Noam Chomsky speaks to BBC's Francine Stock at London's St Paul's Cathedral, 2 December, 2005.
" ... Francine Stock: Since you first started in political activism in the sixties, do you feel that you have made a great deal of headway?
Noam Chomsky: I think the country has made a great deal of headway and I'm happy to participate in it, but it's not traceable to individuals....If you go back to the sixties…there was no feminist movement, no Third World solidarity movements, no substantial anti-nuclear movement, no global justice movements. These are all developments of the last twenty or thirty years and they come from all over the place. For example, the solidarity movements...are quite unique - there's never been a time when people from the aggressor country went to the victims and lived with them to try to protect them.
That happened in the eighties - tens of thousands of Americans did it and they came from conservative circles. A lot of it was church based. And it came from Main Street in the United States, and now it's all over the world..."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=676452061991429040
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Noam Chomsky interviewed by the BBC's Francine Stock
Secret US Human Biological Experimentation
1931 Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, infects human subjects with cancer cells. He later goes on to establish the U.S. Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah, and Panama, and is named to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. While there, he begins a series of radiation exposure experiments on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients.
1932 The Tuskegee Syphilis Study begins. 200 black men diagnosed with syphilis are never told of their illness, are denied treatment, and instead are used as human guinea pigs in order to follow the progression and symptoms of the disease. They all subsequently die from syphilis, their families never told that they could have been treated.
1935 The Pellagra Incident. After millions of individuals die from Pellagra over a span of two decades, the U.S. Public Health Service finally acts to stem the disease. The director of the agency admits it had known for at least 20 years that Pellagra is caused by a niacin deficiency but failed to act since most of the deaths occured within poverty-striken black populations.
1940 Four hundred prisoners in Chicago are infected with Malaria in order to study the effects of new and experimental drugs to combat the disease. Nazi doctors later on trial at Nuremberg cite this American study to defend their own actions during the Holocaust.
1942 Chemical Warfare Services begins mustard gas experiments on approximately 4,000 servicemen. The experiments continue until 1945 and made use of Seventh Day Adventists who chose to become human guinea pigs rather than serve on active duty.
1943 In response to Japan's full-scale germ warfare program, the U.S. begins research on biological weapons at Fort Detrick, MD.
1944 U.S. Navy uses human subjects to test gas masks and clothing. Individuals were locked in a gas chamber and exposed to mustard gas and lewisite.
1945 Project Paperclip is initiated. The U.S. State Department, Army intelligence, and the CIA recruit Nazi scientists and offer them immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top secret government projects in the United States.
1945 "Program F" is implemented by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This is the most extensive U.S. study of the health effects of fluoride, which was the key chemical component in atomic bomb production. One of the most toxic chemicals known to man, fluoride, it is found, causes marked adverse effects to the central nervous system but much of the information is squelched in the name of national security because of fear that lawsuits would undermine full-scale production of atomic bombs.
1946 Patients in VA hospitals are used as guinea pigs for medical experiments. In order to allay suspicions, the order is given to change the word "experiments" to "investigations" or "observations" whenever reporting a medical study performed in one of the nation's veteran's hospitals.
1947 Colonel E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Comission issues a secret document (Document 07075001, January 8, 1947) stating that the agency will begin administering intravenous doses of radioactive substances to human subjects.
1947 The CIA begins its study of LSD as a potential weapon for use by American intelligence. Human subjects (both civilian and military) are used with and without their knowledge.
1950 Department of Defense begins plans to detonate nuclear weapons in desert areas and monitor downwind residents for medical problems and mortality rates.
1950 I n an experiment to determine how susceptible an American city would be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprays a cloud of bacteria from ships over San Franciso. Monitoring devices are situated throughout the city in order to test the extent of infection. Many residents become ill with pneumonia-like symptoms.
1951 Department of Defense begins open air tests using disease-producing bacteria and viruses. Tests last through 1969 and there is concern that people in the surrounding areas have been exposed.
1953 U.S. military releases clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide gas over Winnipeg, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland, and Leesburg, Virginia. Their intent is to determine how efficiently they could disperse chemical agents.
1953 Joint Army-Navy-CIA experiments are conducted in which tens of thousands of people in New York and San Francisco are exposed to the airborne germs Serratia marcescens and Bacillus glogigii.
1953 CIA initiates Project MKULTRA. This is an eleven year research program designed to produce and test drugs and biological agents that would be used for mind control and behavior modification. Six of the subprojects involved testing the agents on unwitting human beings.
1955 The CIA, in an experiment to test its ability to infect human populations with biological agents, releases a bacteria withdrawn from the Army's biological warfare arsenal over Tampa Bay, Fl.
1955 Army Chemical Corps continues LSD research, studying its potential use as a chemical incapacitating agent. More than 1,000 Americans participate in the tests, which continue until 1958.
1956 U.S. military releases mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever over Savannah, Ga and Avon Park, Fl. Following each test, Army agents posing as public health officials test victims for effects.
1958 LSD is tested on 95 volunteers at the Army's Chemical Warfare Laboratories for its effect on intelligence.
1960 The Army Assistant Chief-of-Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) authorizes field testing of LSD in Europe and the Far East. Testing of the european population is code named Project THIRD CHANCE; testing of the Asian population is code named Project DERBY HAT.
1965 Project CIA and Department of Defense begin Project MKSEARCH, a program to develop a capability to manipulate human behavior through the use of mind-altering drugs.
1965 Prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia are subjected to dioxin, the highly toxic chemical component of Agent Orange used in Viet Nam. The men are later studied for development of cancer, which indicates that Agent Orange had been a suspected carcinogen all along.
1966 CIA initiates Project MKOFTEN, a program to test the toxicological effects of certain drugs on humans and animals.
1966 U.S. Army dispenses Bacillus subtilis variant niger throughout the New York City subway system. More than a million civilians are exposed when army scientists drop lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto ventilation grates.
1967 CIA and Department of Defense implement Project MKNAOMI, successor to MKULTRA and designed to maintain, stockpile and test biological and chemical weapons.
1968 CIA experiments with the possibility of poisoning drinking water by injecting chemicals into the water supply of the FDA in Washington, D.C.
1969 Dr. Robert MacMahan of the Department of Defense requests from congress $10 million to develop, within 5 to 10 years, a synthetic biological agent to which no natural immunity exists.
1970 Funding for the synthetic biological agent is obtained under H.R. 15090. The project, under the supervision of the CIA, is carried out by the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, the army's top secret biological weapons facility. Speculation is raised that molecular biology techniques are used to produce AIDS-like retroviruses.
1970 United States intensifies its development of "ethnic weapons" (Military Review, Nov., 1970), designed to selectively target and eliminate specific ethnic groups who are susceptible due to genetic differences and variations in DNA.
1975 The virus section of Fort Detrick's Center for Biological Warfare Research is renamed the Fredrick Cancer Research Facilities and placed under the supervision of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) . It is here that a special virus cancer program is initiated by the U.S. Navy, purportedly to develop cancer-causing viruses. It is also here that retrovirologists isolate a virus to which no immunity exists. It is later named HTLV (Human T-cell Leukemia Virus).
1977 Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research confirm that 239 populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969. Some of the areas included San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Key West, Panama City, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.
1978 Experimental Hepatitis B vaccine trials, conducted by the CDC, begin in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ads for research subjects specifically ask for promiscuous homosexual men.
1981 First cases of AIDS are confirmed in homosexual men in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, triggering speculation that AIDS may have been introduced via the Hepatitis B vaccine
1985 According to the journal Science (227:173-177), HTLV and VISNA, a fatal sheep virus, are very similar, indicating a close taxonomic and evolutionary relationship.
1986 According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (83:4007-4011), HIV and VISNA are highly similar and share all structural elements, except for a small segment which is nearly identical to HTLV. This leads to speculation that HTLV and VISNA may have been linked to produce a new retrovirus to which no natural immunity exists.
1986 A report to Congress reveals that the U.S. Government's current generation of biological agents includes: modified viruses, naturally occurring toxins, and agents that are altered through genetic engineering to change immunological character and prevent treatment by all existing vaccines.
1987 Department of Defense admits that, despite a treaty banning research and development of biological agents, it continues to operate research facilities at 127 facilities and universities around the nation.
1990 More than 1500 six-month old black and hispanic babies in Los Angeles are given an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected to their children was experimental.
1994 With a technique called "gene tracking," Dr. Garth Nicolson at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX discovers that many returning Desert Storm veterans are infected with an altered strain of Mycoplasma incognitus, a microbe commonly used in the production of biological weapons. Incorporated into its molecular structure is 40 percent of the HIV protein coat, indicating that it had been man-made.
1994 Senator John D. Rockefeller issues a report revealing that for at least 50 years the Department of Defense has used hundreds of thousands of military personnel in human experiments and for intentional exposure to dangerous substances. Materials included mustard and nerve gas, ionizing radiation, psychochemicals, hallucinogens, and drugs used during the Gulf War .
1995 U.S. Government admits that it had offered Japanese war criminals and scientists who had performed human medical experiments salaries and immunity from prosecution in exchange for data on biological warfare research.
1995 Dr. Garth Nicolson, uncovers evidence that the biological agents used during the Gulf War had been manufactured in Houston, TX and Boca Raton, Fl and tested on prisoners in the Texas Department of Corrections.
1996 Department of Defense admits that Desert Storm soldiers were exposed to chemical agents.
1997 Eighty-eight members of Congress sign a letter demanding an investigation into bioweapons use & Gulf War Syndrome.
1932 The Tuskegee Syphilis Study begins. 200 black men diagnosed with syphilis are never told of their illness, are denied treatment, and instead are used as human guinea pigs in order to follow the progression and symptoms of the disease. They all subsequently die from syphilis, their families never told that they could have been treated.
1935 The Pellagra Incident. After millions of individuals die from Pellagra over a span of two decades, the U.S. Public Health Service finally acts to stem the disease. The director of the agency admits it had known for at least 20 years that Pellagra is caused by a niacin deficiency but failed to act since most of the deaths occured within poverty-striken black populations.
1940 Four hundred prisoners in Chicago are infected with Malaria in order to study the effects of new and experimental drugs to combat the disease. Nazi doctors later on trial at Nuremberg cite this American study to defend their own actions during the Holocaust.
1942 Chemical Warfare Services begins mustard gas experiments on approximately 4,000 servicemen. The experiments continue until 1945 and made use of Seventh Day Adventists who chose to become human guinea pigs rather than serve on active duty.
1943 In response to Japan's full-scale germ warfare program, the U.S. begins research on biological weapons at Fort Detrick, MD.
1944 U.S. Navy uses human subjects to test gas masks and clothing. Individuals were locked in a gas chamber and exposed to mustard gas and lewisite.
1945 Project Paperclip is initiated. The U.S. State Department, Army intelligence, and the CIA recruit Nazi scientists and offer them immunity and secret identities in exchange for work on top secret government projects in the United States.
1945 "Program F" is implemented by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). This is the most extensive U.S. study of the health effects of fluoride, which was the key chemical component in atomic bomb production. One of the most toxic chemicals known to man, fluoride, it is found, causes marked adverse effects to the central nervous system but much of the information is squelched in the name of national security because of fear that lawsuits would undermine full-scale production of atomic bombs.
1946 Patients in VA hospitals are used as guinea pigs for medical experiments. In order to allay suspicions, the order is given to change the word "experiments" to "investigations" or "observations" whenever reporting a medical study performed in one of the nation's veteran's hospitals.
1947 Colonel E.E. Kirkpatrick of the U.S. Atomic Energy Comission issues a secret document (Document 07075001, January 8, 1947) stating that the agency will begin administering intravenous doses of radioactive substances to human subjects.
1947 The CIA begins its study of LSD as a potential weapon for use by American intelligence. Human subjects (both civilian and military) are used with and without their knowledge.
1950 Department of Defense begins plans to detonate nuclear weapons in desert areas and monitor downwind residents for medical problems and mortality rates.
1950 I n an experiment to determine how susceptible an American city would be to biological attack, the U.S. Navy sprays a cloud of bacteria from ships over San Franciso. Monitoring devices are situated throughout the city in order to test the extent of infection. Many residents become ill with pneumonia-like symptoms.
1951 Department of Defense begins open air tests using disease-producing bacteria and viruses. Tests last through 1969 and there is concern that people in the surrounding areas have been exposed.
1953 U.S. military releases clouds of zinc cadmium sulfide gas over Winnipeg, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Fort Wayne, the Monocacy River Valley in Maryland, and Leesburg, Virginia. Their intent is to determine how efficiently they could disperse chemical agents.
1953 Joint Army-Navy-CIA experiments are conducted in which tens of thousands of people in New York and San Francisco are exposed to the airborne germs Serratia marcescens and Bacillus glogigii.
1953 CIA initiates Project MKULTRA. This is an eleven year research program designed to produce and test drugs and biological agents that would be used for mind control and behavior modification. Six of the subprojects involved testing the agents on unwitting human beings.
1955 The CIA, in an experiment to test its ability to infect human populations with biological agents, releases a bacteria withdrawn from the Army's biological warfare arsenal over Tampa Bay, Fl.
1955 Army Chemical Corps continues LSD research, studying its potential use as a chemical incapacitating agent. More than 1,000 Americans participate in the tests, which continue until 1958.
1956 U.S. military releases mosquitoes infected with Yellow Fever over Savannah, Ga and Avon Park, Fl. Following each test, Army agents posing as public health officials test victims for effects.
1958 LSD is tested on 95 volunteers at the Army's Chemical Warfare Laboratories for its effect on intelligence.
1960 The Army Assistant Chief-of-Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) authorizes field testing of LSD in Europe and the Far East. Testing of the european population is code named Project THIRD CHANCE; testing of the Asian population is code named Project DERBY HAT.
1965 Project CIA and Department of Defense begin Project MKSEARCH, a program to develop a capability to manipulate human behavior through the use of mind-altering drugs.
1965 Prisoners at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia are subjected to dioxin, the highly toxic chemical component of Agent Orange used in Viet Nam. The men are later studied for development of cancer, which indicates that Agent Orange had been a suspected carcinogen all along.
1966 CIA initiates Project MKOFTEN, a program to test the toxicological effects of certain drugs on humans and animals.
1966 U.S. Army dispenses Bacillus subtilis variant niger throughout the New York City subway system. More than a million civilians are exposed when army scientists drop lightbulbs filled with the bacteria onto ventilation grates.
1967 CIA and Department of Defense implement Project MKNAOMI, successor to MKULTRA and designed to maintain, stockpile and test biological and chemical weapons.
1968 CIA experiments with the possibility of poisoning drinking water by injecting chemicals into the water supply of the FDA in Washington, D.C.
1969 Dr. Robert MacMahan of the Department of Defense requests from congress $10 million to develop, within 5 to 10 years, a synthetic biological agent to which no natural immunity exists.
1970 Funding for the synthetic biological agent is obtained under H.R. 15090. The project, under the supervision of the CIA, is carried out by the Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, the army's top secret biological weapons facility. Speculation is raised that molecular biology techniques are used to produce AIDS-like retroviruses.
1970 United States intensifies its development of "ethnic weapons" (Military Review, Nov., 1970), designed to selectively target and eliminate specific ethnic groups who are susceptible due to genetic differences and variations in DNA.
1975 The virus section of Fort Detrick's Center for Biological Warfare Research is renamed the Fredrick Cancer Research Facilities and placed under the supervision of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) . It is here that a special virus cancer program is initiated by the U.S. Navy, purportedly to develop cancer-causing viruses. It is also here that retrovirologists isolate a virus to which no immunity exists. It is later named HTLV (Human T-cell Leukemia Virus).
1977 Senate hearings on Health and Scientific Research confirm that 239 populated areas had been contaminated with biological agents between 1949 and 1969. Some of the areas included San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Key West, Panama City, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.
1978 Experimental Hepatitis B vaccine trials, conducted by the CDC, begin in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Ads for research subjects specifically ask for promiscuous homosexual men.
1981 First cases of AIDS are confirmed in homosexual men in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, triggering speculation that AIDS may have been introduced via the Hepatitis B vaccine
1985 According to the journal Science (227:173-177), HTLV and VISNA, a fatal sheep virus, are very similar, indicating a close taxonomic and evolutionary relationship.
1986 According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (83:4007-4011), HIV and VISNA are highly similar and share all structural elements, except for a small segment which is nearly identical to HTLV. This leads to speculation that HTLV and VISNA may have been linked to produce a new retrovirus to which no natural immunity exists.
1986 A report to Congress reveals that the U.S. Government's current generation of biological agents includes: modified viruses, naturally occurring toxins, and agents that are altered through genetic engineering to change immunological character and prevent treatment by all existing vaccines.
1987 Department of Defense admits that, despite a treaty banning research and development of biological agents, it continues to operate research facilities at 127 facilities and universities around the nation.
1990 More than 1500 six-month old black and hispanic babies in Los Angeles are given an "experimental" measles vaccine that had never been licensed for use in the United States. CDC later admits that parents were never informed that the vaccine being injected to their children was experimental.
1994 With a technique called "gene tracking," Dr. Garth Nicolson at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX discovers that many returning Desert Storm veterans are infected with an altered strain of Mycoplasma incognitus, a microbe commonly used in the production of biological weapons. Incorporated into its molecular structure is 40 percent of the HIV protein coat, indicating that it had been man-made.
1994 Senator John D. Rockefeller issues a report revealing that for at least 50 years the Department of Defense has used hundreds of thousands of military personnel in human experiments and for intentional exposure to dangerous substances. Materials included mustard and nerve gas, ionizing radiation, psychochemicals, hallucinogens, and drugs used during the Gulf War .
1995 U.S. Government admits that it had offered Japanese war criminals and scientists who had performed human medical experiments salaries and immunity from prosecution in exchange for data on biological warfare research.
1995 Dr. Garth Nicolson, uncovers evidence that the biological agents used during the Gulf War had been manufactured in Houston, TX and Boca Raton, Fl and tested on prisoners in the Texas Department of Corrections.
1996 Department of Defense admits that Desert Storm soldiers were exposed to chemical agents.
1997 Eighty-eight members of Congress sign a letter demanding an investigation into bioweapons use & Gulf War Syndrome.
A Palestinian love story
Ghassan Abdullah writing from Ramallah, occupied West Bank
Live from Palestine
27 Dec 2007
A few months ago, a European professional in Ramallah threw a farewell party after completing part of the project for which he was recruited. The European himself, a Belgian, spent many years previously in the Palestinian territories and was very well liked locally, not least because he married a Palestinian woman, but that's another story.
A friend and old colleague of mine came up to me at the party and asked me discretely about A., a good-looking and outgoing woman who works with us: "What religion is she?" "Muslim, I said." "Good," he said. "What sort of ID does she hold?" I replied, "She is Palestinian with a Jordanian passport who overstayed here. Why?" "What a pity," he said, "because a friend of mine, Y., who has just met and chatted with her likes her and wanted to find out."
Such a question might seem odd elsewhere. But in Palestine it is very relevant.
There are tens of thousands of Palestinians with Jordanian or other foreign passports who are denied by the Israeli occupying army, or by the Israeli ministries of interior or labor, from residing in the Palestinian territories. Others are prevented from visiting or returning to the territories, although they have family, friends, business or studies, in a very arbitrary manner. The reason given by the Israeli authorities is often bitakhon, or security, without bothering to give any shred of justification. This has led many Palestinians, and even non-Palestinian wives and relatives, to overstay their Israeli permits for fear of not being allowed back. This was the case of A.
So many families in Palestine, and also in Israel, are separated by different passports. A Palestinian orange ID holder marrying a Palestinian with an Israeli nationality will not be allowed to live in Israel and the spouse with Israeli nationality will be not allowed to live in the Palestinian Authority areas. Even a Jerusalem blue ID holder marrying a West Banker will not be permitted to have her spouse live with her in Jerusalem. So the question of what ID is held by the subject of one's fancy has to be asked before one falls in love with her or him.
This Israeli policy was met with resistance prompted by an active grassroots campaign and pressure from the governments of nationals denied entry or re-entry to the occupied Palestinian territories. Israeli overtures towards the Palestinian Authority in response included the granting of family unification to members of families torn apart by differing nationalities and IDs. A. was eventually among the lucky ones, but not all her family.
I have never seen A. so ecstatic as when her name appeared on the list of those to be allowed to apply for a Palestinian ID, itself issued by the Israeli occupying army. She immediately sent in her papers and a week later went to Jordan to see her sisters and relatives that she had not seen for close to ten years. She also found that there is more choice in shopping there than the confines of Ramallah which she was always afraid to leave lest she be caught at an Israeli army checkpoint.
A. came into my office this week, with a broad and telling smile, to say that her admirer Y., who stayed mostly away after the party, has turned up again to visit A., showing renewed interest. The rest might become history.
Ghassan Abdullah is a computer adviser in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
A friend and old colleague of mine came up to me at the party and asked me discretely about A., a good-looking and outgoing woman who works with us: "What religion is she?" "Muslim, I said." "Good," he said. "What sort of ID does she hold?" I replied, "She is Palestinian with a Jordanian passport who overstayed here. Why?" "What a pity," he said, "because a friend of mine, Y., who has just met and chatted with her likes her and wanted to find out."
Such a question might seem odd elsewhere. But in Palestine it is very relevant.
There are tens of thousands of Palestinians with Jordanian or other foreign passports who are denied by the Israeli occupying army, or by the Israeli ministries of interior or labor, from residing in the Palestinian territories. Others are prevented from visiting or returning to the territories, although they have family, friends, business or studies, in a very arbitrary manner. The reason given by the Israeli authorities is often bitakhon, or security, without bothering to give any shred of justification. This has led many Palestinians, and even non-Palestinian wives and relatives, to overstay their Israeli permits for fear of not being allowed back. This was the case of A.
So many families in Palestine, and also in Israel, are separated by different passports. A Palestinian orange ID holder marrying a Palestinian with an Israeli nationality will not be allowed to live in Israel and the spouse with Israeli nationality will be not allowed to live in the Palestinian Authority areas. Even a Jerusalem blue ID holder marrying a West Banker will not be permitted to have her spouse live with her in Jerusalem. So the question of what ID is held by the subject of one's fancy has to be asked before one falls in love with her or him.
This Israeli policy was met with resistance prompted by an active grassroots campaign and pressure from the governments of nationals denied entry or re-entry to the occupied Palestinian territories. Israeli overtures towards the Palestinian Authority in response included the granting of family unification to members of families torn apart by differing nationalities and IDs. A. was eventually among the lucky ones, but not all her family.
I have never seen A. so ecstatic as when her name appeared on the list of those to be allowed to apply for a Palestinian ID, itself issued by the Israeli occupying army. She immediately sent in her papers and a week later went to Jordan to see her sisters and relatives that she had not seen for close to ten years. She also found that there is more choice in shopping there than the confines of Ramallah which she was always afraid to leave lest she be caught at an Israeli army checkpoint.
A. came into my office this week, with a broad and telling smile, to say that her admirer Y., who stayed mostly away after the party, has turned up again to visit A., showing renewed interest. The rest might become history.
Ghassan Abdullah is a computer adviser in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Remembering Raul Hilberg
by Norman G. Finkelstein
15 August 2007
Raul Hilberg passed away on August 4. A refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, Hilberg was the founder of the field of Holocaust studies.
I cannot now remember when I first read Hilberg's magnum opus The Destruction of the European Jews, but it must have been in my early youth. In fact I wasn't even sure whether I did plow my way through the first edition, published in 1961 by Quadrangle Books, with its forbidding double columns of text in 10-point font but I just pulled it off the shelf, binding broken, pages loose, and sure enough it was all marked up.
I read the expanded three-volume Holmes & Meier edition published in 1985 many times. Whenever I ventured to write something on the Nazi holocaust I would again peruse all the volumes cover to cover. They provided the psychological security I needed before daring to render a judgment of my own. Wanting to stand on the firmest possible intellectual foundations I reflexively reached for Hilberg. As it happens, in preparation for a statement I was commissioned to write on the Nazi holocaust, I was just in the midst of reading the three-volume third edition published by Yale University Press in 2003 when news of his death arrived.
Hilberg was not pleased with the first edition - a vital table he pored over many weeks to get just right was botched in the cramped composition - but he couldn't do better: no major publishing house expressed interest in his groundbreaking study, and he only managed to find any publisher due to a private benefactor who agreed to defray indirectly some of the costs. (The Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem had also rejected the manuscript and initially even barred him from its archive.)
In his melancholy memoir The Politics of Memory Hilberg tells the story that when he first proposed studying the Jewish genocide to his advisor at Columbia University, the great German-Jewish sociologist Franz Neumann (author of Behemoth, a classic study of the organization of the Nazi state), he was warned that "this will be your funeral."
It is hard now to remember that the Nazi holocaust was once a taboo subject. During the early years of the Cold War, mention of the Nazi holocaust was seen as undermining the critical U.S.-West German alliance. It was airing the dirty laundry of the barely de-Nazified West German elites and thereby playing into the hands of the Soviet Union, which didn't tire of remembering the crimes of the West German "revanchists." The major American Jewish organizations rushed to make their peace with Konrad Adenauer's government (the Anti-Defamation League took the lead) while those holding commemorations for the Jewish dead were tagged communists, which as a rule they were.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in the mid-1960s, Hannah Arendt could draw on only one other scholarly study apart from Hilberg's on the Nazi holocaust in the English language. Nowadays there are enough studies to fill a good-sized library, although it is perhaps not accurate to grace all these publications with the descriptive "scholarly."
Arendt borrowed extensively from Hilberg's work with less-than-generous attribution. He never forgave her this oversight and - what truly is unforgivable - her condescending references to his study in private correspondence and her recommending against its publication by Princeton University Press. In his memoir Hilberg parries the insult, asserting, wrongly in my opinion, that Arendt's study The Origins of Totalitarianism lacked originality. It is true that Arendt could be lazy about facts, which might account for Hilberg's harsh judgment, but the first part of Origins contains many shrewd insights on the dilemmas of Jewish assimilation and paradoxes of the nation-state.
Hilberg reserved even greater contempt (and loathing) for Lucy Dawidowicz, author of the highly touted The War Against the Jews. Here it can be said that his verdict was faultless. During the heyday of the Holocaust religion in the 1970s-1980s, Dawidowicz was its designated high priestess. The problem was that, as Hilberg brutally demonstrates in his memoir, she got the most elementary facts wrong. I once asked my late mother, who survived Maidanek concentration camp, about Dawidowicz's depiction of all the Jews in the ghettos and camps furtively staying faithful to their religion until their final steps into the gas chambers. "When I first entered my block at Maidanek, all the women inmates had dyed-blond hair," my mother laughed. "They had been trying to pass as Gentiles." The shocking accounts of Jewish corruption that could be found in conveniently forgotten memoirs like Bernard Goldstein's The Stars Bear Witness were deleted in Dawidowicz's fantasy.
Hilberg's reputation for mastery of the primary sources was such that my former coauthor (and an authority in her own right on the Nazi holocaust) Ruth Bettina Birn feared their first meeting: no mortal being, she thought, could have stored so many Nuremberg Tribunal documents in his brain. The magnitude of Hilberg's achievement is hard to appreciate today because the scholarly breakthrough has passed into commonplace. His sequential-chronological account of the steps pressing ineluctably from the Nazi definition of Jews to their expropriation, massacre, deportation and assembly-line extermination has been assimilated into the infrastructure of all subsequent scholarship.
Stylistically Hilberg's study might be said to be the opposite of current Holocaust fare: short on adjectives and adverbs such that when he reaches for one it packs unusual intensity. Apart from professional discipline his dry-as-dust rendering was perhaps also meant to capture the desiccated esprit of the bureaucratic - dare I say banal? - process through which millions of Jews were shoved along to their deaths.
Hilberg didn't truck in the pieties of what became the Holocaust industry that exploited the colossal suffering of Jews for political and financial gain. He rejected the notion that the Nazi holocaust sprang uniquely from virulent anti-Semitism and concomitantly maintained that "Jews were only the first victims" of the German bureaucracy's genocidal juggernaut, which also targeted Gypsies and Poles, among others. He reckoned Jewish resistance to be negligible but Jewish cooperation (which however he distinguished from collaboration) to be significant, while he reckoned the total number of Jewish victims at closer to 5.1 million. The third volume contains a 20-page appendix detailing his complex calculations of Jewish dead. In contrast Dawidowicz gives a figure for each country and then totals the number, as if this calculation were simply an addition problem whereas, as Hilberg notes, "the raw data are seldom self-explanatory, and…their interpretation often requires the use of voluminous background materials that have to be analyzed in turn."
It should go without saying that whether the figure is closer to five than six million is of zero moral significance - except for a moral cretin, who could utter "only five million"? - although Hilberg believed it was of historical significance. Even if it weren't he almost certainly would still have insisted on the 5.1 million figure if his research showed it was closer to the truth. "Always in my life," Hilberg wrote unaffectedly in his memoir, "I had wanted the truth about myself." This was also how he approached the study of the Nazi holocaust.
His confident knowledge of the field no doubt accounted for Hilberg's easygoing tolerance of Holocaust deniers. Those who want to suppress them do so not only in disgust at what they might say but also in dread of the inability to answer them. (The hysterical allegation of Holocaust deniers lurking in every corner is apparently also contrived to justify the endless proliferation of Holo-trash.) Hilberg recently made the provocative statement that whereas the Nazi holocaust is an irrefutable fact this was "more easily said than demonstrated."
It is indeed easy for the non-expert to be tripped up on the details especially when on crucial matters like the gas chambers (a favorite target of the deniers), there exist, as historian Arno Mayer noted, "many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources," none of which however "put in question the use of gas chambers in the mass murder." On a personal note I myself vividly recall reading Arthur Butz's Hoax of the Twentieth Century and not being able at the time to answer many of his simplest challenges. (If the figure for Jews killed right after the war was put at six million, and the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz was then estimated at three million, how - he asked - can the figure still stand at six million if the estimate of the number killed at Auschwitz has now been scaled down by scholars to one million?) Her lawyers imposed a gag rule on Deborah Lipstadt during her trial with David Irving - she was banned not only from testifying in court but also from speaking to the press - because they knew full well that a single word from this know-nothing's mouth would sink the ship. In her account of the trial Lipstadt can barely conceal the lawyers' contempt for her, yet she is too thick-headed to notice the absurdity of her smug two thumbs-up after the jury announced its verdict. She had as much to do with the victory as I did with last night's performance of the Bolshoi.
Mention of Irving's name didn't evoke howls of indignation or torrents of abuse from Hilberg. Instead he recognized Irving's impressive apprehension of some of the subject matter, although qualifying it - with a touch of snobbery - as "self-taught," and speculated that his preposterous statements sprung less from anti-Semitism than love of the spotlight. Of Holocaust denial in the Arab world Hilberg observed that "they are as confused about the West as we are about them," while he casually dismissed the Holocaust denial conference in Teheran as "needless difficulty and trouble," and said he was "not terribly worried about it." Echoing John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Hilberg even declared that Holocaust deniers served the useful purpose of posing questions that everyone else assumed were already settled.
Hilberg was equally derisive of another of the Holocaust industry's shibboleths, the "New anti-Semitism." The much-ballyhooed resurgence of anti-Semitism, he said, amounted to "picking up a few pebbles from the past and throwing them at windows." In his last interview Hilberg also sharply criticized Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians, which, I suspect, couldn't have been easy for him. (His daughter lives in Jerusalem.)
Although Hilberg suffered professionally because he chose to study the Nazi holocaust when it was politically imprudent and because he later resisted the orthodoxies of the Holocaust industry, those wanting truly to understand the unfolding horror have benefited from his independence of spirit. Like the best memoirs of the Nazi holocaust (many of which are out of print), his study was written before ideological exigencies deformed and debased much of the scholarship on the subject. In recent years Hilberg was given to observing that most serious scholarship on the Nazi holocaust was coming out of Germany while "there are not many Holocaust researchers worth mentioning in this country." It is hard to conceive a more withering indictment of the Holocaust industry's multibillion-dollar operation.
***
For reasons that frankly still perplex me, Hilberg was a stalwart and vocal supporter of mine. Truth be told I was always careful to keep my distance. I didn't feel worthy of his praise and feared alienating him. We couldn't have been more different in academic styles and I am a person of the Left whereas he was a lifelong Republican.
When Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners was released in 1996, I approached it with an open mind. Both my late parents were of the conviction that all Germans wanted the Jews dead (my father survived Auschwitz) so I figured maybe there was something to Goldhagen's thesis. Reading the book was quite the shock. The reasoning was bizarre, the evidence nonexistent. In debates on it I was accused of polemical overkill. It couldn't be that bad: look at what reviewers were saying. Indeed, who can forget the endless months of breathless prose in the New York Times for the Holocaust industry's new poster boy? It was a singular relief when I read Hilberg's verdict: "worthless."
After a division of Henry Holt (Metropolitan) agreed to publish my critical essay on Goldhagen (together with one by Birn), the Holocaust industry went ballistic. Its attempts to halt the book's publication were neutralized, however, when Hilberg stepped forward to praise my contribution. But Adam Shatz, wielding the hatchet in Slate, breezily surmised that Hilberg, along with the half dozen other leading scholars who blurbed the book, hadn't read carefully what I wrote. In light of what is known about Hilberg's fastidiousness, this would have been strangely out of character.
When my book The Holocaust Industry could no longer be ignored in the U.S. (it had created a huge stir in Europe), the floodgates of vitriol opened wider still. New York Times reviewer Omer Bartov apparently consulted the unabridged edition of Roget's Ad Hominems, while Peter Novick, author of The Holocaust in American Life, declared that not a word I wrote could be trusted. (Novick's study of Holocaust commemoration in the U.S. originally elicited outrage as well but, after joining in the assault on The Holocaust Industry, he was heralded as a responsible critic in contrast to me.) Hilberg stepped forward again to support my most controversial contention in The Holocaust Industry that the campaign for Holocaust compensation was a "double shakedown" of the European states as well as the Holocaust survivors. Hilberg told me that the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Elie Wiesel relentlessly pleaded with him to retract his endorsement of my book. He refused.
Prior to publication of The Holocaust Industry Hilberg had himself denounced American Jews for resorting to the "blackmail weapon" against Europe. His disgust for the megalomaniacal Edgar Bronfman and the irredeemably vulgar Rabbi Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress, which orchestrated the shakedown, is barely disguised in the recently updated Yale edition of his study.
The charges Hilberg and I independently leveled back in 2000 have since been vindicated. The $1.5 billion extracted from the Swiss banks bore no relationship to the pittance they actually owed, while Holocaust survivors have complained of receiving only a pittance of the fully $20 billion extracted from Europe in their names.
Recent revelations get worse. A report by Israel's state comptroller found that Israel's record on Holocaust compensation "is far behind Germany and other countries in Europe." While Singer was denouncing secret Swiss bank accounts, he was squirreling away WJC monies in his own secret Swiss bank account and allegedly had also filched Bronfman's piggy bank of a half million dollars. Alan Hevesi, the New York City comptroller who headed up the economic blackmail of Switzerland, had to step down from his current office due to financial improprieties and is again under investigation for more financial shenanigans. Lead counsel for Holocaust plaintiffs Burt Neuborne, a liberal N.Y.U. law professor, piously declared that he was donating his services pro bono in memory of his prematurely deceased daughter. But then he put in a bill for $6 million for the Swiss case, after having raked in $5 million from the German case, which outraged even the Times's editorial board.
I only met Hilberg once. I was asked to be the presenter for a documentary to be shown on British television on Holocaust compensation ("The Final Insult"), and he was one of the expert commentators.
Hilberg lived in a modestly furnished home in Burlington, Vermont. His wife worked in a hospice. He showed me the various foreign translations of his study in which he took obvious pride (in particular the Japanese edition), not least for their physical workmanship. I doubt he ever used the internet, just as it is unimaginable that a citation of an old-fashioned scholar like him would begin www.
During breaks in the filming I put to him many questions on the Nazi holocaust - the role of Nazi ideology (he was skeptical of its importance), the female block in Maidanek (he said very few survived), the Holocaust industry's claim that millions of Jews survived (he put his index finger to his temple, made a circular motion, and said "cuckoo"), other Holocaust scholars (he was uniformly generous in his appraisals, even of those whom, he said, would "whisper the worst things about me behind my back"). What Hilberg never did was lapse into Holocaust cliché which, along with Holocaust kitsch, he detested.
Hilberg's last statement for the camera was that next to the likes of Bronfman and Singer, even Shylock looked good. Fully aware of just how incendiary the juxtaposition was, Hilberg chuckled after the camera stopped rolling that he'd probably gotten himself into a lot of trouble. Ironically the British television station forced the producer to edit out this statement. Not even Hilberg could be allowed to utter certain truths.
When my tenure troubles at DePaul University reached a crescendo, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! rang up Hilberg for a comment. It was a sobering occasion. Ruth Conniff and Mathew Rothschild of The Progressive had denounced me as a "Holocaust minimizer" for citing Hilberg's 5.1 million figure. Jon Wiener, writing in The Nation, another left-of-center publication, "defended" me by quoting Peter Novick's "thoughtful" remark that Alan Dershowitz and I "deserve each other." Yet Hilberg, the lifelong Republican, once again stinted no words on my behalf. Character not ideology, Birn once counseled me, is the better measure of a person.
Hilberg famously used the triad Perpetrators-Victims-Bystanders to catalogue the main protagonists in the Nazi holocaust. It is notable that he didn't include a category for givers of succor, presumably because they were so few in number. Judging by the life he lived, my guess is that, had the tables been turned, Hilberg would have been among those few.
Primo Levi originally titled his memoir of Auschwitz If This is a Man. Of Raul Hilberg it might be said, There went a man.
Norman G. Finkelstein
New York City
15 August 2007
I cannot now remember when I first read Hilberg's magnum opus The Destruction of the European Jews, but it must have been in my early youth. In fact I wasn't even sure whether I did plow my way through the first edition, published in 1961 by Quadrangle Books, with its forbidding double columns of text in 10-point font but I just pulled it off the shelf, binding broken, pages loose, and sure enough it was all marked up.
I read the expanded three-volume Holmes & Meier edition published in 1985 many times. Whenever I ventured to write something on the Nazi holocaust I would again peruse all the volumes cover to cover. They provided the psychological security I needed before daring to render a judgment of my own. Wanting to stand on the firmest possible intellectual foundations I reflexively reached for Hilberg. As it happens, in preparation for a statement I was commissioned to write on the Nazi holocaust, I was just in the midst of reading the three-volume third edition published by Yale University Press in 2003 when news of his death arrived.
Hilberg was not pleased with the first edition - a vital table he pored over many weeks to get just right was botched in the cramped composition - but he couldn't do better: no major publishing house expressed interest in his groundbreaking study, and he only managed to find any publisher due to a private benefactor who agreed to defray indirectly some of the costs. (The Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem had also rejected the manuscript and initially even barred him from its archive.)
In his melancholy memoir The Politics of Memory Hilberg tells the story that when he first proposed studying the Jewish genocide to his advisor at Columbia University, the great German-Jewish sociologist Franz Neumann (author of Behemoth, a classic study of the organization of the Nazi state), he was warned that "this will be your funeral."
It is hard now to remember that the Nazi holocaust was once a taboo subject. During the early years of the Cold War, mention of the Nazi holocaust was seen as undermining the critical U.S.-West German alliance. It was airing the dirty laundry of the barely de-Nazified West German elites and thereby playing into the hands of the Soviet Union, which didn't tire of remembering the crimes of the West German "revanchists." The major American Jewish organizations rushed to make their peace with Konrad Adenauer's government (the Anti-Defamation League took the lead) while those holding commemorations for the Jewish dead were tagged communists, which as a rule they were.
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in the mid-1960s, Hannah Arendt could draw on only one other scholarly study apart from Hilberg's on the Nazi holocaust in the English language. Nowadays there are enough studies to fill a good-sized library, although it is perhaps not accurate to grace all these publications with the descriptive "scholarly."
Arendt borrowed extensively from Hilberg's work with less-than-generous attribution. He never forgave her this oversight and - what truly is unforgivable - her condescending references to his study in private correspondence and her recommending against its publication by Princeton University Press. In his memoir Hilberg parries the insult, asserting, wrongly in my opinion, that Arendt's study The Origins of Totalitarianism lacked originality. It is true that Arendt could be lazy about facts, which might account for Hilberg's harsh judgment, but the first part of Origins contains many shrewd insights on the dilemmas of Jewish assimilation and paradoxes of the nation-state.
Hilberg reserved even greater contempt (and loathing) for Lucy Dawidowicz, author of the highly touted The War Against the Jews. Here it can be said that his verdict was faultless. During the heyday of the Holocaust religion in the 1970s-1980s, Dawidowicz was its designated high priestess. The problem was that, as Hilberg brutally demonstrates in his memoir, she got the most elementary facts wrong. I once asked my late mother, who survived Maidanek concentration camp, about Dawidowicz's depiction of all the Jews in the ghettos and camps furtively staying faithful to their religion until their final steps into the gas chambers. "When I first entered my block at Maidanek, all the women inmates had dyed-blond hair," my mother laughed. "They had been trying to pass as Gentiles." The shocking accounts of Jewish corruption that could be found in conveniently forgotten memoirs like Bernard Goldstein's The Stars Bear Witness were deleted in Dawidowicz's fantasy.
Hilberg's reputation for mastery of the primary sources was such that my former coauthor (and an authority in her own right on the Nazi holocaust) Ruth Bettina Birn feared their first meeting: no mortal being, she thought, could have stored so many Nuremberg Tribunal documents in his brain. The magnitude of Hilberg's achievement is hard to appreciate today because the scholarly breakthrough has passed into commonplace. His sequential-chronological account of the steps pressing ineluctably from the Nazi definition of Jews to their expropriation, massacre, deportation and assembly-line extermination has been assimilated into the infrastructure of all subsequent scholarship.
Stylistically Hilberg's study might be said to be the opposite of current Holocaust fare: short on adjectives and adverbs such that when he reaches for one it packs unusual intensity. Apart from professional discipline his dry-as-dust rendering was perhaps also meant to capture the desiccated esprit of the bureaucratic - dare I say banal? - process through which millions of Jews were shoved along to their deaths.
Hilberg didn't truck in the pieties of what became the Holocaust industry that exploited the colossal suffering of Jews for political and financial gain. He rejected the notion that the Nazi holocaust sprang uniquely from virulent anti-Semitism and concomitantly maintained that "Jews were only the first victims" of the German bureaucracy's genocidal juggernaut, which also targeted Gypsies and Poles, among others. He reckoned Jewish resistance to be negligible but Jewish cooperation (which however he distinguished from collaboration) to be significant, while he reckoned the total number of Jewish victims at closer to 5.1 million. The third volume contains a 20-page appendix detailing his complex calculations of Jewish dead. In contrast Dawidowicz gives a figure for each country and then totals the number, as if this calculation were simply an addition problem whereas, as Hilberg notes, "the raw data are seldom self-explanatory, and…their interpretation often requires the use of voluminous background materials that have to be analyzed in turn."
It should go without saying that whether the figure is closer to five than six million is of zero moral significance - except for a moral cretin, who could utter "only five million"? - although Hilberg believed it was of historical significance. Even if it weren't he almost certainly would still have insisted on the 5.1 million figure if his research showed it was closer to the truth. "Always in my life," Hilberg wrote unaffectedly in his memoir, "I had wanted the truth about myself." This was also how he approached the study of the Nazi holocaust.
His confident knowledge of the field no doubt accounted for Hilberg's easygoing tolerance of Holocaust deniers. Those who want to suppress them do so not only in disgust at what they might say but also in dread of the inability to answer them. (The hysterical allegation of Holocaust deniers lurking in every corner is apparently also contrived to justify the endless proliferation of Holo-trash.) Hilberg recently made the provocative statement that whereas the Nazi holocaust is an irrefutable fact this was "more easily said than demonstrated."
It is indeed easy for the non-expert to be tripped up on the details especially when on crucial matters like the gas chambers (a favorite target of the deniers), there exist, as historian Arno Mayer noted, "many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources," none of which however "put in question the use of gas chambers in the mass murder." On a personal note I myself vividly recall reading Arthur Butz's Hoax of the Twentieth Century and not being able at the time to answer many of his simplest challenges. (If the figure for Jews killed right after the war was put at six million, and the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz was then estimated at three million, how - he asked - can the figure still stand at six million if the estimate of the number killed at Auschwitz has now been scaled down by scholars to one million?) Her lawyers imposed a gag rule on Deborah Lipstadt during her trial with David Irving - she was banned not only from testifying in court but also from speaking to the press - because they knew full well that a single word from this know-nothing's mouth would sink the ship. In her account of the trial Lipstadt can barely conceal the lawyers' contempt for her, yet she is too thick-headed to notice the absurdity of her smug two thumbs-up after the jury announced its verdict. She had as much to do with the victory as I did with last night's performance of the Bolshoi.
Mention of Irving's name didn't evoke howls of indignation or torrents of abuse from Hilberg. Instead he recognized Irving's impressive apprehension of some of the subject matter, although qualifying it - with a touch of snobbery - as "self-taught," and speculated that his preposterous statements sprung less from anti-Semitism than love of the spotlight. Of Holocaust denial in the Arab world Hilberg observed that "they are as confused about the West as we are about them," while he casually dismissed the Holocaust denial conference in Teheran as "needless difficulty and trouble," and said he was "not terribly worried about it." Echoing John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, Hilberg even declared that Holocaust deniers served the useful purpose of posing questions that everyone else assumed were already settled.
Hilberg was equally derisive of another of the Holocaust industry's shibboleths, the "New anti-Semitism." The much-ballyhooed resurgence of anti-Semitism, he said, amounted to "picking up a few pebbles from the past and throwing them at windows." In his last interview Hilberg also sharply criticized Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians, which, I suspect, couldn't have been easy for him. (His daughter lives in Jerusalem.)
Although Hilberg suffered professionally because he chose to study the Nazi holocaust when it was politically imprudent and because he later resisted the orthodoxies of the Holocaust industry, those wanting truly to understand the unfolding horror have benefited from his independence of spirit. Like the best memoirs of the Nazi holocaust (many of which are out of print), his study was written before ideological exigencies deformed and debased much of the scholarship on the subject. In recent years Hilberg was given to observing that most serious scholarship on the Nazi holocaust was coming out of Germany while "there are not many Holocaust researchers worth mentioning in this country." It is hard to conceive a more withering indictment of the Holocaust industry's multibillion-dollar operation.
For reasons that frankly still perplex me, Hilberg was a stalwart and vocal supporter of mine. Truth be told I was always careful to keep my distance. I didn't feel worthy of his praise and feared alienating him. We couldn't have been more different in academic styles and I am a person of the Left whereas he was a lifelong Republican.
When Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners was released in 1996, I approached it with an open mind. Both my late parents were of the conviction that all Germans wanted the Jews dead (my father survived Auschwitz) so I figured maybe there was something to Goldhagen's thesis. Reading the book was quite the shock. The reasoning was bizarre, the evidence nonexistent. In debates on it I was accused of polemical overkill. It couldn't be that bad: look at what reviewers were saying. Indeed, who can forget the endless months of breathless prose in the New York Times for the Holocaust industry's new poster boy? It was a singular relief when I read Hilberg's verdict: "worthless."
After a division of Henry Holt (Metropolitan) agreed to publish my critical essay on Goldhagen (together with one by Birn), the Holocaust industry went ballistic. Its attempts to halt the book's publication were neutralized, however, when Hilberg stepped forward to praise my contribution. But Adam Shatz, wielding the hatchet in Slate, breezily surmised that Hilberg, along with the half dozen other leading scholars who blurbed the book, hadn't read carefully what I wrote. In light of what is known about Hilberg's fastidiousness, this would have been strangely out of character.
When my book The Holocaust Industry could no longer be ignored in the U.S. (it had created a huge stir in Europe), the floodgates of vitriol opened wider still. New York Times reviewer Omer Bartov apparently consulted the unabridged edition of Roget's Ad Hominems, while Peter Novick, author of The Holocaust in American Life, declared that not a word I wrote could be trusted. (Novick's study of Holocaust commemoration in the U.S. originally elicited outrage as well but, after joining in the assault on The Holocaust Industry, he was heralded as a responsible critic in contrast to me.) Hilberg stepped forward again to support my most controversial contention in The Holocaust Industry that the campaign for Holocaust compensation was a "double shakedown" of the European states as well as the Holocaust survivors. Hilberg told me that the U.S. Holocaust Museum and Elie Wiesel relentlessly pleaded with him to retract his endorsement of my book. He refused.
Prior to publication of The Holocaust Industry Hilberg had himself denounced American Jews for resorting to the "blackmail weapon" against Europe. His disgust for the megalomaniacal Edgar Bronfman and the irredeemably vulgar Rabbi Israel Singer of the World Jewish Congress, which orchestrated the shakedown, is barely disguised in the recently updated Yale edition of his study.
The charges Hilberg and I independently leveled back in 2000 have since been vindicated. The $1.5 billion extracted from the Swiss banks bore no relationship to the pittance they actually owed, while Holocaust survivors have complained of receiving only a pittance of the fully $20 billion extracted from Europe in their names.
Recent revelations get worse. A report by Israel's state comptroller found that Israel's record on Holocaust compensation "is far behind Germany and other countries in Europe." While Singer was denouncing secret Swiss bank accounts, he was squirreling away WJC monies in his own secret Swiss bank account and allegedly had also filched Bronfman's piggy bank of a half million dollars. Alan Hevesi, the New York City comptroller who headed up the economic blackmail of Switzerland, had to step down from his current office due to financial improprieties and is again under investigation for more financial shenanigans. Lead counsel for Holocaust plaintiffs Burt Neuborne, a liberal N.Y.U. law professor, piously declared that he was donating his services pro bono in memory of his prematurely deceased daughter. But then he put in a bill for $6 million for the Swiss case, after having raked in $5 million from the German case, which outraged even the Times's editorial board.
I only met Hilberg once. I was asked to be the presenter for a documentary to be shown on British television on Holocaust compensation ("The Final Insult"), and he was one of the expert commentators.
Hilberg lived in a modestly furnished home in Burlington, Vermont. His wife worked in a hospice. He showed me the various foreign translations of his study in which he took obvious pride (in particular the Japanese edition), not least for their physical workmanship. I doubt he ever used the internet, just as it is unimaginable that a citation of an old-fashioned scholar like him would begin www.
During breaks in the filming I put to him many questions on the Nazi holocaust - the role of Nazi ideology (he was skeptical of its importance), the female block in Maidanek (he said very few survived), the Holocaust industry's claim that millions of Jews survived (he put his index finger to his temple, made a circular motion, and said "cuckoo"), other Holocaust scholars (he was uniformly generous in his appraisals, even of those whom, he said, would "whisper the worst things about me behind my back"). What Hilberg never did was lapse into Holocaust cliché which, along with Holocaust kitsch, he detested.
Hilberg's last statement for the camera was that next to the likes of Bronfman and Singer, even Shylock looked good. Fully aware of just how incendiary the juxtaposition was, Hilberg chuckled after the camera stopped rolling that he'd probably gotten himself into a lot of trouble. Ironically the British television station forced the producer to edit out this statement. Not even Hilberg could be allowed to utter certain truths.
When my tenure troubles at DePaul University reached a crescendo, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! rang up Hilberg for a comment. It was a sobering occasion. Ruth Conniff and Mathew Rothschild of The Progressive had denounced me as a "Holocaust minimizer" for citing Hilberg's 5.1 million figure. Jon Wiener, writing in The Nation, another left-of-center publication, "defended" me by quoting Peter Novick's "thoughtful" remark that Alan Dershowitz and I "deserve each other." Yet Hilberg, the lifelong Republican, once again stinted no words on my behalf. Character not ideology, Birn once counseled me, is the better measure of a person.
Hilberg famously used the triad Perpetrators-Victims-Bystanders to catalogue the main protagonists in the Nazi holocaust. It is notable that he didn't include a category for givers of succor, presumably because they were so few in number. Judging by the life he lived, my guess is that, had the tables been turned, Hilberg would have been among those few.
Primo Levi originally titled his memoir of Auschwitz If This is a Man. Of Raul Hilberg it might be said, There went a man.
Norman G. Finkelstein
New York City
15 August 2007
"the astonishing speed with which IFCJ and the evangelical movement...have grown in stature as supporters of Israel"
26 Dec 2007
" ... About a decade ago, the head of the Jewish Agency for Israel refused to be photographed taking a check from Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, founder and president of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. This past week, the agency accepted a hefty donation from the evangelical-backed organization and offered Eckstein a seat on two of its most powerful committees.
Eckstein’s organization and the Jewish Agency, which helped found the State of Israel, announced that IFCJ would donate $45 million to the agency over the next three years, almost all of it raised from evangelical Christians in North America. As part of the agreement, IFCJ will be declared a funding partner of the Jewish Agency. Eckstein will also receive new voting powers that will include spots on the committees that oversee the agency’s budget and that meet with the prime minister and his Cabinet.
“For the first time, Christians, who are mainly my constituency, will have a seat at the table,” Eckstein told the Forward.
The moves underscore the astonishing speed with which IFCJ and the evangelical movement in general have grown in stature as supporters of Israel. Even 10 years ago, Eckstein was shunned not only by Jewish Agency head Avraham Burg but also by many American donors.
Some Jewish leaders remain uneasy about allying themselves with evangelicals. But the support, both political and financial, seems to have proved irresistible.
As part of the agreement, which still must be approved by the Jewish Agency’s board, IFCJ will donate $15 million a year to the Jewish Agency’s core budget for immigration and resettlement, historically IFCJ priorities. This is nearly double IFCJ’s donation of $8 million last year. The IFCJ will also be described as one of the Jewish Agency’s funding partners, a status previously shared only by United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization for American federations, and Keren Hayesod, which represents international federations. Eckstein will also become a voting member of the executive board and will gain seats on the budget and finance committee, which makes recommendations for how the Jewish Agency allocates its funds, and the coordinating committee, which meets with the prime minister and Cabinet members. Eckstein had previously been a nonvoting member of the executive board. Both Eckstein and a Jewish Agency representative stressed that Eckstein would continue to be IFCJ’s representative on the board.
“It’s not like all of a sudden you’re going to have Pat Robertson on the committee,” Eckstein joked. ... "
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