Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Articolo da incorniciare

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec06/Ash14.htm
Hollowcaust Hullabaloo
by Gabriel Ash
www.dissidentvoice.org
December 14, 2006
 It's been a good week for the Holocaust. It was in the news all the
time. Unfortunately, the media excels in not making connections, which
leaves me with the joyful job of bringing together all the recent
Holocaust news.
In Iran, the clowns at the Foreign Ministry hosted a conference of
Holocaust buffoonery graced with the presence of such luminaries as the
white supremacist David Duke. In France, Presidential hopeful Segolene
Royal stumbled over the question whether she heard the comparison that
a Hizbullah deputy made (or didn't make, in Arabic or not, that was
or wasn't translated to Royal) between Hizbullah and the French
resistance to the Nazis. Royal assured us that any such comparison,
which implies some measure of likeness between Nazi Germany and Israel,
would be, had it been made, completely "inadmissible, odious, an
abomination" (Loubnan Ya Loubnan, December 2006). Finally, before
leaving for a visit to Germany, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert gave a speech at
the National Holocaust Museum in which he compared Iran to the Nazis
and urged Germany to cut its economic ties to Iran.
Let us begin with the third event. This is how Olmert put his case to
the Germans: "May I suggest to the German people. . . . You may have
an economic interest, you may have a business interest, but you have a
deeper and more fundamental moral obligation to yourself, to your
history and to your future." (Israel National News, December 11,
2006) In other words, because of the Holocaust, Germany must support
Israel's assault on Iran.
Five centuries ago, a German monk rose against the Catholic pope,
accusing him of mixing matters of conscience with lucre by selling
divine pardons to wealthy sinners. Martin Luther was adamant that sin
and redemption were matters of the direct relation between the
individual and God. Anyone who pretended to mediate this relation, to
obtain redemption on someone else's behalf (and to be paid for it)
was a charlatan (Luther actually said "antichrist," but that is the
name of the supreme charlatan). The least one can say about post WWII
Germany is that it betrayed Luther. Repentant of their recent Nazi
past, Germans agreed to pay billions of dollars to Israel. Israel is a
state that didn't exist during the Nazi holocaust. The Nazis murdered
Jews, homosexuals, Roma, socialists. That had nothing to do with the
state of Israel, some of whose founders expressed admiration for Nazi
ideology and even wanted to fight on Hitler's side in the War (Lenni
Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis). Israel
was not a victim of Nazism. It was, if anything, an indirect
beneficiary. Yet Israel offered Germans redemption: pay us, and we will
lift the burden of sin from your shoulders. Pay us, and you will be
rehabilitated. And Germans were happy to pay. Having a conscience of
one's own, living with one's true past and seeking redemption in
the desolation of the wrecked self was just too much for many Germans
(to be fair, that is easy to understand. The burden of Nazism wasn't
light.) They were happy to pay and they watched silently, uncritically,
as Israel took their blood money and used it to build exactly the kind
of militarized garrison state that had led them to perdition. It is
ironic that the Germans, having accused themselves of being too
obedient, too eager to let the Nazi state define morality, would try to
cure themselves by giving yet another state, Israel, the right to
define morality on their behalf. Yet they did. Thus German politicians
and intellectuals outsourced their conscience to Israel and the U.S.
Fifty years later they are still unable to criticize the actions of
either. Instead of a real conscience, they adopted a sanctimonious
servility to all things Israeli. Into this context stepped Ehud Olmert,
the new Holocaust Pope, demanding from Germans obedience in exchange
for a renewal of the epochal pardon, reminding them, like the sleek
indulgence hawker that he is, of their "obligation to themselves."
Olmert, however, the man received "warmly" by Chancellor Merkel, is
a war criminal. Only recently he ordered the slaughter of hundreds of
people. According to his own words the slaughter was not a by-product
of military action (which would be bad enough) but a deliberate attempt
to exert pressure on Lebanese politicians (Gabriel Ash, Dissident
Voice, July 2006). Olmert is thus a criminal even by the lax standards
of ius in bellum. To be clear, there is absolutely no comparison
between what Olmert did in Lebanon and Gaza and what the Nazis did in
Auschwitz. There is, however, a pertinent similarity between what
Olmert did in Lebanon and Gaza and what the Nazis did in places such as
Lidice. If contemporary Germans had any obligation to themselves and to
their history, that obligation would be to arrest him and put him on
trial the moment he landed in Germany. They certainly did not have an
obligation to listen to a blood stained butcher pontificate about
morality. Nobody does.
Let us turn now to the Affaire Sego. According to masterful digging of
the French Lebanese blogger of Loubnan Ya Loubnan, Segolene Royal was
trapped by a little comedy put together either by the members of the
Lebanese "Cedar revolution" parties or by insiders of Jacque
Chirac's government or by both. The two groups have a stake in
preserving the current French Lebanon policy and its alignment with
Washington and Tel-Aviv. The interesting thing to ponder, however, is
the lasting usefulness of the Holocaust as a leash against stray
European politicians. Royal, smarting up from the bruises, canceled her
meeting with Hamas representatives, essentially giving up on her
erstwhile commitment to listen to all parties in the Middle East. She
issued the expected declaration that any comparison between the Nazis
and Israel would have prompted her to leave the room. That effectively
means she cannot be in the same room with 90% of people who actually
live in the Middle East. The Holocaust, one concludes, is the most
effective weapon in the hands of those bent on manufacturing a "clash
of civilizations." If the memorization of Nazism in the West can
prevent a French politician from meeting with the democratically
elected representative of Palestinians, the Holocaust has become a tool
in the arsenal of segregation in the service of global apartheid.
I am not sure which is more offensive, a Saudi doctor insisting that he
wouldn't be in the same room with women (Arab News, November 22,
2006), or a French politician insisting she won't stay in a room with
a Lebanese who sees himself fighting in the tradition of the French
resistance against the Nazis. The comparison is salient because the
Holocaust has taken in Europe (and differently, in Israel) the
semblance of religious dogma. "Denying the Holocaust" is the only
speech-act that is legally proscribed as blasphemy and can land one in
jail. And European politicians apparently cannot be in the same room
with "infidels," i.e. people who challenge the belief that there is
only one great Holocaust, with Israel its prophet.
And just like the breathtaking hypocrisy of Saudi fundamentalists, who
raise hell over a stupid Danish cartoon but co-operate with the U.S.
and Israel behind the scenes against Palestinian resistance, the
"Holocaust fundamentalists" of Europe talk through both sides of
their mouth. No sooner had Segolene Royal asserted she would not listen
to the slightest implication of a similarity between Israel and Nazism,
Israel's PM used the podium of the Holocaust Museum to compare Iran
to Nazi Germany. Will Royal say she would have left the room if she had
heard Olmert make that historical comparison? Israelis and Americans
run a cottage industry of comparisons between Nazism and the evil man
de jour. Begin compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler. Clinton compared
Milosevic to Hitler. Sundry columnists compared Islamic fundamentalism
to Nazism.  Bush compared Saddam to Hitler. And now Iran is Israel's
latest Nazi incarnation. When was the last time a European Holocaust
fundamentalist left the room in reaction to these truly asinine
comparisons?
Let me spell out the hypocrisy of the Holocaust hawkers. The West has
elevated the crimes of the Nazis into a benchmark of evil.
Paradoxically, every subsequent crime, especially when the perpetrator
is Israel, can now be excused on the ground that it falls short of the
death camps. Conversely, the genocidal tendencies inherent in the
systematic obliteration of the basis of civilian life can be ignored by
invoking the ritual condemnation of the "false analogy" with Nazism,
even as such systematic destruction has been incorporated in the
military practice of the West and is operative wherever modern armies
must contend with popular resistance. Therefore one could never compare
the death of over a million Iraqis as the result of deliberate American
policy since 1992 to the holocaust, nor can one compare the decade long
collective punishment of the people of Gaza or the destruction of South
Lebanon to the pacification methods of the Nazis. Nobody would call
Bush a "holocaust denier" for flatly denying the value of a
scientific study that estimates the number of his victims to be in the
hundreds of thousands. However, the opposite happens when the interests
of the West are so disposed. The "lesson" of the holocaust is good
enough to justify the NATO bombing of civilian targets in Yugoslavia,
the genocidal U.S. occupation of Iraq, Israel's massive bombing of
Beirut, a future nuclear war against Iran, etc. The pettiest tyrant who
"kills his own people" (and who doesn't?) is suddenly as terrible
as Hitler.
The slaughter of European Jews has thus been transformed into a
Hollowcaust, a benchmark of evil that is utterly indeterminate, empty
at its core, at once trivially applicable to everything and sublimely
applicable to nothing. The Hollowcaust acts like a quirky and
capricious divinity, rejecting a comparison here, accepting an equally
valid or invalid one there. It is a partisan divinity, a god that
always blesses 'us' and curses 'them,' even as it simultaneously
demands to be worshipped by all humanity and in the name of all
humanity. The Hollowcaust thus entices victims to a futile competition
in which they must worship it with a steady sacrificial offering of
facts, reports, statistics, that would justify their demand to be heard
by measuring what happened to them in relation to the fate of the Jews
of Europe. But the success of this appeal, like the success of Cain's
original 'holocaust,' depends on nothing except the freedom of the
divine will -- in this case the mood in Western capitals. History and
facts are more or less irrelevant. Like Skinner's pigeons, the
supplicants are driven to insanity by the complete disconnect between
causes and consequences. Like Cain, they are sometimes driven to
fratricide. It is quite understandable that under such circumstances
the temptation to deny or belittle the crimes of the Nazis is almost
irresistible. The denial of the holocaust is rooted in the desire to
pin down the Hollowcaust.
This brings us back to the pathetic holocaust conference that took
place in Iran. The most charitable thing that can be said about the
organizers of this conference is that they are fools. Allegedly in
solidarity with the victims of state terrorism, they come out in
defense of state terrorism. Challenging the veracity of the holocaust,
Iran's President's pet cause, is not a repudiation of Zionism, but
as Joseph Massad convincingly argued (Al-Ahram, 2004), a useful
justification for Zionism. Moreover, to whitewash Nazism is to defend
state terrorism, and that includes Israel. There are anti-imperialists
who reject state terror categorically. It is perhaps not surprising
however that the government of Iran, itself not averse to torture and
murder, would find such high principles too burdensome.
The pettiness of Iran's President are, as expected, manna from heaven
to Zion's willing apologists. The Western media took the occasion to
fill many pages with condemnations, exhortations, and scare mongering
of epic proportions. To take one illuminating example, Anne Appelbaum
warns her readers that all the work done to institutionalize the memory
of the holocaust is not enough. "The near-destruction of the European
Jews in a very brief span of time by a sophisticated European nation
using the best technology available was, it seems, an event that
requires constant re-explanation . . ."
The message of Hollowcaust hawkers such as Appelbaum is only amplified
by such idiocies as the Iranian conference. O Jews! They are singing in
unison, give some more money to the likes of the Simon Wiesenthal
center, so they can blabber a little more about the Hollowcaust while
they present Rupert Murdoch with a human rights award! (The Forward,
February 3, 2003)
But pay close attention to what exactly Appelbaum seeks to
"explain." For in her words one can see clearly the trace of the
Hollowcaust's Faustian bargain, the bargain that gave Jews official
recognition for their suffering in return for accepting to become the
standard bearers of Western Whiteness. It isn't the horror suffered
by the victims as such, it isn't murder, it isn't terror, it
isn't even genocide that Applebaum singles out as the uniqueness of
the holocaust. What needs to be explained, according to her, what needs
to be constantly re-imagined, is the horror of "a sophisticated
European nation using the best technology available" to commit
genocide. But it should takes no effort it figure out that this is the
last thing that requires an explanation. A sophisticated European
nation using advanced technology to kill those it considers not fully
human!? Where is the question? Isn't that a valid synopsis of a full
dozen chapters of modern history? Did anyone expect white supremacy to
be enforced with sticks and stones? Of course states use the best
technology they have when they perpetrated murder against whole
populations. Does Appelbaum not know how many billions of dollars are
spent every year perfecting the tools of mass murder and inventing new
ones? What makes gas chambers so sophisticatedly shocking or shockingly
sophisticated among nuclear bombs, mustard gas, napalm, cluster bombs,
Agent Orange, machine guns, Caterpillar D-9s, long range bombers and
any of the thousand small and large inventions designed by perfectly
legitimate enterprises to hasten the passage of the offending
population to its unmarked grave?
Sophistication and technology are not what sets the Nazi genocide
apart. It is the one thing it has most in common with dozens of other
campaigns by Western states against non-white population groups. It is
remarkable that Appelbaum wants to erect as primal difference the very
element that is least unique to the holocaust, the one element that is
most likely to be seized upon by victims of Western imperialism and
colonialism as the common ground of their victimization. The stakes
cannot be clearer. "Remembering" the holocaust is primarily about
excluding other victims. It is about rendering murder incomprehensible
when committed on a massive scale by "a sophisticated nation with
advanced technologies." The act of explaining is not concerned with
adding insight. In the manner of negative theology, one "explains"
the holocaust by preserving its incomprehensibility, so that it
constantly remains in need of re-explanation.
Erecting the Hollowcaust as a unique case of "a sophisticated nation
with advanced technology" committing genocide is not about affirming
the past. It is about denying the present. It is about denying the
millions of deaths that are perpetrated year in year out by
"sophisticated nations with advanced technologies." It is also
about erecting a totemic barrier between "sophisticated nations with
advanced technologies" and the rest of humanity. On the one side are
those nations whose acts of mass murder are made to be
incomprehensible, and therefore effectively denied -- it does not
happen anymore because it would be unthinkable to think that it
happens. A genocide committed by a sophisticated nation happened only
once. And to suggest that it happened more than once is to betray the
memory of the victims. It is blasphemy. The very commemoration and
deification of that unique, one-off, historical aberration confirms
that it was an unexplainable departure from the "civilized" norms
that are defined by it. In Freudian terms, the Hollowcaust is the
foundation of modern Western supremacy in the same way that incest is
the foundation of the family.
On the other side (of the wall, if you wish) are the
"unsophisticated," technologically backwards nations. By
implication, mass murder in those nations is low-tech, but also
unremarkable, easily comprehensible, explained quite "naturally" by
their very lack of sophistication. They are the barbarians and they
just tend to kill each others. It follows that to kill them is to
commit no great crime, since violent death is their very modus vivendi.
'They' do not respect life as 'we' do; they raise their kids to
be suicide bombers, and so forth. In a perfectly circular manner, their
irreverent rejection of the Hollowcaust faith (which is built to
exclude them) confirms their exclusion from the community of the
civilized and abandons them to be killed without repercussions.
The Hollowcaust is thus the ideology par excellence of Global Apartheid
(of which the Israeli wall is but a small section). Abdullah
Derkaoui's brilliant cartoon above captures the way the Hollowcaust
functions according to the classic definition of ideology, mediating
between the viewer and the reality of Apartheid and thus constructing
the subject of segregation.
And now these pious Hollowcaust hawkers are surprised and shocked that
so many barbarians piss on their memorials? Note: they are only getting
back the message of their own racism with a "return to sender"
scrawled over the envelope.

On 15 Dec 2006 16:03:15 -0800, "
luno...@hotmail.com
" 
[cut]
Minchia che palle giorgino, parliamo di altro.
Tu ce l'hai la fidanzata?
MMAX
-- 
http://bloggoanchio.splinder.com

 Tu ce l'hai la fidanzata?
Parliamo della tua visto che sei uno dei maggiori postatori in questa
fogna a cielo aperto, dubito che esista


wrote:
[cut]
Eccone un altro
MMAX
-- 
http://bloggoanchio.splinder.com

 Hollowcaust Hullabaloo
Si. E' sicuramente tra quelli piu' puzzolenti che hai trovato tra la
merda in cui sguazzi giornalmente.
-Stefano