The Holocaust caused by, crisis-ridden capitalism

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Victims of Nazi barbarism in the Warsaw Ghetto never happen again' , the author albeit under every kind of makes it difficult to see any link atrocious threat, generally between the events of Holocaust administered the ghetto in and the events of Brick Lane, accordance with the demands of though millions of viewers will the Nazis. watched showing al films extermin They good deal political press.

Bishops Bishops have said never have been shown TV critics have sne soap opera' qualities.

million people BBC Television's of the four fictionabout the Nazi ation of the Jews. have sparked off a of controversy, both and artistic, in the said it should Such of heat makers "make they art point.

reactions generate a lot among the self-styled of opinion and they good television" . But all largely beside the Repeated The rear question is-what effect did "Holocaust'' have on people's understanding of a of the most horific episodes in human history?

The early chapters of reflects the fact al leaders' want Holocaust are being repeated today in Britain and all over the capitalist world by those like the National Front who share the ideological and political positions of the SS.

So the protest from arrogant bourgeois moralists like Christian bishops that to show such films was to remind people of horrors they should forget could hardly be more disgusting.

Blind eye

It that such "mor to turn a * 24 blind eye to fascist violence today, just as most of their predecessors did in the 1930s and 1940s.

Then the Pope signed a Concordat with Hitler, and the Catholic clergy in Germany (along with most of their Protestant fellows) either supported or were silent about the atrocities of fascism.

Responsibility

Where Holocaust is to be seriously criticised, however, is that it systematically fails to show the full extent of the responsibility for the atrocities it describes.

For instance, the only Catholic priest in the story is an atypical one who was eliminated by the Nazi authorities for his open protests about their policies.

Nor is there more than a passing reference to the fact that the imperialist nations and Stalin silently collaborated with the killing of the Jews.

• They restricted immigration; they failed to publicise the facts that they knew (both the Times and the BBC for example had information about the 'final solution': which they never revealed); and they made a political accomodation to Hitler and fascism in the name of 'peaceful coexistence' -the most stark example of which was the 1939 Stalin-Hitler.pact.

Limitation

This failure is linked more genera limitation of Holocaust's political perspectives.

Its story is presented simply as the Nazis-or even 'Germans' -against the Jews.

The overall goals of Nazi Uidck reaction-of which unit hland anantiam ...hinh ther "final solution of the Jewish problem" was a central part, but still a part-is hidden.

The authors of Holocaust can attribute Nazi racism to no more than collective cruelty and delusion and not to the desperate effort of a capitalist class threatened with economic extinction to split the working class and destroy its organisations.

So the relationship between the genocide of the Jews and the repression of the working class and the mass murder of its leaders and militants is avoided by Holocaust. . As a result although the subtitle of the book is "It must have made the connection themselves.

This political narrowness of vision, the inability to see the class dimension of racism and genocide, is reflected in Gerald Green's one dimensional Jewish characters.

Green's Jews-predominantly the Weiss family-are all morally good; by calling they are liberal professionals (Weiss is a doctor in Berlin): their sons are artistically talented handsome and athletic; and the girls they fall in love with areone almost has to say, "of course"-innocent, self-sacrificing and beautiful.

They all either resist with valour. or suffer with great dignity.

It would be wrong to demand from a popular novel or TV film a fully rounded picture either of the characters or of East European Jewish society during the Holocaust.

Distorted

But its special kind of idealism, definitely distorts the im. pression of the events which is left with the viewer or the reader of Green's novel.

The Holocaust is converted from a political event into a purely moral question of 'evil' Germans (with a few exceptions) against 'innocent and universally good Jews (with no exceptions).

The reality was, of course, immensely more complex.

And Green has not only performed many oversimplifications but he is in a number of ways guilty of historical falsification. • This is at its most extreme in the case of the Warsaw ghetto to which Dr. and Mrs. Weiss are transported.

Agents

The inhabitants of Green's fictional Warsaw ghetto are all kindly and dignified sufferers until they decide, almost unan. imously to resist the Nazis.

From this picture it would be impossible to imagine that among the Jews the Nazi authorities had paid Gestapo agents.

Or that the ghetto was administered by a council lof which Dr. Weiss in the fictional version is a member) which,

Conciliatory

This system, common to all the East European ghettos, was not collaboration in a willing sense with the Nazis.

But it did represent the conciliatory positions which dominated the Jewish political leadership throughout most of the period of the Holocaust.

That is not to say that earlier organised resistance would have certainly been successful.

But what is certain is that years of conciliation meant that when resistance developed, as it did in the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943, it was inevitably hopeless-even if incredibly heroic.

In fact resistance in the Warsaw ghetto did not become widespread until the official council (the Judenrat), which controlled a vast bureaucracy and had become corrupt as well as conciliatory, lost its political leadership in the ghetto.

The new. leaders were an alliance of Labour Zionists, the Jewish Bund, the Communist Party and other traditional organisations of Jewish labour and of the left.

Green's version admits of scarcely any conflict of this kind in the Jewish community.

The differences which do exist in his version are between Zionists and the rest, with Zionists representing the heroes who resisted.

Both the book and, more emphatically the film, point towards Zionism as the real answer to the Holocaust never happening again.

And the historical record is falsified to lead to this conciusion.

Fortunately, at the same time as the publication and showing of Holocaust another book has been published which provides the most accessible, detailed historical account of the terrible events so far published.

"Final solution"

This is The War Against the Jews: 1933-45 by Lucy Dawidowicz (Penguin, £1.95).

The first part of the book is about the origins and course of the Nazi programme for the "final solution of the Jewish problem"

And the second documents

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series of events, only a, genera- tion old, which constitute one