The Books of My Life: The Holocaust Industry

Norman Finkelstein's muckracking expose The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso, second edition, 2003), explores the morally questionable side of what Finkelstein calls the holocaust industry. The holocaust industry of mainstream American Jewish organisations has, Finkelstein argues and documents, used the holocaust as an ideological and public relations weapon to expropriate or extort monies from the Swiss and German governments, with the aid of American lawyers and the American government, and to sterilse and shield the contemporary state of Israel from any valid criticism of its policies and actions particularly toward the indigenous people of this settler society, the Palestinians.

Finkelstein argues that the ideological use of the Holocaust by the holocaust industry is grounded in the teleological notions that the Holocaust is unique and that Jews have been the unique and only victims of this singular Holocaust. Given that the Holocaust is a species of murder, in this instance mass murder or genocide, Finkelstein argues, both cultural and ideological assumptions are problematic since there have been and will certainly be more instances of planned and intentional mass murders beyond the Armenian Genocide, the genocide aimed at Jews, the Romany, communists, and the disabled in Nazi Germany, the Indonesian Genocide, the genocide of Native Americans, and the genocide associated with American slavery. Murder, in other words, must be seen as on a continuum ranging from murder, intentional or not, to mass murder and genocide rather than as a binary of holocaust/not holocaust.

After reading Finkelstein's expose I couldn't help but wonder whether it is the the pursuit of power and the pursuit of plunder rather than prostitution or spying that is the real oldest profession of the world. After all, holocaust industry organisations come off, in Finkelstein's book, as working less for the benefit of holocaust survivors, who seem to get both smaller in number and larger in number in holocaust industry rhetoric, than for its own benefit, and holocaust industry lawyers come off as interested more in big payoffs than in helping those who survived the horrors of the actual Holocaust. Ironically, argues Finkelstein, this holocaust industry has ended up aiding and abetting that which one would hope it would try to undermine, anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Welcome to the rabbit hole.