Those Who Forget the Past (41 page)

There's a fellow named David [
inaudible
] who went around to the Auschwitz Museum and they told him that—they had to rebuild that stuff. The only place where there was any concentration was . . . [
inaudible
] Yeah there were prison camps, but half the people who died in prison camps died from bombings from the Allies.

There was no systematic extermination, no. The idea was— what Hitler considered his Final Solution—was. . . . He made a deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel, because they needed people there to fight the Arabs and take up space.

And then the people who coined the word—Shoah— according to the various newspapers he was released from three different prison camps within several months. Figure if they were going to exterminate anyone, they would have exterminated him.

No I don't believe that for a minute. Because even so, there were any number of Polish that were there after the war too.

That's something that will never be forgotten. If the world lasts ten million years they . . .

CN: So, Hitler was secretly working with the Jews?

HG: He was cooperating with the bigwigs to get the small fry to get out of Germany and go to Israel.

CN: The bigwigs were?

HG: The financiers . . . I notice your machine is running. In Germany you can go to jail for saying it didn't happen.

CN: You can go to Jail?

HG: Yeah. Because they tell us that they have no connection to the crucifixion of Christ. Because they weren't there. It's their ancestors if anybody, not the current people. But look at the whole race. We're all involved in original sin. In Germany, they weren't there. They're forced to pay reparations. They have two sets of rules—one for them and one for us. They're not responsible for what their ancestors did, but we are responsible for what ours did. It's not our fault, because we didn't do it. The rest of the world didn't know anything about it.

CN: Will the movie that Mel is making clearly make that connection to who is responsible?

HG: The facts are clear. Those facts are the most well established in our history.

Why Peter Boyer wishes to whitewash Hutton Gibson's views about the Holocaust remains a mystery, as does The New Yorker's silence about the perpetration of that whitewash in its pages.

January 9, 2004

PART EIGHT

SOME NEW FORMS OF ANTI-SEMITISM

SIMON SCHAMA

Virtual Annihilation

[
This
is a transcript of Professor Schama's talk at the YIVO Institute conference“Old Demons, New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West,” May 11,
2003.
]

HOW WAS MOTHER'S DAY this year? Mine didn't go so well. I called my mother; I say, “What's up?” “Three hundred and eighty-six headstones is what's up,” she says: “Plashett Cemetery in Eastham, your Uncle Victor”—it's actually her Uncle Victor—my Great-Aunt Prissy—“perpetrators apparently arrested.”

“A shock,” I say then. “No, I'm not shocked by anything anymore,” she says. And she's right. We certainly shouldn't be surprised that ancient paranoia has, after all, survived both the reasonings of modernity and the testimony of history. We live, after all, in a country and at a time when—so the opinion polls tell us—more people than not reject the scientific validity of the theory of evolution. (In some quarters, Darwinism is regarded, along with secular humanism, as another conspiracy of the Elders of Zion.) But then America is not the only country in which children are made precociously knowing while adults are made credulous. It was a French book that became a best-seller by asserting that the al-Qaeda attack on the Pentagon never happened and that photographs which suggested it had, had been digitally doctored by the CIA. Where once it was naïvely supposed that images never lie, the sovereign assumption of the digital age is that they never tell the truth. Truth morphs: Elvis is alive, the Mogen David is really the Satanic pentangle, there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. And digital-communications technology, once imagined as a universe of transparent and perpetual illumination in which cancerous falsehoods would perish beneath a saturation bombardment of irradiating data, has instead generated a much murkier, verification-free habitat, where a Google-generated search will deliver an electronic page in which links to lies and lunacy appear in identical format as those to truth and sanity. But why should we ever have assumed that technology and reason would be mutually self-reinforcing, since a quick visit to “Stormfront” will persuade you that the demonic is in fact the best customer of the electronic.

It's only in America that we imagine history as a series of cultural supercessions, each one comprehensively victorious in the totality of its effacements. Thus, in this processional view of the past, Native American society is supposed to have been obliterated by colonialism, which in turn yields to individualist, capitalist democracy. Except, of course, it doesn't, not entirely— and much time is spent, and blood oft times is spilled, tidying up the inconvenient anachronisms. In Europe, on the other hand, especially at the end of the last century, so rigidly serial in approach to cultural alteration, it has been suspected to be not much more than textbook convenience.

In Europe, ghosts have an impolite way of muscling their way into times and places where they are unexpected, which is why, for example, the cultural emblem of the first great industrial society in the world, Victorian Britain, imprinted on railway-station designs and museums of arts, crafts, and science, was the medieval pointed arch. It was, to be sure, an emblem of resistance as much as validation. So the pointiest of the champions of Christian perpendicular, England and Scotland, Thomas Carlyle, unsurprisingly turns out to be the fiercest in his hatred of—his words—“niggers and Jews.” The great and the good of Victorian Britain could take both the friends and the enemies of the machine age in its stride, so the age which fetishized rooted-ness, Victorian Britain again, while at the same time making fortunes by displacing mass populations, made, as it thought, the willfully deracinated,
le juif errant,
the special target of its disingenuousness. Bonjour, Monsieur Melmotte; hello, Henry Ford.

TO GROW UP British and Jewish is by definition not to be especially confounded at the obstinacy of atavisms refusing to lie down in the tomb of their redundancy. The protean persistence of anti-Semitism came home to me early. I think I was seven when I first saw the writing on the wall. The wall in question was one of those crumbling redbrick affairs, blocking off a view of the tracks on the Fenchurch Street line connecting London with the Essex villages which lie in the north banks of the Thames Estuary, where my family lived. They were not quite suburban, these places, though Jewish businessmen, like my father, had moved there out of the burnt-out wreckage of the city in the East End, where they still kept warehouses and offices. They were part fishing villages, part dormitory suburbs, part seaside towns: yellow broom in the spring, blowsy cabbage roses in the summer, the smell of the unloading shrimp boats, the laden winkle carts—dangerously, excitingly
treif
— drifting over the tide. But every morning those Jewish businessmen would take the Fenchurch Street train—and one morning my father took me as far as the station—and there on that wall, in white letters faint and fugitive, but since the day was cloudy and gray as they always are on the Estuary, it seems, livid in the light, were just two cryptic letters.

P.J. Nothing more, not P.J. LOVES S.T., just the letters alone. So of course I asked my father, and remember him reddening briefly and telling me it was just some
chazerei,
old
chazerei,
and to forget about it; it didn't matter. Which of course made me more determined to decode the crypt. And it was, I think, my cheder teacher, Mrs. Marks, the same teacher who got me to dress up in miniature tuxedo as Mr. Shabbes (the eight-year-old bride was, of course, Mrs. Balabooster), who looked me in the eye and told me, “P.J. was ‘Perish Judah.' ” And that was a relic of some bad old days in the thirties, when the union of fascists and Arnold Leese's Britain had marched—not just in Stepney and Whitechapel and Mile End but right down to the end of the line, to where the Jews had dared penetrate the sanctum sanctorum of Englishness: pebble-dashed, herbaceous-bordered, tea-pouring Westcliff and Leigh-on-Sea.

P.J. SCARED THE HELL out of me, and not because it smelled faintly of Zyklon B. I'm not sure I knew much about that in '52, despite the missing relatives on my mother's side. My generation, born in the last years of the war—I was born in '45— would only get their crash course in Holocaust a little later: in the London shul library, where Lord Russell of Liverpool—
Scourge of the Swastika,
with its obscenely unsparing photography of bulldozed, naked bodies—opened and shut our eyes. But I had read
Ivanhoe
—indeed, I'd seen Elizabeth Taylor's Rebecca—and so the archaic, declamatory quality of P.J. spoke to me of the massacres at York, the canonization of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, Richard I's coronation pogrom in London, 1199. The persistence of the ugliest strain of medieval paranoia in my island culture seemed, while not exactly fish and chips, not something wholly alien from British tradition, notwithstanding Disraeli,
Daniel Deronda,
and the Victorian high hats and morning coats, which for some reason marked the official Shabbes morning dress of the notables of our synagogue. Some of the same writers I most enthusiastically read as a child— Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesteron, John Buchan, all of them armored warriors for holy tradition and for the sceptered isle—of course turned out a bit later, on closer inspection, to be the most relentless perpetuators of anti-Semitic demonologies.

There was, however, a moment of innocence when the cheerfully technocratic Festival of Britain in 1951 did seem to announce the exorcism of barbarian phantoms. Never mind it coincided with the first panicky revival of racist fascism in Britain, mobilized against Caribbean immigration. We were told that technology, and especially new kinds of communications technology, would diffuse knowledge and that knowledge would chase away superstition, destitution, and disease. It would fall to our generation, the most confidently booming of the baby boomers, to make good on the promises of the Enlightenment of Voltaire, Franklin, and, above all, the cheerfully ill-fated Marquis de Condorcet. Modernism, started in the first half of the twentieth century, had somehow fallen foul of redfanged tribalism, but we were the children of techne, of the dream machines of the
philosophes
. Not that anything like this was as yet either on our lips or our minds. I remember one of our history teachers at school, secondary school, who in fact bore a rather startling resemblance to Voltaire, say to our class of thirteen-year-olds, “Well, lads, we don't know what the rest of the twentieth century has in store, but I guarantee that two of the old bugbears are finally done for—revealed religion and ethnic chauvinism.” So much for history's predictive power.

Looking so much like Voltaire as he did, he should perhaps have known better, since Voltaire, as we know from Arthur Hertzberg, Peter Gay, and many other scholars, was a prime case of a
philosophe
who thought one way and felt another, who positively nursed the worm in the bud; who believed in the transformative power of reason up to a point, and that point was where it concerned Jews. It was not just that Voltaire believed the condition of being able to treat Jews humanely was the mass abandonment of Judaism and his understandable pessimism this would ever happen. It was that,
au fond,
he believed that even if the Jews could be persuaded to discard what made them culturally Jews, there would always still be some sort of insuperable racial or even biological obstacle to true assimilation.

The notion that the benevolent illuminations of the Enlightenment would in due course be bound to eradicate superstition and prejudice—both those said to be held by the Jews and those undoubtedly held against them—was compromised, not just by the disingenuousness of some of its apostles but by the slightly mechanical nature of their prescience. What failed them was their dependence on wordiness, their belief in the inevitable and permanent supremacy of textual logic, their faith in the unconditional surrender of fables to the irrefutably documented proof. He who could command critical reading, and critical writing, would in such a world of logically driven discourse command the future. And that future would be one in which rational demonstration would always prevail over emotive spectacle—just as, the same epistemologists thought, the Protestant
logos
had vanquished Catholic charisma. But of course it hadn't. Nor did the Enlightenment banish the fairy tale so much as become, in the hands of the Brothers Grimm, its most psychologically aggressive reinventor. What would unfold in the age of the industrial machine which ensued was precisely, as Walter Benjamin accurately diagnosed, the astonishing capacity of technology to promote and project fantastic mythologies rather than banish them.

From the outset, of course, the machinery of sensationalist stupefaction—the dioramas and panoramas and Eídophusikons— were the natural handmaid of the sublime and terrible. As Victorian Britain became more colonized by industry, so its public became greedier by spectacles of disaster, brought to them as visceral entertainment: the simulacra of Vesuvian eruptions, the collapse of the Tay Bridge, an avalanche in the Simplon. More ominously, the paradox of a modernist technology, co-opted to attack modernism, came at the hands of its most adroit practitioners, no longer so paradoxical. The D. W. Griffith who specialized in the manipulation of immense crowds and the apocalyptic collapse of imperial hubris was all of a piece with the chivalric romancer of the Ku Klux Klan. Mussolini could simultaneously embrace the piston-pump ecstasies of Marinettian futurism and the most preposterous Cinecittà-fabricated colossalism of Roman nostalgia. Ultimately, of course, Albert Speer would deliver for Hitler a cathedral of light where annihilationist rant would be bathed in arch of refulgence and Leni Riefenstahl would begin her epiphany with a kind of aerial cinematic annunciation: the angel of the
Totenkopf
moving through the skies, casting an immaculately shadowed simulacrum down on the ancestral sod.

From which it is surely just a hop, skip, and a click to the consummation of cyber-hatred, to the welcoming page of the Czech-based “Jewrats,” where its designers, appreciative of their predecessors' knack for cutting-edge media, proudly declare, rather as if they were offering a year's warranty, that “National Socialism was always known for its all-round quality propaganda.” At “Jewrats,” you can not only download the old favorites
Der Ewige Jude
,
Triumph of the Will
, and
The Turner
Diaries
and elegiac interviews with George Lincoln Rockwell but also try your hand at games like “SA Mann,” “Rattenjagd,” and “Ghetto Blaster.”

Or try the homepage of “Resistance Records,” if you've got a strong stomach, featuring a video game called “Ethnic Cleansing,” whose champions, Terminator-style, are garbed as gladiators, whose targets, helpfully visualized at the top of the page lest casual visitors confuse them with Bosnian Muslims, are Julius Streicher caricatures of Jews, complete with standard-issue
Der Stürmer
extruded lips and hooked proboscis.

Just as Romantic Gothic Sensationalism fed on the victories which the optical scored over the textual, so the creative forte of the digital media has been the projection of electronic violence and encrypted runes. The most archaic motives of human culture, manichean battle, objects of occult veneration, ecstatic occasionally hallucinatory vision, all delivered in liquid crystal readouts, one kind of elemental plasma translated into another. The online game “Nazi Doom” is in fact just an adapted and slightly pirated version of the emphatically nonscientific Gothic space-fantasy games “Doom,” “Final Doom,” and the deliciously oxymoronic “Final Doom 2.” The optimistic dream of the Enlightenment that technology and addictive fantasy would be in some sort of zero-sum-game relationship turns out, as Benjamin predicted again, to be precisely the opposite case.

I don't mean of course to say that the digital world is typified by the engineered delivery of the irrational, only that it is not exactly inhospitable to its propagation. Cyberspace is, of course, itself the work of much cerebration, but its most elaborate fabulists are devoted to the primacy of the visceral over the logical. They know their market. Against instantly summoned electronically pulsing apparitions, the Celtic crosses of the white power organizations like Aryan Resistance or Stormfront—the mid-'90s creation of the ex-Klansman Don Black, who hooked it up in federal prison and who created a digital thirteen-year-old wide-eyed boy as his ideal teenage apologist and recruiter. Against that, the patiently discursive modes of recent argument are handicapped, especially in competition for the attention of alienated adolescents, for whom the appeal of barbarian symbolism and occasionally barbaric action is precisely the rejection of bookishness. The ultimate Gothic fantasists, the murderers at Columbine, are known to have been visitors to these websites.