Norman Finkelstein - The Holocaust Industry
controlled opposition
As the Holocaust industry plays with numbers to boost its compensation claims. anti-Semites gleefully
mock the "Jew liars" who even "huckster" their dead. In juggling these numbers the Holocaust
industry, however unintentionally, whitewashes Nazism. Raul Hilberg. the leading authority on the
Nazi holocaust, puts the figure for Jews murdered at 5.1 million.74 Yet. if 135.000 former Jewish
slave laborers are still alive today, some 600,000 must have survived the war. That's at least a
half-million more than standard estimates. One would then have to deduct this half-million from the
5.1 million figure of those killed. Not only does the "6 Million" figure become more untenable but the
numbers of the Holocaust industry are rapidly approaching those of Holocaust deniers. Consider that
Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler put the total camp population in January 1945 at a little over 700,000
and that, according to Friedlander. about one-third this number was killed off by May. Yet if Jews
constituted only 20 percent of the surviving camp population and. as the Holocaust industry implies.
600.000 Jewish inmates survived the war, then fully 3 million inmates in total must have survived. By
the Holocaust industry's reckoning, concentration camp conditions couldn't have been harsh at all; in
fact, one must suppose a remarkably high fertility and remarkably low mortality rate.75
All the hype notwithstanding, there is no evidence that Holocaust deniers exert any more influence in the United States than the flatcarth society docs. Given the nonsense churned out daily by the Holocaust industry, the wonder is that there are so few skeptics. The motive behind the claim of widespread Holocaust denial is not hard to find. In a society saturated with The Holocaust, how else to justify yet more museums, books, curricula, films and programs than to conjure up the bogy of Holocaust denial? Thus Deborah Lipstadt's acclaimed book.
Denying the Holocaust,50 as well as the results of an ineptly worded American Jewish Committee poll alleging pervasive Holocaust denial.51 were released just as the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum opened.
50 New York: 1994. Lipstadt occupies the Holocaust chair at Emory University and was recently
appointed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council.
51 Employing a double negative, the AJC poll practically invited confusion "does it seem possible or
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The Holocaust Industry: HOAXERS. HUCKSTERS AND HISTORY
does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?" Twenty-two
percent of respondents answered "it seems possible." In subsequent polls, which rephrased the
question straightforwardly. Holocaust denial approached zero. A recent AJC survey of 11 countries
found that, notwithstanding pervasive right-wing extremists' claims to the contrary, "few people
denied the Holocaust." Jennifer Golub and Rcnac Cohen, What Do Americans Know About the
Holocaust? |Thc American Jewish Committee: 1993); "Holocaust Deniers unconvincing — Surveys,"
in Jerusalem Post (4 February 2000]) Yet in Congressional testimony regarding "anti-Semitism in
Europe," David Harris of the AJC highlighted the salience of Holocaust denial in the European Right
without once mentioning the AJC's own findings that this denial finds virtually no resonance among
the general public. (Hearings before the Foreign Relations Committee, United States Senate, 5 April
2000)
