Prof. Kevin Macdonald hit the mark on his BLOG, Oct. 3, 2011:
Excerpt:
Atzmon is at his best in dealing with the culture of the Holocaust. In Chapter 16 ("Trauma queen") he dismisses the reality of Jewish Holocaust trauma among Jews who never actually went through the experience, noting that whatever feelings they have are manufactured by what he calls the "Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome" — where Jews are manipulated into feeling trauma by media images of imminent destruction and by being transported to Auschwitz for the purpose of "maturing into traumatised Jewish adults" (p. 131), thereby suppressing any possible empathy for the Palestinians. "The well-established Judeo-centric tendency to interpret almost any political and ideological criticism as a declaration of impending Judeocide is a severe form of collective Pre-TSS" (p. 131). There is always a "Shoah to come" (p. 132) lurking around the corner, likely to be set off by any criticism of Jews, no matter how rationally based (see also here, pp. 11–12).
Atzmon notes that the Holocaust cult has all the features of a religion and none of the features of a historical narrative:
It has priests (e.g., Simon Wiesenthal, Elie Wiesel, Deborah Lipstadt) and prophets (… those who warn of the Iranian Judeocide to come). It has commandments and dogmas ('Never Again') and rituals (memorial days, pilgrimage to Auschwitz, etc). It has an established, esoteric symbolic order (kapos, gas chambers, chimneys…). It also has a temple, Yad Vashem, and shrines — Holocaust museums in capital cities worldwide. The Holocaust religion is also financed by a massive global financial network …. This new religion is coherent enough to define its 'antichrists' (Holocaust deniers) and powerful enough to persecute them (through Holocaust-denial and hate-speech laws). (pp. 148–149)
The Holocaust has therefore achieved "meta-historical status" — beyond factual inquiry, its "'factuality' sealed by draconian laws, and its reasoning secured by social and political institutions" (p. 149). It is a powerful political force on behalf of Jewish interests—e.g., it "is touted as a pretext for nuking Iran" (p. 152).
Many of these points have also been made by Peter Novick his The Holocaust in American Life. Novick adds that the culture of the Holocaust was promoted as the main source of Jewish identity and in the effort to combat assimilation and intermarriage among Jews. An important lesson is that "tolerance and diversity [are] good; hate [is] bad, the overall rubric [being] 'man's inhumanity to man'" (pp. 258-259). The Holocaust has thus become an instrument of Jewish ethnic interests as an instrument to silence opponents of high levels of multi-ethnic immigration into Western societies. And, regarding the metaphysical uniqueness of the Holocaust, it would be hard to improve on Abe Foxman's comment, cited by Novick (p. 199) that the Holocaust is "not simply one example of genocide but a near successful attempt on the life of God's chosen children and, thus, on God himself."
Atzmon makes the interesting point that the Holocaust religion is simply another version of age-old Jewish fear — the pre-traumatic stress syndrome discussed above. It is a bunker mentality of impending doom that rationalizes even the most extreme actions to prevent it. One might also note that it functions as a modern version of Jewish chosenness — that Jews are a special people whose sufferings are unique.
Atzmon is not so much a Holocaust denier as someone who denies the metaphysical status that the Holocaust has achieved—its uniqueness, its being beyond questioning, and its historical transcendence—all of which have made it into an enormously powerful weapon for achieving Jewish interests and in particular for making Israel's behavior beyond reproach. Thus, he does not deny that his great-grandmother died in WWII, but he refuses to give her death any special status: Her death "was indeed bad and tragic, but not that different from the fate of millions of Ukrainians, on learning the real meaning of communism. … [Her fate] was not so different from hundreds of thousands of German civilians who died in deliberate, indiscriminate bombing, just because they were Germans" (p. 175).
More:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2011/10/a-dissident-meditation-on-jewish-identity-a-review-of-gilad-atzmons-the-wandering-who/?show=comments
Peace.
Mike Santomauro
Editorial Director
ReporterNotebook@gmail.com
Call anytime: 917-974-6367
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