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Nazi Genocide

 

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Author: John P Fox

26 October 1999.

"The Holocaust was the apex, or nadir, of anti-Semitism [and] it is this tradition that led to and supported the Nazi Endlosung" (Robert Michael, 26.10.1999).

Would Robert Michael care to explain, if he can:

  a) why it was, in the whole of modern European history, that only under the National Socialist dictatorship of Adolf Hitler - but never before, and never since - that the attempted extermination of a mass of European Jewry was put into effect? And that, in the especially extreme context of the Russo-German war of 1941-45.
  b) what, in the meantime and afterwards, happened to all the rest of supposed European "anti-Semitism"? Was that murderously genocidal as well? If so, why did "it" not act as Hitler did?
  c) why, if the supposedly genocidal anti-Semitism Michael is talking about - and here one must presume that what is meant is the usual simplistic misnomer notion of so-called "Christian" anti-Semitism - why was it that late on the evening of 7 April 1933, Adolf Hitler swore to a group of colleagues that he was determined "to eradicate Christianity in Germany root and branch"? How, now, Robert Michael for this usual simplistic connection between "Christianity" (whatever that meant in practice for non-Jews), anti-Semitism, and Nazi genocide?
  d) why, in common with millions of other Europeans after the Great War and the Russian-Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Hitler totally identified Jews with Bolshevism in his speeches and other political formulations in the 1920s and beyond - in other words, placing "the Jews", but in this context the Russian Jews, into a completely and totally different category from their usual historical category in the European experience?
  e) why the systematic extermination of Jews in the Second World War only began as of 22 June 1941 in connection with the anti-Bolshevik ideological war of National Socialism against Russian Bolshevism, and not before? For, if Michael's repetition of the usual run of simplistic arguments and tendentious connections is to be taken as the gospel truth about the origins of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, he, Michael is required to explain this: why not before, in the middle of Europe, where supposed "Christian anti-Semitism" was supposed to have been alive and kicking?

At the end of this murderous century of ours, I find myself increasingly fed up with some of the utter nonsense which is spread around about anything connected with the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Even this week in the London "The Times", we are told that "the Holocaust" happened in 1939, because that was when a British "spy" in Berlin up to August 1939, Frank Foley, supposedly "rescued" German Jews "from the Holocaust"! And some people prattle on about "education" about "the Holocaust"? Amazing.

What I also find quite utterly offensive, from a humanitarian point of view, is the British Government's submission to the pressure it has sustained from the (British) Holocaust Educational Trust, that there be a special "Holocaust Remembrance Day" established in the United Kingdom. A week ago yesterday, on Monday 19 October, I was interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 "Today" programme [reported on in "The Times" on 20 October], where I outlined my opposition to this measure since use of the term "the Holocaust" would wipe out from the historical memory the other victims of Nazi genocidal policies (some 10-12 million of them), let alone the tens of millions of other victims of other genocides this century.

Instead, I suggested that what should be implemented now is an "International Genocide Day". Such a day would remember all victims of genocide, not merely one group alone who suffered an horrific genocide, but a genocide no less or more horrific than that suffered by other victims of genocide.

John P Fox

 
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New York Times article on Lipstadt Case, June 26, 1999 | Auschwitz Index | current AR-Online

Mr Irving:

I TAKE....

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