The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering

Nobody is better qualified to write this book than Norman Finkelstein. Both his parents were `authentic' survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and associated concentration camps. It is therefore no surprise that he is deeply angered by the unbridled and unjust greed of the holocaust industry. What I found most remarkable was his mother's ability not to criticize or seek revenge, but to compare her suffering to that of the indigenous Americans, African Americans and the Palestinians. She concludes that `we are all holocaust victims'. This obviously had a strong influence on Norman Finkelstein's values. There are few people in the world today that would deny the holocaust. However, legislating the holocaust as a fact of history provided the holocaust industry with a bandwagon to throw anything and everything on. And to question any part of it provided the holocaust Industry with an opportunity to put you in the `holocaust denier' category. Books were written by phony holocaust survivors of their horrific experiences. The books were highly acclaimed in book reviews, awarded prizes and accepted as truth by publishing houses and universities. Massive claims against Swiss banks and European companies were made using blackmail rather than evidence. And sixty years after the war there are more holocaust survivors than there was at the end of the war Norman Finkelstein was the child of real holocaust survivors and I'm not surprised by his anger. His excellent well researched book should be in all our libraries and universities.

The content makes for interesting reading; my interpretation of the author's thesis is that the human tragedy of WWII was hijacked during the mid-sixties by certain factions in the American Jewish community for political and financial gain. Finkelstein is a serious academic (he has a PhD. from Princeton and would apparently be a tenured professor if it weren't for the highly unfashionable nature of his views) and his points are well argued; by any measure this is a difficult subject to deal with because the Holocaust is a sacred cow and any researcher not towing the party line is immediately branded an anti-Semite. The book is written in a psueudo academic style with an almost endless number of footnotes; it is not unusual for the footnotes on a page to be significantly longer than the content proper itself. Of course referencing is crucial and if you want to do this with footnotes rather than reference numbers then fine, but the footnoting in this book is completely off the chart; many pages contain 300+ word footnotes which span multiple pages; a good writer should integrate these passages into the text, but my guess is that the author uses these long footnotes as a ploy to make his book seem more academic to readers with a non-academic background. Anyway, that is just personal taste, the real issue is that Finkelstein spends too much time constructing ad hominem attacks against his enemies and spouting vitriol. Good academic writing should be balanced and measured and totally impersonal and alas this book is none of these things; this is a shame because it is a lack of such qualities that the author consistently chides his enemies for. My personal opinion is that this book contains a wealth of excellent research, but that the presentation lets it down; this is neither an academic work, nor mass-market politics. Still an important book and worth reading if you are interested in such things.

The zionists have been using dubious claims about the events of World War 2 to justify their own holocaust against the unfortunate Palestinians. These disgusting people have to be removed from the middle east and speaking out in word, action and deed is the way we are going to achieve this.

I have read many books on the Nazi Holocaust and had a growing personal discomfort about the manner in which the non-Jewish element was increasingly marginalised (I must admit that I had a similar feeling when I started learning about the numbers of Asian non-POWS who had been killed in building the Death Railway in Burma in WWII, a feature that is ignored in most books of that event). This feeling was added to when I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Now in this book I have some basis for understanding my discomfort though for reasons I had not envisaged. Finkelstein's book delivers a very hard hitting analysis of how the Holocaust has been increasingly suborned to a mixture of Jewish American political and religious personal interests and the Israeli pursuit of garnering US support post the 1967 Six Days War, covering key events up to the current day. At times he has a very personal and edgy emotional style in dealing with counter arguments but given the personal abuse and attacks he has suffered from such groups, this adds to the drama of the story he tells. His analysis of the abuses engineered under the Swiss "Nazi Gold" claims alone is worth the price of this book in my mind. Read and you will not be unmoved even if you disagree certain points.

A very interesting book with lots of facts and figures that really cause one to reflect. Unlike many books that I have read, it is not fiction pretending to be fact. It is a serious book, and often not easy to read. I would venture that it's not particularly well organised and at times perhaps not even that well written. But that's fine because our primary demand from factual books is that they are factual, not that they are great literary works.

For the various political currents of Zionism, Norman Finkelstein is a particularly terrifying foe - his polemical edge had me wincing with delight; his holocaust-survivor parents deflect the crude character assassinations so favoured of the ADL; and most of all, his rare erudition and sharp scholarship, which has won plaudits from such luminaries as Raul Hilberg (who uses much of the present work's research, citing it as a "breakthrough"), presents a serious intellectual challenge. Not many people could commit themselves to proving Alan Dershowitz's wholesale lifting of research on a footnote by footnote basis, but Finkelstein does it in another book, and he has you chuckling all the way at the sheer audacity of it all. The case for the book has already been made, so I simply wish to briefly correct "a reader"'s complaints that "The Holocaust Industry" is a "polemical barrage" which "lacks context" and is inferior to the more nucanced approach of Peter Novick. This does not note that Finkelstein both refers to and criticises Novick in this work, criticisms unaddressed by comrade 'reader'. It also ignores the fact that nuance is not always desirable - there was nothing "nuanced" about Hitler's policy of mass extermination, for a start, and the Holocaust Industry's record, while obviously not nearly as horrendous as Hitler's, is no more possessed of shades of grey. In fact, Finkelstein's whole thesis is that this all represents an attempt to introduce shades of grey artificially into a fairly black and white issue - the ethnic cleansing and subsequent occupation of Palestinians by the state of Israel.

It seems a little odd at first glance that activists of the Anti-Nazi movement criticise this book like Mike Simons did in "Socialist Review" in September, 2000.But it does totally make sense, as Simons wrote; "[The] memory of the Holocaust is the biggest barrier to the rebirth of a modern Nazi movement." I think they want to say at heart; "You should not throw a wet blanket over the righteous movement." Still, those Anti-Nazi activists and other left-wingers who call the Israeli state "Fascist" make the matter indigestible.It seems to me that there are no differences, apart from the motivation, money on one hand and ideology on the other, between both the Jewish cheaters and the agents of the Anti-Nazi movement because both of them are, in reality, profiting from the Holocaust Industry. By the way, Holocaust Industry seems to be not only one industry of such kind that makes profits for various people worldwide involving money and ideological activities. Here, I name "Nanking Massacre/ Rape of Nanking", which was coincidentally called "forgotten holocaust of the world war 2" by Iris Chang, the author of the best-selling book, "the Rape of Nanking", for another "Industry".Although many contemporary documented evidences suggest that such massacre on both civilians and the soldiers (other than legitimate executions of unlawful soldiers) never happened, the propaganda story has evolved into a large-scale profit-making machine hugely supported by a still influential historical view of the Tokyo Trial for over half a century. In this "Industry", however, as well as other "Japan's Wartime Atrocities Industries" mostly the Tokyo Trial created such as "Comfort Women Industry" and "Unit 731 Industry" and so on, there is a quite peculiar side that "the Holocaust Industry" never has: bogus perpetrators. Among those bogus perpetrators, there are a few hundreds of the victims of the Chinese "brain-washing" who "confessed" horrible crimes before the Chinese People's Court after "reformed" their "inhumane thought" to "righteous" Anti-Japanese Imperialism at the Fuxuan War Criminal Camp in China for 5 to 10 years after transported from Russian slave labour camps in Siberia in July, 1950, by the direct order of Stalin. (Of course, by doing that, both China and Soviet Union was violating the Potsdam Declaration art. 9 which stated the Japanese soldiers should be returned "to their homes" after the war.)They were returned to Japan as planned and formed "Association of the Soldiers Returned from China" to advocate the Anti-Japanese Imperialism publishing books and giving lectures throughout Japan and China. However, the biggest profit they have made so far is, actually, not for themselves but for the Anti-Japanese campaigners of both the Japanese and the Chinese. (Sometimes for the Korean, too.)Sadly, they will never be able to come to realisation that they were actually "brain-washed" and, most importantly, are not real perpetrators of the barbaric crimes they "confessed", therefore, there is no need for them to suffer from painful guilt, just because the Chinese Communist Party and their sympathisers in Japan, as well as other left-wingers who are of anti-Japanese sentiment, never ever let them unless, like the U.S. authority did to their own "brain-washing" victims of China, some decent authority in Japan take care of them as "victims" of the mental manipulation called "thought reform". But, that is unlikely because there are strong "China school" in Japanese authorities such as Foreign Ministry and the Justice Department and some MPs even in the "conservative" parties, not to mention both the Japan Communist Party and the Japan Socialist Party, that are said to be having some good "kickbacks" from the Chinese government. Having so much enjoyed those lucrative but ugly businesses, the profit-makers of both sides would have no intention to search for the truth of history. Never. The profits are too juicy and too many people involved for them to give it up altogether.Finkelstein and other's struggle to reveal the truth and to change the situation to better one is, therefore, inevitably endless.

Until comparatively recently, I implicitly accepted the image of the holocaust and its victims that was presented by the mass media. Then, a year ago, I read the Penguin Book of Twentieth-century Speeches, in particular some of what Elie Weisel had to say about the holocaust.It was clearly exaggerated, sentimentalist nonsense. I began to think a little more independently about the issue, but had nowhere to turn for a more balanced view.One day, Amazon's recommendations system suggested this book to me, and I bought it at once. Having read it, I'm delighted to be able to recommend it unreservedly as exactly the book I needed.Finkelstein does not deny the Nazi holocaust, nor the suffering it inflicted on both those it killed, and on those who survived. His contention - persuasively argued - is that their genuine suffering is being debased and abused by the Holocaust "industry" in order to bring political power and huge sums of money to an élite minority.He also points out that by labelling the Holocaust with false superlatives, one belittles the plight of others who have suffered comparably awful genocide and victimisation, both in World War II and throughout history.The book is well written. Finkelstein occasionally personalises the debate, or becomes less than dispassionate, but I never once felt this damaged his objectivity. He quotes sources throughout the book - in many cases his opponents are condemned by their own tongues.It is time the media stopped pandering to the abusive interests of the Holocaust Industry, time they took a more balanced, more critical and less sensationalist view. Billions of dollars are being extorted from governments (even those that can hardly afford it, such as Poland's) by the playing of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism cards. This is unjust.Buy this book. Read it. Tell your friends about it.

A well written book that focuses on how the Holocaust has been manipulated for commercial gain. Sometimes a little repetitive and Finklestein tends to critise those who have written literature, produced films etc... But one must remember that remembrance of such an event is prevention of another Holocaust.

With the exception of Noam Chomsky it has been a long time since anyone attempted a deconstruction of an American power elite along the lines of C. Wright Mill's famous study. The present author attempts to step into the breach. Finkelstein is concerned with the relationship between the collective American Jewish self image and how that image is mediated and bolstered through a plethora of devices (from compensation claims to educational trips)originating from the impact of the Nazi Holocaust. Many readers will wince at phrases such as 'organised American Jewry'and one from another source that 'Jews are better', as they have uncomfortable connotations in European life - on occasion I had to check myself from saying only a Jewish academic could make these points. Finkelstein's main arguments are (a) that American Jewry (or that aspect he portrays)has used the tragedy of the Holocaust as a means of morally, and on occasion even financially, terrorising critics into silence, (b) the 'uniqueness' of the Holocaust is to the contrary purely historically relative, and (c) that the suffering of nonJewsish victims of the Nazis has largely been set aside, especially when financial settlements are being pursued. His castigation of various Holocaust organisations as a cynical self serving 'industry' is unstinting, and his contrasting of the reception given to Jewish concerns by successive Administrations, in contrast to Black America's treatment, is grim reading. Finkelstein furnishes copious notes throughout the book, which are very useful. Two subcurrents emerge in the book which are never fully debated (and weaken its central theses to an extent). Firstly Finkelstein argues that 'organised American Jewry' has used the ethnicity of the Holocaust to put itself beyond criticism and inter alia Israel. All criticism of Jewish ideology is therefore antisemitic and one can never ask if antisemitism was/is in any way influenced by Jewish practices, i.e. antisemitism is really another expression of economic conflicts of interests. Finkelstein leaves this very contentious issue undeveloped and it is a definite weakness in the text. Secondly, he dismisses the uniqueness of the Holocaust, citing other exterminations that have occurred through history, yet he leaves unanalysed the motive for the Nazi extermination campaign deferring to Raul Hilburg's work instead. If the book is reprinted it would be helpful to have these issues examined clearly.In conclusion I found this a very arresting book. Perhaps unnecessarily polemical in parts, but passionately argued. Confrontational and courageous yes, but arguably it needs more detail on the points above to substantiate its many charges. Essential reading for those on the Left and Right who really believe in a family of mankind where ethnicity has no role, except an accidental one.