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“The Holocaust” Is a Myth That Conceals Our Shame

By Kevin Barrett • Unz Review • April 15, 2019

“Most of the time ‘history’ is institutionally engaged in concealing our shame.” —Gilad Atzmon

I love the words, music, and soul of my Israeli-born truth jihadi brother Gilad Atzmon. In fact, I enjoy his company so much that just about every year I take up the largely thankless task of organizing a public event for him here in Israeli-occupied Madison, Wisconsin. Last year the local Israeli Occupation forces got Gilad banned at the last minute from Wil-Mar Community Center. The director refunded our money and told us, in so many words, that Wil-Mar’s obligatory suppression of free speech was all about the Benjamins. So we directed people down the block to the Orton Park rotunda, the local equivalent of Hyde Park Speakers Corner.

One of Gilad’s most memorable lines was: “History exists to conceal our shame.” Citing Lyotard, who asserts that the real historian’s task is to unveil the shame, Gilad has analyzed such events as the Balfour Declaration. According to Gilad, the official history of the Balfour Declaration as a magnanimous gesture by the powerful British toward the oppressed Jews exists to conceal the shameful truth: It is the Britons (not to mention the Palestinians) who were and still are oppressed by the Zionist Jews, not the other way around.[1] This truth is shameful to both Britons and Jews. It is shameful to Britons that they have allowed themselves to be used in such degrading fashion. It is even more shameful that they have been unable to face the awful reality for 100 years and counting. Likewise, it is shameful to Zionist Jews that they have profited mightily by posing as the oppressed, when in truth they are the oppressor. And of course there is the shared British-Jewish shame at enabling and perpetrating the Palestinian Holocaust.

Now some might argue that Gilad’s analysis is correct insofar as it uncovers British shame. The Brits, after all, are the world’s leading experts in hyper-politeness and its shadow, shame, which emerges into the light when polite pretenses fail.

But the Jewish Zionists, the argument continues, are utterly shameless. Their intelligence agency’s motto is “By way of deception thou shalt do war.” How shameless is that? About as shameless as the Lavon Affair, the USS Liberty massacre, and 9/11, that’s how shameless. The Zionists’ one-word slogan (and future epitaph) is chutzpah, a word whose definition is: “That quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.” Like the psychopath, the guy with chutzpah always plays the victim, especially when he is victimizing others.

French historian Laurent Guyénot analyzes Jewish-Zionist shamelessness rather brilliantly in his article “Israel, the Psychopathic Nation.” (For the full story, read his masterpiece From Yahweh to Zion.) Guyénot notes that this psychopathic shamelessness is orchestrated by a manipulative, profiteering tribal elite. Most ordinary Jews are not aware that their collective behavior is so shamelessly psychopathic. Guyénot’s insight helps us understand how Zionist Jews, like Britons, are being manipulated by the lying, shame-concealing historiographers.

The notion that “’history’ is institutionally engaged in concealing our shame” obviously applies to the Holocaust. This fact is admitted, even highlighted, by official historiographers. But they look only at one side of the story.

The Official Story: “Holocaust Denial” Conceals Nazi Shame

Defenders of orthodox Holocaust history claim that holocaust revisionists conceal their shameful sympathy with Nazis who killed six million Jews. This is in fact the main argument against “holocaust denial” in such books as Shermer and Grobman’s Denying History and Deborah Lipstadt’s Denying the Holocaust. That this argument is an empty ad-hominem with no relevance to the empirical issues in question does not seem to have occurred to these authors.

The reductio ad absurdum of “Holocaust denial conceals the shame of the gas chambers” is Keith Kahn-Harris’s Denial: The Unspeakable Truth. The author claims that “Holocaust denial is not just eccentricity; it is an attempt to legitimate genocide through covert means. Denials of the harmfulness of tobacco, of the existence of global warming, and other denialisms, are, similarly, projects to legitimate the unspeakable.” This suggests a very useful all-purpose argument, suitable for any occasion or topic: “Anyone who disagrees with me does so to conceal their secret love of mass murder.” The next step: “Anyone who disagrees with me is a mass murderer and should be executed.” A fine excuse to kill your opponents en masse! This would be funny if they weren’t already locking people in maximum security prison, destroying YouTube livelihoods, and burning books because the individuals so targeted had the temerity to disagree with the likes of Keith Kahn-Harris. It may be only a matter of time before the executions commence. One hopes they will try to use Nazi-style hydrogen cyanide gas chambers, which would drastically limit their ability to actually kill significant numbers of dissidents.

But Kahn-Harris, Lipstadt, Shermer and Grobman, and other gatekeepers are not entirely wrong. There is a grain of truth somewhere in those vast, arid sand dunes of ad hominem bullshit. It is true that some people of German heritage like Ernst Zundel, Germar Rudolf, and Monika Schaefer voice their own versions of history in part to dispel the guilt and shame that the sacred narrative of the Holocaust has laid on the heads of the German people. Monika Schaefer speaks eloquently about this legacy of shame in her masterful YouTube Sorry Mom I Was Wrong About the Holocaust, which should have have been awarded “best foreign short documentary” at the Oscars, but instead won her a year in maximum-security lockup.

If it is partly true that some Holocaust revisionists spin their histories to conceal or absolve shame—and I personally believe that National Socialist Germany’s treatment of Jews among others was in fact shameful, regardless of the extent to which the conventional history of the Holocaust may be false or exaggerated—it is obvious that the conventional story is “institutionally involved in concealing our shame.” By focusing so relentlessly on the metaphysical evil of the big-H Holocaust, our cultural custodians conceal the at least equally shameful behavior of World War II’s victors.

“The Holocaust” Conceals the Shame of World War II

The real Holocaust, of course, was the war itself. 70 million people were massacred, two thirds of them civilians. Those nearly 50 million civilians were singled out for extermination on the basis of their ethnicity, just as surely as a vastly smaller number of Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs may have been by the Reich. When the Allies firebombed Dresden, which was not a military target, more than 100,000 innocent civilians were deliberately burned to death for the crime of being German. Centuries of German cultural achievement, too, went up in flames. Now that is a real holocaust: a gratuitous burnt offering.

And Dresden is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Anyone who honestly explores the history of the deliberate Allied firebombings of civilians, the respective treatment of prisoners by both sides, the atrocities against Germans during the invasion and occupation of their homeland, the firebombings and nuclear bombings of Japanese civilians, the brutal torture that elicited false confessions from “Nazi war criminals,” and so much more, will inevitably conclude that, as Pogo might say, “We have met the Nazis and they are us.”

Not convinced? Listen to my interviews with:

• MS King, author of The Bad War;
• Tom Goodrich, author of Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947;
• Gerard Menuhin, author of Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil;
• James Perloff on “myths and realities of World War II.”

For those who would rather read than listen, I recommend Ron Unz’s “American Pravda: Post-War France and Post-War Germany” and more generally the excellent collection of World War II articles at Unz.com. And concerning the shameful way the US was hoodwinked into joining the demonic bloodbath euphemistically known as World War II, Gore Vidal’s novel The Golden Age offers more truth, disguised as fiction, than most supposedly nonfictional histories.

We Americans, of course, are not the only ones who recount dubious histories of World War II to conceal our shame. Russia, too, demonizes Hitler and bans “holocaust denial” to hide its own shameful Stalinist history and its own war crimes against Germans. Japan minimizes both its own crimes and the crimes committed against it—the former for obvious reasons, the latter to save face in light of seven decades of shamefully abject submission to its criminal civilian-nuking occupiers. France pretends that most 1940s Frenchmen were partisans of the “heroic resistance” and that only a tiny minority supported the “evil Nazi collaborator Pétain,” when the reality was precisely the opposite.

What broader conclusions might we draw about the role of history as a shame-concealment mechanism? Our best guide along these dark and twisted paths is René Girard, the recently-deceased Stanford professor who taught that all culture is based on a murder and a lie. The primordial murder, according to Girard, is the lynching of a scapegoat. This act of human sacrifice forms the basis of every culture, the foundation of every myth. It occurs when the group’s mimetic-desire-driven rivalries get so out of hand that mass mayhem is in the offing. Suddenly the group turns in unison against a scapegoat—usually a marginalized or powerless figure—and murders them. Shared blood-thirst, murderous exaltation, and guilt solves the rivalry problem and re-unites the group. But the unifying blood-guilt cannot be admitted to. The reality is too tawdry and horrible. So a myth—a sacred lie—gradually takes shape around the memory of the victim. Surely the victim must have had some sort of miraculous sacred power, since (by being murdered) the victim has solved the rivalry problem and brought unity and cohesion to the group! Soon a monument is designated or erected in honor of the “sacred victim,” who eventually becomes a minor or even major deity, to be propitiated in annual sacrificial rites that commemorate and disguise the original act of primordial slaughter.

Every culture is held together by foundational myths based on this template. Pagan gods are just distorted memories of slaughtered scapegoats. The Abrahamic religions sublimate sacrifice by asking Abraham and his descendants to stop scapegoating and sacrificing their children (a ubiquitous practice in the ancient Mediterranean and elsewhere) and to kill and roast a sheep instead. Christianity goes one step further and makes Christ the scapegoat to end all scapegoats and the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. (That didn’t work out too well, did it?) In all of the above cases, foundational sacred stories, a.k.a. myths, arise to explain how the society in question began, and to justify its current ways.

Secular mythologies, too, are rooted in repressed memories of sacrifice and blood-guilt. The foundational myth of the Enlightenment, with its deities of reason, progress, and tolerance, grows out of the sacrificial bloodletting of the Wars of Religion and the accompanying witch-burnings and heretic-huntings. The foundational American myth of the Revolution and its Founding Fathers conceals the shame of equally horrific fratricidal bloodletting of a scale and ferocity that most Americans today have never heard about—because the “history” taught in our schools exists precisely to erase that shame. Likewise with the Civil Rights mythologies that emerged from the oceans of gore spilled in the Civil War.

Girard’s theory explains the otherwise inexplicable “sacred victim syndrome.” Why is Arlington Cemetery so sacred, especially on Memorial Day?[2] Why are people who ask questions about 9/11 silenced by screams of “You’re insulting the victims”?[3] And why is it sacrilege and blasphemy, punished by maximum-security-prison time in many leading Western countries, to question the sacred six-million-victim Holocaust?

Differences between political cultures are largely based on the degree of divergence of their foundational mythologies. For Zionists, Jews in general, and the sacred six million in particular, are eternally sanctified victims, in whose name the most appalling excesses are legitimate and necessary. For Palestinians, by contrast, the martyrs murdered by the Zionists, emblematic of all displaced and thus “sacrificed” Palestinians, are the sacred victims at the foundation of the political mythos of Resistance.

Similarly, for Americans, the nearly 3000 people murdered on 9/11/2001 are sacred victims who deserve honor and commemoration on each anniversary of “Black Tuesday.” (The 9/11 sacrificial rites, designed by Philip Zelikow and other specialists in “the creation and maintenance of public myths,” were engineered to bring about this convergence of Israeli and American mythology.) Non-Westerners, especially Muslims, are more likely to remember Madeleine Albright’s comment that America’s murder of half a million Iraqi children under the Clinton regime was “worth it.” Many are aware that the US has killed 27 million Muslims in the continuing holocaust set off by 9/11. For them, it is America’s victims, not its victimized, who are more notable as well as vastly more numerous.

If, as Girard said, all culture is based on murder and lies, can we ever stop killing and lying? Marxists think a materialist utopia would do the trick. But murderous and uncontrollable mimetic-desire-driven envy is ubiquitous, even (especially) among those whose material needs are fully satisfied.

Liberal-progressive types seem to think that exposing relatively harmless bits and pieces of their own culture’s shameful histories might help. Take Howard Zinn—please! When liberal progressives reveal the shame of slavery and oppression of women, they are really buttressing the modern secular-progressive myth that celebrates the “progress” that “we” have supposedly made—concealing our shameful slaughter of 27 million Muslims in the 9/11 wars on the grounds that “they” oppress women, adhere to traditional religion, and in other ways remind us of our own hated, barbarous ancestors. If people like Zinn really wanted to stop their own countries from murdering millions, they would attack and annihilate the myths of the Holocaust and 9/11. But that is the furthest thing from their minds. Why? Because they are complicit in the murder of millions, and they desperately desire to conceal that complicity.

Likewise all of the supposed “identification and sympathy with victims” displayed in today’s fashionable deification of sexual deviance serves to cover our ongoing mass murders of dozens of millions of real victims. By casting homosexuals, an economically privileged class, as sacred victims, we conceal our shameful massacres, displacements, and exploitations of the genuinely poor and downtrodden (most of whom don’t care much for homosexuality) including those in our own country. It seems that the scam of leveraging fabricated or exaggerated victimhood for tribal solidarity and profit, which should have been copyrighted by the Jews, has now been subjected to multiple copyright infringements—which would certainly make for an interesting and revealing series of lawsuits. But even the ADL doesn’t have quite that much chutzpah.

If Marxism and secular-progressive materialist liberalism can’t solve the murder-and-lies problem, whatever possibly could? Traditional religion seems to have a mixed record. Though Girard argued that Christianity exposes the scapegoating mechanism (“Oh shit! We just lynched God!!”) and is responsible for all of the alleged progress in humanitarianism since then, the historical record does not really bear this out. Still, it must be admitted that real Christians, like the Mennonite, Amish, and Quaker farmers here in western Wisconsin, excel at eschewing participation in America’s periodic orgies of sacrificial carnage. Likewise, real Muslims, unlike secularized Uncle Toms and obscurantist Wahhabis, are blessed with unusually peaceful souls and communities, as anyone who has lived among them knows.

Ultimately it is the mystical dimension of traditional religion that holds the most hope for overcoming the murderous lies at the heart of human nature and culture. The mystics have a novel interpretation of sacrifice: Instead of materially murdering the Other, we must learn to spiritually sacrifice the Self. The Sufis call this fana’, the annihilation of the ego (the Self that Commands Evil). This spiritual self-sacrifice liberates us from desire, the goal of Buddhist teaching as well. Those who have achieved such an overcoming-of-self enjoy the freedom to reject the desire-driven Girardian scapegoating mechanism, and step outside of its myth-based cultural constructs into the light of al-Haqq: an Islamic term that translates as Truth, God, Reality.

Notes

[1] One obvious example of Jewish power and British powerlessness is the ongoing witch-hunt against Jeremy Corbyn and the non-Zionist wing of the Labor Party. Another was related to me by Gilad Atzmon himself: When he fled Israel and arrived in London, Gilad, despite his anti-Zionism, was born Jewish, and therefore able to plug into the local Jewish network and make lots of easy money playing rigged games in London real estate. There was so much kosher money available, Gilad said, that he eventually had to quit in order to save his soul and his sanity. Obviously nobody of any other ethnicity could land in London nearly penniless and friendless and receive such a lavish sinecure on a silver platter. But well-connected Jewish nepotism networks exist everywhere where wealthy Jewish communities are established, offering Jews power and privileges that non-Jews do not enjoy.

[2] Answer: Because we still sacrifice our children—only now in wars instead of on bloody altars—and are lying about it, as we must if we are to live with ourselves.

[3] And why have the forces of repression been so successful at deplatforming alternative media using the “insulting the victims” ploy? Those figures in the alternative media who have come off as insensitive in the way they talk about alleged victims and survivors at Sandy Hook and elsewhere have provided their opponents with a perfect excuse to silence critical voices in general.

April 14, 2019 - Posted by aletho | Book Review, Timeless or most popular | Zionism