The
personalized attack on the
messenger was a deliberate
tactic to evade confronting
the bad news that the Nazi
holocaust had become an
instrument of political and
financial
gain.
-- Norman Finkelstein | [Archive images
from West Bank added by this
website] Monday, November 25, 2002 Counterfeit
Courage: Reflections on "Political
Correctness" in Germany by
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN THIS past month I was
invited, for the second time in as many
years, to present a book in Germany. Last
year Piper published The Holocaust
Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation
of Jewish Suffering and this year
Hugendubel put out Image and Reality of
the Israel-Palestine Conflict. In
significant respects, the receptions
differed: The Holocaust Industry
generated much public interest, Image
and Reality relatively little.
No doubt the reason is that Germans
have a huge stake in the legacy of the
Nazi holocaust but rather little in a just
resolution of the Israel-Palestine
conflict. It would seem that this order of
priorities, although understandable, is to
be regretted. The Nazi holocaust, however
horrific and even if forever a part of
Germany's present, is -- except for the
handful of survivors -- fundamentally a
historical question. The persecution of
the Palestinians is, by contrast, an
on-going horror, and it is, after all, the
crimes of the Third Reich that are used to
justify this persecution. In the first
instance, moral action by Germans is no
longer possible; in the second, it plainly
is. Precisely for this reason I actually
looked forward to the recent German trip.
I made no secret last year of my
conflicted feelings about promoting The
Holocaust Industry in Germany. Many
close friends and comrades counseled
against it and -- much more important -- I
was quite certain that both my late
parents would have disapproved. Germans, I
was told, could not be trusted to honestly
debate Jewish misuses of the Nazi genocide
(the subject of The Holocaust
Industry). In addition, the huge media
interest in my book prompted questions --
in my opinion, legitimate -- about whether
I myself wasn't becoming a beneficiary of
the industry I deplored. Ultimately I
decided that, notwithstanding the real
moral risks entailed, I should go to
Germany, a decision which, in retrospect,
I don't regret. In the case of the new edition of my
book on the Israel-Palestine conflict,
such reservations seemed less pertinent.
The post-war German generation had just
redeemed itself by voting into power a
coalition with a resolute anti-war
platform. If Germans weren't now ready to
honestly debate the Israel-Palestine
conflict, when would they be? And no real
danger lurked that this book would provoke
a media circus if for no other reason than
that it wasn't an easy read. Nonetheless,
I arrived in Germany with high hopes that
just as The Holocaust Industry
somewhat succeeded, I think, at breaking a
harmful taboo, so my new book would
perhaps break the taboo on German public
discussion of Israel's brutal occupation.
With Palestinians facing an unprecedented
catastrophe in the event of a new Middle
East war, the stakes loom particularly
large. To judge by a steady stream of email
correspondence and many conversations, it
seems that The Holocaust Industry
did stimulate a sober -- and much-needed
-- debate among ordinary Germans. (A
handful of neo-Nazis exploited the
occasion but, as the dean of Nazi
holocaust scholars, Raul
Hilberg, observed, German
democracy is not so fragile that it can't
tolerate a few kooks coming out of the
woodwork.) It's still too soon to gauge
the popular reaction to the
Israel-Palestine book. What can already be
discerned, however, is the persistence
among politically correct Germans of a
pronounced animus to my work. The nadir in the relentlessly ugly
campaign of ad hominem vilification after
publication of The Holocaust
Industry was probably the article in a
major German newsweekly, Der
Spiegel, claiming in all
seriousness that each morning after
jogging I meditated on the Nazi holocaust
in the company of two parrots. Either Germans
had suddenly become engrossed by the
(imagined) private life of an obscure
Jew from Brooklyn, New York or -- what
seems likelier -- the personalized
attack on the messenger was a
deliberate tactic to evade confronting
the bad news that the Nazi holocaust
had become an instrument of political
and financial gain. During this last trip to Germany, a
major state television station, ARD,
suggested that I was a publicity hound
peddling used goods. This same program
wanted, however, to stage a confrontation
between me and the Israeli exhibitors at
the Frankfurt Book Fair, and to have me
denounce on camera a famous Israeli author
-- both of which I refused to do. It would
surely have garnered lots of publicity but
I found distasteful the idea of a slugfest
between Jews for the amusement of Germans.
Even among the politically correct crowd
some nasty habits apparently die hard. It
is widely known in Germany that both my
late parents passed
through the Nazi holocaust. This
family background has also been
shamelessly seized on by politically
correct Germans to ridicule and dismiss me
as unstable. Such venomous attacks on a Jew and the
son of Holocaust survivors are altogether
unique in German public life which is
otherwise ever so tactful and discreet on
all things Holocaust. One can't but wonder
what accounts for them. In fact, the
Holocaust has proven to be a valuable
commodity for politically correct Germans.
By "defending" Holocaust memory and Jewish
elites against any and all criticism, they
get to play-act at moral courage. What
price do they actually pay, what sacrifice
do they actually make, for this "defense"?
Given Germany's prevailing cultural
ambience and the overarching power of
American Jewry, such courage in fact reaps
rich rewards. Pillorying a Jewish dissident costs
nothing -- and provides a "legitimate"
outlet for latent prejudice. It happens
that I agree with Daniel
Goldhagen's claim in Hitler's
Willing Executioners that
philo-Semites are typically anti-Semites
in "sheep's clothing." The philo-Semite
both assumes that Jews are somehow
"different" and almost always secretly
harbors a mixture of envy of and loathing
for this alleged difference.
Philo-Semitism thus presupposes, but also
engenders a frustrated version of, its
opposite. A public, preferably
defenseless, scapegoat is then needed to
let all this pent-up ugliness ooze
out. To account for
Germany's obsession with the Nazi
holocaust, a German friend explained
that Germans "like to carry a load." To
which I would add: especially if it's
light as a feather. No doubt some Germans of the post-war
generation genuinely accepted the burden
of guilt together with its paralyzing
taboos on independent, critical thought.
But today German "political correctness"
is all a charade of pretending to accept
the burden of being German while actually
rejecting it. For, what is the point of
these interminable public breast-beatings
except to keep reminding the world: "We
are not like them." It can also be safely said that
politically correct Germans know full well
that, more often than not, the criticism
leveled against Israeli policy and misuse
of the Nazi holocaust is valid. In private
conversation (as I've discovered) they
freely admit to this. They profess to fear
that, if Jewish abuses become public
knowledge, it will unleash a tidal wave of
anti-Semitism. Is there really any
likelihood of this happening in Germany
today? And isn't vigorous and candid
debate the best means to stem an
anti-Semitic tide: exposing the abuses of
the Jewish establishment as well as the
demagogues who exploit these abuses for
nefarious ends? What politically correct Germans really
fear, I suspect, is the loss of power and
privilege attendant on challenging the
uncritical support of all things Jewish.
Indeed, their public defense of the
indefensible not only breeds cynicism in
political life but, far from combating
anti-Semitism among Germans,
actually engenders
it. Isn't this duplicity typically
credited to a dread of, or a desire to
curry favor with, a presumed all-powerful
Jewry? One also can't help but wonder what
thoughts run through the heads of
politically correct Germans about Jews
when the ones they typically consort with,
prostrate themselves before in unctuous
penance, and publicly laud are known to be
the worst sort of hucksters. The challenge in Germany today is to
defend the memory of the Nazi holocaust
and to condemn its abuse by American
Jewish elites; to defend Jews from malice
and to condemn their overwhelmingly blind
support for Israel's brutal occupation.
But to do this requires real moral courage
-- not the operatic kind that politically
correct Germans so love. Norman Finkelstein is the
author of The Holocaust Industry and
Image and Reality in the
Israel-Palestine Conflict. -
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