Property Restitution Holocaust Industry Finkelstein

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, by Norman G. Finkelstein. 2000

Courageous Jewish Author Confronts the Property Restitution Extortion Racket and Holocaust Supremacism. Poland in the Crosshairs of the Holocaust Industry

Although now written over a decade ago, this book is very timely. The trend nowadays is to redefine non-German European nations (notably Poland) as co-perpetrators of the Holocaust (or at least “complicit in the Holocaust”) for rather obvious reasons. For an update of Finkelstein, please click on, and read my detailed English-language review, of [[ASIN:8393514452 Nie musimy placic Zydom!]]. It is clear that, individual exceptions aside, the Poles owe the Jews nothing. All Jewish demands, for compensation for Jewish properties lost during the German-made Holocaust, had been satisfied in 1952 and 1960.

NO MERITOCRACY ON GENOCIDES. THE HOLOCAUST IS ONE OF MANY GENOCIDES

Norman G. Finkelstein is, to begin with, very critical of the notion that Jewish suffering is special and that it is deserving of special public memory. His own mother, a Holocaust survivor, opposed moral distinctions between different peoples’ sufferings (p. 8). Finkelstein examines and rejects arguments advanced to support the uniqueness of the Holocaust. He finds them internally inconsistent and intellectually barren, and suggests that whenever a particular argument is refuted, a new one is advanced in its place. He scoffs at the notion that the Holocaust is beyond rational understanding or that it is uniquely evil. He shows how the current preoccupation with the Holocaust, among both Jews and gentiles, did not begin until over 20 years after WWII, and dismisses the notion that this was just a delayed reaction of the Jewish community to the trauma of the event. He points out that there is no evidence for any such delayed group reaction to trauma. Finkelstein pulls no punches in identifying the real foundation for Holocaust-uniqueness claims: UNIQUE SUFFERING CONFERS UNIQUE ENTITLEMENT (p. 47). He even sees this as a form of self-aggrandizement by certain Jews.

TODAY’S JEWS IN PERSPECTIVE

American Jews have been very successful. Norman G. Finkelstein points out that American Jews’ per capita income is almost double that of non-Jews (p. 32). Sixteen of the forty wealthiest Americans are Jews. Some forty percent of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics are Jewish. So are 20% of the professors at major universities, and 40% of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington.

ORIGINS OF THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY

Finkelstein traces the origins of the Holocaust Industry to the progressively more flagrant misuse of reparations monies that began from West Germany in 1952. In time, the number of “Holocaust survivors” has been bloated to a ridiculous extent (even to the inclusion of 2nd and 3rd generation of those who experienced the Holocaust). Moreover, up to now, only 15% of reparations monies have actually gone to Jewish Holocaust survivors! The rest went to Jews and Jewish organizations that never went through the Holocaust, but which have arrogated to themselves the claim that they speak for Jewish victims. Finkelstein calls this a racket. He discusses the shakedown of the Swiss, and how they paid out 1.25 billion dollars to avoid being labeled “anti-Semitic”, “hard-hearted”, “unwilling to come to terms with one’s past”, etc., even though claims of confiscated Jewish wealth in Swiss banks turned out to be almost completely baseless.

POLES AS TARGETS OF THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY

The Polonophobic tone of Holocaust materials have long made Poles suspicious that it is agenda driven. This is now openly corroborated by Finkelstein.

By way of introduction, the Pole is familiar with the PEDAGOGIKA WSTYDU (The Pedagogy of Shame). A Communist authority would accuse a person of something, and would keep pressuring him to “confess” as the only way of redeeming himself. Now the Holocaust Industry is engaging in its own version of PEDAGOKIKA WSTYDU. The constant portrayals of Poles as a primitive, villainous people are designed to shame Poland into paying off the Holocaust Industry, and to generate international pressure on Poland to do so. At the same time, the instilling of guilt into young, mostly-uninformed Poles, is designed to make them more Judeo-compliant.

Norman G. Finkelstein touches on the anti-Polish aspects of the Holocaust Industry. (p. 130-133). However, it goes far beyond efforts of still-living Jews to reacquire their prewar property, or for Poland’s existing Jews to reacquire some prewar communal properties. Compensation-reparations demands are never satisfied, and can go as far as pressuring Poland to pay for everything that belonged to Jews before the war, even though Poland had been conquered by the Germans and had nothing to say about the seizure of Jewish property and the murder of the Jews. Of course, this would totally bankrupt Poland. But if taken this far and applied consistently and fairly, it would also mean that Poland would have to pay compensation to the Germans for lands acquired after the war, whereas the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Lithuania would have to pay compensations to Poland for the prewar Polish lands seized by the Soviet Union. But why stop there? Would present-day Germany and Russia pay Poland compensation for all the vast amounts of Polish properties destroyed during and after the German-Soviet WWII conquest and occupation of Poland?