Liberation of Auschwitz
January 27, 1945
Holocaust Denial — The Truth of the Matter
– Dougal MacDonald –
The Holocaust was a program of systematic state-sponsored murder by the Hitlerite Nazis and their allies, the Italian fascists and Japanese militarists.
The word “Holocaust” must be understood in its broadest sense as referring to the mass murder of all those who were persecuted, imprisoned, tortured and murdered by the Nazis in Germany and the countries it occupied, especially the Jews and others targeted for extinction including the Roma and many Slavs as well as political opponents, especially communists and resistance fighters.
So too the Japanese carried out the Nanjing Massacre and many others in China and throughout Southeast Asia, while to this day they owe reparations to the Koreans for the crimes committed against them.
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While the Western powers initially collaborated and colluded with Nazi Germany with the hopes that it would wipe out the Soviet Union, they also wanted to crush Germany, because it threatened their economic and political interests.
The German Nazis wanted to crush everyone, especially the Soviet Union and, as the war progressed, they hoped for Western assistance to do so. Thus revanchism, war and aggression were the order of the day, instead of all countries sorting out matters on the basis of opening society’s path to progress.
In opposing the murderous Hitlerites, a great and heroic role was played by the anti-fascist resistance, especially in the Soviet Union, and by the brave fighters for all the resistance movements in Germany and the occupied countries, as well as the liberating armies from all countries which fought the Hitlerites, the Italian fascists and Japanese militarists, including the British, Canadians and Americans.
The living memory of many Jews from Eastern Europe of their direct experience with the Soviets in particular is very positive. Besides the undying gratitude of the world’s people for the sacrifices the Soviet Union made, such as at the Battle of Stalingrad, many Jews and others were provided asylum or were liberated by the Red Army, which they recall with utmost fondness and gratitude.
At the same time, because of the influence of Cold War anti-communism and Zionism, some have the tendency to spout anti-communist cold war ideology to oppose the former Soviet Union, or what to this day is called Stalinism to connote oppression and dictatorship. It is all done in a manner which is irrational and completely at odds with their actual experience.
Meanwhile, the mantle of the Hitlerite atrocities was inherited after the war by the Anglo-Americans who betrayed the cause for which the people of their own countries sacrificed their lives to liberate humankind from the scourge of fascism.
First they created a civil war in Greece killing communist fighters and demanding that all resistance fighters disavow communism and the resistance struggle and espouse the regime of the fascist military junta imposed on them. Then they adopted the Cold War anti-communist ideology to criminalize communism and disorient the generations which suffered so much so that they blame some abstract human nature for the atrocities, instead of the system of economic and political power concentrated into the few hands of a financial elite which sought domination in order to solve its problems.
In the post-war period the crimes committed during the Second World War were systematically used by the Anglo-American powers to stop the peoples from moving forward in a manner which favours them and ensures such things are never repeated. Disinformation was spread on a massive scale so as to justify creating the state of Israel as a bastion of Anglo-American imperialism in the Middle East.
This was done in a manner which was to create a permanent state of no-war-no-peace so as to deprive the Palestinian people of their homeland and right to self-determination and also suppress the striving of the peoples of the entire Middle East to empower themselves. This has led to prolonged suffering of a kind which itself represents the attempted genocide of a people.
Today, attempts to criminalize support for the Palestinian Resistance by declaring it is “anti-Semitic” is a contemptible attempt to manipulate the sympathy expressed worldwide for the suffering of the Jews, amongst others, during the war.
Israel and the Holocaust
Between 1948 and 1957, the Holocaust was not a major aspect of Israeli policy. In 1957, Israel began building an extended Holocaust Museum in Tel Aviv called Yad Vashem, which is still being expanded. This project followed shortly after the October 1956 Suez Crisis, when Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser nationalized Egypt’s Suez Canal on October 29 and was attacked a day later by Israel, in collusion with Britain and France. After the war, Israel refused to withdraw its troops from the Gaza Strip and only reluctantly withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula.
Many people opposed Israel’s unprovoked attack on Egypt (e.g., on November 4, 1956, thirty thousand people demonstrated in London’s Trafalgar Square). One highly publicized incident that created international outrage was that at the start of the war, 48 Arab civilians were killed by Israel in what became known as the Kafr Qasim Massacre.
Israel’s first Holocaust project in Tel Aviv in 1957 was initiated just as people around the world began to seriously criticize Israeli aggression. The Tel Aviv project was a calculated move to deflect criticism and gain sympathy.
In 1960, the Holocaust was widely publicized around the world when Israeli agents kidnapped leading Nazi Adolph Eichmann and illegally smuggled him back to Israel for trial. During the Second World War, Eichmann had managed the mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe.
Eichmann lived in Germany after the Second World War, then fled to Argentina via Italy in 1950, assisted like many Nazi war criminals, by a Vatican priest and using travel papers issued by the International Red Cross. The Eichmann trial in Israel lasted four months and was the first trial ever televised.
Today, the Holocaust is still used politically by Israel and by pro-Zionists to justify unquestioning support for Israel. It is part and parcel of the free pass that the U.S. imperialists and their allies, including the Harper systemic dictatorship, have given Israel to commit war crimes against the Palestinian and other Arab peoples, the very crimes that the Nazis committed during the Second World War.
Israel tries to create a diversion from its crimes by bringing up the Holocaust when it is being condemned by the world’s people for its atrocities, such as its three-week terror bombing of Gaza during December 2008 and January 2009 (Operation Cast Lead).
The U.S. and the Holocaust
The U.S. imperialists have co-opted the Holocaust for their own propaganda purposes, even though U.S. troops did not fight in Europe until the July 10, 1943 invasion of Sicily, after the Nazis had been murdering the people of Europe for almost four years.
U.S. hypocrisy is clearly shown by the fact that many U.S. monopolies collaborated with the Nazis throughout the war, such as Standard Oil, General Motors, Ford, Dupont, Alcoa, and General Electric. And, after the war, the U.S. brought thousands of known Nazis to the U.S., for example, SS Sturmbannführer Dr. Werner von Braun, who was put in charge of the U.S. missile program. During the war, von Braun oversaw the Mittelwerk rocket factory, which used slave labour from nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, and von Braun’s slaves, personally-picked from the Buchenwald concentration camp.
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The first Holocaust museum/memorial was built in Washington, DC in April 1993 and by 1999, there were over 100. In the 1950s and 1960s, even in the U.S., Holocaust talk strongly emphasized heroism, resistance and rebellion in the face of Nazi persecution. Today, it serves the U.S. ruling circles to have Holocaust talk emphasize victimhood and the world’s indifference. The story accompanying the U.S. museums is one of victims/survivors and liberators. The Jews are falsely depicted not as fighters but only as victims and survivors.
Now, the late-arriving U.S. troops are supposedly the heroes. According to the U.S. President and others who rewrite history to push U.S. imperialist democracy and hegemonism, the U.S. saved Europe from the scourge of fascism in the Second World War, not the heroic anti-fascist resistance which was anything but passive and in which the people of Jewish origin always occupied the front lines.
U.S. museums also imply that Nazism is finished, gone forever, and that the mere act of memorializing the Holocaust shows that it can never happen again. These are really anti-museums that provide a false image that it is “un-American” to be like the Nazis. The main attempt is to confirm the essential rightness of so-called American values by falsely conveying that the U.S. has never done and would never do such a thing as massacre millions of innocent people.
The U.S. museums tell the big lie that the U.S. is not like Nazi Germany and never will be, even though immediately after the Second World War, the U.S. imperialists took up the mantle of the Nazis, including the Nazi plan to rule the world, by implementing their own holocausts in Greece, Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and so many other countries.
The U.S. Holocaust story also includes a crocodile tears confession that the U.S. stood by and let Jews be murdered in the 1930s and 1940s, for example the 1939 St. Louis incident.[1] Having failed then, the U.S. claims it must now take up a self-appointed role of “liberating” the world and providing a refuge for “survivors.”
The conclusion which the U.S. ruling circles want the world’s people to draw is that in this era everyone should unquestioningly support U.S. imperialist military intervention around the world under the hoax of the so-called war on terror, even though its real aim is to subjugate the world’s people and create a 1,000-year U.S. imperialist Reich.
Note
1. On May 15, 1939, nine hundred and seven German Jews set sail from Hamburg on a luxury liner, the St. Louis. They were barred by governments from disembarking, including in the U.S. The St. Louis eventually returned to Europe, where many passengers were finally accepted by France, Belgium, England and the Netherlands. Others died in the extermination camps of the Third Reich.
(Originally published under the title “Remembering the Holocaust” in TML Weekly, April 21, 2012.)
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