How "the Shoah cult" is used to prop up the Empire by Joshua Snyder
(libertarian)
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
"The uproar over the literature professor who undertook to challenge the accepted historic fact that gas chambers were used to exterminate Jews in Nazi concentration camps turned out to be a key event in a process that has led to the establishment of the Holocaust, or 'Shoah' (the Hebrew religious term now commonly used in France) as a sort of religion of memory and repentance, raised to the status of official dogma," writes Diana Johnstone -- Why the French Hate Chomsky. (She makes note that "the simple fact of defending the principle of free speech was interpreted as support for Robert Faurisson's theses, despite Chomsky's insistence that the two things were quite separate.")
Ms. Johnstone makes mention of "the sacralization of the Holocaust, or 'Shoah', which has increasingly been regarded less as an historic event than as a sacred dogma." She continues, "In a secular state where traditional religions are excluded from public schools, only the Shoah demands both the mental and emotional adherence traditionally reserved for religion."
Ms. Johnstone notes that the "law has been used to prosecute or silence persons who do not in fact contest, dispute or question the existence of the above-named crimes in general, but who question the use of gas chambers to commit mass genocide." She writes, "Since actual 'negation' of Nazi persecution of Jews is nearly nonexistent, the law has been brought to bear especially on persons who, because of their general political orientation, are suspected of concealed anti-semitism."
I do not harbor any doubts about the veracity of the Holocaust. My much touted Gypsyquadroonhood would have likely earned me a one-way ticket on a cattle-car to the nearest concentration camp. (On which I would have protested all the way, "Doesn't the term Indo-Aryan mean anything to you National Socialist dummkopfs?") However, the scale and scope of the Holocaust should be matters for reasonable debate.
"Making history an object of reverence rather than of curiosity marks a subtle but serious regression from the secular values of free inquiry," says Ms. Johnstone. "For much of the younger generation, the Shoah cult," she continues, "with annual obligatory commemorations and constant reminders of the 'duty of memory', is getting to be as boring as any other imposed religion."
Ms. Johnstone earlier in her article suggests how "the Shoah cult" is used to "justify France's subservience to the United States." She writes, "The basic idea of the old 'new philosopher' Bernard-Henri Levy is that fascism is 'the French ideology' and that the French people and government are not to be trusted." She notes that "[i]n cartoons and films, the French working class are portrayed as racist boors," and that "the pendulum has swung away from celebration of the French Resistance to self-flagellation for crimes against Jews committed under Nazi occupation." She continues:
The very existence of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front have, for nearly thirty years, contributed mainly to strengthening an opposing attitude of anti-nationalism. Justified criticism of the European Union for tearing down social welfare in favor of globalized finance capital is stigmatized as archaic and unacceptable French nationalism. The dominant center left has abandoned both economic issues and anti-militarism in favor of a human rights ideology more concerned with the Dalai Lama (about which France can do nothing) than with the deindustrialization of France. The human rights left has largely abandoned economic policy to the EU and military policy to NATO and its boss, the United States.
Sound familiar? Is not the very existence of Patrick J. Buchanan on our own shores and his criticism of N.A.F.T.A. and N.A.T.O., of militarism and war, stigmatized as archaic and unacceptable American nationalism? Has not America's Left abandoned both economic issues and anti-militarism in favor of a gay and women's rights ideology, at home and abroad, saying nothing of the deindustrialization of America?
So not only does "the Shoah cult" serve to "justify France's subservience to the United States," it justifies the American people's subservience to the un-American Empire, and most obviously it's unconditional support of Israel. Most sadly, in the wake of the Tea Parties, even "America's greatest intellectual" resorted to such fear-mongering in service of the Empire, calling the situation "very similar to late Weimar Germany" -- Noam Chomsky Has 'Never Seen Anything Like This'.
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Posted By: elizkbest
Date: June 15, 2010 12:30:24 PM
There appears to be a new wave of marginal protest regarding an overemphasis or wrongful emphasis on the Shoah or Holocaust, so it is not without consternation that I read your article casting Shoah interests as a form of 'religious dogma' and in turn suggesting it might have the scandalous role of causing favor towards Israel. In some sense you are both correct and incorrect: having dealt with issues of the Shoah and religion for some time, I would posit that one cannot entirely separate religious concerns from the Shoah, for it was a battle of ideologies and faith as well as politics and armaments.
The Jews, have and always will be, an ensign of sorts to the nations, both politically and 'religiously' as in terms of faith, in Judaeo-Christian thought, they bear the presence of God and his history to the nations. While this may rankle the sensibilities of self-serving agnostics, one can nevertheless not deny that the Jews are a people who have survived 2000 years in dispersion, with a return to a homeland unprecedented in history, while most other dispersed peoples were assimilated after a generation or two into other cultures and peoples. One cannot help but take note then, and serious note, when a 20th century process to erase 2/3 of their European population by Inquisition like terrorism takes place, and it is with some degree of perverse amusement that you consider it odd in any way for the nations or the Church, however defined, would be called to repentance, as your refer to it as "self-flagellation" and worry that we might regard them as a people worthy of protection.
The 'Shoah cult' is a gross exaggeration of what has taken place over the past 20 or 30 years, or the entire post shoah era. Yes, there has been a mostly healthy interest and move towards 'repentance' in some denominations and international groups, but please do not fret, it is mostly momentary and on paper and in ceremony. At least it has raised the consciousness of many, and educated children in a very brutal world, that the fullness of our sins in the Shoah fell not only on the Jews, nor even on other persecuted peoples, but on the world itself: nations changed, rising out of puppet governments formed by the Third Reich; warfare changed: the last semblance of boundaries to what was allowed in modern warfare were erased, with no bounds between 'civilized' and 'uncivilized' societies.
For all the 'over emphasis' on the Shoah you[COLOR="Navy"][/COLOR] worry about, Anti-Semitism has not changed nearly enough, as Western nations see regularly massive anti-Israel marches, and even in the US, we find White Aryan groups healthy and thriving with marches on State capitals, and the intrusion of rank Third Reich,Deutsche Christen doctrine into modern American churches, liberal and conservative. Would you like to see even our 'nod' in Israel's direction erased?
Numbers, the proverbial conundrum, are debated since 1945, but considered the hidden human cost: almost no wars before the Shoah, and WWI, involved massive kills in a few years, and the genocides since the Shoah have all taken the same pattern and monstrous unconcern for civilian life, coupled with a new hunger for atrocity. Bangladesh, Cambodia, Uganda, Croatia, the Karens of Burma, Sudan, and all the others, were tainted with the same process and precision of the Shoah, including a new attitude toward human life: means to an end.
The marriage between the State and Corporations with the new amoral sense is also a product of the Shoah: as we watch the Gulf Oil Spill, or issues of criminal enslavement, or any other issue regarding the profit margin, the concept of ethics has degenerated totally into whether or not it accomplishes an agenda, and whether or not they can get away with it.
The concept of Law has changed: laws are no longer the glue and fabric of society and civilized living, Law is merely a contrived set of wavering siderails, used as ploys to accomplish amoral causes.
In addition to seditioning our concept of the person, the Gleichschaltung of the National Socialists found its way to the US in the first years after the war, as 10,000 Nazi party members were willingly received into our ranks officially, bringing with them a way of life, and infecting the nature of our society and culture, including the mass produced modern Bible translations, based newly upon the Kittels' Biblia Hebraica and Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, on almost every American Pastors's shelf, which has caused confusion and division in churches, and subtly introduced moribund concepts of 'belief'.
Our western culture psychology and psychiatry emanates from concepts in Racial Science, with our entire tests and Measurements area based historically upon Racial scientists and Eugenicists efforts at 'weeding out' defectives to produce a 'super type', a Herrenvolk, developed initially by central Eugenicists such as Pearson, Burt, based upon the work of Darwin and Galton. We 'spin' the effort now and refer to 'optimal functioning' or 'actualization' but the clear meaning is a superior type, which has so worked its way out in the American psyche that parents of any means are trying to produce 'super babies' both genetically and educationally, though without moral sense and with a new social Darwinism which has replaced any form of character training in schools.
The effects of the Shoah not only on the Jews but the rest of the world are so intense, and pervasive, that it was essentially the modern pivot on which history and the concept of personhood changed. So did our thoughts of God. While I have mentioned only a few above, it is inconceivable to me, that we ever now or in the future reach a point of trivializing the Shoah, or seek to make it merely another war, with debatable numbers.
The fatalities, as always, were first the Jews, then civilization, and I do not see that we will return. So please forgive those of us who find nothing wrong with what you describe as 'self flagellation' but what I choose to see as insufficient repentance.
Posted By: Mike Foster
Date: June 16, 2010 02:52:30 PM
It's good to see there are some people not afraid to talk about this. In known human history there are multiple instances where millions of people were slaughtered. How can we consider any one of them to be more horrible than the others? And yet, ask any High School student about "the holocaust" and see if their answer doesn't toe the religious dogma line described in this article.
Posted By: Billy Roper
Date: June 17, 2010 11:10:24 AM
Throughout modern times, people identified as jews have never risen above being approximately 3% of the world's population. One would certainly think that the deaths of six million individuals from such a small group would put a sizeable dent in their statistical count, however the figures as provided by establishment media sources simply do not add up. For example, the original Auschwitz death toll has undergone an interesting metamorphosis over the years: "Jewish and Polish scholars of the Holocaust now agree that the Auschwitz death toll was less than half the four million cited for four decades. The actual number was probably between 1.1 million and 1.5 million."- (Knight-Ridder Newspapers, April 2, 1992.)
According to figures supplied by the American Jewish Committee in 1933, there were some 15,315,359 jews living in the world at that time. The 1945 edition of The World Almanac (which also reprinted the 1933 figures cited above in their 1940 edition) estimated that there were 15,192,089 jews living in the world, leaving a difference of only 123,270 jewish persons who simply went missing or died from all causes between these years including old age, disease, suicide, accidents, natural and war time related disasters common criminal homicide and executions.
