Jewish World ReviewNov. 12, 1999 /3 Kislev, 5760
Sam Schulman
The un-Holocaust
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
THE EDITORS of The New Republic have, correctly, demanded that the US
apologize for what was clearly a mistake: the bombing of the Al-Shifa
pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Based on the reporting of James Risen in the
New York Times, it's now clear that no one in our government had any
conviction that the plant was a terrorist operation even at the time. As the
editorial says, "Now, more than 14 months later, after repeated investigative
reports and repeated evasions by the Clinton administration, it is clear that
the missile attack was a mistake. It's time to say so."
I wonder when the courage will come to say "it was a mistake" about the
Yugoslavia bombardment. Do you remember Harvard professor Daniel Jonah
Goldhagen proclamation that
"Serbia's deeds are, in their essence, different from those of Nazi Germany
only in scale."
Bliss it was to be alive in those days of May. But now the
bad news is beginning to transpire: there was no holocaust of Albanians.
There are only a handful of mass graves. There was no genocide, no
Auschwitz, no mass extermination. In the face of this emergency, a grim and
desperate body count is going on to verify the NATO claims of 10,000, or
40,000, or even 100,000 dead.
Alas, it is failing miserably.
Last week,
one of the EU pathology teams, from Spain, pulled out in disgust. Its leader,
Dr. Pujel, was frankly disappointed. He told the Sunday Times that "I
calculate that the final figure of dead in Kosovo will be 2,500 at the most.
This includes lots of strange deaths that can't be blamed on anyone in
particular." His team had been prepared to perform 2,000 autopsies, which
would take him through November to get through. Instead, "On September 12 I
called my people together and said: 'We have finished here.' I informed my
government and told them of the real situation. We had found a total of 187
bodies. Four or five had died from natural causes." And few were in mass
graves.
It is sad enough that, under the cover of war, Serbs and Albanians killed one
another even in these numbers. It is criminal that, under the protection of
UN forces, Albanians are now killing Serbs with virtual impunity, and are
finishing the job of ethnic cleansing the KLA was formed to undertake a
decade ago.
And it is a profound horror that our government undertook a war
against unarmed civilians in order to prevent a genocide that was not taking
place, and to stop a mass deportation that had not happened. Moreover, they
did so in a way that inflicted killing solely on civilian targets: over 1,000
Serbian citizens were killed by our bombs, but only a handful of Milosevic's
soldiers lost their lives. The New York Times reported recently that only
the conviction that an invasion was about to be undertaken brought the war to
an end; and implied that had such an enterprise been threatened at the
beginning, the 89 days of civilian bombardment would have been unnecessary.
And not only western governments, but those among us speaking in the name of
the Holocaust bear particular responsibility for this outcome. Who said this
(and I apologize for inflicting this rotten prose upon your ears):
"Any people that commits such deeds in open defiance of international law and
the vehement condemnation of virtually the entire international community
clearly consists of individuals with damaged faculties of moral judgment and
has sunk into a moral abyss from which it is unlikely, anytime soon, to
emerge unaided. The majority of the Serbian people, by supporting or
condoning Milosevic's eliminationist politics, have rendered themselves both
legally and morally incompetent to conduct their own affairs and a
presumptive ongoing danger to others."
Again, this is Professor Goldhagen, whose book arguing that the entire German
Volk were complicitous in the holocaust has had great influence. But who can
believe his historical work now? He clearly judgment and common sense are
clearly as faulty as his ear for the English language. He imputes guilt to
an entire people in the same language of race-theorists and nationalists he
thinks he decries. One heard the same imputation of blood-guilt on the Serbs
in many other Jewish writers at the time.
Even Elie Wiesel brings out his
memories of the historical Holocaust in order, coyly, to try to understand
the stories he was told in the KLA refugee camps. "What I saw and heard there
was often unbearable to the survivor that still lives in my memory. In fact,
I never thought that I would hear such tales of cruelty again." And now it
may turn out that the tales of cruelty may, many of them, be nothing but
tales.
I think that the age of the Holocaust may be coming to an end. And the
Kosovo warriors have hastened its demise. Curiously, the deed was done not
by Holocaust-deniers, but by Holocaust-affirmers. On the one hand, there are
those who have permanently debased the currency of the Holocaust by seeing in
every war, in every bit of cruelty or bullying, another holocaust. On the
other hand, there are the academic Holocaustorians, who, as Gabriel Schonfeld
has so brilliantly shown, have taken the holocaust out of history and
politics, in which its study belongs, and reduced it to trivial social
science. No wonder that "Holocaust scholars" are reduced in desperation to
applying academic fads to the death camps, wondering not how it happened, but
whether Anne Frank would, had she not been carted off to a death camp,
murdered, and buried in a unmarked grave, or perhaps her bones ground to
dust-have become a lesbian when she grew up. (The answer? Good news! She
would have been!).
The Holocaust was not people bullying each other, not people carrying out
vendettas against one another, not people being moved at gunpoint out of
their homes, not people being put on trains and sent away from their country,
not reprisals and guerrilla warfare, not teenaged girls being pinched or
slapped by teenaged boys. All these things are bad enough in their own
right. But it's too late. The Holocaust, as it really was, is over. Its
usefulness has come to an end. And I fear now for its
memory.
Sam Schulman Archives
JWR contributor Sam Schulman is deputy editor of Taki's Top Drawer, appearing in New York
Press, and was formerly publisher of Wigwag and a professor of English at
Boston University. You may contact him by clicking here.
©1999, Sam Schulman
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