    The Personal is Political

    Rather ostensibly, Anglo-American political argumentation is gradually
    taking the form of a pornographic appeal to one’s empathy. It is
    grounded on a distribution of sporadic stories of personal pain. Once
    Blair or Bush feel the urge to flatten an Arab country, all they have to
    do is to provide their supportive media outlets with some painful
    personal accounts of an exiled dissident voice who would willingly and
    enthusiastically share with us some horrendous graphic details of his
    troubles at home. In most cases, we are then instantly predisposed to
    military intervention and we stand behind our democratically elected
    governments, collectively providing them with the mandate to kill in the
    name of freedom and democracy.

    As it happens, a given personal account, without even being verified or
    validated can easily become a legal indictment of a country, its
    leadership, a culture, a people and even an entire gender. Apparently,
    the phrase ‘the personal is political’ serves as an efficient political
    argumentative apparatus. While pre-WWII Western politicians tended to
    make us believe that politics must transcend beyond the personal and
    what may seem as contingent, within the post-WWII Western political
    discourse, as long as it serves the Western hegemony, the personal is
    nothing but political.

    As we know, it was different American feminists’ networks that were the
    first to call a war on the Talibans, spreading the personal accounts of
    some abused Afghani women. Whether consciously or not, they were laying
    the groundwork for Clinton and Bush’s war against Islam. Similarly, it
    was the personal accounts of the gassed Kurds of Halabja that were
    preparing the ‘international community’ for the war against Saddam. It
    was the personal accounts of Jewish survivors told after WWII that
    retrospectively justified the outrageous Anglo-American carpet-bombing
    of German cities towards the end of that war.

    In the past, I suggested a skeptical philosophical take of the notion of
    the personal narrative in the light of Heidegger’s Hermeneutic criticism
    of Husserl’s Phenomenology.[1] However, in the current paper I will
    engage myself with questions pertaining to the politics of the very
    shift from the personal to the political.

    Currently, our political commitment is in large part determined by our
    reaction to personal narratives. Whether it is the personal story of the
    female rape victim or a detailed graphic account of an exiled Halabja
    resident, the Western subject is now properly trained in reacting
    politically and correctly to any given personal account. In metaphysical
    terms, the Western being has managed to rise above and resolve the old
    problem of induction; it is now adept at easily deducing a general
    political rule out of a very singular tale. This isn’t a big surprise,
    at the end of the day, human beings do tend to generalise. In
    metaphysical terms we have learned to avoid doubts having to do with our
    general tendencies.

    But in fact it is slightly deeper: the shift from the personal to the
    political allows the Western subject to regard himself as an integral
    part of a cosmic ‘universal’, ‘liberal’ and ‘humanist’ order:
    collectively he reacts ‘humanly’ in a ‘single voice’ manner. Indeed, the
    empathetic sensation we detect within ourselves once confronting a
    personal traumatic account is an effective manipulative tool used rather
    often by our democratically elected leaders.

    Auschwitz the Message

    At least historically, it was within post-WWII Jewish discourse, both
    Zionist and anti- Zionist, where a clear tendency to present the
    personal as political could be easily detected. As bizarre as it may
    sound, Jewish discourse both on the right and left equally substantiates
    its argument by politicising the personal story of Auschwitz.[2]

    After all, this isn’t that surprising. Auschwitz is indeed a story of
    very many singular human beings who are exploited and reduced into mere
    livestock due to their sexual preferences, political beliefs and of
    course ethnic or racial origin. Yet, it was the personal accounts told
    by the liberated camp inmates that transformed WWII from the historical
    chapter and ideological insight that it was into a mere ‘political
    narrative’ not to say a solid political argument.

    At least politically, it is ‘Auschwitz the message’ that provides the
    Israeli government with (false) legitimacy to drop bombs on crowded
    Palestinian urban areas. At the end of the day, after Auschwitz, the
    Jews are now “entitled to defend themselves.” It is Auschwitz the
    message as well that entitles Norman Finkelstein, a child of Holocaust
    survivor parents, to say what he has to say and receive commentary based
    on this fact. Rather often Finkelstein would use his very personal
    background as a core of legitimacy. But then, thinking about it, if
    Finkelstein is indeed an academic scholar, presenting a solid argument,
    which I am totally convinced he does, then we must be able to address
    his arguments without any reference to his family background.
    Academically, we should be able to address his ideas regardless of his
    unique autobiography. Similarly, the moral ground to kill innocents in
    the name of Auschwitz is rather suspicious. As we all know, it wasn’t
    the Palestinians who sent European Jews to concentration camps in
    Poland. Within the heavy smoke invoked by the personal trauma, not many
    suggest to the Jews to redeem themselves of the personal traumatic
    discourse of justification. Such a suggestion is sometimes regarded as a
    form of Holocaust denial with some grave legal implications.

    But in fact, it isn’t Jews alone who are capitalising on ‘Auschwitz the
    message’. It is in the shadow of that very message that Americans allow
    themselves to kill millions of innocent civilians in the name of
    democracy and freedom. As we will see next, ‘Auschwitz the message’ is
    now deeply rooted within the core of the Anglo-American notion of
    democracy and liberal thinking.

    On the face of it, it seems as if the liberal Western subject is trained
    to believe that it is the lesson of Auschwitz that entitles us all to
    ground the political in the personal. Thus, it isn’t really a
    coincidence that the official Holocaust narrative had become the entry
    card into the Anglo-American or even Western discourse. Accordingly, it
    isn’t really a coincidence that Holocaust shrines are now sprouting up
    like mushrooms in every major Western capital. In the UK for instance, a
    permanent Holocaust exhibition occupies a large part of the Empire War
    Museum. Clearly, the Jewish Holocaust has very little to do with the
    general perception of British Empire History. In fact, the Empire has
    many other non-Jewish Shoahs to account for. Yet, the absurdity is even
    greater, it is rather crucial to mention that it was the British Empire
    that was so reluctant to help European Jews escape their doomed fate. It
    was Lord Bevin’s 1939 White Paper that stopped Jews from immigrating to
    Palestine when danger for their lives was immanent. It was the RAF that
    repeatedly dismissed the necessity of bombing Auschwitz. We have a very
    good reason to assume that the British decision to capitalise on
    Auschwitz and the Jewish Holocaust narrative is rather a highly
    calculated political move.

    A Holocaust memorial opened its gates in Washington a few years ago, yet
    it is very hard to cover the clear fact that Roosevelt did very little
    to help European Jews during the war. The American administration didn’t
    change its immigration laws between 1933-45 in order to prevent mass
    immigration of European Jews into the USA. Again, we have a very good
    reason to assume that the American decision to capitalise on Auschwitz
    and the Jewish Holocaust narrative is there to serve a very specific
    cause. Let me say it, this cause is not history per se, in fact it is
    there to undermine historical thinking and to cover up some crucial
    historical facts.

    Auschwitz is indeed a horrible story of a total abuse of human rights by
    a sovereign State. It is certainly a disastrous account of the violation
    of human liberty. Auschwitz is the ultimate story of violation of the
    most fundamental rights, Auschwitz is certainly a story of State
    terrorism and considering the fact that the Anglo-Americans present
    themselves as the guardians of human liberty, it is not surprising that
    Auschwitz settled comfortably within the core of English speaking
    cultural and political thought. This may as well explain why rather than
    being a historical event, Auschwitz has become a political argument
    grounded on a collection of graphic personal and biographical accounts.
    In some European countries Auschwitz has now become a legally sealed
    list of prohibitions and laws that are set to prevent any possible
    historical scrutiny. Unfortunately, the Holocaust and WWII are now
    covered with a heavy cloud of quasi moral smoke that blocks any serious
    treatment of the event, either scholarly or artistically.

    Auschwitz and the Holocaust are now realised mainly in political terms.
    Auschwitz is shaping the Western vision of history as well as the vision
    of any possible future. Moreover, ‘Auschwitz the message’ stands as a
    perceptual mediator and a gatekeeper of any possible Western political
    ideology. Unless you acknowledge and approve the way Auschwitz is
    considered, you are not allowed in. In case you do not know what I’m
    talking about, you may ask the Iranian president, surely he can tell you
    more about the subject.

    Needless to say, the vision of Auschwitz ‘the historical event’ is
    totally shaped by ‘Auschwitz the message’. In other words, any scholarly
    access into the Judeocide aspects of World War II is now totally denied.
    Furthermore, unless one approves and repeats the official Holocaust
    narrative, one may find oneself locked behind bars. This happened lately
    to three rightwing history revisionists who dared to suspect the
    official Auschwitz narrative. Regardless of what they have to say,
    whether one accepts their views or not, the idea of locking people up
    just for trying to shape our vision of the past is rather alarming. In
    fact, it means that we have totally failed in internalising the most
    crucial lesson of the war against Nazism. To employ thought police is
    exactly what totalitarianism is all about. To lock a historical
    revisionist up is to become a Nazi and the reason is simple: if
    Auschwitz is indeed a story of total personal abuse then denying freedom
    of speech is nothing but surrendering to the Nazi methods of personal
    abuse.[3]

    Admittedly, Auschwitz has now become the very essence of the liberal
    democratic argument. It is a timeless event, a crude and banal glimpse
    into evilness. It often takes new shapes and new faces. Yet, some
    parameters always remain the same. Within the Auschwitz ideological
    apparatus there is always clear binary opposition at stake. Auschwitz
    suggests a clear dichotomy between the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’, between
    the ‘open society’ and its ‘enemies’, between ‘West’ and ‘the rest’,
    between the ‘democratic man’ and the ‘savage’, between Israel and Iran,
    between the ‘Judeo-Christian’ and ‘Islam’ and most importantly between
    the ‘universal humanist liberator’ and the ‘dark oppressor’[4]

    Somehow, it is always the West that awards itself and itself alone with
    the legal capacity of enforcing the moral of Auschwitz. Somehow, most
    Western people still fail to see that within the emerging so called
    ‘cultural clash’, it is the Palestinians who are locked in a
    concentration camp named Gaza, they are obviously surrounded by the
    Israeli Vermacht and blitzed by American-made bombers dropped by
    American planes piloted by Israeli Luftwaffe top guns. Most Westerners
    fail to grasp that it is the West that is fighting an energetic
    Lebensraum expansionist war in the deserts of the Middle East. Why do we
    fail to see it? Because we are submerged within a dubious moral jargon
    that is there to impose some severe intellectual blindness upon us.
    Rather than thinking ethically and in categorical terms, we are giving
    in to the flood of shallow personal narrative rhetoric a la Blair and
    Bush. When those two were left with no forensic evidence to justify
    their illegal war in Iraq, they simply shifted their reasoning rhetoric
    to the Hitler-like Saddam Hussein. The invasion of the Iraqi oil
    reserves was retroactively justified by the necessity of removing the
    murderous tyrant. As strange as it may be, no one actually provided us
    with any real solid forensic evidence to back that very allegation of
    colossal breeches of human rights. Indeed, occasionally we saw some
    devastating mass graves exposed in the desert, but then a few days
    later, we would learn from an expert that those graves were actually a
    legacy of the bloody Iran-Iraq war. Worryingly, we have never asked for
    real evidence for Saddam’s crimes. We happened to be satisfied enough
    with some sporadic televised personal accounts. Apparently, we love to
    watch televised images of pain. As I mentioned before, we are
    enthusiastic about reacting collectively to a moral call.

    In the liberal democratic world, the elected leader is doomed to justify
    his wars, to back them with solid or at least convincing moral
    arguments. As it happened, Tony Blair had to stand in front of the
    Parliament and justify his latest illegal war. At the time of its
    occurrence, the British government had to justify the erasure of
    Dresden. Similarly, the American administration had to provide sound
    reasoning for the outrageous use of atomic bombs against civilians.

    Indeed, Western governments are inclined to providing us with some
    shallow ad hoc political and moral arguments that have the tendency of
    maturing into historic narratives. Yet, we do not have to accept those
    accounts. We are more than entitled to revise those ‘official arguments’
    and historic narratives. To understand the contemporary political
    rhetoric is to be able to study and criticise it. But then, to revise
    the present is to re-visit the past. At least categorically, there is
    not much difference between the erasure of Dresden, Hiroshima, Caen,
    Fallujah or Najaf.

    May I add at this point that I am totally convinced that denying
    Auschwitz should never have become a legal issue. The question of
    whether there was a mass homicide with gas or ‘just’ a mass death toll
    due to total abuse in horrendous conditions is no doubt a crucial
    historical question. The fact that such a major historical chapter less
    than seven decades ago is scholarly inaccessible undermines the entire
    historical endeavour. If we cannot talk about our grandparents’
    generation, how dare we ever say something about Napoleon or even the
    Romans? Personally speaking, I may admit that I am not that interested
    in the question above. I am not an historian, I am not qualified as one.
    Being trained as a philosopher, I rather ask ‘what is history all
    about?’ ‘What can we say about the past?’

    For me, the entire issue is purely ethical: challenging the dubious
    morality of the Western concern with Auschwitz is essential for the task
    of challenging those who kill daily in the name of ‘Auschwitz the
    message’. I am obviously referring here to Israel, America and Britain.
    Ostensibly, there is far more pain inflicted by those who maintain
    ‘Auschwitz the message’ than by those who dare challenging the
    historical validity of its official narrative.

    Is the Personal Political?

    Though there is a clear tendency amongst some major Western institutes
    to impose the personal as a political message all in the name of liberty
    and humanism, it is rather crucial to mention that this very political
    apparatus achieves exactly the opposite effect. Politically, it silences
    the very personal.

    Once the personal becomes political, the singular voice loses its
    importance and authenticity disappears. Once a society willingly
    endorses discourse based on a ‘correct’ collective empathy, first, the
    so-called ‘empathy’ is reduced into a mere ‘call’ rather than a vivid
    sensation, but most importantly, the voice of the genuine sufferer fades
    into the void.

    In other words, within the Western liberal apparatus the singular voice
    often gets lost. If humanism is indeed a universal value, then the
    particular and singular becomes a public asset, the victim serves an
    instrumental role, he conveys a universal message. Once the personal
    becomes political, morality becomes a private-like discourse of
    righteousness. Rather than a general ethical abstract rule grounded on a
    true reflection, we would start to hear some ad hoc, self-centred and
    half-baked moral arguments.[5] This may explain why rather occasionally,
    yesterday’s victims turn into today’s oppressors. For instance, it may
    explain why it didn’t take the Jewish State more than three years after
    the liberation of Auschwitz to ethnically cleanse 85% of the Palestinian
    indigenous population. Seemingly, the Jewish State has never matured
    enough to ethically endorse the moral lesson of the Holocaust. The
    reason is simple: as far as Israel is concerned, the Holocaust has never
    been realised as a general abstract ethical insight. Instead, it was
    grasped solely from a collective Judeo-centric perspective. The personal
    pain was properly politicised. A humanist would expect that young
    Israeli high school students who visit Auschwitz and confront their
    ancestors’ suffering would tend to empathise with the plight of the
    oppressed, and would identify with the Palestinians who are caged behind
    walls and starved to death at the hands of a nationalist racist regime
    seeking Lebensraum. Indeed the truth is shocking, less than a year after
    their visit to Auschwitz those same Israeli youngsters join the IDF,
    outwardly, they learned their political lesson in Auschwitz. Rather than
    taking the side of the oppressed i.e., Palestinians, they apparently
    willingly endorse some SS Einsatzgruppen tactics.

    But it isn’t only the Palestinians who happen to suffer from the
    politicisation and industrialisation of the Holocaust personal
    narrative. Once the Holocaust had become ‘the new Jewish religion’, it
    was the real, genuine victim who was robbed of his own intimate personal
    biography. The very private disastrous narrative has now become
    collective Jewish property. The real singular Holocaust survivor, the
    one who lived the horror, has been robbed of his very personal life
    experience. Similarly, within the extremist militant feminist view,
    which refers rapist qualities to the entire male gender, the genuine
    female rape victim is losing her voice. She is fading into the mass.
    Within the radical feminist political discourse the rape victim isn’t
    special at all: if all men are rapists, all women are victims.

    Finkelstein’s ‘Holocaust Industry’ teaches us that once world Jewry
    adopted the Holocaust as its new institutional communal bond, the
    Holocaust was rapidly transformed into an industrial affair. The real
    victims were left behind. The funds and reparation money that were
    allocated for their recovery and the restoration of their very human
    dignity one way or another found its way to some Zionist and Jewish
    organizations. Somehow, this makes a lot of sense. Once the personal
    Holocaust narrative has become a collective political faith, almost
    everyone is entitled to be an ordinary disciple or even a priest.
    Consequently, we are now entitled to deduce that within the
    politicisation of the personal narrative, no one is left to own a
    biography. We are left with a collective ecstasies mindset that draws
    its power from a set of communally shared floating personal accounts.

    Going along with the hermeneutic line of thought we may conclude that
    the political becomes personal.

    The Political is Personal, The Crucial Role of Jewish Neurosis

    The bizarre emergence of the so-called Israeli ‘3rd generation’, young
    Holocaust post- traumatic Israelis, is exactly that. It is a form of a
    new collective religious worshiping. To be a 3rd generation is to join a
    belief system. To be personally traumatised by a past one has never
    entertained. It is to assimilate within a heavily orchestrated political
    precept. In fact, the 3rd generation are locked within a vicious trap
    that leads towards total alienation: the more those young Israelis who
    were born a few decades after the end of the last great war claim to be
    traumatized by the Nazis, the less the rest of humanity can take them
    seriously. The less they are taken seriously, the more those young
    Israelis feel deprived of minimal human dignity and respect. The more
    they are deprived, the more they are fixated onto their new politically
    imposed notion of trauma.

    In a way, this is exactly the path towards religious isolation. The
    so-called ‘3rd generation’ are entangled within a narrative that leads
    towards a form of total alienation, a clear detachment from any
    recognised human cultural environment or reality. It is the religious
    zeal i.e., trauma, that shapes that reality. One would expect that this
    form of collective neurosis would mature into a cultural separation wall
    between Jews and others. Surprisingly enough, not only did this not
    happen, if anything, it is the other way around. The Jewish discourse is
    integrated as a central part of Western consciousness. While some Jews
    would insist upon liberating themselves from the Holocaust burden that
    imposed a clear stain of hopeless impotence on their collective
    identity, the Western political system needs the Holocaust and the Jews
    to be the carrier of its narrative. Furthermore, the West needs the
    Jewish neurosis. It is the myth-like shaped narrative that facilitates
    the political and the commercial hegemony in a world that loses its
    contact with any genuine abstract categorical ethical thinking. The
    Holocaust is taking the shape of a belief system and the traumatised
    Jews are serving as its altar.

    From a Western perspective, the Jews have an instrumental role in
    maintaining the liberal fundaments filling it with some devastating
    vivid poetic expressionism. This may explain why Holocaust denial laws
    are imposed in several countries, especially in countries where Zionist
    and Jewish lobbies’ influence is relatively minor. The Israeli scholar
    Yeshayahu Leibovitch, himself an observant Jew, noticed many years ago
    that the Jewish religion is dead, and that the Holocaust is the new
    religion uniting Jews around the world. I am inclined to agree that the
    Holocaust is now shaped as a religion. It is there to replace an
    anthropocentric ethical thinking. The Holocaust religion is there to rob
    the Western being of genuine ethical humanist thinking all in the name
    of humanism.

    The emergence and the evolution of the Holocaust belief system is the
    subject I will try to explore next.

    The Scientific, the Technological and the Religious

    I would like now to look at the evolvement of three major 20th century
    Western discourses: the scientific, the technological and the religious.

    The scientific discourse can be defined as a highly structured form of
    ‘knowledge seeking’. Within the scientific worldview, man confronts
    nature and tries to get to the bottom of it. The technological
    discourse, on the other hand, is far less concerned with knowledge
    gathering, it is rather orientated around the transformation of
    knowledge into power. The technologist would say, ‘It’s of no concern to
    me whether you are applying Newtonian mechanics or Einstein’s relativity
    theory, just make sure that you get me to the moon, (you may as well
    make sure that it doesn’t cost too much).’ On the face of it, both the
    scientific and the technological discourses set man apart from nature.
    Both discourses imply human detachment from nature. The reason is pretty
    simple, if man can get to the bottom of nature, then man must be somehow
    greater or at least a different quality to nature. From a technological
    point of view, if nature and the knowledge of nature are there to serve
    man, then man must somehow be superior to nature.

    Seemingly, these two discourses dominated the 20th century
    Anglo-American intellectual discourse. And since it was the
    Anglo-Americans who dominated our universe at least since the end of
    WWII, we are entitled to argue that these two thinking modes have been
    dominating the entire Western discourse for more than a while. In other
    words, to be Western in the 20th century meant to think scientifically
    and to act technologically. Accordingly, growing up in the West would
    mean, first learning to admire the scientist and to worship science,
    then gradually learning to applaud and consume technological
    innovations.

    Academically speaking, it was the positivist school that insisted that
    we should become more scientific and far less philosophical.
    Historically at least, it was the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers
    and scientists who aimed at eradicating any traces of metaphysics out of
    the body of scientific knowledge. For the logical positivists, ‘logical
    rules and empirical data are the only sources of knowledge.’ Needless to
    say, logical positivism was an attempt to strike against the diversity
    of human reality. As some of the readers of this paper would hopefully
    agree: emotions, feelings and aesthetic pleasure can be equally as
    important as sources of knowledge and even scientific realisation, not
    to say insight. Nevertheless, the logical positivists wouldn’t agree,
    they were full of contempt towards quasi-scientific knowledge.
    Psychoanalysis, for instance, was like a red rug to a bull, it was
    totally unacceptable. Logical positivism wasn’t just an attack against
    emotional and spiritual _expression, it was also a clear offensive on
    German philosophy. It was an unambiguous assault on German metaphysics,
    Idealism and early Romanticism.

    In 1936, following the Nazi incursion of Austria, there were no
    positivists left in Vienna, due to their ethnic origin they had to flee.
    Most of them found shelter in Anglo-American universities. I do believe
    that the overwhelming positivistic tendency within the post-war English
    speaking academic world has a lot to do with the forced immigration of
    those Jewish-German positivists. And yet, America has never been a
    scientifically orientated nation. Not ‘many’ scientific revolutions took
    place on the other side of the Atlantic. America is the land of open
    opportunities and science was no doubt a great opportunity.

    Rather than internalising the spirit of science, America was very
    efficient in transforming science into political and economic power. It
    was quick in allowing a bunch of exiled European scientists, most of
    them German Jews (as well as one Italian married to an Jewish woman), to
    build its first atomic bombs. It was very quick in embracing German
    rocket scientists who were enthusiastic enough to blast monkeys into
    outer space. The American intellectual world has never been too
    enthusiastic about abstract theoretical, not to say philosophical,
    questions. The very Germanic question ‘Was ist?’ didn’t really make it
    to the Anglo-American academic world. On the contrary, America has
    always been concerned with technological challenges. In other words, it
    is enthusiastic about the different mode of transformation of knowledge
    into power. America is all about technology, it is pragmatically
    orientated. Even within art, where America happens to contribute some
    major works of modern art and music, it didn’t take long before a market
    value was tagged. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what
    you may know about the origin of knowledge as long as you drink Coke,
    eat McDonalds, buy a Charlie Parker album and dream of owning an
    original by Kandinsky.

    It is within this very pragmatic approach that led to the rise of a new
    form of contemporary unique religious discourse. While the scientific
    and the technological approaches set man aside from nature, the new
    Western religion re-locates man deeply within nature. The new Western
    subject, very much like the rock and the tree, lacks any substantial
    sense of self-awareness or critical tendencies. Willingly and
    enthusiastically, the newly formed Western being tends to accept some
    readymade reality perceptions. Within this newly emerging mythological
    faith, Democracy is one God, the Holocaust is another. These two Gods
    support each other. Democracy is the blind praise of human liberty a la
    Natan Sharansky whom George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice repeatedly
    quote. Holocaust, on the other hand, is the story of the ultimate
    persecution and everlasting revenge a la Simon Weisenthal. Democracy is
    the matter, the noticeable and manifested glory with white houses and
    glass skyscrapers. The Holocaust is the spirit, the Holy Arc, that thing
    which you follow in the desert but can never enter, question or
    challenge. The Holocaust God is standing at the very core of the
    argument for democracy that allows the Anglo-Americans to insist upon
    ‘liberating’ the very few countries that still hold some energy
    resources or are found to be located strategically close enough to these
    resources.

    As we can see, the two Gods, Holocaust and Democracy, are cleverly set
    in a complementary relationship. The message is clear: unless Democracy
    is in place, a Holocaust is inevitable. Apparently, Anglo-Americans are
    using democracy as a political argument to violently expand their
    economic global hegemony. The less we are convinced by the democratic
    goddess, the less we believe our elected politicians and their illegal
    wars, the more we are dependent on an external supernatural paradigm.
    Auschwitz is exactly that paradigm. It is the ultimate supernatural
    narrative in which ordinary human beings become killing machines. It is
    the Auschwitz narrative in which the most culturally advanced nation is
    becoming a willing executioner a la Daniel Goldenhagen.

    The Holocaust God is there to sketch the alternative doomed reality. But
    as bizarre as it may sound, it is democratic America that has been
    lethally applying science against innocent civilians for over six
    decades. Whether it is Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, whether it is
    Vietnam or Iraq among many more places, the same story repeats itself:
    Anglo-Americans are killing en masse in the name of Democracy. There is
    always a clear valid moral cause behind their kill. Allegedly, lately
    they liberated the Iraqi people from the tyranny of the ‘Hitler-like’
    mass murderer Saddam. Yet, it is crucial to mention that although the
    Americans and their puppet Iraqi legislators had enough time to collect
    more than enough forensic evidence to incriminate Mr Saddam Hussein,
    they were unable to do so. On the face of it, Mr Hussein’s charges in
    court are negligible compared to the charges that can be already
    established against Bush or Blair. Obviously, what is true about Saddam
    is applicable to the other ‘Hitler-like‘ Milosevic. As we happen to
    learn, for the time being, very little as been established to convict
    the former Serbian leader, a man who was repeatedly presented to us as a
    mass murderer. Again, I am far from being judgmental here, I just follow
    the legal proceedings against these two ‘Hitler-like’ ex-tyrants.

    Here we come across the beauty and strength of religious belief. It is
    always flourishing in the regions of blindness. You can indeed love God
    as long as you cannot see him. You can join the party and hate Saddam as
    long as you know very little about him or Iraq. Worshipping and hatred
    alike are blind tendencies. Similarly, the strength of Auschwitz is due
    to its incomprehensibility. Auschwitz is feasible as long as it
    infeasible. Auschwitz is the modern-day burning bush, it is
    counterfactual. You can believe in it as long as you cannot comprehend
    it, as long as it doesn’t make sense, as long as it is beyond
    contemplation. Like a Holy Arc, you would follow it in the desert just
    because you aren’t allowed in. Auschwitz is the sealed sacred secret of
    the Anglo-American emerging religion. It is the unseen face of God
    delivered in a form of personal accounts. Once you question it, you
    challenge the future of Anglo-American life on this planet. Once you
    question Auschwitz, you become a modern-day Antichrist. Instead of doing
    that, you are highly recommended to kneel down and to approve the newly
    emerging burning bush mythology.

    History

    Within the Jewish orthodox apparatus history in general and Jewish
    history in particular are totally redundant. Simply, there is no need
    for such an intellectual endeavour, the Bible is there to set the Judaic
    thinking parameters. Judaically speaking, Saddam, Chmelnisky, Hitler and
    even Arafat are nothing but a mere repetition of the horrendous Biblical
    Amalek. With the Bible in place, there is no need to question the
    empirical and forensic validity of the different burning bushes and the
    Holy arcs. The Jewish belief is based on blind acceptance. To love God
    is to obey his rules. To be a Jew is never ever to question the
    fundaments. Apparently, there is no Jewish Theology. Instead, Jews have
    their Talmud: a collection of laws and rules. This perception is far
    from being stupid. It is rather logical and consistent. If God is indeed
    a supreme transcendental entity that exceeds any notion of space and
    time, then man is doomed to fail in comprehending him anyway. Thus,
    rather than philosophising on fundaments, Rabbis are mainly concerned
    with regulations. They are there to say what is Kosher and who is a
    sinner. Similarly, within the newly emerging Anglo-American religion, no
    one is supposed to raise questions concerning the Holocaust or WWII.
    Moreover, no one is supposed to ask what freedom, liberty, human rights
    and democracy really mean. The question of whether or not we are free
    beings is far too philosophical. Rather than suggesting an answer, we
    are confronted with the Rabbinical icons Blair and Bush who restrict of
    our freedom all in the name of freedom.

    Let’s leave the Iraqis out. Are we, the so-called West, liberated?
    Within the new Israelite Western religion, blindness is the way
    forwards. On the face of it, the complexity of the WWII narrative with
    its contradictions and discrepancies just contributes to its magical,
    fantastic and supernatural qualities. We better learn to accept the
    Hollywood take on WWII rather than adopting some silly sceptical
    approach. Indeed, it is the contradictions and discrepancies that turn
    the Holocaust into a vivid human story shaped as a religion. It is the
    inconsistencies that turn the Holocaust into a modern-day burning bush.
    Let’s face it, you cannot see God but you can clearly hear the voice of
    democracy and freedom echoing from within the cloud of smoke. Indeed the
    political is what is left out of that which was personal at one time.

    Appendix 1

    With their trousers halfway down I can see these three outlaws: Irving,
    Zundel and Germar, the three rightwing historical revisionists who
    happen to be locked behind bars. They are surrounding our precious
    shrine, rudely they are pissing over our emerging democratic miracle.
    Vulgarly, they question the validity of the personal narrative;
    foolishly they aim at establishing a rational, dynamic, lucid
    empirically grounded narrative based on forensic evidence. The three
    criminals are applying logical-positivistic methods. Pathetically, they
    follow the tradition of Carnap, Popper and the Vienna Circle. I wonder
    whether they realise that they happen to follow an academic tradition
    set by a Jewish secular Germanic school. Those ugly revisionists are
    aiming at truth-values, correspondence rules, empiricism. Shame on them,
    let them rot in hell. They fail to see that the West has moved forward.
    Listen you revisionists, you missed the train, we aren’t scientific
    anymore, we aren’t even technological. We are now deeply religious and
    we aren’t even theological about it. We are Evangelical, we take things
    on their face value and don’t ask me whose face is it. We want to
    believe. We are now religious and we will make sure that you do not
    interfere.

    Appendix 2

    Rather than suggesting a preferable historical narrative, I aim at
    grasping what history is all about. What are the conditions of the
    possibilities of any knowledge of the past? I am not an historian and I
    am not intending to be one, I am interested in the conditions that shape
    the historical narrative. When it comes to the history of the 20th
    century, we are locked within a strict tale that was imposed on us by
    the winners. True, history is the tale of the winners and yet the
    winners were and still are: capitalist, colonialist and imperialists.
    The question to be asked is how come the European left that
    traditionally opposed the above, tended to blindly buy the twisted tale
    of those ‘colonialist’ ‘capitalist’ winners? I assume that the fact that
    Stalin was amongst the winners has something to do with it. The fact
    that the left was itself chased by Hitler is probably another reason.
    Yet, USSR is itself part of our past, Stalin is gone and Leftists aren’t
    chased by Hitler anymore. The European left is now entitled to think
    freely. Supposedly we are now at liberty to re-view our knowledge of the
    past, we are entitled to re-ask questions and to try to re-solve some
    major discrepancies to do with WWII. I am not talking here about a
    truthful historical account, because unlike David Irving and his bitter
    academic opponent Richard J. Evans, I do not know what historical truth
    is. But I do understand what narrative is and I even realise what
    consistency means. I argue that not only are we entitled to revise
    history, we must do so and I will mention two reasons: A). If the left
    or what is left of it, won’t jump into this boiling swamp, WWII history
    and Holocaust scholarship will be left in the hands of the European
    radical right (politically and academically). I tend to believe that at
    large, this is already the case. While left academics are mainly
    concerned with signalling out Holocaust deniers telling us what is right
    and who is wrong, it is the revisionists who engage themselves in
    detailed archive work as well as forensic scrutiny. B). Those who
    dropped bombs over Dresden and Hiroshima have never stopped killing in
    the name of democracy. They are now engaged in a murderous occupation of
    Iraq and they are even planning to expand to Syria and Iran. If we want
    to stop them, we better re-visit our past and revise our image of
    Anglo-American democracy. We must re-arrange the 20th century. For the
    sake of a better future we must revise the past.

    Appendicitis

    It is rather clear that at least from an Anglo-American perspective
    Hitler wasn’t the enemy. Stalin, the Communist tyrant, was their real
    foe. Hitler had a very precise role. He was there to bash the eastern
    Communists on behalf of the West, he was there to flatten the Reds and
    so he did for a while. This may explain why no one in the West really
    tried to stop Hitler in the 1930’s. From an Anglo-American point of
    view, the moustached man fitted in rather nicely. It may explain why
    Hitler himself didn’t eradicate a third of the British army in Dunkirk.
    Why should he? These British soldiers were his allies to come. May I
    suggest that the fact that Hitler was actually serving Western interests
    explains why the Americans who joined the war in 1942, didn’t engage
    with him in a battle over central Europe until June 1944. Rather than
    fight Hitler in the main ground, they engaged in battles in North Africa
    and in Southern Italy. The reason is simple: They wanted Hitler to
    exhaust Stalin. They didn’t want to jeopardise his holy mission. Once
    Hitler lost his 6th Army in Stalingrad, the Western perception of
    Hitler’s role changed dramatically.

    Once it was clear that Hitler was losing to Stalin, there was a
    necessity to keep the Reds as far as possible from the British channel.
    Though the Allies presented themselves as the liberators of France, in
    fact they were raiding the beaches of Normandy speeding up to stop
    Stalin in central Europe. This may explain the devastation the Allies
    left behind them in Normandy. Liberators hardly slaughter the liberated,
    Anglo-Americans are apparently different.

    From mid-1943, the Allies enjoyed air superiority over Germany and yet,
    rather than dismantle the German army and it logistic targets, they
    concentrated on carpet-bombing German towns, killing hundred of
    thousands of innocent civilians with phosphorus bombs. After the war,
    Albert Speer was quoted saying that considering the Allies’ air
    superiority, a bombardment of German industrial infrastructure and
    logistic targets would have resulted in German military collapse in less
    then two months. I assume that the military reason behind the Allies’
    carpet bombardment is devastatingly simple. The Allies didn’t want to
    disturb the German Army that was fighting Stalin. Meanwhile, the Allies
    had many bombs and they had to drop them somewhere. Around 850,000
    German civilians died in those murderous military operations.

    Anglo-Americans do believe in attacking their enemies’ soft bellies.
    This is why British and Americans arrived at the war with tactic bombers
    (Lancaster, B-17 and B24). Within the Anglo-American tactical
    philosophy, heavy pressure of civilian population would benefit the
    offender. This may explain the fact that it was Churchill who was the
    first to use Blitz tactics, launching a heavy bombardment on Berlin in
    August 1940. In fact it was that move that led Hitler to retaliate and
    to divert Luftwaffe efforts from Britain’s southern airfields to London
    and other populated British cities (September 7, 1940). Indeed, it was
    Churchill’s cold decision that saved Britain from a Nazi invasion
    (Operation Sea Lion). Yet, we should never forget that it was Churchill
    who brought German retaliation to the British streets. This fact hardly
    finds its way into British history texts.

    Within the victorious narrative, the use of atomic bombs was necessary
    in order to shorten the war. Within the Anglo-American narrative, nuking
    Hiroshima and Nagasaki sounds almost like a humanitarian effort.
    Apparently, there is an historic chronological fact that doesn’t find
    its place into the English-speaking history curriculum. Two days after
    the Hiroshima bomb (August 6, 1945) the Soviets entered the war against
    Japan. It was that event which led the Americans to nuke Nagasaki just a
    day later. Clearly, the industrial liquidation of thousands of Japanese
    civilians was there to guarantee a rapid, unconditional Japanese defeat
    to the Americans and to them alone.

    I tend to believe that the Holocaust narrative that is forcefully
    imposed on us all is there to silence some alternative interpretations
    of WWII events. I do believe that if we really want to stop
    Anglo-Americans from killing in the name of democracy we better re-open
    a genuine debate.

    Stopping Bush and Blair in Iraq, stopping those warmongers from
    proceeding to Iran and Syria is a must. If history shapes the future, we
    need to liberate our perspective of the past, rather than arresting
    revisionists, we simply need many more of them. We must let go; we must
    Re-arrange the 20th century.

    [1] (Zionism and other Marginal Thoughts Counterpunch article). Husserl
    suggests that one can refer to ‘Evidenz’, which is a form of unmediated
    awareness. Accordingly, it is possible to experience a pure awareness of
    oneself. Husserl stresses that an individual’s self-awareness can convey
    an authentic form of knowledge.

    Martin Heidegger refused to go along with Husserl’s perception; he
    indeed exposed a major flaw in Husserl’s thought. According to
    Heidegger, unmediated awareness is actually hard to conceive. Human
    beings, he rightly said, do operate within language. Language is out
    there before one comes into the world. Once one enters the realm of
    language, a separating wall made of symbolic lingual bricks and cultural
    mortar thwarts one’s access to any possible ‘unmediated awareness’. Can
    we think without applying language? Can we experience at all without the
    mediation of language? As soon as we name or rather say - once within
    language - we can never be authentic anymore. It would seem that a
    comprehensive authentic awareness is impossible. Consequently, personal
    narrative, though plausible, can never convey an ‘authentic reality’, it
    is always shaped by a predated language and even cultural conditions.

    [2] The leftist may say, ‘being a son of a survivor, I am more than
    entitled to criticise the State of Israel, Zionism or even the
    exploitation of the Holocaust by Jewish organisations. On the contrary,
    the Jewish hawk would maintain that it is precisely the tale of
    Auschwitz told by his parents that gives meaning to the Zionist project,
    set there to prevent Auschwitz from repeating itself.

    [3] On a first glance it was very encouraging to learn that Deborah
    Lipstadt, the leading warrior in the war against Holocaust denial, was
    actually calling upon the Austrian authorities to let the Historical
    Revisionist David Irving free. "Let the guy go home. He has spent enough
    time in prison," she said. It didn’t take long to realize that what may
    sound like tolerance and forgiveness is in fact a cold instrumental
    maintenance of the official Auschwitz narrative. “I am uncomfortable
    with imprisoning people for speech,” says Lipstadt and stresses on, “Let
    him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens." We are entitled
    to assume that Lipstadt's concerns with Irving’s re-appearance have
    something to do with Irving's willingness as well as capacity to
    challenge the official Holocaust narrative. Seemingly, the American
    Rabbinical academics enthusiastically endorse ‘freedom of speech’ just
    in order to silence her foe.

    Apparently, Lipstadt isn’t alone. “If Austria wants to prove itself a
    modern democracy,” argues Christian Fleck, a sociologist at the
    University of Graz, “you use argument, not the law against Holocaust
    deniers.” BBC article . This indeed sounds like a proper argument you
    could expect to hear from a European scholar. Yet the Austrian
    sociologist doesn’t stop there; unwittingly, he presents what he regards
    as a correct academic argument: “Irving is a fool - and the best way of
    dealing with fools is to ignore them… Are we really afraid of someone
    whose views on the past are palpable nonsense, at a time when every
    schoolchild knows of the horrors of the Holocaust? Are we saying his
    ideas are so powerful we can't argue with him?" (ibid). Seemingly, Fleck
    is not fully familiar with basic logical formulation. To ‘use an
    argument’ isn’t to present a conclusion as a premise. Fleck’s academic
    duty is to prove beyond doubt that Irving is indeed a fool. This would
    mean something slightly more substantial than the ‘common knowledge of a
    schoolboy’. Again, without addressing Irving’s accountability, without
    referring to the validity of his arguments, we find ourselves learning
    about the current dubious notion of Western tolerance. I would argue
    that Fleck and Lipstadt alike are interested merely in an image of
    tolerance. Something that looks like freedom but in fact maintains
    hegemony.

    [4] It is rather important to mention at this point that that it is
    within the above very dichotomy where the Iranian president is singled
    out and left with no other option but endorsing what is seen by some as
    a Holocaust denial narrative. It is crucial to mention that the Iranian
    president is not alone, many Muslims and Arabs feel the same. Once
    Auschwitz becomes the symbol of reconciliation between Jews and
    Christians, Islam in general and Arabs in particular are left to be seen
    as a universal global threat. They are practically evicted from the
    Western discourse. If this isn’t enough, they are dispossessed of
    elementary human dignity. To a certain extent, the only way around it
    for them may be to dismiss the Holocaust altogether.

    “If you care so much about the Jews,” asks Ahmadinejad the Iranian
    president, “why don’t you take them back?” Although such a suggestion
    may sound bizarre at first, it indeed conveys logical and consistent
    deconstruction of the Auschwitz ideological apparatus at least from the
    point of view of today’s oppressed. At the end of the day, the Holocaust
    is a Western affair. Neither the Arabs nor the Muslims have anything to
    do with it. The Judeocide took place in the heart of Europe. If
    Europeans and especially Germans indeed feel unease with their
    collective past, they may have to consider providing the Jewish Israeli
    citizens with German passports rather than supplying the Israeli Navy
    with three brand new submarines furnished with nuclear facilities.
    Somehow, Germany prefers the latter option. I’ll let the reader guess
    why.

    It is rather crucial to mention as well that the Palestinians are
    ‘Hitler’s last victims’. No one can doubt the clear fact that it was
    indeed the Holocaust that transformed Zionism from being a marginal
    aspiration ideology into the motor and justification of a racist
    nationalist State. Thus, again, if the Germans feel uncomfortable with
    their past, it is the Palestinians whom they must look after. Let’s not
    stop there: if the Palestinians are indeed the last victims of Hitler,
    why aren’t they entitled to develop their own Shoah narrative?

    If I am correct here, then the unique left solidarity movement, which
    suggests accommodating a pro-Palestinian stand together with Auschwitz
    religious worshiping is doomed to failure (Al Ahram Weekly guest
    commentary). The two are conflicting not to say in contradiction. As
    long as Auschwitz fails to become a categorical ethical insight as well
    as an historic chapter, it is Auschwitz itself that stands in the core
    of the Zionist led oppression of the Arab people and Palestinians in
    particular.

    5] I would suggest at this stage to re-introduce Kant’s ethics.
    According to Kant, moral requirements are based on a standard of
    rationality he defined as the “Categorical Imperative”: "Always act in
    such a way that the maxim of your action can be willed as a universal
    law." Moral judgment is dependent on a procedure of self-reflection
    rather than the acceptance of a rule.