containing holocaust denial

"The Jews weren't gassed. Damn! Better luck next time!"

That is the lasting impression yours truly got from some ephemeral Holocaust denial literature about a quarter century ago.

There does not seem to be much concern with Jewish survival in denial literature, although yours truly does not profess to be an expert on it. The recent histrionics from Iran, however, denying the Holocaust and threatening to wipe Israel off the map in the same breath, are just the most prominent recent example.

Not that this however worthy effort presumes to settle the denial controversy, but, for purposes of discussion, arguendo, as the lawyers say, let us consider if perhaps the deniers are right.

What if no Jews were gassed?

What does that prove? Isn't the rest of Nazism, short of gassings, quite horrible enough?

Just who would give Nazism a clean bill of health if gassings were disproved?

It is something of a staple in denier literature that the skin-and-bones corpses and near-corpses found in the camps as the war ended were not gassed. Rather, the horrible conditions resulted from disruption of supplies under war-time conditions.

Such a proposition, as far as it goes, is entirely plausible. The next question, however, is, why were all those people in the camps in the first place, and certainly not only Jews? Has anyone ever offered a good reason for that?

You put people into detention and you assume responsiblity for their welfare. And legal definitions of negligence generally refer to consequences of acts that could have been reasonably forseen. Under this logic, the camps were not mass murder but mass manslaughter.

There was a criminal conviction recently of a truck driver for leaving a semi-full of illegal immigrants to die of starvation or suffocation. Was this murder or manslaughter/

By Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Auschwitz was an utterly horrendous place, pointing out a few things that have escaped Holocaust traumaturgy elsewhere. It was a synthetic oil and rubber plant. Thus it was a completely legitimate military target. Why wasn't it bombed?

A recent PBS documentary on Goebbels showed a clip, ten seconds or so, of a bulldozer in one the camps pushing dozens of naked corpses into a trench. Does it make that much difference if they were gassed or not?

Toward the end of Charles Lindberg's wartime diary is an account of Japanese corpses being similarly bulldozed. How much difference does a defeated, fanatical enemy make?

The widely broadcast assessment of Eichmann almost a half-century ago was that he was "normal." Ever-present Holocaust traumaturgy, however, is still locked in the abnormal.

Jewish survival is not questioned by yours truly, only recognizing that it has been threatend far more than that of other groups. It is not threatened, however, merely from the outside. See Michael Goldberg, Why Should Jews Survive?, for starters, that victimology is not a sufficient basis for the survival of Jewish identity.

The standard denier charge is that the Jews invented the Holocaust to gain sympathy. The charge made here is actually worse. The Zionists played footsie with the Nazis and pogromists to gain sympathy elsewhere and were complicit in the disaster that befell the Jewish people.

Traumaturgy has its pitfalls. Raul Hilberg, now recognized as the foremost Holocaust historian, caught his share of flack for showing Jewish cooperation with the Nazis. Edwin Black's parents disowned him when he published The Transfer Agreement about twenty years ago, but have apparently settled down since then. There, pp77-78, is a reference to "catastophic Zionism," the notion that Zion would not come until a disaster befell the Jewish people.

That is the topic that needs discussion. Who knows, maybe then the Zionists will play down the disaster they helped bring upon the Jews, and everyone else, gassings or no gassings.

zionist-holocaust cult

To the editor:

Now that the 50th anniversary of the State of Israel is in full swing, some background reading is a bit overdue. We might start with Michael Goldberg, Why Should Jews Survive?, which argues that the story of Exodus has been displaced as the master story of Judaism by what he calls "the Holocaust cult." His principal argument is that the obsession with disaster is a menace to Jewish survival simply because it cannot sustain a belief in the essential worth of Judaism. I found precious little to disagree with in this book, except that I would call it "the Zionist/ Holocaust cult."

What has put me off about Zionism over the years is not anything Yassir Arafat or any other anti-Zionist has said. It is, rather, the total monomania I get from the Zionists themselves, whether in person, or in print, such as the "FLAME" (Facts and Logic About the Mid East) ads in various magazines.

Lately I have been reading about a peculiar Zionist fanaticism that has indeed endangered Jewish survival. Over the past twenty years or so we have seen how dangerous cults can be, but this one goes back much further and has endangered far more than its own members.

In Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement, a magnificently researched volume begun here in Chicago about a Zionist deal with the Nazis, there is a brief discussion of Walter Nordau's ideas of "catastrophic Zionism." By the 1920's the co-founder of Zionism had concluded that Zion would not come about until some disaster had befallen the Jewish people. In Black's overview of Zionist history, Herzl had mobilized Zionism with notions of unavoidable Jewish-Gentile antagonism. He also anticipated Zionism's big opportunity coming with renewed persecution.

In other volumes we see that early Zionists ran into a lot of comfortable, established Jews who had no intention of starting anew in some wilderness. At Zionist Congresses in the 1930's David Ben-Gurion said he would prefer saving half the Jewish children in Palestine to saving all of them in England, that rescue efforts would "strike Zionism off the world agenda." In the 1940's there was Zionist opposition to rescue missions, on grounds that after the war the world would be distributed to those who had shed blood. (Lenny Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators; Reb Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse).

In the 1950's Ben Hecht wrote Perfidy, on the betrayal of Hungarian Jews in the name of the Zionist cause. Ralph Schoenman, The Hidden History of Zionism, has a chapter on Zionist objections to rescue. It also quotes Chaim Weizman, Israel's first president, as saying at a Zionist Congress that only the young Jews will survive, that the old ones are economic and moral dust in a cruel world.

Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, is certainly not the most charming book I have ever read. If one can read around rather a virulent distaste for things Jewish, however, one can see death rates running from 2.8% to 10% a month at Auschwitz, gassings or no gassings, and a crematoria capacity capable of cremating the camp population two and a half to five times a year. Butz also points out that the camp was a major producer of synthetic oil and rubber. In other words, the camp was an entirely legitimate military target, quite aside from any humanitarian concerns. Why wasn't it bombed?

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel, shows at some length that Zionism was founded on extremely derogatory notions of Jewish life in the Diaspora, as does Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri, The Land of Promise: A Critique of Political Zionism. Uri Avnery, Israel Without Zionism, says, from the standpoint of an Israeli pioneer, "Zionist literature, taught to every Jewish child in Palestine, depicted Jewish life in eastern Europe as despicable, the whole tradition and folk lore of the ghetto as cowardly, crooked, parasitical..."

I am not Jewish myself, but after all the abuse Maxwell St. has taken over the years, I find that personally offensive. Maxwell St., of course, is Chicago's original Jewish neighborhood and the world's best poverty program, an extension of eastern European Jewish life. Having spent the past ten years trying to save, then to restore Maxwell St., I find that sort of thing does get a bit too close to home.

Regina Sharif, Non-Jewish Zionism: Its Roots in Western History, documents "Jewish Restoration," the notion by various western luminaries of sending the Jews back to Palestine, going back some 300 years before Herzl. No wonder, there has been so much collaboration between Zionists and the various pogromists and fascists and genocidists of the world, as most of the above works document.

Is an "anti-Semite" anyone who opposes Zionism? Then such prominent Jews as Nahum Goldman, I.F. Stone, and Phillip Klutznick are traitors for deviating from the Zionist party line, according to Paul Findley, They Dared to Speak Out, some 330 pages on the Zionists sandbagging critics. So who is "anti-Semitic" anyway? Zionism has been a disaster for Jews and Arabs both, the two major Semitic peoples.

"The Zionist/Holocaust cult" is also a diversion from, almost a denial of, those evils of Nazism short of gassings, which were plenty bad enough but more likely to be repeated. All the traumaturgy aside, it is also a diversion from the similar evils committed by the State of Israel.

William F. Wendt, Jr.

beyondblogfamily

william wendt wrote:

To whom it may concern:

These are six blogs I have just started in November 2006.

The first is about Chicago transportation issues. The title is a take-off on Moving Beyond Congestion, the project of the Chicago transit agencies to push a major funding bill through the legislature in 2007, which has its website under that name.

They want investment in the future, they say, but the general point here is that it is investment in the past.

http://beyondcongestionbetweenears.blogspot.com/

The second is about primordial human emotions that evolved in hunter-gatherer band over about two million years, but which still dominate our thinking, such as it is, today. Einstein said the bomb changed everything but the way we think. Indeed.

http://beyondmoralaggression.blogspot.com/

The third is about legal issues, the general point being that our vaunted protections of law are little but a Maginot Line easily by-pased through Belguim. It seeks to restore some semblance of legal legitimacy.

http://beyondstateofnature.blogspot.com/

The fourth is a non-Chicago transportation commentary. Shoving blind is pushing cars with no one on the point to signal a stop. It is a great way to cause a train wreck. "The one way to run a railroad" celebrated in Rush Loving, The Men Who Loved Railroads," is shoving blind in a larger context. This is for non-Chicago transportation topics.

http://beyondshovingblind.blogspot.com/

The fifth wonders if "pro-life" and "limited government" are merely cudgels in the cultural wars or have real and important meanings. Is sex subject to moral constraint but not war? Is criminal law or mere unremitting hostility the way to deal with drugs, abortion, and homosexuality?

http://beyondconservofascism.blogspot.com/

The sixth probes Jewish paranoia, certainly understandable in light of history, but a sort of cultural Tay-Sachs disease that creates its own enemies. If you're not paranoid, you're crazy, said Sherman Skolnick, that resolute son of the old sand.

http://beyondjewishparanoia.blogspot.com/

Stay tuned. Rome was not built in a day.