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Holocaust politics in the service of Anglo-American hegemonyBy Gilad Atzmon*28 January 2007 Gilad Atzmon shows how the Bush administration is using Holocaust politics to establish a fake Western collective identity based on blind conformity and total marginalization of the other.
The draft resolution proposed by the USA "condemns without any reservation any denial of the Holocaust", yet it does not single out any specific country for criticism. However, it does not take a genius to realize that it is Iran's president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who the Americans are after. Clearly, this new American initiative, whose aim is to transform the world into a "Holocaust Denial Free Zone" has very little to do with genuine truth-seeking or an authentic interest in historical research. The Americans are there to furnish us all with the futureless nightmare of hard capitalism. They mistakenly believe that they can do so as long they restrict our vision of the past. To be sure, the Bush administration does not really care for Abe Foxman and the ADL. Nor does it care about the notion of history or the truth of European Judeocide. What is it all about, then? America wants oil and Ahmadinejad has plenty of it. The Americans also have as their priority preventing Iran from joining the nuclear club which they themselves lead. Yet, it is rather amusing that America, with all its fleets, aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, supreme air power and nuclear might, needs the Holocaust to win what seems to be its next war. I am not a Holocaust scholar nor am I a historian. My primary interest is not the story of Auschwitz nor the destruction of European Jewry. But I am very interested in Holocaust politics, in the range of discourses that employ Auschwitz. My question is: how come America, once the leader of the "free world", finds itself engaged in "global thought policing"? It is clear beyond doubt that US foreign policy needs a popularity injection boost. American ideological hegemony is in a state of total bankruptcy. The Bush administration desperately craves for support within the European community. It is no secret that continental Europe, in itself a multi-ethnic community, does not on the whole accept the Anglo-American notion of a culture clash. So far, the Europeans have refused to join Blair and Bush's war against Islam in a real, dynamic way. Yet, with the new Holocaust denial resolution, America hopes to introduce a change of spirit. Rather than conveying the repeated false image of Judeo-Christianity versus Islam, this time it is the "Holocaust" versus its "Deniers". Rather coincidently, the Holocaust conformists (us) need oil and the "deniers" (them) happen to possess it. As foolish as it may appear, America finds itself slipping into the trap wittingly dug for it by Iranian President Ahmadinejad. Foolishly, the American administration has managed to endorse the notion that the Holocaust is indeed the demarcation line between East and West, between so-called "evil" and "good". Yet, the definition of this separation can be seen as that which stands between the "free thinking West", which enthusiastically seals its past in a black box, and the "open minded East", which dares to raise questions about the past. The Holocaust resolution draws the future battlefield between the uprising of (yesterday's) slave and the decay of (today's) master. Ahmadinejad threw the bone and the Bush administration was stupid enough to pick it up. It affirmed that the Holocaust is the new medium of resistance. Within the framework of the new American Holocaust resolution, it is "us" - the West, those who "know" the "truth" and "them" - nations who are not counted in that hegemonic group, who fail to see it. Yet it is "us" who make our past into a graveyard and it is "them" who grasp that it is the dynamic past that shapes the future. I do not wish to enter the debate regarding the truth of the Holocaust but the ugly face of Holocaust politics cannot be hidden any more. The Holocaust is now officially becoming an ideological weapon against Islam and also against Arab resistance. It is there to establish a fake Western collective identity based on blind conformity and total marginalization of the other. However, in the short term, the new American Holocaust political initiative may prove to be productive. The notion of the destruction of "European Jewry" unites some major political powers. It unites the European parliamentary left together with the conservative liberals as well as America's most radical expansionist forces. They all need the Holocaust for different reasons. In Europe, the Holocaust is there to dismantle the emerging far right. In the Germanic states, the Holocaust is the symbol of the postwar order. For the Anglo-Americans, the Holocaust is there to push away any real ethical engagement with Dresden, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Palestine and Iraq. Most importantly, the new Holocaust denial resolution provides the Americans with the pretext for the next genocide. In other words, the next Holocaust is actually a collective punishment of Holocaust denial. Regardless of what the truth of the Holocaust is and what its denial may entail, to seal the past is to give away the vision of a better future. The end of history is the end of the West. Bush's America may just want to take us there. With the toll in Iraq numbering 650,000 dead and 3,000,000 displaced persons, with millions of Palestinians locked in concentration camps for almost 60 years, neither Bush nor Blair nor any other Western politician can offer us a cheerful vision of the days to come. Instead, they encourage us to stop looking into our past. *Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli-born musician and writer, and a proponent of a secular and democratic one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which the two peoples live in one state as citizens with equal rights and responsibilities. Copyright © Redress Information & Analysis. All rights reserved. |
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