intelligent, plausible but not necessarily conclusive objections to parts of Novick's thesis in his 'Introduction' and his first chapter, 'Capitalizing the Holocaust', even if Finkelstein rapidly undermines these objections by the intemperate and patronising tone he adopts in debating with the more serious scholar, whom he dismisses as belonging 'to the venerable American tradition of muckraking' (p.4), as if Novick were a mere journalist.
Finkelstein intermittently poses as a rigorous Marxist theoretician concerned with 'power', 'interests' and 'ideology', contemptuously remarking: 'Novick's central analytical category is "memory". Currently all the rage in ivory towers "memory" is the most impoverished concept to come down from the academic pike in a long time.' (p.5)
Finkelstein, who as brief asides in his critique of Goldhagen, co-written with Ruth Bettina Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (New York, 1998), showed, has always been contemptuous of the value of oral sources for the history of the Holocaust, seems to have next to no knowledge of the extensive literature on memory, whether collective or individual, that has been a by-product of the growth of oral history over the last 25 years or so, so this attack seems to be gratuitous abuse without any substantial theoretical or empirical underpinning. In any case, such lofty condescension about methodology ill-becomes Finkelstein, given that his own work soon degenerates into a journalistic rant that frequently lacks a coherent structure, particularly in the longest and worst chapter, 'The Double Shakedown', a bizarre paean to Swiss bankers and German industrialists that is notable for its lack of any real conceptual rigour, to which I will return in due course.
Novick discusses the role of the American Jewish organisations such as the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League in shaping views of the Holocaust in America over recent decades, and traces the interconnection between their attitudes to the Holocaust and their attitudes to Israel, especially after the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973. Without analysing Novick's arguments at length – which would be inappropriate in what is intended as a critique of Finkelstein – it is striking that Novick never descends into conspiracy theory, accepting the place of unintended consequences in all historical developments, and situates the major shifts in American Jewish life in the much more general context of the recent trends in American culture that favour identity politics and a collective pride in the experience of victimisation that contrasts markedly with an earlier ethos that was much more universalist and assimilationist and which emphasised success and not showing one's weaknesses.
A Crude Polemic Finkelstein, however, presents in his first chapter, 'Capitalizing the Holocaust', a much cruder, more simplistic and one-dimensional version of the same argument, sidelining any factor that does not lend itself to anti-Zionist polemic. At this stage, despite a measure of irritation with Finkelstein for simultaneously plagiarising and patronising Novick, a left-wing reader devoid of Zionist prejudices might well feel that Finkelstein is putting forward a rational, albeit controversial, argument, and should be defended against those intent on vilifying him merely because of his unwelcome but timely reminder that 'organized American Jewry quickly forgave and forgot Ronald Reagan's demented 1985 declaration at Bitburg cemetery' (p.30), or because he rightly mocks the Anti-Defamation League for taking offence at the alleged anti-Semitism of a radical journal which, in the league's own words, 'portrayed Kissinger as a fawning sycophant, coward, bully, flatterer, tyrant, social climber, evil manipulator, insecure snob, unprincipled seeker after power'. (p.34)
However, as the book progresses, any initial sympathy one might have had with Finkelstein as a leftist engaged in an unequal battle with the American Zionist establishment vanishes. My initial assessment – influenced by the views put forward by Alex Callinicos on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party, which having very publicly endorsed Finkelstein's critique of Goldhagen two years ago at Marxism 1998, now felt some need to distance itself from him in the light of the Irving trial and the London nail bombings – that Finkelstein's judgement of the European situation had been warped by his years with the Palestinians on the West Bank, which had led him to see Zionism as the main enemy rather than merely an enemy, and that his curt dismissal of the Holocaust deniers as an insignificant grouping whose importance had been inflated by Deborah Lipstadt and other writers close to the Zionist organisations (a dismissal in which he echoed Novick's views) was a product of the very American ignorance of the link between Holocaust denial and the European fascist hard core, who attracted a far wider periphery with other forms of anti-immigrant racism, now strikes me as too mild. In short, I can no longer concur with the SWP view that Finkelstein is a comrade who is mistaken, and whose work was undertaken in good faith even if it ends up serving the enemy. Indeed, having enthusiastically promoted Finkelstein when he was pushing his largely legitimate critique of Goldhagen, the SWP is now recoiling from his larger project. Mike Simons' review of The Holocaust Industry (Socialist Review, September 2000) shares many of my criticisms of it, but is written more in sorrow than in anger. The judgement of Finkelstein made by the Zionist intellectual Leon Wieselter, and reported by Finkelstein himself on page 66 – 'You don't know who Finkelstein is. He's poison, he's a disgusting self-hating Jew, he's something you find under a rock!' – became a lot easier to understand by the time I finished the book!
With ever increasing frequency, the overall tone of Finkelstein's work becomes increasingly reminiscent of a neo-Nazi tract; no non-Jewish anti-Stalinist left-wing opponent of Zionism would ever dare to indulge in such blatant anti-Semitic stereotyping, at least in Europe and the USA, although such a discourse would be widespread in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and might find an echo in one strange British sect originating in the Stalinist milieu (whose rentier theoretician was once the youth organiser of the ultra-Stalinist New Communist Party) that has become notorious for its convoluted apologias for Irving and Le Pen. By citing the fraudulent Holocaust memoirs of Kosinski and Wilkomirski (the latter being the nom-de-plume of a Swiss Gentile masquerading as a Polish Jew) in a fair amount of detail (pp.55-62) immediately after making the general observation that 'indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud' (p.55), Finkelstein could easily lead the unwary reader to suppose (and one suspects this might be intentional) that all, or at least the vast majority, of survivors' accounts are totally fraudulent, a notion that fits in easily with Irving's view of survivors as fraudsters that was aired during his trial and in videos of his North American tour. There is no attempt by Finkelstein to convey the awkward fact that these two notorious hoaxes are an insignificant proportion of the dozens, if not hundreds, of perfectly straightforward reminiscences, whose literary and historical value vary widely in the same way as examples of any other autobiographical genre would, but are in no sense conscious falsifications, whatever distortions of memory they may contain. Incidentally, the willingness of respected authorities like Wiesel and Gutman (both of whom had survived the death camps) to give credence to Kosinski or Wilkomirski can be paralleled by the equal credulity of mainstream academics faced with the so-called Hitler Diaries, most notably Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had not only written The Last Days of Hitler, but was the author of a fine biographical study of a notorious forger. Therefore, one does not need to resort to an elaborate conspiracy theory as Finkelstein does when he writes, listing Jewish-sounding names like an anti-Dreyfusard pamphleteer in the grip of a paranoid frenzy: 'Consider, finally, the pattern: Wiesel and Gutman supported Goldhagen; Wiesel supported Kosinski; Gutman and Goldhagen supported Wilkomirski. Connect the players: this is Holocaust literature.' (p.67)
If parts of the second chapter, 'Hoaxers, Hucksters, and History', start to induce nausea, the third chapter, 'The Double Shakedown', is impossible to stomach for anybody not already committed to an anti-Semitic world-view, and changes the overall balance of the text from a tract that might have been written by a sincere Jewish socialist whose awareness of a wider context in which his work might be misused is obscured by an excess of anti-Zionist zeal, to a truly pathological example of Jewish self-hatred the like of which has probably not been seen since early twentieth century Vienna. In his 'Introduction', Finkelstein claims: 'The time is long past to open our hearts to the rest of humanity's sufferings.' (p.8) Most readers would naturally assume that this means opening our hearts to the wretched of the earth, and the book contains a fair number of references to the sufferings of native Americans, African Americans, Vietnamese and Palestinians, even if these people's genuine woes are largely deployed to relativise the seriousness of Jewish grievances.
Defending Swiss Bankers <SNIP>