Auschwitz's Finale: racism and holocausts

Author(s): SHIRAZ DOSSA

Source: Third World Quarterly , 2012, Vol. 33, No. 9 (2012), pp. 1575-1593
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

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Third World Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 9, 2012, pp 1575-1593 Ö Routledge
jjj % Taylor & Francis Group

Auschwitz's Finale: racism and

holocausts

SHIRAZ DOSSA

Abstract It is passing strange that the existence of Auschwitz h

lessened racism. In fact quite the reverse: it has unleashed surplus racism
'Third world' and its 'natives'. As I contend here, this is the Auschwitz fina
abject truth, the dialectical residue of the Holocaust. Jacob Neusner calls i
Holocaust 'myth ' and 'mythic theology '. It now constitutes the ruling narr
in the West. This article dissects the Auschwitz discourse and its denial of
holocausts. It critiques the claim that it was the only 'real' genocide. It adv
a contrary thesis on colonialism, racism and holocausts in history. I clarif
affinity between colonialism and fascism and Israeli tactics in Oc
Palestine. It is undeniable that Auschwitz fuels anti-Arab anti-Semitis
anti-Islamism. In my conclusion I analyse Jewish criticism of the Aus
finale.

Kant's 'terrible sublime' resolves the figure of Auschwitz. It exudes the terror
invested in it by the West. It conveys the transcendence of that atrocity. As
Kant writes 'the sublime must always be large'.1 Its status as the exemplary
evil is unassailable in Western culture. Indeed, probing Auschwitz and Jewish
suffering is considered illicit. Yet the intellectual responsibility for such
inquiry is clear. It is crucial for precision in truth and to preclude further
violence. For Auschwitz has yielded its own sublime racism. Its Western logic
depicts the Third World' as the 'terrorist' zone and the Arab/Muslim as the
enemy. The role of Israeli and Diaspora Jewry in this fashioning is unrivalled.
It is truly ironic that Auschwitz's finale is new colonial holocausts as in Iraq,2
and the denial of old ones. Thus the iate Victorian Holocausts' which
occurred during British rule in Asia in the 19th century and claimed well over
30 million lives are not recognised.3 The massive human losses are justified as
causalities of the 'civilising mission'.
Analogously King Leopold's mass murder of over 20 million blacks in the
Congo in the space of 20 years from 1890 to 1911, is deemed a lesser
massacre.4 The journalist Adam Hochschild won't even call it a 'genocide'.
Yet as Robert Weisbrod states 'It was indeed a holocaust before Hitler's

Shiraz Dossa is in the Department of Political Science, St Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova
Scotia, B2G 2W5, Canada. Email : sdossa@stfx.ca.

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/ 12/09 1575-1 9

© 2012 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com
http://dx.doi.org/ 1 0. 1 080/01 436597.201 2.720829 1 575

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 SHIRAZ DOSSA

Holocaust', which Pope Pius X 'endorsed' to facilitate the Church's mi

to acquire converts. Weisbrod's honesty is unusual. Pope John Pa
lamented the 'tragedy of the Holocaust' and the Inquisition, but he
nothing about the 'Congolese genocide'.5 As Novick notes, the 'gold med
the Victimization Olympics' is held by Jews. They are 'intent on perma
possession' and wary of the 'theft of Jewish moral capital' by non- Jews. E
Wiesel has often accused them of 'stealing the Holocaust from us'.6
Sublimity is denied automatically to colonial infernos; also excluded
the Slavic and Roma/Sinti victims of Auschwitz and the Nazis. It is in
sense that Judaic studies scholar Jacob Neusner calls the Holocaust a 'm
He asserts that the genocide of Jews has been turned into 'mythic theo
And American Jews in particular live 'lives . . . separated from reality
veil'.7 In Guy Debord's idiom the Holocaust is cast as a 'spectacle' w
'discourses endlessly upon itself in a 'monologue of self-praise' and w
brooks no 'interruption' and no comparisons. Not only has the 'myth
Auschwitz displaced Auschwitz's actuality, it has legitimised the Jew/A
Muslim binary and Jewish racism against Arabs. Few Jews and Chris
question this quintessentially European construct (in this case of white Jew
To cleave Auschwitz's sublimity from its reality is thus crucial.
In this article I question the ruling Western reading of Auschwitz, th
was exclusively Jewish and wholly unique, and that it is the only
genocide. I begin with literary theorist George Steiner's thesis on the
genocide. His is a self-assured version of this Euro- Jewish narrative. He of
an imperious Jewish thesis but he occasionally worries about it. I discus
views of its leading proponents and critics and I offer a counter-thes
holocausts in history. I stipulate the links between racism, colonialism
fascism and their echoes in the Israeli Occupation. I criticise the use of
Holocaust narrative to dispossess Palestinians and to fuel anti-Islamism
conclude by considering Jewish disaffection with the Auschwitz 'sublime' a
its legacy.

Truth regime
Arendt's contention in Eichmann in Jeusalem, that far fewer Jews would have
been killed if 'Jewish leaders' had not 'cooperated' with the Nazis, struck a
raw nerve.9 It led to vicious attacks on her character, her alleged self-hatred
and anti-Semitic turn of mind. Arendt never said or implied that Jews had
caused or invited the Holocaust, but she condemned the Judenrať s com-
mitment to save 'better' Jews. The irony was that 'lesser' Jews were
considered disposable by the Nazis and by 'respectable Jewish society'
because 'German Jewry from the very beginning' had accepted the Nazis'
'privileged categories'. This led Jewish leaders not to object to the killing of
'little Hans Cohn from around the corner' because he was no 'Einstein'.
Arendt discerned the same attitude in Ben-Gurion's assertion 'that for us a
decent German ... is a decent human being' and that Israel did not 'hold
Adenauer responsible for Hitler'. As she wryly noted, 'There was no mention
of decent Arabs'.10

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 RACISM AND HOLOCAUSTS

It was clear to Arendt that Israel was crafting a new 'regime of

Foucault called it a '"general politics" of truth . . . types of discourse wh
accepts and makes function as true . . . which enable one to distingu
and false statements ... the means by which each is sanctioned', and
say 'what counts as true'.11 This rhetoric has become a real presenc
West. It has metastasised into a global truth and it controls much
narrative on Muslims. Western foreign policy is substantially based
'truth'. Muslims/Arabs are compelled to accept it. The disdain
Palestinians flows from it as well. Any opposition to it is labell
Semitic (as in hating Jews); resistance in Occupied Palestine is quel
F 16s and military invasions. The West sells this as stability and p
reject it is to rebuff human rights, freedom and democracy.
The corollary of this logic is the sibling regime of anti-Semitism.
Arabs is normal and calling Palestinians the new Nazis obligatory.
Israel is a sign of tolerance, opposing its policies is 'terrorism'. So
Muslim, since Islam is deemed violent by nature. Critics of the Jewi
lobby are branded 'hateful'. Arendt understood that the Zionist sett
Palestine had pioneered this logic: 'they did not even to stop to thin
very existence of Arabs', an attitude she condemned as 'plain
chauvinism'.12 Such arrogance would only make them unsafe and in
Arendt's fear has been realised - although she was not above this s
prejudice. She called Africans 'savages' continually.13 Since 1945 th
again' chant has become canonical. Yet the West did not oppose geno
places like the Congo and Rwanda.
The Judeocide has not appreciably enhanced the Judeo-Christian
science. Rwanda's killing season in 1994 was played out in public
presence of UN troops, leaving more than a million dead. Neither
Security Council, nor the USA or the European Union sanctione
vention to stop this announced, advertised genocide, despite pleas
UN force commander on the ground, Lieutenant General Romeo D
It was 'a slaughter on a scale not seen since the Nazi extermin
programme against the Jews . . . the killing was vicious, relent
incredibly brutal ...the killing rate in Rwanda was five times that achiev
the Nazis'.14 The UN Special Envoy for HI V/ AIDS in Africa, S
Lewis, concurred: 'what we were witnessing in Rwanda was unprec
in the annals of human behaviour since the Holocaust in Nazi
Germany and Europe', and the overriding factor in 'the interna
community's' unwillingness to help Rwandans was its 'extraordin
racism'.15
According to Dallaire the 'self-interested racism' of the West allowe
genocide to occur. He noted that 'while Bosnia got thousands of troop
billions of dollars . . . not one of the developed countries sent me tr
within eight to nine days to stop the continuing slaughter of Rwandans'.1
the Bosnian case the West intervened militarily in 1995 well after ove
Muslims were murdered, countless Muslim women raped, librari
homes deliberated destroyed. UN/Western interest in saving Bosnia
took time to develop: their plight became unacceptable four years aft
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 SHIRAZ DOSSA

Serbian bombing and ethnic cleansing initiated in 1991/1992. Bosn

Muslims did well by comparison with black Africans in the crosshairs.
crucial to grasp that Rwandan killers drew on the colonial archive of
West to unleash their genocide; they found their racist logic and mo
operandi in Western methods of conquest. The Nazis also drew on
archive.
Simone Weil had it right: 'Hitlerism consists in the application to the
European continent, and the white race generally, of colonial methods of
conquest and domination'.17 Hitler invoked the liberal Jeffersonian solution
to America's native Indian 'problem' to tackle his Slavic, Gypsy and Jewish
'problem'. He was consciously mimicking the 'American Holocaust'.18 Like
the West generally, he saw 'New World' natives as a 'surplus people'. The
British were not opposed to the 'final solution' as 'long as' the Nazis did
the work.19 Liberals and Nazis shared in the ethos of white supremacy. The
killing of the Indians was 'as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable' for
Roosevelt. Hitler knew that 'the settlement of the North American continent
was a . . . consequence not of any higher claim in a democratic . . . sense but
rather of a consciousness of what is right which had its sole roots in the
conviction of the superiority and thus right of the white race'. Similarly
Israeli Ashkenazis (white Jews) proclaim their superiority to Palestinians and
other 'natives' in the Middle East as a matter of course.20
In brief, basic Western ideas and values abetted the massacre of 'inferior'
groups, 'native' or 'Third world'. Mass murder was acceptable in their case.
The problem for the West is not genocide but the mass murder of cultured
'civilised' humans. Killing the 'uncivilised', 'uncultured' blacks/browns has
not been much of an issue. This is my crucial claim. It should not surprise us:
genocide's efficacy, its ability to elicit intervention, has depended very much
on the calibre of its victims and on Western interests. It took the West a long
time to respond to the Nazi assault on Europe's Jews. And it was the Jews,
not the equally victimised Gypsies, who finally elicited the West's moral
concern. Even now the Gypsies (Roma and Sinti) and the handicapped
murdered and gassed by the Nazis are not counted as victims of the
Holocaust by most scholars of the Nazi genocide. But they should be; they
were killed intentionally.
As Friedlander says:

my research convinced me that this definition of the Nazi genocide . . . had to be

revised because Jews were not the only biologically selected target. Alongside
Jews, the Nazis murdered the European Gypsies. Defined as a 'dark-skinned'
racial group, Gypsy men, women, and children could not escape their fate as
victims of the Nazi genocide. Biology also determined the fate of the
handicapped . . . Nazis killed handicapped infants in hospital as well as elderly
men and women in nursing homes. I realized that the Nazi regime
systematically killed only three groups of human beings: the handicapped,
Jews and Gypsies.21

After the Holocaust Jews rose in the liberal West's esteem, but not the Roma
and the Sinti. In post-Nazi Europe they are still persecuted because so-called
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 RACISM AND HOLOCAUSTS

liberals judge human worth racially.22 As a rule, white Jews (Ashk

accept this view.
Redcliffe Nathan Salaman, a British Jew and Zionist, a specia
biology and eugenics based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was
taken by the fairness of Euro-Jews. So much so that in 1911 in a Jo
Genetics essay, he declared that the Jews from Yemen 'are not Jews. Th
black . . . Arab half-castes . . . The true Jew is the European Ashkena
support him against all others'.23 Such views were common in the E
converts to Judaism and their descendants. The Salamans are the maj
the Diaspora and the ruling class in Israel.24 In 1930 the Odessa bo
Jabotinsky, Zionist settler- pioneer in Palestine, rejected the idea th
should speak Hebrew as it was spoken by Biblical Jews. He opted f
Western accent because the Biblical one would be 'an Arabic accent'. And
that was unacceptable: 'We are European and our musical taste is European,
the taste of Rubinstein, Mendelssohn and Bizet'. His intent is clear even if his
logic is not.25
The 'uniqueness' of the Holocaust flows from Ashkenazi pride in their
racial superiority. Its corollary is not denied but defended: non-Jews count
for very little, which can be traced back to the Old Testament thesis on the
acceptability of the Canaanite genocide because Yahweh willed it. Israel's
killing of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims since its founding has been
similarly justified. Suffice it to mention the 1200 civilians killed in Lebanon in
July 2006 and the 1400 civilians (including 400 children) killed in Gaza in
January 2009. It is evident that the chosen Jew-unchosen non- Jew divide has
been globalised. It is even accepted by many 'Third world'elites, including
Saudi, Jordanian and UAE Arab leaders who endorse the US-Israeli agenda
without demurral. Its legitimacy, its 'truth' has long been settled. The
dissenters among Jews are aberrations.

Christian collusion?

George Steiner blames Christianity for the Holocaust. This view suffuses his
literary criticism and his reflections as a Euro-Jew. His prose is haunting,
thick with philosophical allusions, frequently brilliant. His forte is high-
pitched reflection and assertion. As he sees it, high culture seems less and less
plausible in an age besieged by the pressure of biological instincts and sexual
urges.26 Intellectual things are decried because their relevance is far from self-
evident. Still Steiner exults high culture even though the Judeocide was
authorised by 'civilised' nations: 'When barbarism came to twentieth century
Europe, the arts faculties in more than one university offered very little moral
resistance ... In a disturbing number of cases the literary imagination gave
servile or ecstatic welcome to political bestiality'.27 In high culture's own
commandments there is a taboo against such intimacy. Steiner is intent on
'making sense'. Its horror can't be accounted for by antecedent social/
political factors. Nor can it be dismissed as madness.28
For Steiner the final authority for Hitler lies in the realm of the sacred.
Nazi inhumanity can be traced to the beginning of Western culture nearly
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 SHIRAZ DOSSA

2000 years ago. High barbarism is only chronologically a modern phe

menon: its roots lie in the discovery and the subsequent career of the id
one God. Invented by the Jews, recast into a more palatable, plural for
Pauline Christianity, the ideals of monotheism, 'of ascetic love, of co
passion, of self-suppression' ruptured the consciousness of Occidental m
The unnatural commands of the Western God have, since then, continu
torment his sleep. For centuries the discontent, provoked by monothe
remained muted because Western man, despite severe misgivings, nev
ceased 'to fully acknowledge its supreme value'.29
That is, until the turbulent, promising, exciting 19th century, the centur
progress, of new vistas, of sensual comfort, freedom and above all, unfett
optimism. But below this public face surged a sense of rage and despai
Steiner's allusive rendering, this undercurrent, 'registered, with unequ
precision, in the novels and private life of Flaubert', less poignantly in Heg
Marx, Nietzsche and later Freud, and announced itself as a radical rebe
against the new 'world of middle-class fact . . . middle-class rule . . . (the) s
of a bourgeois life-form'. Flat, sterile, soulless - the new world enrage
literati and induced them to revolt. In their alienation Steiner detects an 'itch
for chaos', 'for revolutionary action'. It was their longing for the
authentically human that spawned destructive impulses in the foes of
liberal modernity and which paved the way for high barbarism in the next
century.30
As he sees it, disenchantment with modernism turned into a revolt against
monotheism. The numbing banality of life in the 19th century exacerbated
Western man's [sic] resentment of monotheism and its impossible, inflexible,
unattainable ideals. And now he was more troubled, since the only
alternative to the secular, debased world he inhabited, was the monotheistic
ideal of 'self-suppression'.31 The 'Jewish' nightmare had returned to haunt his
consciousness in an age of liberal optimism and freedom. Romanticism, with
its conviction - widely shared by the literati - that God had disappeared
,was Europe's answer to this predicament. Nietzsche's declaration that 'God
is dead' summed up what cultured men in the 19th century already knew in
their bones. This nihilistic revolt was underwritten by the cultured and the
educated.
'By killing the Jews', Steiner says, the West sought to 'eradicate those who
had "invented" God . . . the Holocaust is a reflex ... of natural sensory con-
sciousness, of instinctual polytheistic and animist needs'.32 Instinctive
violence lay just beneath the 'civilised' veneer. The Holocaust was an archaic
Christian irruption. Steiner insists that the West is deeply Christian. He takes
Western culture, in essence, to be Christianity writ large. He can thus accuse
'Western culture' of 'killing Jews' to avenge the curse of the absolute God.33
Steiner's claim lacks cogency. If the culture is Christian, how does that make
the Holocaust inevitable? Isn't religious anti-Semitism a contest over doctrine
by rival claimants to the throne? Steiner claims that the Christian West has
been aching to rid itself of the incubus of monotheism by killing its
'inventors'. Why, then, did Byzantine Christians not liquidate Jews when
they were at the zenith of their power?
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 RACISM AND HOLOCAUSTS

It is true that modern anti-Semitism springs 'from Christian the

anti-Judaism', yet the Christian Church or rulers never conte
genocide. For all its willingness to persecute Jews, Christianity 'd
decree [their] extermination', even though it distrusted the pe
rejected its truth.34 As Yerushalmi puts it, 'The problem is not why th
were derogated but rather why they were not wiped out?' when intole
rival faiths was the norm.35 If Jews were the problem, why did the N
murder millions of non-Jews as well?36 Why were the Slavs and Ro
when they did not invent the One God? Steiner's reasoning seems
outlandish.

Anti-Semitism?

It is irrefutable that the Holocaust 'resonate[d] with the religio-mythic tradi-

tions of biblical religion'. And that the Christian Church has political
interests. Like the Nazis, Christians wanted to rule the world. In the creation
of Europe 'all those who rejected baptism, apart from the Jews, were either
expelled or exterminated'. As spiritual precursors, only Jews were exempted.
But the Nazis had none of the qualms that held Christians back. In fact the
Holocaust was Hitler's 'holy war' by methods Christians rejected.37 The
irony is that that Christianity protected Jews. The Nazis took the 'deliberate
genocide' of American Indians as their 'model' for the Jews and other
'Indians' on the 'European continent'.38 It was the colonising 'civilised'
Anglo-West that inspired Hitler.
Steiner avers that "We are not - this is often misunderstood - considering
something truly analogous to other cases of massacre, to the murder of
Gypsies or, earlier, of the Armenians. There are parallels in technique and in
the idiom of hatred. But not ontologically, not at the level of philosophic
intenť. His logic is not compelling.39 The 'philosophic intent' was not clear or
explicit in Nazi discourse until early 1941 when the Nazis began murdering
Slavs, Gypsies and Jews en masse. The Nazis planned to kill all 'non-Aryans',
all 'racial inferiors'; 'eliminating the gypsy plague' was a primary interest.4
The first victims were the handicapped Germans, they were gassed in 1938.
With this move Hitler launched the 'racial re-structuring' of Europe, and the
liquidation of all humans seen as defective by the Nazis. 1 The Holocaust was
never just about the Jews. Slavs were judged worthless as well: '3.3 million
Soviet prisoners of war... out of a total of 5.7 million Soviet soldiers'
captured "by the German Army [by] February 1945' died from 'exploita-
tion . . . starvation and endemic diseases' in Auschwitz and other camps.42
The Nazis murdered 'five million Jews' in all;43 like the Soviet prisoners,
2.4 million of them died in Nazi camps of 'natural' causes, 'disease,
exploitation, malnutrition and the like'. The other Jews were gassed and shot
like many of the Gypsies. As many Gypsies were killed, proportionately, as
Jews in Nazi camps and in similar ways.44 Yet Yehuda Bauer, Steven Katz
and others, exclude Gypsies and other Nazi victims from the Holocaust: they
claim that the Nazis really wanted to kill only the Jews. This is the fallback
position of the 'holocaust is Jewish' academics, which casually dismisses the
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 SHIRAZ DOSSA

other 15 million or so annihilated by the Nazis as extraneous colla

damage.
Katz captures the ruling Ashkenazi view. He asserts that the Nazis were
committed to killing all Jews: 'every man, woman and child'. He sees the
Nazi genocide as unique and exclusively Jewish;45 he adds that the Nazi
attack on the Jews was 'the only true genocide in history'. Katz's claims are
baseless, unsupported. There is no extant evidence that the Nazis wanted to
kill 'all Jews everywhere', or that they sought to 'kill every Jew on earth'.
From 1933, on the contrary, the Nazis were making exceptions for various
categories of Jews.46 Until 1940-41 Hitler favoured mass emigration of Jews
to Madasgascar in particular. Jews exempted from deportation and death
comprised 'the Mischlinge and the Jews in mixed marriages; the There-
sienstadt Jews, including the old people, badly disabled and highly decorated
war veterans and prominent persons'.
The majority of Gypsies killed were of 'mixed blood' (they were not
spared). In addition, as Hilberg notes, 'The Jews were not killed before the
emigration policy was exhausted'. Hitler knew that 'the entire democratic
world dissolves in tears of pity but then . . . closes its heart to the poor,
tortured Jewish people'. The West did accept rich German Jews. In 1938 SS
Chief Ribbentrop told the French Foreign Minister that 'we all wanted to get
rid of our Jews but ... no country wanted to receive them'. Goebbels stated
that 'At bottom ... I believe both the English and the Americans are happy
that we are exterminating the Jewish riffraff '. 48 The Nazis effectively exposed
liberal Western hypocrisy. The other West was not less lethal or less racist. It
killed 'inferior', non-Christian 'natives' in the 'New World'/'Third world'
with facility.
As Lemkin, who coined the term, recognised, 'genocide did not begin with
the Nazis'. Its modern roots lay in 'the atrocities committed by European
colonialists and settlers' in the global South.49 Euro-Jews, however, insist
that the genocide of Jews is unique because only Jews were singled out
because they were Jews. In brief, anti-Semitism caused the genocide. This
conviction is unfounded. Anti-Semitism was not rife, insidious or deep
enough to let the Nazis exploit it. It was 'virulent only in certain sectors' and
it was unserviceable as 'an overall integrating ideology' for authorising the
Judeocide. Secular/theological anti-Semitism was just one factor that
facilitated the Nazi genocide.50 If anti-Semitism had been the exclusive
justification for the Holocaust, Slavs and other Christians and Gypsies would
not have been killed. For this reason, Hilberg and Arendt rejected this
explanation.
Saliently 'first generation' Jewish scholars grasped that Jews were not the
exclusive victims of the Holocaust: Philip Friedman, Raphael Lemkin and
Miriam Novitch included 'the murder of Gypsies in their definition of the
"final solution'".51 Yet Jewish scholars like Yehuda Bauer, Steven Katz,
Deborah Lipstadt and Elie Wiesel consciously exclude non- Jews from the
Holocaust and even deride their losses. Not surprisingly a few Jewish critics
have slammed this fixation on the Jewish dead as 'sordid', 'fatuous' and
'intellectually vulgar'.52 Phillip Lopate recalls that the 'Holocaust' entered
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 RACISM AND HOLOCAUSTS

Jewish conversation as 'part of a polemic . . . the Holocaustians used

club to smash back their opponents'. It was invented by Eli Wiesel wh
'the Holocaust corporation . . . who defends his patents with articles ... i
Sunday New York Times'.53
Why then is Steiner a 'Holocaustian'? After all, he is a feted critic. Yet
less astute than he should be. His take on certain issues is dubious. He sees
the Judeocide as unique because of the 'intent' driving it, and he connects it
to that unbearable 'Jewish invention' - conscience. Thus the killing of the
Jews is the worst of all evils. But the context is crucial. The Judeocide 'must
be seen against the horizon of the unprecedented magnitude of violence' in
the past century, which killed over 100 million, including the victims of 'the
American nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW II'.54
Can any evil be considered truly unique in this light? As Arendt noted,
'massacres of whole peoples are not unprecedented. They were the order of
the day in antiquity.'55

Culture and mass murder

Still, the Nazi killing of Jews had a certain edge to it. Far too often they had
been derided and abused in their European birthplaces.56 A terrible obsession
with Jews has marked Western Christian culture. On the matter of the Jew in
the mind of the West, Steiner is on the mark. As an instance of evil, the
Holocaust was extraordinary but was it incomparably unique? Steiner sees its
Jewish victims as special; he elevates them, denying equality to non-Jewish
victims. He says as much and more on behalf of his thesis on high culture. In
1966 he called all massacres 'realities of profound evil', declining to see the
genocide of Jews as 'singular'.57 But by 1971 he had labelled the Holocaust
'ontologically' unique. He knew then that Western colonialism specialised in
the 'subjugation of other races and continents'. In 1998 he emphasised the
Holocaust's uniqueness, adding that he did 'not know' if 'the Rwanda
genocide is analogous'.58
Yet Raul Hilberg, the leading scholar of the 'destruction of the European
Jews', called the Rwandan carnage a 'pure genocide' just like the Judeocide.59
Steiner's Jewish exceptionalism is encased in his theory of culture. High
culture civilises, preserves, humanises, it does not kill and it does not murder.
These are the basic tenets of the faith of culture that Steiner knows by heart.
These are the unwritten canons of high culture. Yet this culture willed the
destruction of Euro-Jews. It was murder by culture of its own cultural
children, of Jewish lives seething with the culture and the spirit of Western
Europe.60 For Steiner this constitutes high treason. Literary figures Stefan
Zweig and Thomas Mann felt the same. This culture produced the killers; it
killed fellow Europeans. For them the Holocaust's uniqueness resides in this
central fact.
Steiner is enraged by the collusion of high culture in the killing of the
cultured.61 He is unsettled by the mass murder of cultured fellow Jews. He
disdains its compact with the 'inhuman'. 'From the time of Plato to that of
Matthew Arnold' has it not been the enabling conviction of the West
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 SHIRAZ DOSSA

'that culture is a humanizing force, that the energies of spirit are transf
to those of conduct?'. Investment in culture, in reading, writing, has
supposed that it improves the mind, refines the sensibility and
civilises intercourse between men [sic]. Like Steiner, many Euro-Jews
acquiesced in this high culture theory. Its sensibility of nobility was crafted
by them.
What the West calls 'Central European humanism', which dissolved under
Hitler, was substantially created by Jews.62 The Nazi camps swept up
millions of them. By turning on Jews, this culture turned on itself and on the
ideals of culture. Steiner concludes that evil is unique when cultured
Europeans kill cultured fellow Europeans, when it violates Euroopean minds
and bodies on European soil. But the mass murder of 'natives' by white
colonisers is a lesser evil, if one at all. Steiner extols the 'elements of creative
exchange and beneficial import in colonialism1, without offering an explana-
tion. He pours scorn on 'Western gurus', the white sympathisers, 'who
profess to be brothers under the skin with the roused, vengeful soul of Asia or
Africa! .
Steiner's attitude is stunning. The West, he says, just can't grasp ' the rules
of consciousness of a coloured or "third world" culture'.63 He accepts Euro-
Jewish settler canards about violent and cunning Palestinian 'natives'
displaced by these settlers. He reiterates the lies that Euro-Jews turned
'desert into orchard', that Israel had no choice but to 'make itself a closed
fist . . . to survive the wolf pack at its doors'.64 Steiner's chauvinism is jarring.
As early as 1891 and 1905, and in the 1920s and 1930s, immigrant Jews in
Palestine had repudiated such fictions.65 He says that the 'inhuman' warrants
censure because it rose from within, and from the core of European
civilization'.66 Colonial evils, he asserts, are not 'truly analogous' to the
Holocaust. The conceit in this stance is misplaced.
Colonial holocausts were sanctioned by the same 'core of European
civilization' that sponsored Nazi barbarism. In fact, colonial killings served
as precedents, as rehearsals, for the Nazi genocide. Steiner fails to see this.
He rejects 'native' mass murders as true genocides. This is Auschwitz's racist
dividend: it consists in the denial of older holocausts and of the holocausts to
come of non- Jews. In liberal/Jewish discourse this is a non-subject. For
instance, in the Americas the population of 80 million had been reduced to 10
million by 'the middle of the sixteenth century' by the Spanish colonisers. In
the same period (1500 to 1600), the Mexican population had been cut from
25 million to 1 million: 'If the word genocide has ever been applied to a
situation with some accuracy, this is here the case'.68
Colonial evils were not lesser evils. The Holocaust, as Stannard observes,
was an "abominably unique event", but it pales by comparison with the
"total extermination" and "near-extermination" of the "many American
Indian peoples", roughly 100 million dead by 1890 when the US Indian Wars
officially ended. He emphasises that 95% of the indigenous Indian
population was wiped out both by disease and by 'a deliberate racist
purge ... the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world'.
Africans captured and shipped to America as slaves endured spectacular
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 RACISM AND HOLOCAUSTS

losses, between 40-60 million souls'.69 Killing by gas was one novel m
used by the Nazis, who gassed the Roma and Sinti, Jews and handi
Germans with equal fervour. Yet of the 'five million' (Hilberg) Jews kill
the Nazis, half the Jews died of starvation, disease, brutal abuse and
exploitation.70
In its 1997 report on Israeli torture of Arab detainees (approved by the
Israeli state and its courts), the London Sunday Times underlined Israel's
colonial/racist attitudes: Israelis tortured to 'control' the 'natives' even
utilising 'gas' to do so. US journalist Nicholas Von Hoffman noted 'the
grotesque irony of using gas as an instrument of torture' by the Jewish
state.71 In December 2008 Israel launched a full-scale assault on Gaza for 23
days, leaving many civilians, including over 300 children, dead. The UN fact-
finding mission on the Gaza conflict concluded that Israel violated
'international law, international human rights law and humanitarian law'
systematically. Led by a South African Jew, Justice Richard
Goldstone, the mission stated that the 'Gaza Strip had been under a severe
regime of closures and restrictions on movement of people, goods and
services . . . [ including] food and medical supplies . . . and fuel, electricity,
school items, and repair and construction material' for three years before the
invasion.
It added that the Gazans were 'psychologically suffering from long-
standing poverty, insecurity and violence . . . the dignity of the people of Gaza
had been severely eroded'.72 Justice Goldstone was, nevertheless, notably
solicitous of Israeli interests. He assumed that the Gaza strip (under Israeli
siege) and the Israeli state were equal combatants. Gaza has no army or air
force because Israel won't allow it. Lynda Burstein Brayer, a South African
Jew and Israeli-trained lawyer, reports that Israel killed '1417 Palestinians
and 9 Israeli soldiers were killed by Israeli fire. Palestinian rockets killed one
Israeli soldier and 3 Israeli civilians'. It was disingenuous of Justice
Goldstone to say that Israel was guilty of 'potential' 'crimes against
humanity' and 'war crimes'.73
Furthermore, Justice Goldstone did not address the Palestinian right to
fight Israel's illegal occupation and colonisation of Palestine. Nor did he
consider the history of Israel's invasions in the past. In Lebanon (1982),
Israel killed over 20 000 civilians and left it devastated. In July 2006 Israel
annihilated over 1200 hundred Lebanese civilians and destroyed Lebanon's
modern infrastructure. It did so each time with the support of the 'civilised'
West. The UN mission, nevertheless, conceded that in Gaza in 2009 the
Israeli operation was 'premised on a deliberate policy of disproportionate
force aimed not at the enemy but at the "supporting infrastructure". In
practice, this appears to have meant the civilian population '. The mission
witnessed 'obscenities . . . and racist slogans on the walls ... all constituted an
overall image of humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian
population'. The Nazi camps have been closed for 65 years and the
Occupation of Palestine has gone on since 1967. Yet Israel and Jews still
enjoy total immunity in the West, which provides carte blanche moral and
political support. Canada excelled in such collusion in 2012.
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 SHIRAZ DOSSA

Racism and holocausts

Liberals like JS Mill had little sympathy for 'natives'. Circa 1859 he dubbed
Africans and Asians 'backward' and unfit for self-rule. Killing and bombing
them was as uncontroversial then as it is now. Absolute rule over 'natives'
was justified by the 'civilising mission' in their interest. Under Nazism this
constituted 'totalitarian' rule (Arendt). It has been open season on 'natives'
for 200 years. In the 19th century 'native' genocides in places like the USA
and the Congo were far from unusual. The Jewish experience differed from
the 'native' one. Notably Jews were not classified as 'natives' but they were
persecuted. Crucially, however, anti-Semitism co-existed with robust philo-
Semitism. Balfour's, Churchill's and Truman's philo-Semitism literally
created Israel. It was aided, substantially, by Europe's anti-Arab anti-
Semitism. The same Christian habit sustains Israel today.
The Zionists knew this well and exploited it. In a letter to Balfour in 1918,
Weizmann warned him about the Arab: he is 'treacherous' by nature, and 'he
screams as often as he can and blackmails as often as he can'. He added that
he knew that 'the British Authorities' understood this. Weizmann emphasised
both the Judeo-Christian affiliation and the common European view of
Arabs and Muslims.75 Weizmann 'founded' both Israel and the future
negative discourse on the Arab. Pace Weizmann, Jews were once labelled
'treacherous' and now 'blackmail' the West to secure financial and military
support for Israel.76 The corporate Western media see nothing wrong with
this. Indeed, they cover Muslims/Arabs typically through a Jewish filter. In
May 2002 former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak told his fellow Israeli
Jew Benny Morris that Arabs 'are products of a culture in which to tell a
lie. . .creates no dissonance. . . They don't sujfer from the problem of telling
lies that exists in Judaeo-Christian culturé' . Morris's essay was published in
the leading US intellectual journal the New York Review of Books without
comment.

Lying - in other words - is the norm in Islam. The point is that the wh
Christians take white Jews seriously; they are racially similar and they shar
the same cultural milieu. Indeed, the West has granted the latter the power
denigrate Muslims and Arabs. Should we then be surprised by Weizman
and Barak's anti-Arab anti-Semitism? Hardly. Cesaire's criticism is germ
in this context. He noted that the West was shocked by Nazism beca
Hitler 'applied to Europe colonialist procedures

the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and t

'Pacifying' Europeans with colonial methods was un
men 'were its accomplices . . . they absolved it . . . they
massacred 'non-European peoples'. What the West o
crime against man', not 'the humiliation of man as
against the white man' and 'the humiliation of the w
'Concentration camps' were not a Nazi invention; t
them during the Boer War.79 The West killed coun
support of Christians opposed to 'native' 'polytheists
was their faith which led Christian invaders to kill nati
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 RACISM AND HOLOCAUSTS

In Western culture the will to kill has been sustained, historically, by f

monotheism. Indeed, Christians blessed the dispossession of 'natives
name of their Lord.80 The Nazi Holocaust was not Christian revenge
Jews. Steiner and others ignore the real cause: racism. For centuries the
has considered Slavs, Gypsies, Jews and 'natives' to be inferior. Not
racism 'endemic in Western civilization', Nazi racism was based on
'largely' borrowed from European, in particular French, ideas.81
Even 'liberal equality' is fully consistent with racism. It has never
barrier to conquest and subjugation of the 'natives'. It has been just
liberal grounds as 'humanitarian intervention' or 'saving' their wom
notion that liberals are not racists is an illusion.82 It is fully 'inscri
liberal practices: '(forms of violence, contempt, intolerance, humiliat
exploitation)'. It covers the gamut from ' internal . . . to external racism
a 'racism of oppression' to a 'racism of extermination or eliminatio
thrives in what Balibar calls the Western 'racist community' ('comm
racists'). Liberal anti-racism is self-serving, rhetorical and weak.83 Yet S
defends Western culture as non- racist - although he concedes that it is
Semitic (ie anti-Jewish). He is dejected about 'our ubiquitous anthrop
relativistic, non-evaluative in its study of differing races and cultur
and less does the West distinguish 'higher from lower, greater from
civilization from retarded primitivism'. 4
In Weimar Germany the word Jew became 'a metaphor for Mode
Jews were co-producers of modern Western culture. When disillusio
they were blamed for it. And the masses were easily roused by am
politicians to vent their frustrations on the Jews and the barren world
had created.85 Liberalism, modernism (as attitude) and modernisatio
closely associated with Jews. As Arendt said, Jews were 'co-respons
the world they had co-authored. As modernism's co-creators, they
brunt of the rage of the disaffected. Clearly Jews were not 'guilty' but
were 'co-responsible' because they were 'involved in the business o
world'. Their strength was cultural and economic, politically th
powerless. They had not sought, or cultivated political power.8
Christian anxieties had little to do with inciting the Nazi genoci
Yerushalmi writes, 'there must be some significance in the fact th
Holocaust took place in our secular century, and not in the Middle A
Steiner's thesis on Christian anti-Semitism is baseless. Arendt knew that
Nazis were as anti-Christian as they were anti-Jewish. The Western
was and is insidious racism. Conrad summed up its rapacity wel
grabbed what they could ... It was just robbery with violence, agg
murder on a large scale . . . The conquest of the earth, which mostly m
taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly
noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too m
Drinnon unravels US racism succinctly: 'In its more inclusive form,
racism is another name for native-hating - In North America of '
'chinks', 'dagoes', etc. . .in Indo-China "of gooks'".89
This love of native-hating is akin to past Jew-hating. It is now on disp
the attacks on Muslim 'natives' (Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, L
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 SHIRAZ DOSSA

Palestinians, etc), demonstrating the Western zeal for conquest. U

Muslim, Jews (Jewish elites) co-run the Empire today. It should be r
that the Nazis reclassified Jews as 'Asiatics' and 'Orientals', in a wor
'natives', before killing them. Foucault saw that colonial logic was cent
this project: 'racism . . . develops with colonization . . . with colonizing
cide'. Racism validates war and mass murder. It 'justifies' the 'need'
populations and to kill civilizations'. Liberals were as guilty as fascists
Stalinists 'simply extended . . . mechanisms that already existed in th
West.' The 'liberal heritage' proved congenial to them.
It is principally Jews who now assail Muslims, scorn Islam and call
sub-human. Suffice it to mention the prolific screeds of Daniel Pipes,
Peretz, Richard Perle, David Frum, Leon Wieseltier, Alan Dershowitz
Charles Krauthammer, among others. State University of New
research scholar Jerome Slater calls them 'enabler[s] of Israeli policies
of the skewed US foreign policy on Palestine. He condemns the 'discou
rants of our Abraham Foxmans, Alan Dershowitzes, and Martin Pere
In Israel's defence, even Michael Walzer vilifies Muslims and Arabs
routinely. He not only agrees with Martin Peretz and Alan Dershowitz, he
calls them 'my friends' and criticises Slater for underling the 'political power
of American Jews' in crafting US pro-Israel policy. It is worrying when a
liberal political theorist like Walzer allies himself with Peretz and
Dershowitz. Walzer is cannier but he is equally a traducer of Arabs and
Islam. What bonds them is their uncritical Zionism and love of Israel.91
It is no secret that US Jews like Bernard Lewis, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas
Feith, Elie Weisel and William Kristol successfully pushed for war against
Iraq twice (1991 and 2003). And this was justified, among other reasons, to
prevent another Auschwitz. The same crew today calls for war against
Muslim Iran. It is no accident that they are militantly pro-Israel. Hating
Islam, and anti-Islamism have become a Jewish speciality (even though some
Jews condemn this). It comes as no surprise that the self-described 'Jewish
state' occupies Palestinian land, terrorises its inhabitants, builds illegal
settlements, and violates international law. It is the proudly 'Jewish state'
which slays Arabs in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank at will. It is Western
Jews who invoke the Old Testament and Western civilisation to defend
invasion and occupation.92
Yet Jews routinely, 67 years after the Holocaust, still claim to be victims.
In 2008 Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai warned that 'The
more Qassam (rocket) fire intensifies . . . they (the Palestinians) will bring
upon themselves a bigger holocaust .93 Hamas fired rockets to end the 'Israeli
blockade' and siege of Gaza. Vilnai's threat wasn't just crass rhetoric. Israel
invaded Gaza nine months later. The Israeli poet Yitzhak Laor decries this
kind of 'Jewish pride' that leads to 'abetting racism'. He recalls how in Italy
in 2003 Berlusconi was forced to apologise to the Italian Jewish community
for declaring that Mussolini killed no Jews. But he did not apologise for the
1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the 'use of gas to massacre huge
numbers of Ethiopians'. The Italian Jews did not demand an apology for the
slaughter of Ethiopians: 'they were interested only in the Jews who were
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 RACISM AND HOLOCAUSTS

murdered'. Laor adds that 'the Holocaust has become a part of Euro
religion. Under its aegis one has the right to hate foreigners and m
The greatest Islamophobes are also friends of Israel.' 94
Avraham Burg is equally concerned about Jewish attitudes. He
excessive self-love and indifference to non-Jews in his fellow Israeli Jews. An
activist and critic, he rejects the view that Jews are still victims. In his book,
The Holocaust is Over, he writes that 'Anti-Semitism seems ridiculous, even
innocuous, when compared with the strength of the Jewish people today'.
The Ashkenazi Holocaust obsession is debilitating. It is alien to the current
Israeli-Jewish reality: 'There are no more real Nazis. Our people should
return to be part of the family of nations'. Unlike the crafters of the
'Auschwitz sublime', Burg knows that the Holocaust was 'the climax of a
process of racial superiority theories of the white races and their contact with
"inferior races'". He hopes for a new Jewish sensibility and a new Jewish
'world in which the holocausts which were not ours will become ours ... we
have to look ourselves in the eye, to face and sever the new roots of Jewish
racism that are rising in our midst and consuming us from within'.95
Recognising the holocausts of others will not diminish theirs. On the
contrary, it will elevate the stature of Jews and respect for Judaism. It will
serve as well to restore Jews to the human family and the annals of human
suffering. Laor and Burg can see that but they are an anomaly among
Ashkenazis and Jews generally. It is crucial for Jews and non- Jews to rethink
Auschwitz and the Holocaust, to rethink Auschwitz's finale, its racism and its
licensing of current and future holocausts. Rethinking Auschwitz has to start
by disabling the tribal reading of Auschwitz. This construal is committed to
violence and war; it is hostile to humanity and justice; it revels in clannish
exclusivism. It calls tacitly for the continuation of Nazism in new guises.
Racism is intrinsic to this archaic reading. It comes as no surprise that
Auschwitz serves to justify new bloodbaths. It sanctions as well the North's
racism in the South. The antinomy and irony is rich here.
In Auschwitz the Jews invented a strange analytic. The worst-off, close to
death Jews were labelled Muselmänner (Muslims) by fellow Jews. Primo Levi
called them 'the drowned', an 'anonymous mass'. The Muslim surrendered,
he caved in to terror. Muselmänner signalled contempt. Muslim Jews were un-
Jewish, cowards.96 Camp Jews, oddly, knew no Muslims. Yet they used
Muslim as an insult. The Muslim was the South. Northern Jews founded
Israel. But it was in the South. Since then, loathing the South has been the
norm. It ensures disdain for Muslims/Arabs and for Others. In May 2012
Tel Aviv Jews attacked African asylum seekers. In April Ilan Tison, an
Israeli lawyer, called 'the presence of Africans a mortal threat to the lives of
every single Jewish man, woman and child'. It was unclear how or why. The
Israeli interior Minister Eli Yishai warned that 'the country belongs to us, to
the white man', that Israel is a 'white man's country'. 1500 black asylum
seekers were detained in Saharonim prison. Yishai told the UK Guardian : 'I
want to be able to walk the streets without fear or trepidation . . . The
migrants are giving birth to hundreds of thousands, and the Zionist dream is
dying'.97
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 SHIRAZ DOSSA

As usual the North is silent. But not all of Europe has hushed
Philosopher Alain Badiou and his colleague Cecile Winter have har
criticised the Israeli Occupation and Jewish behaviour. Both despise ra
especially Jewish racism. Badiou bluntly states that 'no greater threat weig
upon the name of Jews than the politics of conquest, of physical liquid
of Palestinians, of massacring Arab schoolchildren, of dynamiting ho
and of torture, currently pursued by the state of Israel'. Little about Israe
Jewish: 'the country' is in the 'process of de-Judaization, an anti-Sem
country'. Surprisingly 'the principal threat to the name of Jews comes fro
state calling itself Jewish'. As a Jew, Badiou is incensed by Israeli politics a
its colonial treatment of Palestinians: 'that way of thinking is wrong ..
foreign to everything that has been brought forth in our history unde
name of Jews'.
What really worries Badiou is the Israeli 'project of a genocide of
Palestinians'. He sees 'the will to disperse them at all costs, to drive then
further and further away, to wipe them out on every occasion, to shoot at
their children'.98 Cecile Winter is incisive: 'Who are the masters?' Israeli
terror is no coincidence. It is the West and 'Western discourse' that fuels it:
'the Whites ... the rich, the democrats or Westerners, the developed, the well-
armed wing of Humanity, servicers of goods who know Good and Evil'. The
West is still the master and it has licensed and unleashed the 'New Aryans' -
the Jews." It is rare to encounter such honest criticism of Israeli/Northern
racism. The horror of Auschwitz has not silenced Badiou and Winter. Still,
we all need to be liberated from Auschwitz.

Notes

1 I Kant, The Philosophy of Kant : Immanuel Kant' s Moral and Political Writings , ed CJ Friedrich, New
York: Modern Library, 1949, pp 3-4.
2 Sound scholarly estimates indicate that at least 1.2 million Iraqi civilians were killed mainly by the US-
UK occupation forces. The USA and UK erased a modern society and culture and left behind a legacy
of gross violence, instability, economic devastation and terrible cancers by using depleted uranium and
uranium ordnance. In brief, the USA and UK inflicted a holocaust, deliberately, on Muslim/Arab Iraq.
J Holland, 'Iraq death toll rivals Rwanda genocide, Cambodian killing fields', AlterNet , September 16
2007 (http://www.alternet.org/story/62728/iraq_death_toll_rivals_rwanda_genocide%2C_cambodian_
killing_fields). See also A Amove (ed), Iraq under Siege , Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002.
3 M Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts , London: Verso, 2001, pp 6-9.
4 H Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism , New York: Meridian Books, 1958, p 185.
5 RG Weisbrod, The King, the Cardinal and the Pope: Leopold IPs genocide and the Vatican', Journal
of Genocide Research , 5(1), 2003, pp 35-45.
6 P Novick, The Holocaust in American Life , Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. 1999. d 195.
7 J Neusner, Strangers at Home: 'The Holocaust', Zionism and American Judaism , Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp 6-9.
8 G Debord, The Society of the Spectacle , trans D Nicholson-Smith, New York: Zone Books, 1995, d 19.
9 H Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem , New York: Viking, 1965, o 125.
10 Ibid. , pp 131-134, 12-13.
11 M Foucault, Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interview and Other Writings , ed C Gordon, New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980, p 131.
12 H Arendt, The Jew as Pariah , ed R Feldman, New York: Grove Press, 1978, pp 138, 183-184.
13 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp 190-192.
14 L Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide , London: Zed Books, 2000,
p 4 passim , emphasis added.

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 RACISM AND HOLOCAUSTS

15 S Lewis, 'Rwanda ten years ago: how the world stood back and watched a genocide', Demo
1 April 2004, at www.democracynow.org.
16 R Fanfair, 'West more racist than colonial powers: Daillare', Sharenews , 12 March 2005
sharenews.com (2005 Archives/3-17-05).
17 S Weil, 'East and West: thoughts on the colonial problem 1943', in Weil, Selected Essays , tr
London: Oxford University Press, 1962, p 199. See also NG Finkelstein, Image and Realit
Israel-Palestine Conflict , London: Verso, 1996, pp 89-94.
18 S Kühl, The Nazi Connection : Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism , N
Oxford University Press, 1994, pp 54-55.
19 RL Rubenstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future , New Yor
Colophon Books, 1978, pp 17-18.
20 Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict , pp 93-98.
21 H Freidlander, The Origins of Nazi Violence , Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Caroli
xiii. See also S Milton, 'The context of the Holocaust', German Studies Review , 13(2), 199
283; Milton, 'Holocaust: the Gypsies', in S Totten, WS Parsons & IW Chamy (eds), C
Genocide , New York: Routledee, 2004.
22 R Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism , Cambr
Harvard University Press, 1981, pp 2-6.
23 Cited in S Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People , trans Y Lotan, London: Verso, 2009
24 Ibid. In this text, Tel Aviv University historian Sand cogently shows that Euro-Jews are no
Biblical, to Palestinian (Arab) Jews, and that there has never been a Jewish people. The Z
Israeli narratives about the 'Jewish people' constitute 'conventional lies about the past' (p
25 Cited in E Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East I West and the Politics of Representation , Austin, TX:
of Texas Press, 1989, p 55. Shohat incisively details the racist contempt for the Arabs even
films made well before the founding of Israel, as far back as 1902. See pp 26, 35-36, 44-5
26 G Steiner, 'Night words: high pornography and human privacy', in Steiner, Language an
Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman , New York: Atheneum, 1982, pp 68-77.
27 Ibid , p 61.
28 G Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle (TS Eliot Memorial Lectures 1970), New Haven, CT: Yale U
Press, 1971, pp 34-35.
29 Ibid , pp 36, 42, 45.
30 Ibid, pp 22, 16-20, 11,21.
31 Ibid, p 42.
32 Ibid, p 41.
33 Ibid, pp 88-89.
34 RR Reuther, Anti-Semitism and Christian theology , in fc, rieiscnner (ea), Auscnwitz : beginning oj a
New Era?, New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1977, pp 79, 89, 85.
35 Ibid ; and Y Yerushalmi, 'Response to Rosemary Reuther', p 99.
36 Bruno Bettelheim notes that the exact number killed by the Nazi regime is unknown: the estimates
vary from 1 1 000 000 (which official East German sources consider the lowest reasonable estimate) to
well over 18 000 000; according to the most reliable estimates, between 5.5 and 6 million of these were
Jews'. Bettelheim, Surviving and Other Essays, New York: Vintage Books, 1980, p 46. Zygmunt
Bauman estimates that the Nazis killed 'more than about 20 million' overall. Bauman, Modernity and
the Holocaust, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989, p x.
37 RL Rubenstein, 'Religion and the uniqueness of the Holocaust', in AS Rosenbaum (ed), Is The
Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide , Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996, pp 11,
16.
38 D Stannard, The American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992, pp x-xii; and RL Rubenstein, The Age of Triage , Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1983, pp
152-153.
39 Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle, pp 36, 54, emphasis added.
40 Milton, 'The context of the Holocaust', p 271.
41 J Noakes, 'Social outcasts in Nazi Germany', History Today, December 1985, pp 15-19; and C
Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992, pp 7, 15.
42 J Forster, 'The German army and the ideological war against the Soviet Union', in G Hirschfeld, The
Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany, London: Allen & Unwin,
1986, p 21; and T Cole, Selling the Holocaust : From Auschwitz to Schindler - How History is Bought,
Packaged and Sold, New York: Routledge, 1999, pp 106-108, ch 4.
43 R Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, three vols, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2003, p 1296.
44 Stannard, The American Holocaust, pp 178-179, 169-170.

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45 ST Katz, 'The uniqueness of the Holocaust: the historical dimension', in Rosenbaum, Is The H
Unique ?, pp 19, 37.
46 I Hancock, 'Responses to the Porrajamos: the Romani holocaust , in Rosenbaum, Is The Ho
Unique ?, pp 41-42; and Stannard, The American Holocaust , pp 185, 188.
47 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews , Vol II, pp 414-415, 422, 467.
48 Milton, 'The context of the Holocaust'; Milton, 'Gypsies and the Holocaust', The History T
24(4), pp 375-387. 1991; and Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews , Vol II, pp 410-
49 Lemkin held a racist view of Africans; he labelled them 'savages' and 'cannibals' and even blam
for killing fellow Africans on the orders of their Belgian masters. It testifies to the resil
chauvinism in Ashkenazi culture that a man like Lemkin could succumb to its vile charms. DJ S
'Raphael Lemkin's view of colonial rule in Africa', Journal of Genocide Research , 7(4), 2005, p
536.
50 H Mommsen, 'Anti-Jewish politics and the implementation of the Holocaust', in H Bull (
Challenge of the Third Reich (The Adam Von Trott Memorial Lectures ), Oxford: Clarendon
1986, pp 188,123.
51 Milton, "The context of the Holocaust', p 73.
52 Jacob Neusner, cited in Novick, The Holocaust in American Life , pp 10, 196-198.
53 r Lopate, Resistance to the Holocaust , in D Rosenberg (ed), Testimony : Contemporary Writer
the Holocaust Personal , New York: Times Books, 1989, p 287.
54 Rubenstein, The Cunning oj History , p 7.
SS Arendt, hichmann in Jerusalem , p zöö.
56 J Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction : Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933 , Cambridge, MA:
University Press, 1980, pp 60,178, 183.
57 Steiner, Language and Silence , p viii.
58 G Steiner, Errata , London: Phoenix, 1998, p 106.
59 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews , Vol III, p 1296.
60 Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle , preface.
61 ¡Steiner, Language and Silence , pp, vn-xi, 5, 66.
62 Ibid , pp ix, 146.
63 Steiner, In Bluebeard s Castle , pp. 64, 66, emphasis added.
64 Steiner, Language and Silence , pp 143, 154.
65 Finkelstein, The Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict , pp 95-98; S Flapan, The
Israel: Myths And Realities , New York: Pantheon Books, 1987; and E Said, The Question of Pale
New York: Vintage, 1980, p 11.
66 Steiner, Language and Silence , p viii.
67 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, pp 123-134; and E Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violenc
York: New Press, 2003, ch 2.
68 T Todorov, The Conquest of America , trans R Howard, New York: Harper Perennial, 1992,
134.
69 Stannard, The American Holocaust , pp x, 150-151, 317-318.
70 D Stannard, 'Uniqueness as denial: the politics of genocide scholarship', in Rosenbaum, Is The
Holocaust Unique ?, pp 176-179.
71 Said, The Question of Palestine , New York: Vintage, 1980, pp 42-43.
/2 A Horowitz, L Katner <x r Weiss (eds), lhe United Nations tact-rinding Mission on the Gaza Conflict
(The Goldstone Report), New York: Nation Books, 2011, pp 289-315, emphasis added.
73 LB Brayer, 'Judge Goldstone's bogus test of war time culpability', Counterpunch , April 29-30, 2011.
'War crimes' isn't an entirely appropriate term in this context. It wasn't a war as usually understood. It
was a planned slaughter of defenceless civilians by vastly superior military forces. In Lemkin's terms,
this was a form of genocide.
74 Goldstone Report, pp 289-315, emphasis added.
75 Said, The Question of Palestine , pp 26-29.
76 NG Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering , London:
Verso, 2000, ch 3.
77 B Whitaker, 'Lying is cultural trait of Arabs, says Barak', Guardian , 23 May 2002, emphasis added.
78 A Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism , trans J Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000, p 36.
79 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism , p 440.
80 Todorov, The Conquest of America , pp 127-145. See also R Dnnnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of
Indian-Hating and Empire- Building, New York: Meridian, 1980; and A Maalouf, The Crusades through
Arab Eyes , London: Saqi Books, 1984.
81 J Barzun, Race: A Studv in Superstition , New York: Haroer and Row. dd 6. 17.
82 GM Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, pp 8-13.

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 RACISM AND HOLOCAUSTS

83 E Balibar & I Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities , London: Verso, 2002
38-39.
84 Steiner, In Bluebeard's Castle , pp 81-82.
85 P Gay, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture , New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978, pp vii, 21, 19-23.
86 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism , pp 6-8.
87 Yerushalmi, 'Response to Rosemary Reuther', p 103.
88 J Conrad, Heart of Darkness , New York: Bantam, 1971, p 6.
89 Drinnon, Facing West , pp xvi-xvii.
90 M Foucault, Society Must Be Defended , trans D Macey, New York: Picador, 2003, pp 255, 276.
91 J Slater & M Walzer, 'On Michael Walzer, Gaza and the Lebanon war' (http://dissentmagazine.org/
article/?article=743) and 'Response to Jerome Slater', (http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=744)
Dissent , Winter 2007.
92 I Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine , Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006.
93 Ynet News, 'Israeli minister warns Palestinians of "holocaust"', Reuters, 29 February 2008, emphasis
added.
94 Y Laor, 'Is "Jewish pride" abetting racism?', Haaretz (Israel), 24 January 2010.
95 A Burg, The Holocaust is Over: We must Rise from it Ashes , New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp
153, 166, 174.
96 P Levi, Survival in Auschwitz , trans S Woolf, New York: Collier Books, 1961, pp 80-82.
97 A Deger, '80 refugees are rounded up as Israel's Interior Minister declares, "this country belongs to the
white man'", Mondoweiss , at www.mondoweiss.net, emphasis added; A Abunimah, 'Israel will collapse
unless Africans and Palestinians are expelled, fenced, says legal advocate' (blog), Electronic Intifada , 23
May 2012.
98 A Badiou, Polemics , trans S Corcoran, London: Verso, 2006, pp 168-171.
99 Ibid , pp 227-229.

Note on contributor

Shiraz Dossa teaches political theory and Middle East politics in the
Department of Political Science at St Francis Xavier University in NS
Canada. His articles have appeared in such journals as Political Theory,
Philosophy and Social Criticism, Alternatives, Review of Politics and European
Legacy. His book The Public Realm and the Public Self was published by
WLU Press in 1989. He is currently writing a book on Liberals and 'Savages'.

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