The "Holocaust Industry" - Quotes from Professor Norman Finkelstein
Norman G. Finkelstein, a Jewish professor at the City University of New York, raised a storm in the year 2000 with his book "The Holocaust Industry". The reason? Professor Finkelstein dared to say what many were thinking: that the holocaust was being used as a political and economic blackmailing tool.
Finkelstein says:
"'The Holocaust' is an ideological representation of the Nazi holocaust. Like most ideologies, it bears a connection, if tenuous, with reality. The Holocaust is not an arbitrary, but rather an internally coherent construct. Its central dogmas sustain significant political and class interests. Indeed, The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon. Through its deployment, one of the world’s most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a ‘victim’ state, and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status. Considerable benefits accrue to this specious victimhood – in particular, immunity to criticism, however justified."
- (Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry published by Verso (London and New York, 2000) p3).
Some further quotes:
"In an authoritative study, Leonard Dinnerstein reported: Sixty thousand Jews.. walked out of the concentration camps. Within a week more than 20,000 of them had died.". But ‘As it entered into negotiations with Germany [just two years ago, in 1999], the Holocaust industry demanded compensation for 135,000 still living former (camp inmates)."
On page 83 he notes that ‘The Israeli Prime Minister’s office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million.’
On page 127 he notes
"If 135,000 former Jewish slave laborers are still alive today, some 600,000 must have survived the war. That’s at least a half-million more than standard estimates. If Jews only constituted 20% of the surviving camp population and, as the Holocaust industry implies, 600,000 Jewish inmates survived the war, then fully 3 million inmates in total must have survived. By the Holocaust industry’s reckoning, concentration camp conditions couldn’t have been that harsh at all; in fact, one must suppose a remarkably high fertility and remarkably low mortality rate. If, as the Holocaust industry suggests, many hundreds of thousands of Jews survived, the Final Solution couldn’t have been so efficient after all – exactly what Holocaust deniers argue. (pp127-8). ’
“Both my father and my mother were survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps.. One of my father’s lifelong friends was a former inmate with him in Auschwitz, a seemingly incorruptible left-wing idealist who on principle refused German compensation after the war. Eventually he became a director of the Israeli Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. Reluctantly and with genuine disappointment, my father finally admitted that even this man had been corrupted by the Holocaust industry, tailoring his beliefs for power and profit. As the rendering of the Holocaust assumed ever more absurd forms, my mother liked to quote (with intentional irony) Henry Ford: "History is bunk." (ibid. p7).
“The Holocaust proved to be the perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel.” (ibid p30).
“Much of the literature on Hitler’s Final Solution is worthless as scholarship. Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud.” (p 55).
“Given the nonsense that is turned out daily by the Holocaust industry, the wonder is that there are so few skeptics.” (p 68).
“Annual Days of Remembrance of the Holocaust are a national event. All 50 states sponsor commemorations, often in state legislative chambers. Seven major Holocaust museums dot the American landscape. The centerpiece of this memorialization is the United States Holocaust museum in Washington.. (This) museum’s annual budget is $50 million, of which $30 million is federally subsidized." (p72)
“The Holocaust may yet turn out to be the "greatest robbery in the history of mankind."(p 138).