Why is the Nazi holocaust more important than the Slave Trade and the Death of 10 million Africans in the Belgian Congo?

There is no greater insult to the memory of the 6 million than to exploit their deaths, as the Holocaust Education Trust does, in order to legitimise Israel’s foul racism 

Below is yet another excellent article from Gavin Lewis, Israel, Holocaust and the Un-existing of Black Victimhood. It has prompted me to write an introduction which is longer than the article itself.  My apologies but it’s a topic that doesn’t lend itself to brevity!

If you Google ‘books on genocide in Belgian Congo’ you come up with just one book.  Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. If you type in ‘Nazi holocaust’ then you have an endless selection.

There are literally thousands of books, from every conceivable angle, on aspects of the Holocaust. Most are worthless but nonetheless no respectable library is without a shelf (at least).

How is it that the Jewish Holocaust (because there are few books on the other victims – the Disabled, Gypsies, Russian POWs, Political Prisoners, Jehova Witnesses) has received such attention yet the genocide of Black Africans has not?

In these days of Black Lives Matter there is one, obvious, answer. White lives matter more. Yet this is not the whole answer, indeed it is not even half an answer. The Irish Famine is also not top of the book lists. Admittedly the British killed ‘only’ one million but the accepted figure of Jewish dead in the Holocaust is 6 million. The estimated number of dead in the Belgian Congo is 10 million. The estimated death from the Slave Trade is about 14 million.

Of course the industrial extermination of the Jews of Europe was, by any stretch of the imagination, horrific.  But was death by gas or shooting worse than castration, chopping off of limbs, burning and skinning alive. It took minutes to expire from bullets or cyanide gas, whereas the tortures of the Belgian colonial sadists are unimaginable.

One thing is for certain. It isn’t about the special place of Jews before the anti-Semites get their heartbeats racing. Indeed for a long time after the Holocaust there were very few books about the Holocaust written, albeit they were the best. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of European Jewry, Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution and Gerald Fleming’s Hitler and the Final Solution. Today there are more good histories such as Richard Evan’s trilogy on the Third Reich and Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the Final Solution.

In post-war America the Holocaust was played down to the point of non-existence. During the McCarthy era emphasising the Holocaust was likely to incur accusations of being a Communist. At the funeral for the executed Rosenbergs the Song of the Warsaw Ghetto was sung.

Nor was the Israeli state any different. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Holocaust was barely mentioned in Israel. In a 220 page Israeli history textbook published in 1948, just one page was devoted to the Holocaust compared to 10 pages on the Napoleonic wars. [Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood, p. 94]

Why the change and when did it start to come about? Both Peter Novick [the Holocaust in American Life] and Norman Finkelstein [the Holocaust Industry] agree that the change began after Israel’s victory in the 6 Day War in 1967. By defeating Egypt’s President Nasser and slaying the dragon of Arab nationalism, Israel had proved its utility to US imperialism. It represented a dagger at the heart of the Arab East.

In Israel itself attitudes began to change with the show trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961.  Eichmann was, of course, guilty of all that he was accused of and deserved to hang but that wasn’t the point of the trial. It wasn’t to reveal information  so much as to begin the process of using the Holocaust as a source of Israel’s legitimation. Israel claimed the Holocaust as its inheritance, as well as a source of financial reparations.

Previously Holocaust victims had been seen as a source of shame in Israel.  Unlike the brave Israelis, who slaughtered Arabs without mercy, yea even the suckling on a mother’s breast, the Jews who went to the gas chambers were seen as cowards. 

Hayyim Nahman Bialik

Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the national Zionist poet, spoke of the ‘disgraceful shame and cowardice’ of the Jewish victims of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. Yitzhak Greenbaum, of the Jewish Agency Executive Committee, spoke of ‘unparalleled feelings of burning shame.’ ‘Sheep to the slaughter’ in the words of Eichmann’s prosecutor Gideon Hausner.

The first Holocaust survivors to arrive in Palestine were called sapon (soap) after the myth that the bodies of victims were made into soap.

Hanzi Brand wrote of how, when she settled on Kibbutz Gvata Haim, the other members ‘talked about their war to avoid hearing about hers. They were ashamed of the Holocaust.’ [Tom Segev, The 7^th Million, p. 471]

Peter Novick spoke of the prevailing view in the Yishuv that holocaust survivors represented the ‘survival of the worst.’ In Ben Gurion’s view they were

‘hard, evil and selfish people and their experiences destroyed what good qualities they had left.’

Ben Gurion went on to add that they were

‘A mob and human dust, without language, without education, without roots and without being absorbed in tradition and the nation’s vision.’

David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister had already demonstrated during the war his indifference to the genocide of Europe’s Jews. His only concern was that the extermination of Europe’s Jews would render the establishment of a Jewish state irrelevant and reduc the number of immigrants to Israel.

Ben Gurion’s official biographer, Shabtai Teveth quoted Ben Gurion as saying that

‘where there was a conflict of interest between saving individual Jews and the good of the Zionist enterprise, we shall say that the enterprise comes first.’ (The Burning Ground, p. 855)

It is therefore clear that the obsession, because it is an obsession, with the Jewish holocaust and the almost complete ignoring of, for example, the British genocide in Bengal which killed an estimated 32 million people, has nothing to do with genuine horror.

We can see that quite clearly with Holocaust Memorial Day which excludes all genocide before the Nazi Holocaust.  So there is no mention of the Armenian Holocaust, the Slave Trade or what happened in the Belgian Congo. Why? What possible logic is there for time limiting which Holocausts are deserving of attention?

The only conclusion is that the Nazi holocaust of the Jews serves a major ideological and propaganda purpose in terms of legitimising western imperialism and capitalism. The Nazi Holocaust  makes western capitalism seem anti-racist whereas in fact the way it is used is to reinforce its racism and imperialism. There simply is no other explanation.

If you go to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s web page on the Holocaust it tells you that ‘The Holocaust (The Shoah in Hebrew) was the attempt by the Nazis and their collaborators to murder all the Jews in Europe.’ The page on the Holocaust deals exclusively with the Jews. It says nothing about the Euthenasia campaign between 1939-1941 when about 100,000 mentally and physically handicapped Germans were murdered, mainly by carbon monoxide poisoning.

As Henry Friedlander’s excellent The Origins of Nazi Genocide argues, the Holocaust began in 1939 not 1941/2. The very same gas trucks used to murder the disabled, and German Jewish disabled were singled out in particular, made their way to Chelmno, near Lodz in Poland and there they established the first extermination camp in December 1941.

This prioritisation of the Jewish holocaust is not only racist but it’s also bad history.  It treats the Holocaust, in the words of Tom Segev, as a ‘bizarre cult of memory, death and kitsch’ in which false memory is used to bolster the Zionist narrative of eternal anti-Semitism.

The deliberate use of the Holocaust as a propaganda weapon is illustrated by another organisation, the Holocaust Education Trust. Set up by the late paedophile and President of the Board of Deputies Lord  Greville Janner, it is now presided over by Karen Pollock, who played a bit role in the fantasy drama of ‘Labour anti-Semitism’.

Idiotic comment from Karen Pollock who exploits the Holocaust for the purposes of the Israeli state and Zionism - what possible connection has Corbyn's comments on the ECRC got to do with the dead of the Holocaust?

The HET is a wholly Zionist outfit and Pollock has shamelessly used the HET, a charity, to bolster the fiction that the Labour Party was institutionally anti-Semitic and to plug the IHRA. 

What has the Holocaust got to do with the IHRA’s Working Definition of Anti-Semitism?  The latter, conflates Zionism and anti-Semitism and it is sponsored by the racist International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.  Britain’s delegate to the IHRA is right-wing Tory Eric Pickles, former Chair of Conservative Friends of Israel, an anti-Muslim and anti-Roma bigot who also defended the Tory alliance with fascists and anti-Semites in the European Parliament.

These Zionists have no shame in exploiting the Holocaust for the cause of Israel

Among those who back the IHRA is Hungary’s anti-Semitic Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the United States’s White Supremacist President Trump and a host of anti-Semitic leaders in Western Europe.  The IHRA is a definition that anti-Semites love.

The IHRA, which has been condemned as ‘unfit for purpose’ by Geoffrey Robertson QC has nothing whatever to do with the Holocaust or Holocaust Education. The use of the HET and the Holocaust by pro-Israel propagandists explains exactly why the Holocaust has been turned into solely the Jewish Holocaust.

Karen Pollock - Zionist nonentity who exploits the Holocaust on behalf of Israel's apartheid regime

Pollock herself is a nonentity, a two-bit player in the Zionist game but her poisonous racist view that to attack and criticise Zionism is anti-Semitic besmirches the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the overwhelming majority of whom were not Zionist.

The real record of the Zionists during the Holocaust is not one to be proud of. They first denied the Holocaust having welcomed the rise of the Nazi government as a golden opportunity to strengthen the Jewish state-in-the making. Ben Gurion said of the beginning of the war, which sealed the fate of German and Poland Jewry, that it was ‘'a rare opportunity to achieve the “Zionist solution”, the only true solution to the problem of the Jewish people

Berl Katznelson, Ben Gurion’s deputy, saw the rise of Hitler to power as ‘“an opportunity to build and flourish like none we have ever had or ever will have”.

Gavin Lewis’s article is therefore very welcome and I hope that you find it stimulating.

Tony Greenstein

Israel, Holocaust and the Un-existing of Black Victimhood

Gavin Lewis   Media   December 24, 2019

In his book The Holocaust Industry, political scientist Norman Finkelstein argues that an ideological construct has taken shape around the Holocaust that is used to cloak Israel with the status of “victim state” despite its “horrendous” human rights record. One of the key planks of this ideology is the notion of ‘uniqueness’, both of the European Holocaust and of Western Jews as victims.

In November 2019, Roger Hallam, one of the founders of the environmental movement Extinction Rebellion, was caught up in a highly controversial media storm in which he was accused of anti-Semitism. Hallam had contradicted the ideology Finkelstein had identified, describing the Holocaust as just another genocide—as he phrased it “just another fuckery in human history“—which, by example, he compared to the death toll in the Belgian Congo.

The constructed media notion of supposed offence to European Jews was highly specialised in that it was restricted to white, heterosexual, able-bodied, politically conservative victims. If insult had been genuinely given by Hallam it was also an offence to gay, disabled, black and leftist victims of Nazi eugenics and extermination policies.

Germany had been occupied at the close of the First World War by French-African colonial troops branded the ‘Black Horror’ by the Germans. The colonial troops fathered a generation of mixed race Germans known pejoratively as ‘Rhineland Bastards’ who were smeared as ‘half apes’ by Adolf Hitler in his autobiographical screed, Mein Kampf.

These inconvenient black victims are hardly ever mentioned in the Western media’s Holocaust-invoking, pro-Israel reportage; though they, along with the disabled and gay, were among the first to be victims of Nazi sterilisation and forced euthanasia policies.

Martin Niemoller

Similarly, political victims of the Nazis are now also excluded from mention, despite the fact that the resonant postwar reflection about fascist oppression was Martin Niemöller’s poem beginning, “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist (Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist).”

Ironically the left, and particularly the UK Labour Party, were the prime targets of the pro-Israel media witchhunt, which has demonstrated both the totalitarian nature of attacks on ordinary working-class socialists and the strategic function of excluding them from the list of historic Nazi victims. It is also worth recalling that the people that actually fought during the Second World War and were responsible for postwar reconstruction used the inclusive term ‘Nazi Crimes against Humanity’. Decades later we have—as Finkelstein has observed—slipped into using highly selective labels like Shoah and Holocaust which implicitly create a hierarchy of victimhood.

As for Hallam’s comparative comments, Adam Hothschild, in his history King Leopold’s Ghost, cites the Belgians killing of 10 million Africans in the Congo. This genocide was caused by a horrific regime of mass castrations, floggings and starvation on an almost industrial scale.

The horrors of the Belgian Congo are so well established in history that Mark Twain can be cited as one of the early anti-colonial campaigners against the slaughter. The missionary Alice Seeley Harris photographed the colonial disciplinary practice of cutting off the hands of the children who had, held in forced labour, failed to meet rubber harvest quotas (see image below). The death toll of victims from this practice was considerable, and the collection of hands became a form of currency by which soldiers proved they’d upheld colonial authority and carried out their kill rates.

However, the weight of historical evidence does not shame those political and media elites who structured Labour’s moral panic upon a hierarchy of victimhood privileging a specific white ethnic identity. The black-Jewish political activist Jackie Walker similarly tried to point out that victims of slavery were absented from Holocaust Memorial Day. The fact that a figure of “60 million and more” has long been the accepted number of victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and even featured in Toni Morrison’s Pulizer Prize-winning novel Beloved did not protect Walker from being smeared as a anti-Semite.

Walker, however, was correct: slavery and the other colonial Holocausts that—like the state of Israel—are a manifestation of white settler domination, are systematically excluded from Holocaust Memorial Day. The same media that claims to care about anti-Semitism covers up this racist double standard rather than treat it as a scandal. In fact, strategies of black Holocaust denial were a feature of Cathy Newman’s infamous interview with Walker on Britain’s Channel 4 News in September 2016.

The largest Holocaust in human history is not included in Holocaust Memorial Day, and is now rarely mentioned in contemporary media coverage of the event. David Stannard, in his book American Holocaust, cites 100 million killed in the conquest of the Americas. In the United States you can hardly bump into a Native American; there are now about 6.5 million left, often ghettoised in the reservation system, out of a general population of 327 million.

Ursula K. Le Guin

In the week both before and after Hallam’s comments, the BBC twice broadcast a biographical documentary about the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin. In the film, Le Guin talked about her parents, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and his wife Theodora’s friendship with Ishi, the last surviving member of the Native American Yahi people. When Ishi died, his tribe died with him. So within the timeframe that Hallam was being smeared, popular culture was highlighting that an ethnic group can actually become extinct due white colonial Holocaust. Yet this extermination was still being given subordinate treatment compared to to white Western victims.

The UK establishment has a vested interest in downplaying the horrors of historic Western imperialism. The British had torture camps in Kenya, and have recently had to compensate victims of torture and military rape in colonial Cyprus. Britain’s conquest of a quarter of the planet was facilitated by a eugenics ideology in which the victims of imperialism were (whatever their ethnic identity) regarded as interchangeable lesser human ‘wogs’, a term that originated as a slur targeted at the African disapora but was used throughout the empire.

A Congolese man looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, and allegedly cannibalized, by the members of Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company militia. Photo by Alice Seeley Harris.

The extent of the death toll in colonial India was described by historian Mike Davis in his book Late Victorian Holocausts. Contradicting the media spin that colonial deaths took place over a much longer time period than the Nazi Holocaust, historian Amaresh Mishra in his book War of Civilisations: 1857 cited how the British, in putting down an Indian uprising, presided over “untold Holocaust” which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857.

The historian and former UN under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor recorded the figure of 35 million deaths attributable to the entire history of the British Raj in his books Inglorious Empire and An Era of Darkness. Again, this death toll is not mentioned on Holocaust Memorial Day.

The only qualitative difference between white settler Holocausts and Nazi crimes is that the Western empires and independent colonies relied on mixed military slaughter and methods derived from the theories of population sustainability popularized by cleric and scholar Thomas Robert Malthus, whereby disease and starvation were deliberately imposed on Indigenous peoples. The Nazis, by comparison, utilized the machinery of militarism coupled with Fordist industrialised methods. There is, however, no reason outside of racism and complicity in the ideology of global Western expansionism to explain away why black and brown deaths should be treated as somehow subordinate or second-class.

An early example of German empire envy illustrates the lack of genuine demarcation between Western colonial Holocausts and later Nazi crimes. In 1904, many years before the Nazis came to power, Germany exterminated 75 percent of the Herero tribe in Namibia (amounting to 60,000 people), and embarked on a horrific project of human experimentation on tribal survivors that was later resumed against Europeans—including an overwhelming number of western Jews—in Second World War death camps. For black historians like Clarence Lusane and Tina Campt, the Nazis simply brought Western colonial, eugenics-motivated slaughter back to the European mainland. Isn’t the corporate media being racially selective about which victims matter, simply replicating Nazi racist hierarchies?

Perhaps the answer is that racist double standards of the comparative value of human life and Nazi rhetoric are with us once again, covertly advancing the agendas of both the Israeli colonial project and those who champion the current manifestation of Western imperialism. Israel not only oppresses the Indigenous Palestinian population, it has subjected black Jews to long-term forced contraception injections, established neighbourhoods operating whites-only housing policies, and authorized hospitals to dump so-called ‘black blood’ donations as unclean. However, based on the ‘uniqueness narrative,’ the International Holocaust Remembrance Coalition (IHRC) working definition of anti-Semitism attempts to exempt Israel from scrutiny of racist practices. This begs the question: If Israel could stand up to examination on these issues, why would it need an exemption from scrutiny?

The US-led Western powers are responsible for over a million deaths in Iraq plus more across the region. In subsequent election campaigns, Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee suggested voters should ignore the death toll and instead vote New Labour on the basis of its alleged investments in infrastructure. This was a version of the old Nazi apologist mantra “never mind the death camps, look at the autobahn”. More recently, Nick Robinson of the supposedly impartial BBC characterised criticism of Western imperialism as “a failure to support our armed forces”. Interestingly, this is the same slur Nazis hurled at the German White Rose Peace activists they persecuted.

Much of the rhetoric supporting the new imperialism—particularly the spin of people like Nick Robinson—is based upon a traditional ‘civilising the primitive savage’ ideology. Within this framework, the black and brown peoples of the world are supposedly too inferior for their countries to be permitted to evolve, make mistakes and develop without violent Western exploitation. The enormous number of deaths from historic and ongoing conquests are subsequently ‘buried’ in corporate media coverage.

It is interesting to reflect, even on recent history, where these notions of innate Western superiority versus Indigenous inferiority have led us; sometimes characterised as ‘the onward march of Western civilisation’. Long after the Second World War, when the West had supposedly learned from failing to recognise the humanity of white Europeans, the stuffed and mounted bodies of black and Indigenous peoples were still to be found in Western museums as examples of ethnic primitiveness. The Negro of Banyoles, a controversial piece of taxidermy of a San individual, which used to be a major attraction in the Darder Museum of Banyoles, was only returned to Africa in 2000 after activists had shamed the neighbouring 1998 Barcelona Olympics and subsequently kept up their protests. The Royal Society of Tasmania kept Truganini’s remains until 1976 and the French only returned Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, in 2002.

Currently, it appears horrified indignation at racism is now only to be expressed within a hierarchy of victimhood, strategically sympathetic to those supporting a global ideology of the onward march of white Western civilisation.

Gavin Lewis is a freelance black-British mixed-race writer and academic. He has published in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States on film, media, politics, cultural theory, race and representation. He has taught critical theory, film and cultural studies at a number of British universities.