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5 von 7 Kunden fanden die folgende Rezension hilfreich:
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Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry, 31. Juli 2000
A new book's just out: Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (Verso, 2000). Great stuff. Finkelstein has nothing but respect for the serious work on the subject of the Nazi holocaust and its refractions through postwar Western ideological prisms (hence: what Finkelstein calls the "Holocaust Industry" to distinguish the industry and its ideological products from the actual historical event) by Hannah Arendt (e.g., Eichmann in Jerusalem), Raul Hilberg (The Destruction of the European Jews; The Politics of Memory), Henry Friedlander (The Origins of the Nazi Genocide; Crying Hands : Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany), Arno Mayer (Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?), and Guenther Lewy (The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies). On the other hand, on the work of Elie Wiesel (Night; Against Silence), Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird, which Finkelstein calls the "first major Holocaust hoax"), Binjamin Wilkomirski (Fragments), Bernard Lewis (Semites and Anti-Semites--elsewhere, Edward Said has characterized Lewis' work as a "perfect exemplification of the academic whose work purports to be liberal objective scholarship but is in reality very close to being propaganda AGAINST his subject material"), Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Hitler's Willing Executioners), Deborah Lipstadt (Denying the Holocaust), and Steven Katz (The Holocaust in Historical Context), and a host of other writers,Finkelstein has anything from little respect to utter contempt. That is, he regards them as a "Holocaust dogmatists" and "Holocaust mongers"-- "Hoaxers" and "Hucksters." With the www.amazon.com homepage now (July 28-31) running a "Quick Pick" review (or "recommended reading") of Greg Campbell's 1999 book, The Road to Kosovo: A Balkan Diary, it might make for an interesting research project to look at authors who have written about the wars over the break-up of Yugoslavia the same way that Norman Finkelstein looks at the "Holocaust Industry." Thus, accompanying the advertisement for Greg Campbell's book was an "Editorial Review" that opens with a serious distortion of the recent history of Kosovo and then goes downhill from there. Says the reviewer: "In the summer of 1998, freelance journalist Greg Campbell got into a rental car in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, and drove across Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro into Kosovo, where Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic had recently begun stepping up an ongoing "ethnic cleansing" campaign against the ethnic Albanians who make up the majority of the region's population. Staying with local journalists--some of whom were also part of the underground Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)--Campbell was forced to confront the consequences of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia." Comment ought to be unnecessary. By the summer of 1998, the major "demographic problem" facing the Yugoslav federation in Kosovo was a thirty-year out-migration of ethnic non-Albanians, caused by depressed economic conditions and pressures from Kosovar Albanians on the rest of the Kosovar population to being about what was then called an "ethnically pure" Kosovo--meaning, an all-Albanian province with the goal of gaining eventual republican status within the federation or independence and statehood altogether. My hunch is that the wars over the break-up of Yugoslavia quickly generated something on the model of an "Holocaust Industry"--a "Genocide Industry," let us call it. It's amazing how thoroughly sold commentators are on the ex post facto point of view of view of the powers now occupying parts of the former Yugoslavia. As Norman Finkelstein writes about Elie Wiesel's central place in the pantheon of official Holocaust soothsayers: "Plainly he did not come to this position on account of his humanitarian commitments and literary talents. Rather, Wiesel plays this leading role because he unerringly articulates the dogmas of, and accordingly sustains the interests underpinning, The Holocaust [Industry]." I believe that very much the same thing can be said of the writers on the break-up of Yugoslavia that occupy a central place in the pantheon of official (i.e., well-received and relatively ubiquitous) "Genocide" soothsayers. They occupy this favorable position because they unerringly articulate the dogmas of, and accordingly systain the interests underpinning, the ex post facto point of view of the powers now occupying parts of the former Yugoslavia--American power's in particular.
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von Ilan Pappe
von John J. Mearsheimer
von Shlomo Sand
