The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Foreward to the 2nd Paperback Edition

Foreward to the 2nd Paperback Edition
Posted by Jeffrey (Guest) - Saturday, October 25 2014, 3:07:51 (UTC)
from 173.13.27.45 - 173-13-27-45-Michigan.hfc.comcastbusiness.net Network - Windows NT - Mozilla
Website:
Website title:

I read the following three times over recently. I decided to share it with the forum, because of how well it is written. Any emphasis below, in bold, is mine. This is taken from the Foreword to the 2nd Paperback Edition of "The Holocaust Industry" (Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering) by Normal G. Finkelstein.

-=-
..."Apart from an abundance of ad hominem slurs, criticism of my book has fallen largely into two categories. Mainstream critics allege that I conjured a “conspiracy theory,” while those on the Left ridicule the book as a defense of “the banks.” None, so far as I can tell, question my actual findings. Although the explanatory value of conspiracy theories is marginal, this does not mean that, in the real world, individuals and institutions don’t strategize and scheme. To believe otherwise is no less naive than to believe that a vast conspiracy manipulates worldly affairs. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith observes that capitalists “seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.(1)” Does this make Smith’s classic a “conspiracy theory”? Indeed, “conspiracy theory” has become scarcely more than a term of abuse to discredit a politically incorrect sequencing of facts: to maintain that powerful American Jewish organizations, institutions and individuals, in league with the Clinton administration, coordinated their assault on the Swiss banks is thus alleged to be prima facie a conspiracy theory (not to mention anti-Semitic); but to maintain that Swiss banks coordinated an assault on Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust and their heirs can’t be called a conspiracy theory.

It is often wondered why I— a person firmly of the Left— would defend Swiss bankers. In fact I subscribe to Bertolt Brecht’s credo: “What’s robbing a bank compared to owning one?” Yet my concern in this book is not at all Swiss bankers or, for that matter, German industrialists. Rather, it is restoring the integrity of the historical record and the sanctity of the Jewish people’s martyrdom. I deplore the Holocaust industry’s corruption of history and memory in the service of an extortion racket. Leftist critics claim that I have made common cause with the Right. They seem not to have noticed the company they’re keeping— a repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums and hucksters as well as egregious apologists for American and Israeli power. It is a sad (but telling) commentary how little respect for the dead counts in the moral calculus of my critics on the Left, with their mind-numbing incantations about “the banks.” To a correspondent’s insinuation that she had neglected her father’s gravesite, Eleanor Marx– a remarkable militant in her own right— indignantly replied that “the roses she had put in six or seven years ago were to be replaced but this was not the season for it; that naturally she did not wish to disturb the ivy Engels had planted and... she and her sister were quite able to care for their parents’ grave. (2)”...

Norman G. Finkelstein
April 2003
Chicago


1 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: 2000), intro. by Robert Reich, p. 148.

2 Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx (New York: 1976), vol. 2, p. 632.



---------------------


The full topic:



Host: www.insideassyria.com
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:32.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/32.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf5/rkvsf_core.php?.7Rao.
Cookie: *hidded*
X-clickoncesupport: ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET4.0E)
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-length: 3786
X-onecom-forwarded-ip: 173.13.27.45
X-onecom-forwarded-proto: http
X-forwarded-for: 173.13.27.45
X-varnish: 846312769
Connection: close



Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9