Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Levene, M. 2008. The Meaning of Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, New York

Exclusive Holocaust Dominates Even in the Face of Increasing Publicity to Non-Jewish Genocides

This book discusses and compares many of the genocides in human history. But the Holocaust still gets most of the attention and all of the over-signification. I focus on this.

EXCLUSIVE HOLOCAUST DOMINATES, AND STILL BURIES ALL OTHER GENOCIDES

Levene writes, “…in the last decade, enough tomes on one particular genocide, the Holocaust, have been published to fill a large removal van? Part of the answer might be to question why this one genocide has received so much attention while other cases have received so little. Representations of the Holocaust as not simply the ‘genocide of genocides’ but as even the defining event of the twentieth century have, in recent years, become sufficiently pervasive in the Western consciousness and culture that one sometimes wonders at what point discussion about the possibilities of a broader landscape of genocide is going to surface properly.” (p. 1. Emphasis added). Good question!  And note the racist over-signification of the Holocaust as “the defining event of the twentieth century”.

EXCLUSIVE HOLOCAUST DOMINATES: NON-JEWISH GENOCIDES STILL MARGINALIZED

Author Levene continues, “Try and find a book on what happened to a range of other ethnic groups under the Nazis, or, for that matter, the Soviet regime, and one would have to start searching in specialist libraries and area studies periodicals for the information. It is not, then, that books on other genocides, some of which are accessible to a broad educated public, do not exist. Nevertheless, there is a relative paucity compared with what has been written in recent times on the specifically Nazi destruction of the Jews, while many fewer consider the linkages between this and other possible genocides. A dominant tendency [exists] within Holocaust scholarship, insisting on the absolute incomparability and uniqueness of this particular genocide…” (p. 2. Emphasis added).

MANY JEWS SUPPORT THE SUPREMACY OF THE HOLOCAUST

The author states, “For some, particularly many Jewish people, to suggest that any event, or item, is a genocide, other than the Holocaust, would be equally wrongheaded, not to say sacrilegious.” (p. 37).

Author Mark Levene also comments, “The problem is that if the Holocaust is utterly singular, not to say ‘unique’, it actually has the effect of subverting any attempt to define a more general category of genocide.” (p. 39). No excrement, Sherlock!

EXCLUSIVE HOLOCAUST DOMINATES: JEWISH INFLUENCE IS THE CAUSE

Levene candidly writes, “However, the fact that, in recent decades, the Jewish demographic worldwide has come to correlate more closely with the relatively open, pluralistic societies of the affluent West–especially in North America, when increasing Jewish economic success has generally combined with social acceptability and educational mobility–has clearly played a seminal role in the manner in which this particular genocide has gradually seeped into broader public consciousness. Jews are amply represented in Western universities and research institutes, where writing books and learned articles is a sine qua non. Beyond the ivory towers, publishing and media opportunities abound.” (p. 24. Emphasis added).

EXCLUSIVE HOLOCAUST DOMINATES, DESPITE THE FACT THAT HITLER DID NOT KILL ALL ACCESSIBLE EUROPEAN JEWS

The “totality of extermination” argument, the crown jewel of Holocaust uniqueness arguments, fails. Levene thus describes the Jews’ Holocaust, “Between 5 and 6 million, an estimated 72 percent of the Jewish population of the countries under Nazi hegemony.” (p. 70). These figures mean that 28% of the Jews under Nazi hegemony, that is, between 1.9 million and 2.3 million Jews, were not put to death. The Nazis skipped a lot of Jews.

Holocaust dominance is based on a fraud!