Editor’s note: If white nationalists remain reluctant to debunk the post-war narrative about Hitler and the Holocaust (and by this I do not mean denying that various genocides were committed against various ethnic groups in the 20th century, including Jews), whites will not see the light. Never.
Irmin Vinson’s articles on Hitler and the Holocaust are essential reading for anyone remotely willing to see through the lies with which the elites have been brainwashing us for over sixty years. Although Vinson’s latest article published by Counter-Currents deserves a closer read, as it is over seven thousand words long, I have cut it down to less than half below.
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Once upon a time, not so long ago, the suffering of European Jewry during the Second World War lacked a name. It was just suffering, terminologically indistinguishable from, say, the suffering of Ukrainian peasants during Stalinist collectivization, or even the suffering of German civilians at the hands of the Red Army. The suffering of an American soldier crippled on D-Day, the suffering of a Jew starved at Bergen-Belsen, and the suffering of a German woman crucified on a barn door all belonged to the same broad generic category of wartime deaths and wartime suffering. In the Western democracies historians and the public at large paid, naturally enough, more attention to first two than to the latter, more attention to our suffering than to theirs, but no one believed that ours deserved a special name.
Beginning in the 1960s, during the course of the Civil Rights Revolution, that changed. One group, until then numbered on our side, the Jews, began to distinguish their suffering from everyone else’s.
“Holocaust,” the English version of “Shoah,” was first deployed to describe distinctively Jewish suffering during the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, a trial consciously conducted as an educational enterprise, and it was not until the late 1960s that “Holocaust” began its ascent into public consciousness in the English-speaking world, propelled by a steadily growing number of essays and books bearing the term, most authored by Jews. In 1968 the Library of Congress replaced “World War, 1939-1945 — Jews” with “Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)”; in 1978 the influential television mini-series Holocaust appeared, watched by almost a hundred million Americans, its advertising financed by Jewish organizations; and in the same year President Carter established a commission, chaired by professional “survivor” Elie Wiesel, to create a national museum in Washington memorializing Jewish suffering in Europe. Holocaust remembering accelerated rapidly in the decade that followed, and by 1991 Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, then project director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, could boast, accurately, that World War II was merely a “background story” to the Holocaust. The contrary view, that the Holocaust was a footnote (“point de détail”) to the war, is now illegal in France and much of Europe, as the French nationalist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen discovered. The old view of World War II has not only been supplanted; in some countries it has literally been criminalized.
The Jewish Holocaust was a run-of-the-mill horror in a century that saw many horrors, no worse than the Armenian holocaust, or the Cambodian holocaust, or the Russian holocaust, or the Rwandan holocaust, or the Ukrainian holocaust.
Whose suffering gets publicly commemorated is a political decision based not on the magnitude of the suffering but on the political lessons that the commemorators hope to privilege.
There should be no real mystery why this occurred. Holocaust education in the public schools, Holocaust Studies programs at most major universities, a Week of Holocaust Remembrance in mid-April, annual Holocaust commemorations in fifty states, a Holocaust Museum on the Washington Mall, Holocaust documentary after Holocaust documentary, Holocaust film after Holocaust film — all testify either to the absolutely unprecedented character of Jewish suffering during World War II, a suffering that dwarfs all pseudo-holocausts into pitiable insignificance, or else to the power of Jews to foist their racial agenda on White Gentiles. Since the first alternative should be unthinkable — the death-tolls of Soviet and Chinese Marxism were twenty million and sixty-five million respectively, according to the Black Book — no one can seriously discuss contemporary “Holocaust mania” without also discussing Jewish power.
[Norman] Finkelstein has, however, no intention of discussing Jewish power, and he resolves the problem, in his own mind, by recourse to a fantasy common across the mainstream political spectrum, from Rush Limbaugh on the Right to Noam Chomsky on the Left — the fantasy of Israel as a valuable strategic resource, “a proxy for US power in the Middle East” necessary to ensure cheap oil and docile Muslims. Because the Holocaust deflects legitimate criticism of the Jewish State, Finkelstein argues, incessant remembering of the Holocaust also serves American foreign-policy objectives.
It is difficult even to conceive how this Israeli proxy is supposed to function, and there is no evidence that it does function, witness the price of oil, a devastating oil embargo in the 1970s, and the conspicuously undocile Muslim terrorists who now regularly attack Americans. But the proxy’s phantom existence enables Finkelstein and some others on the Left to identify their anti-Zionism as a species of anti-Americanism. Leftist criticism of Israel becomes de facto criticism of American geopolitical objectives. The latter are, Finkelstein imagines, really responsible for the billions shipped annually to Israel, and Zionist lobby groups in Washington, motivated not by distinctively Jewish group loyalty but by the raceless pursuit their own political agendas, are only the willing facilitators, “marching in lock-step with American power.” The unexamined assumption — that support for Israel benefits the United States — remains unexamined. No one need discuss Jewish power, Finkelstein has convinced himself, because Jewish power is only a useful tool in the hands of much more powerful non-Jewish “ruling elites.”
Finkelstein’s implausible thesis was necessary, from his perspective, only because the fact, if openly acknowledged, of strong Jewish racial loyalties will inevitably lead anyone who thinks seriously about the political abuse of the Holocaust to anti-Semitic conclusions. Incessant Holocaust promotion by Jews has some obvious ulterior motives, none of which has anything to do with American foreign-policy objectives: to delegitimize nationalism within majority-White nations; to legitimize Jewish nationalism in the Jewish State; to immunize Jews from criticism; to extract money from Germany, the United States, Switzerland, etc. Holocaust remembering is, in short, part of a racially self-interested agenda — it helps Jews and hurts us.
The Lessons of the Holocaust
The Jewish Holocaust, we are told endlessly, teaches universal “lessons,” and there are now taxpayer-funded Holocaust museums throughout the West, along with an extensive miseducational apparatus, designed to impart these supposedly crucial “lessons,” applicable (so we are instructed) to everyone everywhere. But the principal “lesson” that the Holocaust teaches is, undoubtedly, the lethal consequences of any racial or national consciousness among Whites. Because White racialism and intolerance and nationalism led to the Holocaust, White racialism and intolerance and nationalism must be eradicated, to avoid future holocausts. In terms of practical politics a politician who opposes Third World immigration on racial or even on cultural grounds has failed to learn the “lessons of the Holocaust”; the largely successful Jewish campaigns to tag Patrick Buchanan and Jörg Haider with the “Nazi” label/libel are recent cases in point.
The Holocaust Museum in Washington announced its anti-White objectives early on, even before its construction: “This museum belongs at the center of American life because America, as a democratic civilization, is the enemy of racism and its ultimate expression, genocide.” Genocide is, according to Jewish Holocaust lore, the natural outcome of any racial self-assertion by people of European descent, and American democracy is, by Jewish fiat, devoted to the extirpation of every vestige of our racial consciousness. That, not surprisingly, is what organized Jewry has wanted all along, as Kevin MacDonald has thoroughly documented.
In theory, the “lessons of the Holocaust” should teach Jews that Israel cannot ethically remain an explicitly Jewish state, committed to the preservation and advancement of a single Volk, rooted in land, tradition and blood, but must instead become a multiracial “state of its citizens,” bound together only by abstract political principles and an eagerness to celebrate diversity, like the nation-less anti-nations most Diaspora Jews now demand that their host populations become. In practice, needless to say, few Jews and no major Jewish organizations allow logical consistency and the lessons of the Holocaust to interfere with their racial self-interest. On the contrary: “The heart of every authentic response to the Holocaust,” writes philosopher Emil Fackenheim, “…is a commitment to the autonomy and security of the State of Israel.” Whereas in Israel Jews have formed a Jewish State for themselves and permit no one but Jews to immigrate into it, not even the Palestinian Arabs they ejected in 1948, in the Diaspora they campaign for multiculturalism and Third World immigration. Jews hate all nationalisms save their own; they are nationalists within Israel, but anti-nationalists everywhere else.
Broad Jewish support for Zionism in Israel, coupled with strident opposition to any form of racialism or nationalism in the Diaspora, is the defining hypocrisy of contemporary Jewry. Finkelstein, like the late Israel Shahak, is not guilty of it. He is a principled man: He opposes racialism in the United States, so he also opposes it in Israel. Yet he is apparently unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, his own anti-racialist debt to the “shelves upon shelves of [Holocaust] shlock” under whose weight American libraries are currently groaning. What has been, beyond any doubt, the most politically significant lesson of the Holocaust, the evil of White “racism,” is almost completely absent from his text [The Holocaust Industry], appearing only in two sentences in the final chapter:
Seen through the lens of Auschwitz, what previously was taken for granted — for example, bigotry — no longer can be. In fact, it was the Nazi holocaust that discredited the scientific racism that was so pervasive a feature of American intellectual life before World War II.
Auschwitz did not, of course, scientifically discredit scientific racism, but it is certainly true that the academic study of racial differences has been discredited by its association with German National Socialism, although the facts themselves remain indifferent to the lessons of the Holocaust. It is also true that “bigotry is no longer taken for granted,” but this bland summary of the sea-change in post-war attitudes to race requires a translation. Finkelstein, like most multiracialists, believes that the majority-White nations of the West are still riddled, from top to bottom, with bigotry and systemic “racism.” The fight against White “racism” has scarcely begun; the lessons of the Holocaust have only taught us that bigotry should no longer be taken for granted.
Thus in the midst of a culture soaked in White guilt, Finkelstein recommends more of the same, while presenting his proposals as part of a radical assault on a conservative Holocaust Establishment too timid to berate the goyim with the severity they deserve. “We could,” he says, “learn much about ourselves from the Nazi experience,” and he helpfully suggests additional atrocities that we might, if so inclined, also commemorate: European “genocide” in the Americas; American atrocities during the Vietnam war; American enslavement of Blacks; murderous Belgian exploitation of the Congo. All of these suggestions for atrocity commemoration have a feature in common that should not be too difficult to discern, and with the likely exception of the last, each could be dutifully recited by any well-indoctrinated schoolboy, thanks to multicultural miseducation.
Finkelstein has further suggestions. We could also contemplate, while learning much about ourselves from the Nazi experience, how “Manifest Destiny anticipated nearly all the ideological and programmatic elements of Hitler’s Lebensraum policy”; how German eugenics programs, commonly regarded as precursors of the Jewish Holocaust, merely followed American precedents; how the Nuremberg Laws were a milder variant of the Southern prohibition of miscegenation; how “the vaunted western tradition is deeply implicated in Nazism as well,” Plato and Rousseau being the proto-Nazis Finkelstein has in mind. Clearly, learning from the Nazi experience means learning to see the Nazi in ourselves and in our history.
Here Finkelstein’s self-described radical critique of Holocaust orthodoxies has a parasitical relation to what it purports to debunk, tacitly relying on alleged Holocaust uniqueness in order construct a tenuous guilt-by-association which would be laughable in any other context. Hitler opposed “birth control on the ground that it preempts natural selection”; Rousseau said something similar. Most American states once had eugenics laws sanctioning the sterilization of mental defectives; the Nazis had similar laws. Leo Strauss called this form of non-reasoning the reductio ad Hitlerum. We are expected to see, and unfortunately most Whites will indeed see, not discrete ethical issues but a sinister pattern that establishes culpability.
Yet the sinister pattern of culpability only exists if the Holocaust remains, on account of its unparalleled evil, the terminus toward which all of Western history was directed; the pattern ceases to exist if the Holocaust is dislodged from its position high atop a hierarchy of suffering. Substitute the Judeo-Bolshevik slaughter of Ukrainians for the Jewish Holocaust [see e.g., here] and you will also select a different set of sign-posts leading to a different unparalleled evil.
Since Finkelstein does not practice what he preaches, avoiding the implications of his own call to democratize suffering, his preferred Holocaust lessons turn out, as we have seen, to be not much different from the anti-racialist lessons that Holocaust promoters already teach. Elie Wiesel would have no objection to most of Finkelstein’s pedagogy of White guilt, though he would of course insist that Jews need not be among its pupils. White guilt is a given for both; they differ only on how we should best commemorate it and on whether Jews should be included among the group to whom the requisite lessons must be addressed. We are, Finkelstein and Wiesel agree, morally obliged to “confront” and “remember” Nazi crimes, even though the confronting and remembering will be “difficult” and “painful,” because we were somehow complicit in them, and in this both articulate what is now surely the core dogma of Holocaust propaganda.
“[To] study… the Holocaust,” says Marcia Sachs Littell, director of the National Academy for Holocaust and Genocide Teacher Training, “is also to study the pathology of Western civilization and its flawed structures.” Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, Holocaust theologian, goes further: “The guilt of Germany is the guilt of the West. The fall of Germany is the fall of the West. Not only six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. In it Western civilization lost its claim to dignity and respect.”
Such expressions of anti-Western animus, routine in Jewish Holocaust writing, would be very difficult to reconcile with Finkelstein’s account of the genesis of Holocaust remembering, namely that organized Jewry “forgot” the Holocaust throughout the 1950s and then, in order to become valued participants in American statecraft, tactically “remembered” it in 1967, so that “Jews now stood on the front lines defending America — indeed, ‘Western civilization’ — against the retrograde Arab hordes.”
Anti-Western animus is, on the other hand, very easy to explain within the socio-political context of the decade when, by all accounts, the Holocaust received its English name and began its ascent into popular consciousness. American Jewry’s decision to remember the Holocaust was dependent on White America’s willingness to listen. A speaker normally presupposes an auditor, and vocal Holocaust remembering likewise presupposes receptive Holocaust listening. Jews had no intention in the 1960s and they have no intention now of remembering their Holocaust in the absence of a non-Jewish audience.
American Jews conveniently recovered their forgotten Holocaust memory at the very historical moment when racial victimization in the past began to confer political power in the present. The religion of the Holocaust was the Jewish version of anti-White identity politics. To number yourself among the wretched of the earth was a source of political power during the Civil Rights Revolution, and it continued to be a source of political power in the decades that followed.
Jews had played an instrumental role in fomenting the Revolution, and by remembering the Holocaust they enlisted themselves, citing an impeccable pedigree of suffering at the hands of Whites, among the minority groups eligible to receive its moral capital, while relieving themselves of membership, largely nominal in any case, in the White oppressor race, against whom the Revolution was and still is directed. Through the Holocaust the most successful ethnic group in American history not only joined the various aggrieved minorities staking out a claim against the Euro-American majority, but also pushed itself to the front of the line.
Since Jews are more intelligent and much more politically powerful than other aggrieved minorities, they have elevated their wartime victimization above all other victimizations, while surrounding it with a deceptive, often eloquent language of humane universalism. The Jewish victims of the Holocaust, philosopher Paul Ricoeur writes, are “delegates to our memory of all the victims of history,” a formulation which in practice means that all of history’s other victims can be safely ignored or consigned to a small, dark corner in your local Holocaust museum, being somehow included in the representative suffering of the Jews.
Thus this exceptional piece of Holocaust lore from Yad Vashem’s Avner Shalev: “We add our voice to those who believe that the Holocaust, because of its Jewish specificity, should serve as a model in the global fight against the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatred and genocide.” The sentence is logically incoherent but its meaning is clear: Jewish specificity ensures universality. And the political subtext is also clear: In the holy war against “racism,” one race of victims is far more equal than the rest.
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Insofar as we accept, as far too many of us do, the false moral burden to feel racial guilt over German wartime atrocities, real and fictional, we have internalized Jewish ethnocentrism, learning to see ourselves through Jewish eyes. We should therefore learn our own “lesson of the Holocaust” — that the descendants of both the winners and the losers of the Second World War now have a common interest in repudiating the old mythology of unique Nazi evil, along with the anti-Western Holocaust industry which has fastened itself on it.
