THE REAL HOLOCAUST DENIAL /HOW WASHINGTON THINKS AND WHY IT DOESN'T WORK

Sam Smith is the Editor of the Progressive Review (news@prorev.com)................................PEACE..........................Scott

Sam Smith

THE jailing of Holocaust denier David Irving in Austria is a reminder of
how easy it is to imitate evil even as one excoriates it. The law that
convicted Irving is of the sort the Nazis would have invoked, albeit for
far different purposes, and was a routine offense in Orwell's 1984.

Many fail to see this irony because they are engaged in the greatest
Holocaust denial of all: a refusal to look seriously at why there was a
Holocaust in the first place. To blame it all on anti-Semitism is as
dangerously ahistorical as to deny its existence. Yes, Jews were the
victims, but why did an ancient and widespread prejudice produce such an
extreme result in this case?

We avoid this question because it takes us places we don't want to go.
Like the role of modern bureaucracy and technology in the magnification
of evil. Like the commingling of corporate and state interests in a way
the world had never seen before. Like the failure of Germany's liberal
elite to stand effectively against wrong eerily echoed today in the
failure of America's liberal elite to do likewise.

Some of the most important lessons of the Holocaust are simply missed.
Among these, as Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, is that it could
only have been carried out by “an advanced political community with a
highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service
bureaucracy.”

In The Cunning of History, Rubenstein also finds uncomfortable parallels
between the Nazis and their opponents. For example, a Hungarian Jewish
emissary meets with Lord Moyne, the British High Commissioner in Egypt
in 1944 and suggests that the Nazis might be willing to save one million
Hungarian Jews in return for military supplies. Lord Moyne’s reply:
“What shall I do with those million Jews? Where shall I put them?”
Writes Rubenstein: "The British government was by no means adverse to
the ‘final solution’ as long as the Germans did most of the work. " For
both countries, it had become a bureaucratic problem, one that
Rubenstein suggests we understand “as the expression of some of the most
profound tendencies of Western civilization in the 20th century.”

How many school children are taught that, worldwide, wars in the past
century killed over 100 million people? In World War I alone, the death
toll was around ten million. Much of this, including the Holocaust, was
driven by a culture of modernity that so changed the power of
institutions over the individual that the latter would become what Erich
Fromm called homo mechanicus, “attracted to all that is mechanical and
inclined against all that is alive.” Becoming, in fact, a part of the
machinery -- willing to kill or to die just to keep it running.

Thus, with Auschwitz–like efficiency, over 6,000 people perished every
day during World War I for 1,500 days. Rubenstein recounts that on the
first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British lost 60,000 men and
half of the officers assigned to them. But the bureaucratic internal
logic of the war did not falter at all; over the next six months, more
than a million British, French and German soldiers would lose their
lives. The total British advance: six miles. No one in that war was a
person anymore. The seeds of the Holocaust can thus be found in the
trenches of World War I. Individuals had became no better than the
bullets that killed them, just part of the expendable arsenal of the
state.

But we don't talk about this do we? We don't teach our children about
it, do we?

The problem with using the outcome rather than the origins of the
Holocaust as our metaphor and our message is that we are totally
unprepared for those practices, laws, and arguments that can produce
similar outcomes. We study the death chambers when we should be
learning about the birth places.

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HOW WASHINGTON THINKS AND WHY IT DOESN'T WORK
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SAM SMITH - In trying to figure out why Washington takes such a
different view towards the security of business class and the security
of cargo containers it occurred to me that most policy makers don't
travel by container ship.

The possible application of this seminal observation covers considerable
territory. For example, after the TWA 800 crash, it was unclear what had
caused it. Logical explanations included a missile attack, A misaimed US
test missile, mechanical failure, or a bomb on board. Without waiting
for the answer, the Clinton administration swiftly installed a number of
security procedures that implicitly assumed the final possibility. To
this day, there is little interest in the considerable danger of missile
attacks on domestic planes and absolute denial on the part of the
government in the case of TWA 800. Further, virtually no attention has
been given to the failure of the aircraft in question to be refitted in
accordance with official recommendations. It is assumed by journalists
and policy makers alike that the overwhelmingly logical source of danger
is one of those funny looking passengers standing in line with them.

A similar indifference to the variety of ways that danger might enter
the country is found at ground level. There was virtually no media
attention given the fact the Chinese had taken over several ports of the
Panama Canal. Or that a company owned by the Chinese Army runs the key
port of Long Beach, California. After all, the Chinese are trading
partners, not terrorists.

It wasn't until it was revealed that a corporation of the United Arab
Emirates was about to take over some of our largest and oldest ports
that the indifference towards the dispensation of American maritime
manna was interrupted. It is still not clear whether if the Chinese
Army, rather than the terrorist-hugging UAE, had taken over New York's
waterfront there would have been any problem, but there certainly is
now.

In the end, several factors probably drove the Bush regime towards this
nutty decision. The first was the absence of American bidders for the
port deal. This in itself is a telling reminder of how far downhill the
country has gone. Second, the Bushists were probably trapped in their
mode of 'globalization is good' rather than 'terrorism is bad.' After
all, spin spins the spinners as well as the spun. Finally, however,
people who run things and write things in Washington these days just
don't know much about mundane, declasse matters such as ports and
longshoremen. They proved this already with New Orleans. You can't
expect people who think up things like the Long War to also know how to
recover from a hurricane, build a skyscraper that won't collapse, or
unload a vessel safely.

Older imperialists were a bit different. As the BBC notes of the British
empire: "Overseas commerce was conducted within the mercantilist
framework of the Navigation Acts, which stipulated that all commodity
trade should take place in British ships, manned by British seamen,
trading between British ports and those within the empire."

Perhaps Dubai will want to buy Ronald Reagan airport and the Chinese
Army will take over JFK. Then, finally, the business class that runs
this land will understand what the fuss is all about.