Twelve must reads

How could I have forgotten Irmin Vinson’s book in my lists (see e.g., here)? Perhaps because I only have read Vinson online, including all the articles eventually gathered by Counter-Currents Publishing for a book:

Now there are twelve books of my must-reads, including also Roger Devlin’s already published articles in scholarly journals that merit a single cover.

Quotable quote

“In almost any war one side can be dishonestly demonized even by a truthful enumeration of its crimes, if the crimes of its adversaries are suppressed.”

—Irmin Vinson on the Third Reich

Best essays on Hitler

Shelter in Fournes ca. 1915 by Hitler

Listen here three pieces about Hitler from Counter-Currents Radio. Or if you prefer to skip the music breaks, below the written version of the same essays:

William Pierce’s “The Measure of Greatness”

Irmin Vinson’s “Some Thoughts on Hitler”

Greg Johnson’s “The Burden of Hitler”

Léon Degrelle’s “The Enigma of Hitler”

Léon Degrelle was a Belgian Rexist leader, SS officer, decorated combatant on the Eastern Front. Of the first eight hundred Walloon volunteers who left for the Axis campaign against the Soviet Union and Stalinist Marxism, only three survived the war—one of them Degrelle. He died in 1994, while still in exile in Spain.

“Hitler—you knew him—what was he like?” I have been asked that question a thousand times since 1945, and nothing is more difficult to answer.

Approximately two hundred thousand books have dealt with the Second World War and with its central figure, Adolf Hitler. But has the real Hitler been discovered by any of them? “The enigma of Hitler is beyond all human comprehension,” the left-wing German weekly Die Zeit once put it.

Salvador Dalí, art’s unique genius, sought to penetrate the mystery in one of his most intensely dramatic paintings. Towering mountain landscapes all but fill the canvas, leaving only a few luminous meters of seashore dotted with delicately miniaturized human figures: the last witness to a dying peace. A huge telephone receiver dripping tears of blood hangs from the branch of a dead tree; and here and there hang umbrellas and bats whose portent is visibly the same. As Dalí tells it, “Chamberlain’s umbrella appeared in this painting in a sinister light, made evident by the bat, and it struck me when I painted it as a thing of enormous anguish.”

He then confided: “I felt this painting to be deeply prophetic. But I confess that I haven’t yet figured out the Hitler enigma either. He attracted me only as an object of my mad imaginings and because I saw him as a man uniquely capable of turning things completely upside down.”

What a lesson in humility for the braying critics who have rushed into print since 1945 with their thousands of “definitive” books, most of them scornful, about this man who so troubled the introspective Dalí that forty years later he still felt anguished and uncertain in the presence of his own hallucinatory painting. Apart from Dalí, who else has ever tried to present an objective portrayal of this extraordinary man whom Dalí labeled the most explosive figure in human history? (Dalí was ejected from the Surrealist Movement in 1934 because of his fascination with Hitler and his fascist sympathies.)


Like Pavlov’s Bell

The mountains of Hitler books based on blind hatred and ignorance do little to describe or explain the most powerful man the world has ever seen. How, I ponder, do these thousands of disparate portraits of Hitler in any way resemble the man I knew? The Hitler seated beside me, standing up, talking, listening. It has become impossible to explain to people fed fantastic tales for decades that what they have read or heard on television just does not correspond to the truth.

People have come to accept fiction, repeated a thousand times over, as reality. Yet they have never seen Hitler, never spoken to him, never heard a word from his mouth. The very name of Hitler immediately conjures up a grimacing devil, the fount of all of one’s negative emotions. Like Pavlov’s bell, the mention of Hitler is meant to dispense with substance and reality. In time, however, history will demand more than these summary judgements.


Strangely Attractive

Hitler is always present before my eyes: as a man of peace in 1936, as a man of war in 1944. It is not possible to have been a personal witness to the life of such an extraordinary man without being marked by it forever. Not a day goes by but Hitler rises again in my memory, not as a man long dead, but as a real being who paces his office floor, seats himself in his chair, pokes the burning logs in the fireplace.

The first thing anyone noticed when he came into view was his small mustache. Countless times he had been advised to shave it off, but he always refused: people were used to him the way he was.

He was not tall—no more than was Napoleon or Alexander the Great.

Hitler had deep blue eyes that many found bewitching, although I did not find them so. Nor did I detect the electric current his hands were said to give off. I gripped them quite a few times and was never struck by his lightning.

His face showed emotion or indifference according to the passion or apathy of the moment. At times he was as though benumbed, saying not a word, while his jaws moved in the meanwhile as if they were grinding an obstacle to smithereens in the void. Then he would come suddenly alive and launch into a speech directed at you alone, as though he were addressing a crowd of hundreds of thousands at Berlin’s Tempelhof airfield. Then he became as if transfigured. Even his complexion, otherwise dull, lit up as he spoke. And at such times, to be sure, Hitler was strangely attractive and as if possessed of magic powers.


Exceptional Vigor

Anything that might have seemed too solemn in his remarks, he quickly tempered with a touch of humor. The picturesque word, the biting phrase were at his command. In a flash he would paint a word-picture that brought a smile, or come up with an unexpected and disarming comparison. He could be harsh and even implacable in his judgments and yet almost at the same time be surprisingly conciliatory, sensitive and warm.

After 1945 Hitler was accused of every cruelty, but it was not in his nature to be cruel. He loved children. It was an entirely natural thing for him to stop his car and share his food with young cyclists along the road. Once he gave his raincoat to a derelict plodding in the rain. At midnight he would interrupt his work and prepare the food for his dog Blondi.

He could not bear to eat meat, because it meant the death of a living creature. He refused to have so much as a rabbit or a trout sacrificed to provide his food. He would allow only eggs on his table, because egg-laying meant that the hen had been spared rather than killed.

Hitler’s eating habits were a constant source of amazement to me. How could someone on such a rigorous schedule, who had taken part in tens of thousands of exhausting mass meetings from which he emerged bathed with sweat, often losing two to four pounds in the process; who slept only three to four hours a night; and who, from 1940 to 1945, carried the whole world on his shoulders while ruling over 380 million Europeans: how, I wondered, could he physically survive on just a boiled egg, a few tomatoes, two or three pancakes, and a plate of noodles? But he actually gained weight!

He drank only water. He did not smoke and would not tolerate smoking in his presence. At one or two o’clock in the morning he would still be talking, untroubled, close to his fireplace, lively, often amusing. He never showed any sign of weariness. Dead tired his audience might be, but not Hitler.

He was depicted as a tired old man. Nothing was further from the truth. In September 1944, when he was reported to be fairly doddering, I spent a week with him. His mental and physical vigor were still exceptional. The attempt made on his life on July 20th had, if anything, recharged him. He took tea in his quarters as tranquilly as if we had been in his small private apartment at the chancellery before the war, or enjoying the view of snow and bright blue sky through his great bay window at Berchtesgaden.


Iron Self-Control

At the very end of his life, to be sure, his back had become bent, but his mind remained as clear as a flash of lightening. The testament he dictated with extraordinary composure on the eve of his death, at three in the morning of April 29, 1945, provides us a lasting testimony. Napoleon at Fontainebleau was not without his moments of panic before his abdication. Hitler simply shook hands with his associates in silence, breakfasted as on any other day, then went to his death as if he were going on a stroll. When has history ever witnessed so enormous a tragedy brought to its end with such iron self-control?

Hitler’s most notable characteristic was ever his simplicity. The most complex of problems resolved itself in his mind into a few basic principles. His actions were geared to ideas and decisions that could be understood by anyone. The laborer from Essen, the isolated farmer, the Ruhr industrialist, and the university professor could all easily follow his line of thought. The very clarity of his reasoning made everything obvious.

His behavior and his lifestyle never changed even when he became the ruler of Germany. He dressed and lived frugally. During his early days in Munich, he spent no more than a mark per day for food. At no stage in his life did he spend anything on himself. Throughout his thirteen years in the chancellery he never carried a wallet or ever had money of his own.


Intellectual Curiosity

Hitler was self-taught and made not attempt to hide the fact. The smug conceit of intellectuals, their shiny ideas packaged like so many flashlight batteries, irritated him at times. His own knowledge he had acquired through selective and unremitting study, and he knew far more than thousands of diploma-decorated academics.

I don’t think anyone ever read as much as he did. He normally read one book every day, always first reading the conclusion and the index in order to gauge the work’s interest for him. He had the power to extract the essence of each book and then store it in his computer-like mind. I have heard him talk about complicated scientific books with faultless precision, even at the height of the war.

His intellectual curiosity was limitless. He was readily familiar with the writings of the most diverse authors, and nothing was too complex for his comprehension. He had a deep knowledge and understanding of Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus Christ, as well as Luther, Calvin, and Savonarola; of literary giants such as Dante, Schiller, Shakespeare, and Goethe; and of analytical writers such as Renan and Gobineau, Chamberlain and Sorel.

He had trained himself in philosophy by studying Aristotle and Plato. He could quote entire paragraphs of Schopenhauer from memory, and for a long time carried a pocked edition of Schopenhauer with him. Nietzsche taught him much about the willpower.

His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. He spent hundreds of hours studying the works of Tacitus and Mommsen, military strategists such as Clausewitz, and empire builders such as Bismarck. Nothing escaped him: world history or the history of civilizations, the study of the Bible and the Talmud, Thomistic philosophy and all the master- pieces of Homer, Sophocles, Horace, Ovid, Titus Livius and Cicero. He knew Julian the Apostate as if he had been his contemporary.

His knowledge also extended to mechanics. He knew how engines worked; he understood the ballistics of various weapons; and he astonished the best medical scientists with his knowledge of medicine and biology.

The universality of Hitler’s knowledge may surprise or displease those unaware of it, but it is nonetheless a historical fact: Hitler was one of the most cultivated men of this century. Many times more so than Churchill, an intellectual mediocrity; or than Pierre Laval, with his mere cursory knowledge of history; or than Roosevelt; or Eisenhower, who never got beyond detective novels.


Artist and Architect

Even during his earliest years, Hitler was different than other children. He had an inner strength and was guided by his spirit and his instincts.

He could draw skillfully when he was only eleven years old. His sketches made at that age show a remarkable firmness and liveliness.

His first paintings and watercolors, created at age 15, are full of poetry and sensitivity. One of his most striking early works, “Fortress Utopia,” also shows him to have been an artist of rare imagination. His artistic orientation took many forms. He wrote poetry from the time he was a lad. He dictated a complete play to his sister Paula who was amazed at his presumption. At the age of 16, in Vienna, he launched into the creation of an opera. He even designed the stage settings, as well as all the costumes; and, of course, the characters were Wagnerian heroes.

More than just an artist, Hitler was above all an architect. Hundreds of his works were notable as much for the architecture as for the painting. From memory alone he could reproduce in every detail the onion dome of a church or the intricate curves of wrought iron. Indeed, it was to fulfill his dream of becoming an architect that Hitler went to Vienna at the beginning of the century.

When one sees the hundreds of paintings, sketches and drawings he created at the time, which reveal his mastery of three dimensional figures, it is astounding that his examiners at the Fine Arts Academy failed him in two successive examinations. German historian Werner Maser, no friend of Hitler, castigated these examiners: “All of his works revealed extraordinary architectural gifts and knowledge. The builder of the Third Reich gives the former Fine Arts Academy of Vienna cause for shame.”


Humble Origins

Impressed by the beauty of the church in a Benedictine monastery where he was part of the choir and served as an altar boy, Hitler dreamt fleetingly of becoming a Benedictine monk. And it was at that time, too, interestingly enough, that whenever he attended mass, he always had to pass beneath the first swastika he had ever seen: it was graven in the stone escutcheon of the abbey portal.

Hitler’s father, a customs officer, hoped the boy would follow in his footsteps and become a civil servant. His tutor encouraged him to become a monk. Instead the young Hitler went, or rather he fled, to Vienna. And there, thwarted in his artistic aspirations by the bureaucratic mediocraties of academia, he turned to isolation and meditation. Lost in the great capital of Austria-Hungary, he searched for his destiny.

During the first thirty years of Hitler’s life, the date April 20, 1889, meant nothing to anyone. He was born on that day in Branau, a small town in the Inn valley. During his exile in Vienna, he often thought of his modest home, and particularly of his mother. When she fell ill, he returned home from Vienna to look after her. For weeks he nursed her, did all the household chores, and supported her as the most loving of sons. When she finally died, on Christmas eve, his pain was immense. Wracked with grief, he buried his mother in the little country cemetery: “I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief,” said his mother’s doctor, who happened to be Jewish.

In his room, Hitler always displayed an old photograph of his mother. The memory of the mother he loved was with him until the day he died. Before leaving this earth, on April 30, 1945, he placed his mother’s photograph in front of him. She had blue eyes like his and a similar face. Her maternal intuition told her that her son was different from other children. She acted almost as if she knew her son’s destiny. When she died, she felt anguished by the immense mystery surrounding her son.

Throughout the years of his youth, Hitler lived the life of a virtual recluse. He greatest wish was to withdraw from the world. At heart a loner, he wandered about, ate meager meals, but devoured the books of three public libraries. He abstained from conversations and had few friends.

It is almost impossible to imagine another such destiny where a man started with so little and reached such heights. Alexander the Great was the son of a king. Napoleon, from a well-to-do family, was a general at twenty-four. Fifteen years after Vienna, Hitler would still be an unknown corporal. Thousands of others had a thousand times more opportunity to leave their mark on the world.

Hitler was not much concerned with his private life. In Vienna he had lived in shabby, cramped lodgings. But for all that he rented a piano that took up half his room, and concentrated on composing his opera. He lived on bread, milk, and vegetable soup. His poverty was real. He did not even own an over-coat. He shoveled streets on snowy days. He carried luggage at the railway station. He spent many weeks in shelters for the homeless. But he never stopped painting or reading.

Despite his dire poverty, Hitler somehow managed to maintain a clean appearance. Landlords and landladies in Vienna and Munich all remembered him for his civility and pleasant disposition. His behavior was impeccable. His room was always spotless, his meager belongings meticulously arranged, and his clothes neatly hung or folded. He washed and ironed his own clothes, something which in those days few men did. He needed almost nothing to survive, and money from the sale of a few paintings was sufficient to provide for all his needs.


Summing Things Up

Hitler had not yet focused on politics, but without his rightly knowing, that was the career to which he was most strongly called. Politics would ultimately blend with his passion for art. People, the masses, would be the clay the sculptor shapes into an immortal form. The human clay would become for him a beautiful work of art like one of Myron’s marble sculptures, a Hans Makart painting, or Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

His love of music, art, and architecture had not removed him from the political life and social concerns of Vienna. In order to survive, he worked as a common laborer side by side with other workers. He was a silent spectator, but nothing escaped him: not the vanity and egoism of the bourgeoisie, not the moral and material misery of the people, nor yet the hundreds of thousands of workers who surged down the wide avenues of Vienna with anger in their hearts.

He had also been taken aback by the growing presence in Vienna of bearded Jews wearing caftans, a sight unknown in Linz. “How can they be Germans?” he asked himself. He read the statistics: in 1860 there were sixty-nine Jewish families in Vienna; forty years later there were two hundred thousand. They were everywhere. He observed their invasion of the universities and the legal and medical professions, and their takeover of the newspapers.

Hitler was exposed to the passionate reactions of the workers to this influx, but the workers were not alone in their unhappiness. There were many prominent persons in Austria and Hungary who did not hide their resentment at what they believed was an alien invasion of their country. The mayor of Vienna, a Christian-Democrat and a powerful orator, was eagerly listened to by Hitler.

Hitler was also concerned with the fate of the eight million Austrian Germans kept apart from Germany, and thus deprived of their rightful German nationhood. He saw Emperor Franz Josef as a bitter and petty old man unable to cope with the problems of the day and the aspirations of the future.

Quietly, the young Hitler was summing things up in his mind.

First: Austrians were part of Germany, the common fatherland.

Second: The Jews were aliens within the German community.

Third: Patriotism was only valid if it was shared by all classes. The common people with whom Hitler had shared grief and humiliation were just as much a part of the fatherland as the millionaires of high society.

Fourth: Class war would sooner or later condemn both workers and bosses to ruin in any country. No country could survive class war; only cooperation between workers and bosses can benefit the country. Workers must be respected and live with decency and honor. Creativity must never be stifled.

When Hitler later said that he had formed his social and political doctrine in Vienna, he told the truth. Ten years later his observations made in Vienna would become the order of the day.

Thus Hitler was to live for several years in the crowded city of Vienna as a virtual outcast, yet quietly observing everything around him. His strength came from within. He did not rely on anyone to do his thinking for him. Exceptional human beings always feel lonely amid the vast human throng. Hitler saw his solitude as a wonderful opportunity to meditate and not to be submerged in a mindless sea. In order not to be lost in the wastes of a sterile desert, a strong soul seeks refuge within himself. Hitler was such a soul.


Lightning and the Word

The lightning in Hitler’s life would come from the Word.

All his artistic talent would be channeled into his mastery of communication and eloquence. Hitler would never conceive of popular conquests without the power of the Word. He would enchant and be enchanted by it. He would find total fulfillment when the magic of his words inspired the hearts and minds of the masses with whom he communed. He would feel reborn each time he conveyed with mystical beauty the knowledge he had acquired in his lifetime.

Hitler’s incantory eloquence will remain, for a very long time, a vast field of study for the psychoanalyst. The power of Hitler’s word is the key. Without it, there would never have been a Hitler era.


Transcendent Faith

Did Hitler believe in God? He believed deeply in God. He called God the Almighty, master of all that is known and unknown.

Propagandists portrayed Hitler as an atheist. He was not. He had contempt for hypocritical and materialistic clerics, but he was not alone in that. He believed in the necessity of standards and theological dogmas, without which, he repeatedly said, the great institution of the Christian church would collapse. These dogmas clashed with his intelligence, but he also recognized that it was hard for the human mind to encompass all the problems of creation, its limitless scope and breathtaking beauty. He acknowledged that every human being has spiritual needs.

The song of the nightingale, the pattern and color of a flower, continually brought him back to the great problems of creation. No one in the world has spoken to me so eloquently about the existence of God. He held this view not because he was brought up as a Christian, but because his analytical mind bound him to the concept of God. Hitler’s faith transcended formulas and contingencies. God was for him the basis of everything, the ordainer of all things, of his destiny and that of all others.

Note

Excerpted from volume two of Degrelle’s uncompleted multi-volume series on the life and legacy of Adolf Hitler, Hitler: Born at Versailles (Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1987). The examples of Hitler’s art have been scanned from Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist (Houston: Billy F. Price, 1984).

Source: Irmin Vinson’s site.

Quotable quotes (Letter V)

“The Holocaust helps immunize Jews against criticism in the Diaspora.”

“The fall of Germany is the fall of the West.”

—Irmin Vinson

Spielberg & the holocaust

Without the wisdom of Irmin Vinson on the subject of the Holocaust (see e.g., here and here) no nationalist will ever reach intellectual maturity. “Spielberg & the eleven million” is only the latest of his articles at Counter-Currents:

“The Holocaust has increasingly become, for the democratic world at least, a symbol of all the other Genocides, for racism, anti-Semitism, hatred of foreigners, ethnic cleansing, and mass destruction of humans by humans generally. The reason for this is, possibly, that a vague realization is taking hold of people that the Holocaust, the planned total annihilation of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazi regime, is both a Genocide like other Genocides, and also an unprecedented event in human history, which should serve as a warning to all of us.” — Prof. Yehuda Bauer, Yad Vashem

In an episode of Steven Spielberg’s miniseries Band of Brothers (2001) American soldiers, the men of Easy Company, stumble upon a German concentration camp, a satellite of Dachau, where to their horror they discover hundreds of emaciated Jews, along with about an equal number of Jewish corpses. It is the spring of 1945 and we are — or so Spielberg would have us believe — in the midst of an extermination facility, one part of the vast industrialized machinery of mass murder designed to effect the nazi Final Solution, the physical extermination of the Jewish people. All of the inmates in the camp are thus Jews, identified by the yellow stars stitched into their striped camp uniforms, and they identify themselves as Jews to the startled liberators.

That was Spielberg’s first inaccuracy, which we shall call Falsehood #1. Most of the inmates at Dachau and Buchenwald, about eighty percent, were non-Jews. When we look at photographs of liberated German concentration camps, we now think that all of the “survivors” we see are Jews. But that, as a matter of uncontested fact, is untrue. In 1945 American media coverage of the liberation of the camps on German soil rarely spoke of Jews, for the simple reason that Jews were a minority among their various inmates. The Americans who liberated the camps did not “confront the (Jewish) Holocaust,” as Spielberg’s Band of Brothers wants us to assume. They instead discovered, as a contemporary British documentary put it, “men of every European nationality, including … Germans.”

Falsehood #1 — the ejection of Gentiles from Dachau and their replacement with Jews — generates a problem for Spielberg. If all of the inmates in the concentration camp presented in Band of Brothers are Jews, and if Hitler wanted to exterminate all Jews, then why are the inmates still alive? That is also, of course, the monumental problem that the Jewish Holocaust has always faced. Why did the Germans fail to kill all the Jews under their control? Why did they bother to evacuate Jewish internees from the East? Why is Elie Wiesel, evacuated in 1945 from Auschwitz in Poland to Buchenwald in Germany, still alive? Why was Anne Frank not gassed at Auschwitz? Why was she instead relocated to Bergen-Belsen, where she tragically succumbed to typhus?

By falsely making all of his camp’s inmates Jews, Spielberg faces the same problem, and he invents a solution — Falsehood #2. The camp guards, a Jewish survivor tells Spielberg’s American liberators, desperately shot as many of the inmates as they could, knowing that the imminent arrival of Allied liberators would end their genocidal mission. Then they ran out of ammunition. So they fled, no doubt disappointed at their failure to implement fully their part of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. They had killed as many Jews as they were able to kill, but not as many Jews as they had wanted to kill (i.e. all of them, every single person in the camp). The emaciated Jews we see on the screen are still alive because the nazi killers fortuitously ran out of bullets.

Liberation of Dachau, 29 April 1945: In photographs of concentration camps we now see Jews, but in fact the men above are Poles.


Even for most mainstream Holocaust scholarship, the presence of survivors at Dachau poses no insurmountable problem, since the bulk of the inmates interned there were not Jewish. We should keep that significant yet often overlooked fact in mind: In 1945 none of the American liberators of German concentration camps believed that they had uncovered the physical machinery of a plan to murder all Jews, because the majority by far of the inmates they liberated were Gentiles.

A mainstream historian today can account for living men and women in Dachau even if he accepts the proposition that NS Germany planned the extermination of all Jews. A revisionist historian, who denies that NS Germany planned the extermination of all Jews, can also (and much more plausibly) account for Jewish survivors in the German camps: Hitler did not attempt to murder every Jew on the face of the planet, and the survival of the twenty percent of the inmates at Dachau and Buchenwald who were indeed Jewish proves it. If Hitler had wanted them dead, and if exterminating Jews was the central motive of his political career, they all would have been killed long before the Allies arrived. The Jewish survivors in the various camps therefore prove the revisionist thesis.

Falsehood #1, which amounts to the judaizing of Dachau, is necessary for Spielberg, because it preserves the concentration camp as distinctively Jewish symbolic territory. Spielberg, who rediscovered his Jewishness after studying the Holocaust, has no intention of commemorating German crimes by depicting non-Jews as the majority of the victims. He wants to retain the potently Jewish symbolism of a concentration camp, established in public consciousness by hundreds of Holocaust films and Holocaust memorials, and he is willing to ignore factual history to achieve his political aims. Falsehood #2 — the claim that Germans tried to exterminate Dachau’s inmates — is also necessary for Spielberg, because without it the death camp presented on our television screens would be reduced to an internment camp or even to a mere prison, ceasing to appear as a site for genocide. A nazi concentration camp not dedicated to genocidal mass killing would be a contradiction in terms.

We are thus prepared for Falsehood #3, which is the ideological culmination of the others. A final notice, which brings this episode of Band of Brothers to its conclusion, reads: “During the following months, Allied Forces discovered numerous POW, concentration, and death camps. These camps were part of the Nazi attempt to effect the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’. Between 1942 and 1945 five million ethnic minorities and six million Jews were murdered — many of them in the camps.”

Falsehood #3 — the “five million ethnic minorities” — is more complex than its two predecessors and requires a longer explanation.

In popular memory the Holocaust is the extermination of Six Million Jews. Any man on the street asked to put a numerical figure to the Holocaust’s victims will have a simple answer: Six Million. Yet at a more official level the Holocaust is really the extermination of Eleven Million: Six Million Jews plus five million “others,” even though those “others” are generally absent from the Holocaust’s public representations.

Many Holocaust museums, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, are officially dedicated to the Eleven Million. Unsurprisingly the Jews running the USHMM have blithely ignored an explicit mandate to that effect, secure in the knowledge that no politician would dare complain that the Museum is too Jewish and should diversify itself by sharing almost half its space with five million dead Gentiles. In theory, however, about half of the Holocaust is non-Jewish, and if the Holocaust were an affirmative-action employer, about half of all the Holocaust films and Holocaust museums and Holocaust educational programs would be devoted to non-Jews.

In Band of Brothers Spielberg elects, as an act of multicultural inclusion, to present the Holocaust as the extermination of the Eleven Million, not simply of the Six Million, because he wants to construct Dachau as an unmistakable embodiment of “racism.” He wants us to believe that Germans murdered, in camps like Dachau and elsewhere, Six Million Jews and five million other minorities as part of their deranged racial vision of the world, which required the physical extermination of various non-optimal racial types, not only Jews.

The liberation episode in Band of Brothers is thus appropriately entitled “Why We Fight,” indicating that the Americans who liberated the camps belatedly discovered an “anti-racist” justification for World War II in their horrific “confrontation with the Holocaust.” A White American in 1940 might not have known what “racism” could lead to — he might even have been a “racist” himself — but after he saw “racism” concretized in the camps in 1945, he knew what he had been unwittingly fighting to prevent. That, at any rate, is the lesson Spielberg hopes we will learn.

This formally inclusive anti-racism also provides an official rationale for the presence of the USHMM on the Mall in Washington, at the symbolic heart of American nationhood: “This museum belongs at the center of American life because America, as a democratic civilization, is the enemy of racism and its ultimate expression, genocide.” The Eleven Million are a more ecumenical and democratic statement of anti-racism than the Six Million, and they imply that not only Jews have a stake in the institutionalized commemoration of Jewish deaths.

The five million others are always dispensable, but they are, despite their virtual absence from public view, structurally useful to the Holocaust when it provides anti-racist lessons to multiracial America, because they prove that Holocaust commemoration is not simply a self-serving warning against the evils of anti-Semitism. If you think of yourself as a racial or an ethnic minority, then you too are included in the Holocaust, even though you may find yourself relegated to a few footnotes or (as in this case) to a single line at the conclusion of a television program that has otherwise deliberately excluded you.

Spielberg could have accomplished his educational objective by eliminating Falsehood #1 while retaining Falsehood #2. In other words, he could have visibly embodied the Eleven Million in a throng of emaciated European “ethnic minorities” milling about the camp awaiting liberation, with a few Jews wearing yellow stars sprinkled among them.  Falsehood #2 could have been spoken by (say) a Pole or a Serb, a non-Jewish minority, a member of one of the ethnic groups whose victims (allegedly) comprise the five million.

Although Polish Holocaust survivors in speaking roles are likely too WASPish for the purposes of contemporary anti-racism, and although Jews hate Poles even more than they hate Germans, their visible presence would be a reasonable concession to the historical fact that most of the inmates at Dachau were Gentiles, many of them Poles and Catholics.

Band of Brothers would have remained, even with this gesture to multiethnic inclusion, an ideologically driven fiction, still falsely presenting Dachau as a place where Germans warehoused minorities whom they planned (when time and available ammunition permitted) to murder; yet it would have been spared the burden of one theoretically unnecessary lie, the lie that Dachau was filled with Jews.

Spielberg is not, however, interested in anti-racism alone, so the lie was politically imperative. He, like most Holocaust promoters, has little interest in generic anti-racism. He prefers a special kind of anti-racism, a Judeocentric anti-racism wherein his Jewish minority can stand for other minorities, whose literal presence then becomes optional. The Holocaust can be reduced to the Six Million in most public presentations, or enlarged (for the sake of multicultural inclusion) into the Eleven Million whenever Jews think it expedient.

Jews have successfully figured Jewish Holocaust survivors and Jewish Holocaust deaths into synecdoches for the results of “racism,” one part standing for the rest, so that other victims become semantically superfluous and need not be exhibited. It is a politically valuable symbolic structure that no activist Jew would willingly endanger, and hordes of White Holocaust survivors in a didactic version of Dachau are thus unthinkable.

This flexible structure has important practical consequences. A student being indoctrinated into the truths of multiracialism can learn his anti-racist lessons while contemplating only the Six Million, which is the normal educational practice in most Holocaust museums. “Because of its Jewish specificity,” Yad Vashem’s Avner Shalev argues, “[the Holocaust] should serve as a model in the global fight against the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatred and genocide.” Jewish specificity is somehow equivalent to human universality, so through the symbolic magic of the Holocaust we can commemorate crimes against any given minority by commemorating German crimes against Jews.

If a Euro-American wants to rid himself of “racism” and learn tolerance for Blacks, he need only study German atrocities against Jehovah’s Chosen People, whose victims during the Holocaust serve, in the words of philosopher Paul Ricoeur, as “delegates to our memory of all the victims of history.” As the result of a process purportedly involving nothing extrinsic to the events of the Holocaust, nothing so vulgar as Jewish media power, Jewish Holocaust victims have come to signify all other racial victims from time immemorial down to the present.

Spielberg therefore presents the Eleven Million while dispensing with all visible evidence of any victims other than Jewish victims, a prerogative that the Holocaust entitles him to exercise. Indeed he gains the best of both worlds: He explicitly states the Eleven Million, signaling multicultural inclusion, while eradicating all Gentile camp inmates from the screen. His wildly unhistorical version of Dachau is an exact duplication of the ideological structure of an anti-racist Holocaust museum: Jewish victims stand for all other victims.

Yet in fact — and here we enter into the strange complexity of the Eleven Million — Spielberg’s multicultural deference to the five million others, Falsehood #3, is more historically inaccurate than his racial devotion to the Six Million Jews. For the Eleven Million are bogus, pure fantasy. If the five million others who form the Holocaust’s Gentile Auxiliary include all Allied civilians who died during the course of the war, the figure is far too low; if it means (as Spielberg intends) targeted ethnic minorities who perished in German concentration camps, it is far too high. (See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999], 215–216.)

Although revisionists seek to reduce the Six Million to some smaller number, it remains a genuine result of mainstream scholarship, whether it is true or not. No revisionist, furthermore, denies that millions of Jews were killed by Germans or died in German concentration camps. The five million, on the other hand, are completely fictional and no Holocaust scholarship could ever account for their official recognition as co-victims with the Six. They were conjured up, on the basis of political expediency alone, by nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal in order to provide an emotional reason for non-Jews to commemorate the Holocaust, while retaining preeminent Jewish victimhood.

Five million dead Gentiles are simply one million victims fewer than Six Million dead Jews, and that elementary arithmetic is literally the source of the Eleven Million victims that the Holocaust is officially supposed to commemorate, an obligation honored more in the breach than the observance. So by paying occasional lip service to the five million, Jews are falsifying history; by regularly ignoring them, they are unintentionally respecting the historical record.

Since most Americans have probably never heard of the five million, who constitute only a small part of the Holocaust’s public mythology, we should not exaggerate their political significance. It is, however, worth noting the symbolic instability of this five million. Insofar as the five million are Gentiles they are us, our stake in the Jewish Holocaust, invented as a motive for our commemoration; insofar as they are “ethnic minorities” they are Other, not us, essentially surrogates for rainbow-coalition minorities, who can thereby be transported back into wartime history to teach anti-racist lessons.

In the five million we are supposed not only to see ourselves but also to see the potential victims our of “racism,” our reason for avoiding nazi-like racial self-assertion. A nonracialized interpretation of the five million would be useless for Holocaust lessons in racial tolerance; a five million comprised of powerless “ethnic minorities” provides an appropriate supplement to Judeocentric anti-racism.

Tens of millions of European deaths occurred in World War II, together with an incalculable number of casualties. Through Holocaust arithmetic they have all dwindled into one million less than Six Million, reduced to a symbolically ambiguous cohort of token Gentiles that Jews rarely even deign to exploit.

____________

See endnotes at the original article in Counter-Currents.

Irmin Vinson on the Holocaust

If nationalists continue to be reluctant to debunk the postwar narrative about Hitler and the holocaust, and by this I don’t mean to deny that several genocides were committed against various ethnic groups in the twentieth century (including Jews), the white people won’t see the light. Ever.

Irmin Vinson’s articles on Hitler and the holocaust are essential reading for anyone who is remotely willing to see through the lies with which the elites have been brainwashing us for over sixty years. Although the latest Vinson article published by Counter-Currents Publishing deserves a more detailed reading, since it is more than seven thousand words, below I have cut it by less than a half. Take it as an invitation to print and read the full articles linked above (Counter-Currents has a friendly-printer option if you just reduce the size of the letters).

No ellipsis added between unquoted paragraphs:

♣

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the suffering of European Jewry during the Second World War lacked a name. It was just suffering, terminologically indistinguishable from, say, the suffering of Ukrainian peasants during Stalinist collectivization, or even the suffering of German civilians at the hands of the Red Army. The suffering of an American soldier crippled on D-Day, the suffering of a Jew starved at Bergen-Belsen, and the suffering of a German woman crucified on a barn door all belonged to the same broad generic category of wartime deaths and wartime suffering. In the Western democracies historians and the public at large paid, naturally enough, more attention to first two than to the latter, more attention to our suffering than to theirs, but no one believed that ours deserved a special name.

Beginning in the 1960s, during the course of the Civil Rights Revolution, that changed. One group, until then numbered on our side, the Jews, began to distinguish their suffering from everyone else’s.

“Holocaust,” the English version of “Shoah,” was first deployed to describe distinctively Jewish suffering during the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, a trial consciously conducted as an educational enterprise, and it was not until the late 1960s that “Holocaust” began its ascent into public consciousness in the English-speaking world, propelled by a steadily growing number of essays and books bearing the term, most authored by Jews. In 1968 the Library of Congress replaced “World War, 1939-1945 — Jews” with “Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)”; in 1978 the influential television mini-series Holocaust appeared, watched by almost a hundred million Americans, its advertising financed by Jewish organizations; and in the same year President Carter established a commission, chaired by professional “survivor” Elie Wiesel, to create a national museum in Washington memorializing Jewish suffering in Europe. Holocaust remembering accelerated rapidly in the decade that followed, and by 1991 Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, then project director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum, could boast, accurately, that World War II was merely a “background story” to the Holocaust. The contrary view, that the Holocaust was a footnote (“point de détail”) to the war, is now illegal in France and much of Europe, as the French nationalist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen discovered. The old view of World War II has not only been supplanted; in some countries it has literally been criminalized.

The Jewish Holocaust was a run-of-the-mill horror in a century that saw many horrors, no worse than the Armenian holocaust, or the Cambodian holocaust, or the Russian holocaust, or the Rwandan holocaust, or the Ukrainian holocaust.

Whose suffering gets publicly commemorated is a political decision based not on the magnitude of the suffering but on the political lessons that the commemorators hope to privilege.

There should be no real mystery why this occurred. Holocaust education in the public schools, Holocaust Studies programs at most major universities, a Week of Holocaust Remembrance in mid-April, annual Holocaust commemorations in fifty states, a Holocaust Museum on the Washington Mall, Holocaust documentary after Holocaust documentary, Holocaust film after Holocaust film — all testify either to the absolutely unprecedented character of Jewish suffering during World War II, a suffering that dwarfs all pseudo-holocausts into pitiable insignificance, or else to the power of Jews to foist their racial agenda on White Gentiles. Since the first alternative should be unthinkable — the death-tolls of Soviet and Chinese Marxism were twenty million and sixty-five million respectively, according to the Black Book — no one can seriously discuss contemporary “Holocaust mania” without also discussing Jewish power.

[Norman] Finkelstein has, however, no intention of discussing Jewish power, and he resolves the problem, in his own mind, by recourse to a fantasy common across the mainstream political spectrum, from Rush Limbaugh on the Right to Noam Chomsky on the Left — the fantasy of Israel as a valuable strategic resource, “a proxy for US power in the Middle East” necessary to ensure cheap oil and docile Muslims. Because the Holocaust deflects legitimate criticism of the Jewish State, Finkelstein argues, incessant remembering of the Holocaust also serves American foreign-policy objectives.

It is difficult even to conceive how this Israeli proxy is supposed to function, and there is no evidence that it does function, witness the price of oil, a devastating oil embargo in the 1970s, and the conspicuously undocile Muslim terrorists who now regularly attack Americans. But the proxy’s phantom existence enables Finkelstein and some others on the Left to identify their anti-Zionism as a species of anti-Americanism. Leftist criticism of Israel becomes de facto criticism of American geopolitical objectives. The latter are, Finkelstein imagines, really responsible for the billions shipped annually to Israel, and Zionist lobby groups in Washington, motivated not by distinctively Jewish group loyalty but by the raceless pursuit their own political agendas, are only the willing facilitators, “marching in lock-step with American power.” The unexamined assumption — that support for Israel benefits the United States — remains unexamined. No one need discuss Jewish power, Finkelstein has convinced himself, because Jewish power is only a useful tool in the hands of much more powerful non-Jewish “ruling elites.”

Finkelstein’s implausible thesis was necessary, from his perspective, only because the fact, if openly acknowledged, of strong Jewish racial loyalties will inevitably lead anyone who thinks seriously about the political abuse of the Holocaust to anti-Semitic conclusions. Incessant Holocaust promotion by Jews has some obvious ulterior motives, none of which has anything to do with American foreign-policy objectives: to delegitimize nationalism within majority-White nations; to legitimize Jewish nationalism in the Jewish State; to immunize Jews from criticism; to extract money from Germany, the United States, Switzerland, etc. Holocaust remembering is, in short, part of a racially self-interested agenda — it helps Jews and hurts us.


The Lessons of the Holocaust

The Jewish Holocaust, we are told endlessly, teaches universal “lessons,” and there are now taxpayer-funded Holocaust museums throughout the West, along with an extensive miseducational apparatus, designed to impart these supposedly crucial “lessons,” applicable (so we are instructed) to everyone everywhere. But the principal “lesson” that the Holocaust teaches is, undoubtedly, the lethal consequences of any racial or national consciousness among Whites. Because White racialism and intolerance and nationalism led to the Holocaust, White racialism and intolerance and nationalism must be eradicated, to avoid future holocausts. In terms of practical politics a politician who opposes Third World immigration on racial or even on cultural grounds has failed to learn the “lessons of the Holocaust”; the largely successful Jewish campaigns to tag Patrick Buchanan and Jörg Haider with the “Nazi” label/libel are recent cases in point.

The Holocaust Museum in Washington announced its anti-White objectives early on, even before its construction: “This museum belongs at the center of American life because America, as a democratic civilization, is the enemy of racism and its ultimate expression, genocide.” Genocide is, according to Jewish Holocaust lore, the natural outcome of any racial self-assertion by people of European descent, and American democracy is, by Jewish fiat, devoted to the extirpation of every vestige of our racial consciousness. That, not surprisingly, is what organized Jewry has wanted all along, as Kevin MacDonald has thoroughly documented.

In theory, the “lessons of the Holocaust” should teach Jews that Israel cannot ethically remain an explicitly Jewish state, committed to the preservation and advancement of a single Volk, rooted in land, tradition and blood, but must instead become a multiracial “state of its citizens,” bound together only by abstract political principles and an eagerness to celebrate diversity, like the nation-less anti-nations most Diaspora Jews now demand that their host populations become. In practice, needless to say, few Jews and no major Jewish organizations allow logical consistency and the lessons of the Holocaust to interfere with their racial self-interest. On the contrary: “The heart of every authentic response to the Holocaust,” writes philosopher Emil Fackenheim, “…is a commitment to the autonomy and security of the State of Israel.” Whereas in Israel Jews have formed a Jewish State for themselves and permit no one but Jews to immigrate into it, not even the Palestinian Arabs they ejected in 1948, in the Diaspora they campaign for multiculturalism and Third World immigration. Jews hate all nationalisms save their own; they are nationalists within Israel, but anti-nationalists everywhere else.

Broad Jewish support for Zionism in Israel, coupled with strident opposition to any form of racialism or nationalism in the Diaspora, is the defining hypocrisy of contemporary Jewry. Finkelstein, like the late Israel Shahak, is not guilty of it. He is a principled man: He opposes racialism in the United States, so he also opposes it in Israel. Yet he is apparently unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, his own anti-racialist debt to the “shelves upon shelves of [Holocaust] shlock” under whose weight American libraries are currently groaning. What has been, beyond any doubt, the most politically significant lesson of the Holocaust, the evil of White “racism,” is almost completely absent from his text [The Holocaust Industry], appearing only in two sentences in the final chapter:

Seen through the lens of Auschwitz, what previously was taken for granted — for example, bigotry — no longer can be. In fact, it was the Nazi holocaust that discredited the scientific racism that was so pervasive a feature of American intellectual life before World War II.

Auschwitz did not, of course, scientifically discredit scientific racism, but it is certainly true that the academic study of racial differences has been discredited by its association with German National Socialism, although the facts themselves remain indifferent to the lessons of the Holocaust. It is also true that “bigotry is no longer taken for granted,” but this bland summary of the sea-change in post-war attitudes to race requires a translation. Finkelstein, like most multiracialists, believes that the majority-White nations of the West are still riddled, from top to bottom, with bigotry and systemic “racism.” The fight against White “racism” has scarcely begun; the lessons of the Holocaust have only taught us that bigotry should no longer be taken for granted.

Thus in the midst of a culture soaked in White guilt, Finkelstein recommends more of the same, while presenting his proposals as part of a radical assault on a conservative Holocaust Establishment too timid to berate the goyim with the severity they deserve. “We could,” he says, “learn much about ourselves from the Nazi experience,” and he helpfully suggests additional atrocities that we might, if so inclined, also commemorate: European “genocide” in the Americas; American atrocities during the Vietnam war; American enslavement of Blacks; murderous Belgian exploitation of the Congo. All of these suggestions for atrocity commemoration have a feature in common that should not be too difficult to discern, and with the likely exception of the last, each could be dutifully recited by any well-indoctrinated schoolboy, thanks to multicultural miseducation.

Finkelstein has further suggestions. We could also contemplate, while learning much about ourselves from the Nazi experience, how “Manifest Destiny anticipated nearly all the ideological and programmatic elements of Hitler’s Lebensraum policy”; how German eugenics programs, commonly regarded as precursors of the Jewish Holocaust, merely followed American precedents; how the Nuremberg Laws were a milder variant of the Southern prohibition of miscegenation; how “the vaunted western tradition is deeply implicated in Nazism as well,” Plato and Rousseau being the proto-Nazis Finkelstein has in mind. Clearly, learning from the Nazi experience means learning to see the Nazi in ourselves and in our history.

Here Finkelstein’s self-described radical critique of Holocaust orthodoxies has a parasitical relation to what it purports to debunk, tacitly relying on alleged Holocaust uniqueness in order construct a tenuous guilt-by-association which would be laughable in any other context. Hitler opposed “birth control on the ground that it preempts natural selection”; Rousseau said something similar. Most American states once had eugenics laws sanctioning the sterilization of mental defectives; the Nazis had similar laws. Leo Strauss called this form of non-reasoning the reductio ad Hitlerum. We are expected to see, and unfortunately most Whites will indeed see, not discrete ethical issues but a sinister pattern that establishes culpability.

Yet the sinister pattern of culpability only exists if the Holocaust remains, on account of its unparalleled evil, the terminus toward which all of Western history was directed; the pattern ceases to exist if the Holocaust is dislodged from its position high atop a hierarchy of suffering. Substitute the Judeo-Bolshevik slaughter of Ukrainians for the Jewish Holocaust [see e.g., here] and you will also select a different set of sign-posts leading to a different unparalleled evil.

Since Finkelstein does not practice what he preaches, avoiding the implications of his own call to democratize suffering, his preferred Holocaust lessons turn out, as we have seen, to be not much different from the anti-racialist lessons that Holocaust promoters already teach. Elie Wiesel would have no objection to most of Finkelstein’s pedagogy of White guilt, though he would of course insist that Jews need not be among its pupils. White guilt is a given for both; they differ only on how we should best commemorate it and on whether Jews should be included among the group to whom the requisite lessons must be addressed. We are, Finkelstein and Wiesel agree, morally obliged to “confront” and “remember” Nazi crimes, even though the confronting and remembering will be “difficult” and “painful,” because we were somehow complicit in them, and in this both articulate what is now surely the core dogma of Holocaust propaganda.

“[To] study… the Holocaust,” says Marcia Sachs Littell, director of the National Academy for Holocaust and Genocide Teacher Training, “is also to study the pathology of Western civilization and its flawed structures.” Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, Holocaust theologian, goes further: “The guilt of Germany is the guilt of the West. The fall of Germany is the fall of the West. Not only six million Jews perished in the Holocaust. In it Western civilization lost its claim to dignity and respect.”

Such expressions of anti-Western animus, routine in Jewish Holocaust writing, would be very difficult to reconcile with Finkelstein’s account of the genesis of Holocaust remembering, namely that organized Jewry “forgot” the Holocaust throughout the 1950s and then, in order to become valued participants in American statecraft, tactically “remembered” it in 1967, so that “Jews now stood on the front lines defending America — indeed, ‘Western civilization’ — against the retrograde Arab hordes.”

Anti-Western animus is, on the other hand, very easy to explain within the socio-political context of the decade when, by all accounts, the Holocaust received its English name and began its ascent into popular consciousness. American Jewry’s decision to remember the Holocaust was dependent on White America’s willingness to listen. A speaker normally presupposes an auditor, and vocal Holocaust remembering likewise presupposes receptive Holocaust listening. Jews had no intention in the 1960s and they have no intention now of remembering their Holocaust in the absence of a non-Jewish audience.

American Jews conveniently recovered their forgotten Holocaust memory at the very historical moment when racial victimization in the past began to confer political power in the present. The religion of the Holocaust was the Jewish version of anti-White identity politics. To number yourself among the wretched of the earth was a source of political power during the Civil Rights Revolution, and it continued to be a source of political power in the decades that followed.

Jews had played an instrumental role in fomenting the Revolution, and by remembering the Holocaust they enlisted themselves, citing an impeccable pedigree of suffering at the hands of Whites, among the minority groups eligible to receive its moral capital, while relieving themselves of membership, largely nominal in any case, in the White oppressor race, against whom the Revolution was and still is directed. Through the Holocaust the most successful ethnic group in American history not only joined the various aggrieved minorities staking out a claim against the Euro-American majority, but also pushed itself to the front of the line.

Since Jews are more intelligent and much more politically powerful than other aggrieved minorities, they have elevated their wartime victimization above all other victimizations, while surrounding it with a deceptive, often eloquent language of humane universalism. The Jewish victims of the Holocaust, philosopher Paul Ricoeur writes, are “delegates to our memory of all the victims of history,” a formulation which in practice means that all of history’s other victims can be safely ignored or consigned to a small, dark corner in your local Holocaust museum, being somehow included in the representative suffering of the Jews.

Thus this exceptional piece of Holocaust lore from Yad Vashem’s Avner Shalev: “We add our voice to those who believe that the Holocaust, because of its Jewish specificity, should serve as a model in the global fight against the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic hatred and genocide.” The sentence is logically incoherent but its meaning is clear: Jewish specificity ensures universality. And the political subtext is also clear: In the holy war against “racism,” one race of victims is far more equal than the rest.

* * *

Insofar as we accept, as far too many of us do, the false moral burden to feel racial guilt over German wartime atrocities, real and fictional, we have internalized Jewish ethnocentrism, learning to see ourselves through Jewish eyes. We should therefore learn our own “lesson of the Holocaust” — that the descendants of both the winners and the losers of the Second World War now have a common interest in repudiating the old mythology of unique Nazi evil, along with the anti-Western Holocaust industry which has fastened itself on it.

A nationalist reading of the “Holocaust”

 
The chosen image
for Irmin Vinson's site

Good articles about the so-called Holocaust are extremely difficult to find either in mainstream media or in the tiny white nationalist scene. Counter-Currents’ most recent article, “Holocaust Commemoration” by Irmin Vinson is the best introduction to this thorny subject I have read so far. It is a long read (14,000+ words) but worth of every minute spent. Every nationalist must read it and I hope more articles by Vinson will appear at CC.

More than the revelations of the main text, what shocked me the most was endnote #1:

On the subject of Jewish ethnocentrism, the comments of Talmudic scholar Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, a former American citizen now living in Israel, are worth noting: “If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, and is thus part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA… If a Jew needs a liver, can he take the liver of an innocent non-Jew to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has an infinite value. There is something more holy and unique about Jewish life than about non-Jewish life.” Quoted in Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 43.