In the opinion, not of evil men, but of the best men, no belief which is contrary to truth can be helpful to. . .
John Stuart Mill
“Palestine appears a tragic mirage, Biro-bidjan a
bureaucratic farce. The Kremlin refuses to accept refugees. The “anti-fascist”
congresses of old ladies and young careerists do not have the slightest
importance. Now more than ever, the fate of the Jewish people—not only their
political but also their physical fate—is indissolubly linked with the
emancipating struggle of the international proletariat. Only audacious
mobilization of the workers against reaction, creation of workers’ militia,
direct physical resistance to the fascist gangs, increasing self-confidence,
activity and audacity on the part of all the oppressed can provoke a change in
the relation of forces, stop the world wave of fascism, and open a new chapter
in the history of humanity.”
Leon Trotsky
“Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and
of human relationships to a man himself.”
― Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question
This book is not without merit. Her study is well-researched
using new sources which draw on the testimonies of both survivors and
eyewitnesses, as well as rare photographs, to reveal the global nature of the
genocide perpetrated by the Nazis.
Bergen’s book adds to an already very crowded market. In his
excellent review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the
Marxist writer David North made the following perceptive point: “For all that
has been said and written about the Holocaust, it remains a strangely obscure
event. It is true that a vast amount of empirical data about the Holocaust has
been collected. We possess detailed information about how the Nazis organised
and executed their “Final Solution,” the murder of six million European Jews.
And yet the issues that are central to an understanding of the Holocaust—its
historical origins, political causes and, finally, its place in the history of
the twentieth century—have, with very few exceptions, been dealt with poorly.
This is, really, an intolerable state of affairs. The one basic question raised
by the Holocaust, “Why did it happen?” is precisely that to which it is most
difficult to obtain an answer.”[1]
I want to say that Bergen attempts to answer the question “Why
did it happen posed by North, but she does not even come close. Bergen’s work is
strong on empirical data and incorporates the ‘voices’ of the Holocaust, but
light on analysis. She says next to nothing about the betrayals of the
leadership of both the Stalinist German Communist Party and the German Social
Democratic Party, which allowed not only Hitler to come to power without a shot
being fired and led to the crushing of the workers' movement, which was a prerequisite
for the Nazis to murder 6 million jews.
Given the extent of her research and the fact that she makes
little attempt to examine the betrayals of Stalinism and Social Democracy, it
is not surprising that Bergen claims that there was little resistance to the
rise of the Nazis to power. Daniel Goldhagen, who praises the book on its back
cover, makes a similar point in his book.
Goldhagen writes: The Nazi German revolution … was an
unusual revolution in that, domestically, it was being realised—the repression
of the political left in the first few years notwithstanding—without massive
coercion and violence. … By and large, it was a peaceful revolution willingly
acquiesced to by the German people. Domestically, the Nazi German revolution
was, on the whole, consensual.
David North replies, “Until I read those words, I had been
inclined to look upon Goldhagen as a rather sad and somewhat pathetic figure, a
young man whose study of the fate of European Jewry had left him
intellectually, if not emotionally, traumatised. However, in this paragraph,
something alarming emerges. Except for its treatment of the Jews, the Nazi
“revolution”—Goldhagen does not use the word “counterrevolution”—was a rather
benign affair. His reference to the “repression of the political left” is
inserted between hyphens, suggesting that it was not all too big a deal. The
claim that the Nazi conquest of power was “a peaceful revolution willingly
acquiesced to by the German people” is a despicable falsification. What
Goldhagen refers to as the “repression of the political left” consisted, in
fact, of the physical destruction of mass socialist parties that represented
the hopes and aspirations of millions of workers and the best elements of the
German intelligentsia for a just and decent world. German socialism was not
only a political movement: it was, for all its internal contradictions, both
the inspirer and expression of a flowering of human intellect and culture. Its
destruction required the barbaric methods in which the Nazis excelled.”[2]
Given the right-wing nature of Goldhagen’s work, if this
were my book, I would not have him anywhere near it. There is no need for me to
examine Goldhagen’s previous historiography on the matter of Genocide, as this
has been more than ably covered by others, such as David North and Daniel Finkelstein.[3]
It would, however, be remiss of me not to discuss recent pronouncements by several
historians, including Goldhagen, on the ongoing Genocide carried out by the fascist
Israeli government in Gaza.
In a recent well-written and thoughtful article, the
historian Shira Klein wrote, “A chasm has formed between Holocaust scholars
concerning Israel/Palestine, deepening immeasurably since 7 October 2023.
Unlike previous controversies in the field, the divide is not just historical
or methodological; it revolves around academics’ role in the world today,
particularly the public stand they choose to take on Palestine/Israel and
Zionism. Two main camps have formed. Put reductively, one camp defends Israel,
while the other defends Palestinians, although differences between individual
scholars within each camp make for more of a spectrum than a clear-cut divide.
How, despite a diversity of ideas and foci within each camp, did two
academic-political antipodes solidify over several decades, and how has 7
October and the ensuing war widened the rift between them?[4]
Klein makes the point that scholars supporting Israeli war
aggression is nothing new and dates back to the illegal formation of the
Israeli state. What is a relatively new
phenomenon is the equating of criticism of Israel's genocide in Gaza with
anti-Semitism. One of the leaders of
this new movement is Daniel Goldhagen. Goldhagen, following the 11 September
2001 attack, wrote that “the internet and television’s biased stories and
inflammatory images of Palestinian suffering” were nothing but “globalised antisemitism.”
According to Goldhagen. Europe had exported its classical racist and Nazi
anti-semitism.to Arab countries, which they applied to Israel and Jews in
general.” Then the Arab countries re-exported the new hybrid demonology back to
Europe and, using the United Nations and other international institutions, to different
countries around the world.”15 In 2006, while Israel was curtailing
Palestinians’ movement with a massive separation barrier, Goldhagen contended
that “hostility to Israel is not, and never was, based on Israel’s policies.”[5]
In his book The Logic of Zionism: From Nationalist Myth to
the Gaza Genocide, David North opposes vehemently the slander that opposition
to Israel's genocide is antisemitic, saying this claim is absurd, given the significant
participation of so many Jewish people in the anti-genocide protests—including,
one could add, a developing movement within Israel itself.
He also points out the brazen hypocrisy of the howls of
“antisemitism” given the “open alliance of the imperialist powers with the
regime in Ukraine, whose principal national hero, Stepan Bandera, was a vicious
fascist and antisemite, the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated with the Nazis in the extermination of
the Jews of Ukraine. The establishment of the Zionist state was not only a
tragedy for the Palestinians; it was, and is, a tragedy for the Jewish people
as well. Zionism never was, and is not today, a solution to the historic
oppression and persecution of the Jewish people.”
He quotes the assessment of Leon Trotsky, who warned in 1938
that the Jews faced the threat of “physical extermination” in the coming war,
and declared in July 1940, one year after World War II had begun: “ The attempt
to solve the Jewish question through the migration of Jews to Palestine can now
be seen for what it was: a tragic mockery of the Jewish people. … Never was it
so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up
inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system”.[6]
Given that Bergen has not elaborated her position openly in
the press as regards the Israeli genocide, it is perhaps not surprising that
she has not distanced herself from Goldhagen's blatant right-wing stance.
She did, however, sign The Jerusalem Declaration on
Antisemitism, which, according to its website, “ Is a tool to identify,
confront and raise awareness about antisemitism as it manifests in countries
around the world today. It includes a preamble, definition, and a set of 15
guidelines that provide detailed guidance for those seeking to recognise
antisemitism to craft responses. It was developed by a group of scholars in the
fields of Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies to address
a growing challenge: providing clear guidance on how to identify and combat
antisemitism while protecting free expression. Initially signed by 210
scholars, it now has around 370 signatories.[7]
[1]
The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
[2]
The Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
[3]
https://newleftreview.org/issues/i224/articles/norman-finkelstein-daniel-jonah-goldhagen-s-crazy-thesis-a-critique-of-hitler-s-willing-executioners.pdf
[4]
The Growing Rift between Holocaust
Scholars over Israel/
Palestine www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14623528.2024.2448061
[5]
Daniel Goldhagen, “The Radical Politics of Islamic Fundamentalism,” SPME, 13
March 2006, https://spme.org/
[6]
The Only Salvation for the Jews (July 1940) The Militant, Vol. X No. 35, 31
August 1946, p.www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1946/v10n35/trotsky.htm
[7]
https://jerusalemdeclaration.org/