Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List concludes with a sentimental epigraph, labeled as a quotation from the Talmud: "Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire." This declaration of humane universalism is appealing to many, and it became part of the publicity campaign for the film, but it is not genuinely Jewish. As historian Peter Novick reports, in his informative The Holocaust in American Life, "the traditional version, the one taught in all Orthodox yeshivot, speaks of 'whoever saves one life of Israel.'" The traditional Talmudic text thus stands in stark contrast to Spielberg's epigraph. To save one Jewish life ("one life of Israel") is to save the entire world, because in Jehovah's eyes Jewish lives are infinitely precious and non-Jewish lives are not. Far from teaching the brotherhood of man, the Talmud teaches a Jewish supremacy so absolute that a single Jewish life is deemed as valuable as the totality of all other lives. [1]
The Talmud, Judaism's most sacred document, exists in two major recensions. The apparently universalist text that Schindler's List quotes appears in the Jerusalem Talmud, the strikingly ethnocentric text in the authoritative Babylonian Talmud. The latter, the real Talmud, contains the definitive text taught in all Orthodox religious schools and memorized by generations of studious young Jews, but less than a moment's reflection will disclose the practical impossibility of including, in a film addressed to a non-Jewish audience, a Talmudic aphorism that so markedly depreciates non-Jewish lives. Spielberg prudently chose instead to present Judaism as a universalist faith with an extravagant notion of the value of each individual life, a Semitic brand of Christianity. He was not teaching a Jewish moral lesson but rather an exaggerated piece of Christian humanism, Talmudic tribal wisdom turned on its head for the educational benefit of non-Jews, reflecting their religious traditions, not his own. [2]
The chasm between genuine Talmudic ethnocentrism and Spielberg's bogus Talmudic universalism reveals some significant issues in the marketing of the Jewish Holocaust. In the Diaspora, where Jews form small minorities among their host populations, public commemoration of Jewish deaths during World War II cannot explicitly privilege Jewish lives over other lives, however much Jewish propagandists wish that it could. It must instead teach universalist lessons filled with attractive humanitarian ideals, lessons that offer the promise of moral improvement to anyone who successfully internalizes them. We become better by watching Schindler's List, learning the infinite value of all human life and the moral obligation to respect minority differences, just as we become better by visiting Holocaust museums, where the same lessons are taught. Yet moral improvement effected by commemorating Jewish deaths is only a more subtle form of the same tribal ethnocentrism that Spielberg sought to conceal. In contemporary America and throughout much of the West an acknowledged legacy of victimization in the past is a source of political power in the present, and incessant commemoration of the Jewish Holocaust is, as Novick puts it, the reward for winning a "gold medal in the Victimization Olympics," an official recognition of preeminent victimhood that makes Jews more politically powerful even while we and they jointly remember their wartime powerlessness. Commemorating Jewish weakness sixty years ago is tantamount to celebrating Jewish strength today. Holocaust commemoration tells us, moreover, that Jewish deaths in World War II were much more significant than other deaths, since collectively they constitute a unique archive of invaluable universal truths, although during their lives most of the Holocaust's nonsurvivors were themselves perfectly indifferent to the universal truths that their deaths would later be made to teach. The public discourse of the Holocaust can therefore only be tortuously deceptive, since its underlying motive is, as Norman Finkelstein argues, "Jewish aggrandizement," while its overt message is human brotherhood, a universal truth that Judaism, history's most radically ethnocentric religion, has wisely never acknowledged. [3]
"American Jews," says Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, a former director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), "reinforce their commitment to pluralism by recalling the atrocities that sprang from intolerance." [4] The claim that institutionalized recollection of German intolerance and German atrocities will foster American pluralism takes us beyond pious sentiments about human brotherhood. Speaking in code, a code not yet deciphered by most Whites, Berenbaum was cautiously stating American Jewry's longstanding commitment to racial balkanization ("pluralism") through multiculturalism and non-White immigration, both of which, because they dissolve Euro-America's race-cultural cohesiveness, are in the perceived group interests of American Jewry. The Jewish Holocaust serves as multiracialism's reigning mythology. Since racial balkanization plainly does not benefit the Euro-American majority, our evolving multiracial anti-nation requires some overarching myth that inhibits the expression of majority group interests. A political regime whose survival depends on White passivity must discredit White self-assertion, and the Holocaust helps achieve that objective by teaching Whites to fear their own interests while deferring to the interests of others. The Jewish aggrandizement implicit in Holocaust commemoration must, however, remain concealed beneath the opaque language of tolerance, since systematic deception is the price Jews pay to maintain the improbable fiction of their selfless commitment to pluralism.
The glaring flaw in the Holocaust's discourse of tolerance, the point at which Jewish self-interest becomes most apparent, is Israel, the world's only openly racialist nation, an ethnostate dedicated not to tolerance and pluralism and scrupulous avoidance of atrocities, but to the preservation and advancement of a single Volk, the Jewish people. Israel won its very existence through a violent assertion of racial will inconsistent with the racial passivity that Holocaust lessons mandate. Most Israeli towns once had Arab names, as Moshe Dayan candidly acknowledged. At now Arab-rein Samariah, a former Palestinian town whose indigenous population was expelled during Israel's War of Independence, Jews have brazenly erected a Holocaust museum dedicated to anti-nazi ghetto fighters, a commemoration of old Jewish weakness that sanctifies the effects of new Jewish strength. "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." Schindler's List accordingly ends in Jewry's Mideast refuge from European hatred, indicating that all the preceding trials and travails of the film's Jewish survivors teach a specifically Zionist lesson. In the West the lessons of the Jewish Holocaust prescribe multiculturalism and Third World immigration; for Israel, the Jewish state, they prescribe the exact opposite, teaching the right of Jews to live among other Jews within their own autonomous nation, protected from contaminating pluralism by a Jews-only immigration policy. "The world," Alan Dershowitz believes, "owes Jews, and the Jewish state, which was built on the ashes of the Holocaust, a special understanding." [5] Jewish nationalism is sanctioned by the Holocaust and merits our special understanding; other nationalisms, especially White nationalisms, are morally prohibited.
Blu Greenberg, wife of Rabbi Irving Greenberg, an influential advocate of American Holocaust commemoration, once believed that Jewish wartime suffering should remain an internal group memory, sacred to Jews alone, but quickly changed her opinion after attending an interfaith Holocaust service, where she found it "moving and comforting to see Christians share tears with us, acknowledge Christian guilt, and commit themselves to the security of Israel." Christian tears and Christian guilt equal Jewish power, as Blu Greenberg recognized, yet tears of guilt yield more valuable political benefits than do mere tears of commiseration. Our willingness to accept guilt and American Jewry's eagerness to assign it jointly form the precondition of all the Holocaust's meanings and the glue that holds them together in a largely uncontested set of often contradictory lessons. The public discourse of the Jewish Holocaust is incoherent: it speaks in the universalist language of tolerance and inclusion, while justifying Jewish particularism in Israel; it claims to find in stories of Jewish wartime suffering distinctively Jewish humanitarian lessons, applicable to everyone everywhere, while borrowing them from the historical religion of the West; it teaches human brotherhood, while elevating the suffering of Jews far above all other suffering; it commemorates Jewish powerlessness, while demonstrating Jewish power. But beneath all its deceptions and contradictions lies the message of broad Western responsibility for German mistreatment of Jews, a special culpability which Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits, a self-styled Holocaust theologian, has called "the measureless Christian guilt toward the Jewish people." [6]
Institutionalized Holocaust commemoration in the United States presupposes that White Americans are notably deficient in the various moral qualities that Holocaust remembering purportedly inculcates, whereas Jews, owing to their group experience of nazi persecution, are the appropriate teachers of necessary lessons in racial tolerance. Those peculiar meanings did not, needless to say, arise unaided from stories of German atrocities against European Jewry. The truth of our collective guilt required an aggressive reinterpretation of the Second World War, an assault on the moral legitimacy of the Western nations that fought and won it. Through a remarkable transformation, the Allied victors have become co-agents in the crimes and alleged crimes of the regime they defeated, and the war itself has been reimagined as a Judeocentric moral test, which all of us conspicuously failed. Our measureless guilt, together with the entire edifice of Holocaust commemoration erected upon it, is a doctrine of moral equivalence projected back into the past in order to shape the present.
An Early Holocaust Lesson
In 1944, as the war in Europe was drawing to a close, Jewish playwright Arthur Miller, then in his late twenties, sat down to write Focus, his first and only novel. [7] It would be a critical moral fable about his fellow Americans, for Miller did not share the heroic self-image and traditional patriotism that characterized most other Americans during the war years. Focus, published in 1945, would be an imaginative elaboration of a very simple thesis: being a Jew in Roosevelt's America was like being a Jew in Hitler's Germany. In their irrational hatred of the Jewish Other, White Americans, the same White Americans who were then fighting fascism in Europe and the Far East, were no different from nazis.
Lawrence Newman, the novel's WASP protagonist, is a corporate personnel manager whose quiet bourgeois world is permanently disrupted after he begins to wear eyeglasses, which strangely make him look Jewish, a dangerous liability in the America of Miller's fertile imagination. Without glasses Newman is a gray-flanneled Episcopalian, a normal White American, despite his ethnically ambiguous surname; with glasses he is perceived and treated as a despised Jew, persecuted and even attacked by other normal White Americans, all of whom are racist and anti-Semitic, as Newman had been before he gained his factitious Jewishness. The novel's organizing narrative conceit, that eyeglasses can turn an anti-Semitic Gentile into a Jew, conveys an obvious Judeocentric meaning: Lawrence Newman, in his culpable blindness to the intolerance that surrounds him, must first be seen as a Jew in order to see clearly. Thus in his new role as a reluctant Jew, now seeing and experiencing the world through the Jewish lenses conferred by his racial marginalization, Newman gradually discovers that his homogenous New York neighborhood, which had once seemed a benign social environment of communal amity, is in reality, beneath its placid surface, a seething caldron of xenophobia and hate, at least for anyone with the misfortune to be different, or in his case merely to appear different. "Behind these snug, flat-roofed houses," Newman now perceives, "a sharp-tipped and murderous monster was nightly being formed, and its eyes were upon him."
The novel's historical context is central to its subject. In Focus the European war, depicted in our propaganda as a titanic struggle of good against evil, seems little more than a distant contest between two rival groups of pogromists, each nurturing its own "murderous monster" of racial hatred. In Europe German nazis conduct mass hangings of Jews, while at home angry anti-Semites, organized into the Christian Front, part of a large network of patriotic organizations spread across the country, beat Jews and rape Puerto Ricans as they await the return of the American military, who will then assume the lethal role of storm troops in driving Jews from America, beginning first in New York, the center of Jew-hatred. White America's cleansing war against Jewry will begin, as an activist neighbor informs Newman, "when the boys come home," since American combatants in the European war are at one with their German enemies in their implacable anti-Semitism.
In the political environment we now all inhabit, nothing in Focus is startling, nothing would be out of place in a sensitivity workshop or an anti-racialist educational exercise. The novel's vision of a virulently racist America would have appeared radical in 1945; now it is commonplace, especially for young Whites immersed in a rigorous program of multicultural miseducation. Miller, alarmed by the failure of non-Jews to comprehend "the threatening existence of Nazism," and unimpressed by the fact that many men of his age cohort were then dying in Europe fighting Germans, took it upon himself to teach an early version of what would eventually become the most insidious of the Jewish Holocaust's numerous lessons, namely that pathological ("nazi") hatreds lurk behind the West's superficially civilized exterior. Whereas American wartime propaganda had, naturally enough, presented NS Germany as the moral antonym of the United States in particular and of the democratic West in general, Miller substituted a much different contrastive structure, placing innocent Jews on one side and lethally malevolent Whites on the other, with racial minorities like Blacks and Puerto Ricans in ancillary roles as occasional victims of White intolerance. This structure, which Miller may have been the first to discover, conflated Germans and their enemies in order to nazify White Gentiles as a whole. Focus was a thorough defamation of Euro-America for its endemic anti-Semitism and racial hatred, the purpose of which was to efface any significant moral distinction between ourselves and the propaganda image of the Nazi. Miller's nazification required the Nazi as the acknowledged representation of evil, but his concrete targets were White Americans, who had not yet seen their own visible racial pathologies.
Gratitude has never been a Jewish character trait. "The threatening existence of Nazism," anyone unfamiliar with Jewish idiosyncrasies might think, should have encouraged Arthur Miller to reflect upon the very significant differences that distinguished Hitler's Germany from Roosevelt's America, and to count his blessings. NS Germany, committed to the elimination of Jewish influence from German society, was a systematically anti-Semitic regime; the United States was not. American anti-Semitism, despite Miller's wildly paranoid fears, had never become a serious political force, and any reasonable litany of Jewish complaints against Euro-Americans would have been brief: country clubs that excluded Jews; one prominent lynching, of convicted child killer Leo Frank; a general irritation at Jewish vulgarity; a well-justified suspicion of Jewish business practices; occasional complaints about the Jewish affection for Marxism and political subversion, also well-justified. [8] No pogroms, no organized violence, none of the systematic anti-Semitism that Jewish group behavior has often produced. The remarkable ease with which organized Jewry successfully pilloried Charles Lindbergh, over his mild criticism of Jewish agitation for American entry into the European Civil War, is a telling case in point: in a contest between the power of the label "anti-Semite" and the prestige of America's most admired national hero, the national hero came out the loser. The United States was, as Adolf Hitler observed, the Jews' "new hunting grounds," a tolerant environment surprisingly conducive to Jewish interests; but Miller refused to acknowledge his good fortune, since that would have required a tacit compliment for the White American nation he so passionately hated.
Focus, with its often cartoonish didacticism, is no literary landmark. It was, however, a profoundly prophetic novel, and it helpfully illustrates how the ideological destination of the Jewish Holocaust, the Judeocentric anti-racialism that Holocaust commemoration would later teach, was already implicit in the ethnic discontents and cultural estrangement of American Jewry. An imaginative Jew writing before the liberation of the German concentration camps could arrive at nazifying Holocaust propaganda without the Holocaust, which suggests that the Holocaust does not represent events during the Second World War but rather reveals Jewish attitudes toward their benefactors. The Holocaust, as an idea, was latent Jewish racial aggression awaiting both a symbol and an opportunity to express itself.
The Nazi Camps
In April of 1945 Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Western Europe, ordered troops under his command to tour Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald and the first concentration camp on German soil to be liberated. He had an educational purpose in mind: "We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against." General Eisenhower was not alone in believing that the camps lent moral clarity to the war in Europe. Anti-nazi propaganda had ascribed to Germans a panoply of malevolent qualities distinguishing them from us: arrogance, cruelty, blind obedience to criminal orders, unprovoked violence against the defenseless. Like most modern war propaganda, it had externalized evil in the enemy, thereby bestowing heroic goodness on all the enemy's enemies, the Western democracies and their gallant Soviet ally. The liberated camps, with their legions of emaciated corpses and often skeletal inmates, were vivid confirmation of German darkness and Allied light. The nazi concentration camp retroactively provided, as Novick remarks, "the symbol that defined the meaning of the war." [9] American soldiers could now see with their own eyes solid evidence of the evil they had been fighting against.
Sixty years after the event we now generally assume that American and British liberators of German concentration camps were witnesses to the "Holocaust" and that the inmates whom they liberated were its Jewish "survivors." That assumption, as Novick points out, is a mistake, our own retrospective interpretation of the evidence, a misinterpretation shaped by the centrality that the Holocaust, a term none of the liberators would have understood, has acquired in our collective consciousness. In photographs of camp survivors we now see Jews, but in the spring of 1945 Allied soldiers did not see Jews in the flesh-and-blood inmates they liberated. They saw political prisoners and resistance fighters, "the men of all nations that Hitler's agents had picked out as prime opponents of Nazism," as a reporter for Life described the inmates in Dachau. Most journalistic accounts of the liberation of the camps spoke in similar language; "Jew" did not appear anywhere in Edward R. Murrow's famous radio broadcast from Buchenwald. "There was nothing," Novick writes, "about the reporting on the liberation of the camps that treated Jews as more than among the victims of the Nazis; nothing that suggested the camps were emblematic of anything other than Nazi barbarism in general; nothing, that is, that associated them with what is now designated 'the Holocaust.'" [10] The horror camps, as Eisenhower called them, were not evidence of nazi "racism" nor were their inmates "survivors" of a genocidal Final Solution against Jews. The camps were instead the results of nazi dictatorship, evidence of political crimes against anti-nazis that served by contrast to confirm Anglo-American traditions of political liberty. Godless German fascists were visibly capable of such crimes against political opponents, whereas we, in the democratic West, were not.
In one important respect their interpretation then was much closer to the truth than ours now: only about a fifth of the prisoners liberated by Americans were Jews. The majority by far were non-Jews, some of them real resistance fighters, many apolitical criminals, many others Communists interned for the duration of the war as political enemies of the anti-Marxist NS Reich. Although our eyes have been trained to see, in photographs and old newsreels of Dachau and Buchenwald, Jews targeted for racial destruction, our eyes deceive. Jews formed the majority of internees in German concentration camps in the East, notably at Auschwitz, but not in the camps on German soil and thus not in the camps that Americans liberated. For Americans in 1945, the human face of the nazi concentration camp was expressed, for the most part, in photographs of European Gentiles, not dead Jews. The prevailing political view of the camps, which saw their inmates as brave co-belligerents in our crusade against nazi tyranny, was perfectly convincing. [11]
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It should be superfluous to mention that none of the American liberators felt culpable, none felt that they were somehow complicit in the carnage before them, none felt that they should shed tears of contrition for the victims. Some humanitarians warned of publicizing photographic evidence of nazi atrocities for fear that it might inflame a spirit of vengeance against prostrate Germany; no one worried that nazi atrocities would induce feelings of guilt among the victors for having failed to prevent them or for having been part of the cultural system that perpetrated them. Our side, the democratic West, had just defeated them, the fascist dictatorships. Dachau and Buchenwald testified to our goodness and their evil. Liberty had defeated tyranny. It was a polarizing and triumphalist interpretation, befitting the victors of history's most destructive conflict.
The world would be a better place today if Germany and her allies had won the war in Europe; it would be an immensely better place if the war had never been fought in the first place. Yet given the war's unrecoverable finality in 1945, the triumphalist victors' narrative was a reasonable interpretation of an unnecessary bloodletting, at least if you belonged to any of the nations that had fought on the winning side of Europe's Civil War. If you were a German, our perception of your evil was a terrible libel against you and your descendants. A war's losers, however, seldom write the history of their defeat. History is usually written by the victors, and our victors' history served our parochial interests. It said something good about ourselves, and it dignified the many Allied lives that the fratricidal European war had needlessly cost.
Broadening Guilt
Eisenhower, after his visit to Ohrdruf, wrote a letter to General George Marshall: "The things I saw beggar description ... The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering ... I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda."
Eisenhower's words are chiseled into the stone of the USHMM's exterior wall, providing Gentile validation of the Judeocentrism enshrined within. The words are true -- that is, General Eisenhower actually wrote them -- but they have now been appropriated into a much different discourse, Jewish Holocaust discourse, so that in their new context, as part of a monument on American soil commemorating Jewish wartime suffering in Europe, Eisenhower is made to speak of the Holocaust, the industrially planned extermination of six million Jews, a racial rather than a political crime. The difference is substantial, not simply a new label attached to old events. For the Jewish Holocaust is the attenuation and even the displacement of the heroic version of the Second World War -- the version that, rightly or not, the Allied soldiers who fought and died winning it believed -- in favor of another version, a Jewish version that imputes to the victors the same sins as the vanquished. Whereas the men who liberated the camps thought that they had, like St. George killing the dragon, brought an end to an evil, in the Holocaust discourse that would emerge twenty years later they had merely uncovered their own moral failure, whose source still must be eradicated.
European Jews were killed not only by Germans but also by "apathy" and "silence" in the United States and Great Britain, the apathy and silence being products of a pervasive anti-Semitism that the Anglo-American world shared with its German enemies. This staple of Holocaust discourse, repeated in many forms by many Jewish authors, is a transparently ad hoc attempt to surmount a large, inconvenient obstacle: the Western Allies did not themselves kill European Jews. The allegation that Hitler attempted genocide, the physical extermination of all Jews, might have remained politically inert, useful for extracting reparations from Germany but providing no special advantages in the United States, unless it could be framed so inclusively that our racial intolerance, an ocean away from Auschwitz, could be numbered among its causes. Thus in addition to polemical studies situating the Holocaust as the culmination of a long history of European anti-Semitism, there has emerged in recent decades a growing body of equally polemical scholarship, with titles like The Jews Were Expendable and The Abandonment of the Jews, inculpating the Allies, and in particular the United States, for their failure to prevent the Holocaust. With the outbreak of the European war, the fate of six million Jews fell into the hands of the American government, and the American government, reflecting the anti-alien bigotry of the American people, deliberately allowed them to die. [12]
In their failure to rescue Jews, USHMM spokesman Helen Fagin charged a decade ago, Americans were "just as guilty" as Jew-killing Germans. [13] Fagin was summarizing, more bluntly than most official Holocaust propagandists, an ideological revolution that had transformed the German concentration camp from specific evidence of nazi tyranny into a symbol of generalized White guilt. She was also stating the implicit justification for her museum. White schoolchildren visit the USHMM, along with dozens of similar institutions, not to honor American wartime heroism or to recapture the moral certainty that the camps once evoked, but to learn the lessons of their ancestral culpability, discovering how our old selective ("racist") immigration laws and our willful failure to save Jews caused the Holocaust, both claims being important elements in the museum's educational mission. Many of the same photographs that Americans saw in 1945 are reproduced, and the physical form of the camps therefore remains similar, but their moral content has been dramatically altered. We have become complicit in the events that "Holocaust" designates.
"If you are brought up a Jew," the anthropologist Ashley Montagu (Israel Ehrenberg) once opined, "you know that all non-Jews are anti-Semitic." [14] Accordingly at the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, which teaches "the dynamics of racism and prejudice in America and the history of the Holocaust," visitors must enter the various educational exhibits by passing through a door marked "Prejudiced" in red-neon lights. Although another door is marked "Not-Prejudiced," for those who imagine they should be allowed to tour the museum without accepting racial guilt, that second door cannot in fact be opened. It is locked, a fraudulent object lesson encapsulating the Holocaust's core anti-racialist meaning. Our moral deficiencies -- our "racism" and our "prejudices" -- are central to the Holocaust's subject matter, and we cannot learn tolerance, and cannot even tour the Tolerance Museum, without first acknowledging them. Since prejudice against others is often roughly equivalent to a preference for one's own, Holocaust education nazifies the politically dangerous White racial cohesion it threatens. "Prejudice," we must learn, is an especially wicked condition, and all of us, our Jewish instructors excepted, are afflicted with it.
In the Tolerance Museum, run by militantly Zionist Orthodox Jews, Columbus and the Pilgrim Fathers keep company, as examples of genocidal intolerance, with Hitler, Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot, which is a good indication of the scale of the museum's political ambitions. Not only our present deficiencies but even our pre-national origins must be reinterpreted in the Holocaust's massive shadow, our old offenses against the canons of tolerance serving as harbingers of the infinitely greater crime to follow. Within this Holocaust-centered historiography the lives and the prejudices of our ancestors become prefigurations of nazi crimes against Jews, a model of history that can accommodate the commemoration of any number of crimes against various racial minorities, provided that the Jewish Holocaust remains the ultimate crime that all of them unambiguously portend, much as scriptural antetypes anticipate their fulfillment. Intolerant Pilgrims killed Pequod Indians, a visitor to the Tolerance Museum will learn, and intolerant Germans would later kill Jews. The earlier crime was a portent of the definitive crime, since the Holocaust is the moral terminus toward which all of Western history was directed, the defining event which orientates everything that preceded it and everything that followed. The Tolerance Museum -- its Hebrew name is Beit Hashoah, House of the Shoah -- teaches explicit Holocaust lessons that derive their power from the institutionalized elevation of Jewish wartime suffering into history's most horrible crime and from the concomitant moral obligation, now embedded in the educational system, to ensure that it never recurs, an obligation that requires continual instruction and continual self-inspection, as well as a systematic reevaluation of our history. All of us, Germans and non-Germans alike, must, if we follow the advice of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, self-police and combat our inner nazi, lest our racial prejudices metathesize into another Holocaust.
The USHMM on the Mall in Washington and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, along with all the other Holocaust memorials that litter the terrain between them, are physical embodiments of American Jewry's reinterpretation of the war, as well as public acknowledgments of its political triumph. The Jewish Holocaust is not a collection of German atrocities, real and fabricated; it is a racially aggressive broadening of culpability, a nazification of Western civilization relying on the normally unstated premise that the Allies were "just as guilty" as the Germans. It domesticates what was formerly an alien evil, ascribing to us the same pathology that we falsely ascribed to our enemy sixty years ago. The purgative confrontation with a criminal past that we once imposed on defeated Germans we now allow Jews to impose on ourselves.
Shoah and Holocaust
In its current Judeocentric meaning uncapitalized "holocaust" first tentatively entered English during the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem as a translation of Hebrew Shoah ("Disaster, Catastrophe"). Eichmann was accused of organizing this Shoah, the extermination of European Jewry, and American media coverage of the trial used "holocaust" as a rough English equivalent, following an existing Israeli practice. Shoah, as a term designating the disaster that had befallen the Jews of Europe, had been in currency among Palestinian Jews even before the war, dating specifically to 1933, the year of Hitler's electoral victory in Germany, which was perceived as a disaster for Jews; and in 1942 enterprising Zionists in the yishuv had already begun plans for a memorial, later to become the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, to commemorate the Shoah, well before most of the deaths that the memorial would eventually memorialize had actually occurred. But outside of Israel Jewish deaths during World War II could not until the Eichmann trial be easily differentiated from the more than fifty million non-Jews who perished, and a "holocaust" remained a sacrificial burnt offering in its original biblical context, and a term denoting any destructive conflagration in everyday speech. In that latter sense "holocaust" had been used to describe various acts of destruction inflicted on the Allies by the Axis, with no implication that Jews were notable among the victims. Before the dissemination throughout the West of the Holocaust, an exclusively Jewish holocaust categorically separate from other conflagrations, the suffering of European Jewry during the Second World War lacked a name and a distinct identity; it was just suffering, terminologically indistinguishable from other wartime suffering. The suffering of an American crippled on D-Day and the suffering of a Jew starved at Bergen-Belsen belonged to the same broad generic category of wartime suffering and wartime deaths. Both were violence inflicted on us by our common nazi enemy during the course of a terrible war which we had won. [15]
The Holocaust, capitalized to illuminate its earth-shaking import, was the deliberate disaggregation of Jewish dead from other Allied dead, with Jewish deaths receiving a special name and a special moral significance, forming a qualitatively distinctive wartime event, different in kind from all other wartime events and unprecedented in its world-historical implications. Hence the need for countless memorials to preserve its memory. Hence the need for educational prophylactic measures to prevent its recurrence. Hence the steadily declining significance of the war in which it occurred. World War II has now become, as Rabbi Berenbaum once boasted, a mere "background story" to the Jewish Holocaust. Yet the Holocaust, as it entered our vocabulary and our conceptual landscape in the 1960s and 1970s, was not simply Jewry's declaration of independence from the Allied victors; it also carried a judgment. With the arrival of the Holocaust, the nazi concentration camp, which had formerly testified to our comparative goodness, became the visible revelation of the vast moral failure of our entire civilization. "The guilt of Germany," Eliezer Berkovits proclaimed in 1973, "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." [16]
"The uniqueness of the Holocaust," the Zionist writer Gershon Mamlak explains, "was manifested in a dual form: the way the victims experienced it, and the way the Gentile world performed and/or witnessed it." Mamlak offers a succinct statement of some important Holocaust dogmas. "Uniqueness" is crucial, providing a historiographic counterpart to the religious doctrine of Jehovah's selection of Israel as his preferred people. Jewish suffering during the Second World War was different in kind from all other suffering, so unique that even comparing the Jewish Holocaust to lesser holocausts can be considered a form of blasphemy. Uniquely evil victimization should of course entail the unique evil of a specific set of victimizers, but in Holocaust discourse the Jewish victims of history's most unique crime stand in opposition to the whole Gentile world, which is conceptualized, in terms of its relation to the Holocaust, as a single category subsuming perpetrators and bystanders, each sharing a common guilt. "The [non-Jewish] world," Rabbi Shlomo Riskin informed a group of Jewish tourists visiting Auschwitz, "is divided into two parts: those who actively participated with the Nazis and those who passively collaborated with them." German nazis and their allies murdered Jews; the entire Gentile world, comprised of active nazi participants and their passive collaborators, was culpable. Judaism's intense ethnocentrism has traditionally divided mankind into Jews and the "nations of the world," obliterating the differences that distinguish each non-Jewish nation from others, the defining feature of our various nations being, in Jewish eyes, their non-Jewishness and hence their inherent uncleanness. Holocaust discourse replicates that ancient division, not only tracing a line that divides Jews from everyone else but also erecting a moral barrier along the line, with all of us on the wrong side of it. "Over long centuries," according to Eliezer Berkovits, "especially in the Western world, the [Gentile] nations reacted to the existence of the Jewish people with a form of sadistic cruelty which to call beastly would be an insult to the animal world." [17]
Jerzy Kosinski's Painted Bird, published in 1965 and set in wartime Poland, was among the earliest representations of the Jewish Holocaust's revelation of ubiquitous Gentile savagery, and it should be regarded as Diaspora Jewry's first significant literary expression of its emerging Holocaust consciousness. Kosinski's imaginative treatment of wartime horrors reflected a deliberate decision, like Miller's decision twenty years earlier, to define, with complete indifference to actual history, the generic White Other as the malevolent source of Jewish suffering, the modern Amalek. Kosinski (Lewinkopf) and his family were, as a matter of biographical fact, protected by Polish peasants during the brutal German occupation, but he nevertheless chose, when he came to pen his fictional Holocaust memoirs, to nazify his Catholic benefactors, transforming Poles into hate-filled pogromists who subject the novel's six-year-old protagonist to a series of fanciful sadistic cruelties, none of which ever occurred. Kosinski's real-world experience in occupied Poland, a life of comparative comfort among the Poles he would later vilify, should have led him to endorse the victors' interpretation of the war: on one side evil Germans, on the other us, the evil Germans' enemies, in this case Poles and Jews. Nothing in that structure detracted from the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust; nothing in it would have limited Kosinski's artistic license. He was free to invent as many grotesque atrocities as his muse could inspire, so long as he attributed them to Germans, not Poles. Yet Kosinski chose instead, in a conscious act of racial aggression, to nazify the war's first anti-nazis, at the price of radically distorting his own experience. [18]
One purpose of the Eichmann trial had been, as Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced, to make the nations of the world feel ashamed. The trial was an exercise in mild nazification designed to suggest Allied co-responsibility for the Shoah while advertising the new Israeli refuge from eliminationist anti-Semitism abroad. [19] Zionist instrumentalizing of nazi persecution sought to encourage those Jews who only admired Israel from afar to enact Zionism, to dissolve the Diaspora by taking up residence in the Jewish state. Israel was an unassimilable people compelled for centuries to dwell apart as powerless exiles inside unappreciative nations; with the rebirth of territorial Israel Jews could return to their homeland, where they once again possessed the sovereign power to protect their apartness from its enemies. Kosinski's fabricated account of the nightmarish wanderings of an innocent refugee, threatened by Germans and tortured by psychopathic Poles, was ideologically congruent with Zionist political assumptions, which themselves expressed a common belief in the omnipresence of irrational Jew-hatred. But Zionism has always been halfway between a delusion and a lie: it is based on a sincere faith in Gentile malevolence, yet a faith not quite sincere enough to impel its adherents to remove themselves from the physical threat that Gentile malevolence theoretically poses. Kosinski himself left Poland for the United States in 1957, exchanging one exile (galut) for another, unwilling to avail himself of the refuge from further torments that reborn Israel offered.
Zionism proposed a resolution of the Jewish problem, which it frankly acknowledged, through the normalization of Jews within their own nation state. But when the Jewish ethnostate was finally achieved, most Jews felt no inclination, as Hitler had predicted in Mein Kampf, to ingather themselves en masse in Palestine, however much they cultivated a plaintive yearning to do so. The central Zionist message that motivated Israel's publicizing of the Shoah was irrelevant, almost a rebuke, to any Jew who chose to continue his now voluntary exile among the goyim, and the Shoah, as it incrementally took shape on American soil as the Holocaust, acquired a different purpose, at odds with the intentions of its Israeli promoters. The Jewish problem, our perception of an alien race-nation existing within Western nations, could only be interpreted by immobile Diaspora Jewry as a symptom of the White problem -- "racism," our desire to preserve our race-cultural integrity, a desire that could now be defined as a precondition for genocide. The resolution of the White problem has therefore been the principal objective of the Holocaust, which became an integral part of a campaign to eliminate the Jewish problem by declaring any perception of its existence pathological. [20] The Holocaust was absorbed into anti-racism, instrumentalized as its foremost political weapon for combating Eurocentrism and White racial cohesion. Sadistic nazi cruelties, far from demonstrating the need to end Jewish dispersion, instead supplied a new moral pretext for fragmenting Western nations in order to normalize Jewish self-selected otherness as one otherness in a sea of racial diversity. Contemporary Holocaust commemoration is in that respect a repudiation of Zionism, since it assumes the permanence of Jewish exile: Jews build Holocaust museums in the United States because they have no intention of leaving.
Collective Memory
Diaspora Jews today remember their Holocaust and have convinced us that we should remember it as well, but in the years immediately after the war, when memory should have been most acute, they rarely spoke about nazi persecution and apparently forgot the indignities of European Jewry's wartime internment. Holocaust forgetting preceded Holocaust remembering. The extermination of European Jews, the sociologist Nathan Glazer reported in 1957, "had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of American Jewry." [21] For about two decades after the liberation of the camps wartime suffering played an insignificant role in Jewish group thinking in the West, and the victors' interpretation of the war remained stable, largely unchallenged by the Jewish revisionism that would eventually dethrone it. In recent years various explanations for this phenomenon of Holocaust forgetting have been put forward, the most common being the psychoanalytic view that memories of attempted nazi genocide were far too painful to contemplate and were therefore repressed, just as survivors of child molestation are presumed to repress memories of their abuse. Whatever the reason, the fact remains, a fact conceded by everyone who has seriously examined the subject, that American Jews in the 1950s and early 1960s did not consider nazi persecution a central part of their group heritage. The Holocaust did not then exist as a discrete historical event and as a source of anti-racialist lessons, because Jews had not yet remembered it.
No new discoveries of old nazi evil prompted the collective decision of American Jews to shape their recovered memory of the camps into an indictment of the nations that liberated them. On the contrary: the Allies themselves were willing to believe, in the aftermath of the war, that nazis made lampshades from human skin, turned Jewish fat into soap, electrocuted Jews on conveyer belts, cultivated cabbages with Jewish fertilizer, and burned Jews alive in gas ovens. The Allies were willing, in other words, to attribute a much more lurid evil to their defeated German enemy than does contemporary Holocaust discourse, at least in its more scholarly forms. Yet postwar belief in unique, truly spectacular nazi evil did not generate the Jewish Holocaust.
The old heroic, pre-Holocaust view of World War II was valuable for Jews, and they had no legitimate reason to object to its particular set of lessons. In the postwar years anti-Semitism was driven safely to the periphery of American society. In a 1946 poll eighteen percent of Gentiles identified Jews as "a threat to America," which was myopically charitable; by 1954 the number had plummeted to one percent. Anti-Semitism, through its association with the defeated nazi enemy, had been delegitimized. "The fifteen or twenty years after the war," Novick writes, "saw the repudiation of anti-Semitic discourse and its virtual disappearance from the public realm." In the wake of NS Germany's defeat America became, in pronouncements by public figures, a "Judeo-Christian nation," since a national definition that failed to include our small Jewish minority implied nazi-like cultural homogeneity; in 1945 Bess Myerson became the first Jewish Miss America, breaking an old pageant rule that excluded non-Whites; in 1947 Hollywood's first treatment of anti-Semitism appeared, the overtly didactic Gentleman's Agreement, which Darryl Zanuck, the only major White film executive, campaigned hard to bring to the screen; and by the late 1950s the hagiographic treatments of Anne Frank -- featuring (as novelist Cynthia Ozick has angrily complained) a deracinated, "all-American" Anne -- had propelled her Diary into the canonical status it still enjoys today. [22] Jews, in short, were mainstream in postwar America, and anti-Semitism was not. The Holocaust was belatedly recollected in the near absence of the force its lessons were ostensibly intended to combat.
Postwar Holocaust forgetting is analytically significant. It allows us to see clearly that the Jewish Holocaust, regardless of the truth or falsity of its various factual claims, is an ideological construction dependent for its existence not on historical events in Europe but on contemporary political forces in America. A recovered memory that steadily grows more vivid and more impassioned as it becomes more distant is obviously much different from normal recollection. The idea of the Holocaust, apart from the facts and fictions that provide its raw material, has little to do with history, nor was it, as we have seen, an inevitable interpretation of the camps. The source of the Holocaust as an idea is located not in German concentration camps but in events within the United States in the 1960s, when American Jews first began, during the era of civil rights and counterculture, to vocally recollect memories of nazi persecution in Europe.
Jewish wartime suffering became the Holocaust, a discrete event to which uniqueness could be ascribed and for which Western civilization could be held responsible, at the very historical moment when racial victimization in the past began to confer political power in the present. The victors' interpretation of the war had provided important advantages in the 1950s, immunizing Jews from criticism and mainstreaming them within Euro-America; it provided fewer advantages in the 1960s, when a legacy of victimization became a moral bludgeon with which to extort political privileges from an increasingly besieged Euro-American majority. The Holocaust was the Jewish brand of anti-White identity politics, an aggressive declaration of a distinctive Jewish identity based on our collective guilt for their unique suffering. The old view of the war had externalized evil in the nazi enemy; the Holocaust turned Jews into victims of unprecedented White violence, making the West itself the evil's source and rewarding Jews with their own special form of negritude. To number yourself among the wretched of the earth was a source of political power during the Black civil rights revolution, and it would be an even greater source of power in the decades that followed. Jews had played an instrumental role in fomenting the revolution, providing as much as three quarters of the funding for civil rights organizations, and by tactically remembering the Holocaust they enlisted themselves among the minority groups eligible to profit from racial claims, while relieving themselves of membership, largely nominal in any case, in the White oppressor race, against which 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 racial claims against White America, but also pushed itself to the front of the line. [23]
Jewish identity politics is, however, more than simple political calculation. There can be no doubt that the Holocaust is now genuinely central to Jewish group consciousness, as poll after poll reveals. "It's a sad fact," says Samuel Belzberg, a major financial supporter of the Tolerance Museum, "that Israel and Jewish education and all the other familiar buzzwords no longer seem to rally Jews behind the community. The Holocaust, though, works every time." Most Jews believe their own propaganda and they are often profoundly affected by it. "The Holocaust," the ADL's Abraham Foxman foolishly wrote in 1994, "... is not simply one example of genocide but a nearly successful attempt on the life of God's chosen children and, thus, on God himself." [24] Since such breathtaking ethnocentrism endangers the necessary public fiction of the Holocaust's broad humanitarian meanings, it is safe to conclude that Foxman, the head of an activist Jewish organization teaching racial equality and human brotherhood, was allowing his real emotions to overcome his political judgment, an indication of an authentic psychological investment in unpluralist Holocaust lessons.
Peter Novick describes American Jewry's undeniable absorption in the Holocaust as a collective memory, a group perception of the past distinct from objective historical knowledge. A collective memory is formed in response to contemporary political and social needs, and it makes the implicit claim that the past, rather than being separated from us by the unbridgeable differences between now and then, remains a present reality expressing enduring truths about a group and its place in the world. A collective memory "suffuse[s] group consciousness," representing a group's identity both for itself and for others through a morally simplified construction that strips away distracting details and ambiguities in order to align history with contemporary group concerns. The Holocaust, according to Novick, is a Jewish collective memory, a reshaping of the past brought into present consciousness as a collective social mechanism for defining group identity. [25]
Put simply, the Jewish Holocaust is a racially self-interested belief about the past that tells Jews something about us and something about themselves that most deeply believe to be true. The Holocaust martyrology that we experience as propaganda, and must analyze as such, Jews have internalized as the central component of their racial identity. Neal Sher, former nazi-hunter for the Office of Special Investigations, believes that "every Jew alive today is a Holocaust survivor," and each year on Yom Hashoah ("Shoah Day") Jewish students wear yellow stars to demonstrate their survivorship, a statement of racial identity that distinguishes them from us. A group identity modelled on the Holocaust survivor sanctions Jewish racial hostility by denying Jewish loyalty to anyone but themselves. The resistance fighter, celebrated in the old victors' narrative, was an active figure participating in a pan-European struggle of free men against fascist tyranny; the Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel being the most prominent example, is a passive object of cataclysmic violence at the hands of European civilization, a tragic victim whose unique experience of the literal hell that once took shape on earth makes him the bearer of ahistorical lessons about man's perennial inhumanity to Jews. The Holocaust survivor, abandoned to his fate and filled with a direct knowledge of metaphysical evil imparted by his incomparable suffering, stands as an indictment not only of Western civilization but often of a cruelly indifferent universe as well, and he has become the preeminent expression of Jewish collective memory, personifying a covertly belligerent restatement of Jewish apartness. Never, unfortunately, have Jews been more openly welcomed by the Euro-American mainstream, yet never has their self-representation been more closely bound up in an embittered recollection of racial victimization. "The world wants to wipe out the Jews," Cynthia Ozick once claimed, "... the world has always wanted to wipe out the Jews." [26]
Collective memory is a useful metaphor from a racialist perspective, since it highlights the real strangeness of American Holocaustomania, a guilt-ridden obsession with Jewish deaths that has gripped most of the Western world as well. If the Holocaust is, as Novick argues, the Jewish collective memory of World War II, then we who are not Jews are in effect thinking about our past with someone else's memory, seeing both the past and its implications for the present through Jewish eyes rather than through our own. The Holocaust did not begin as our collective memory of the war. We have not shaped and simplified history into the Holocaust; Jews have, and their memory has become ours. Thus we now think we see Jewish Holocaust survivors, rather than anti-nazi dissidents and European resistance fighters, in photographs of Buchenwald and Dachau, our old political interpretation of the camps having been displaced and forgotten. And thus, much more importantly, we now think we were responsible for the Holocaust and have allowed Jews to erect permanent monuments wherein, under their direction, the guilt many of us readily acknowledge is publicly commemorated.
There can be no mystery how the Jewish Holocaust became our collective memory, the retrospective propaganda with which we also envision the Second World War. Our Holocaust memory is the result of Jewish power, especially media power. In the Jewish-owned New York Times, as Finkelstein notes, the only subject that receives more coverage than the Holocaust is the weather. Jews have dominated Hollywood from its inception, and by the 1960s, the decade of the Holocaust's invention, they were substantially overrepresented in all the various professions that disseminate culture. Jews, that is, create many of the thoughts with which we think. Jews also control the American mass media, and have done so for at least forty years, so they wield the crucial propaganda instruments, enabled by low levels of anti-Semitism, that can transform their thoughts into our public opinion. In 1965 they could turn Kosinski's nazification of the Poles into an instant classic; in 1945 they did not yet possess either the power or the confidence to so elevate Miller's Focus. On this general issue of Jewish power Novick is frank: "We [Jews] are not only 'the people of the book,' but the people of the Hollywood film and the television miniseries, of the magazine article and the newspaper column, of the comic book and the academic symposium. When a high level of concern with the Holocaust became widespread in American Jewry, it was, given the important role that Jews play in American media and opinion-making elites, not only natural, but virtually inevitable that it would spread through the culture at large." [27]
A Fragile Victory
The Holocaust must be numbered among Jewry's most impressive victories in their new hunting grounds, second only to the 1965 liberalization of immigration law, which opened American borders to the Third World. There are now Holocaust memorials in most major American cities, as there are in almost all Western capitals, and we are in the midst of a deluge of Holocaust remembering in films and books and on television that shows no signs of subsiding. There are numerous Holocaust Studies programs in universities, staffed by professional Holocaustologists who owe their livelihoods to the further propagation of Holocaust lore, and Holocaust education flourishes in the public schools, drawing us ever closer to the full integration of anti-racialist Holocaust instruction into school systems across the country, the stated ambition the President's Holocaust Commission, the USHMM's forerunner. All these various forms of Holocaust commemoration teach political lessons that Jews want us to learn. A well-indoctrinated Euro-American who has internalized the lessons of the Jewish Holocaust will not object to non-European immigration into the United States; a Jew who has internalized the same shared collective memory will acquire a more emotional commitment to his racially exclusive Heimat in Palestine. Therein lies, of course, the danger of thinking with someone else's thoughts. Holocaust commemoration racializes Jews and deracializes Whites; it strengthens them and weakens us.
But we can question whether this victory will persist. Holocaust memory, because it took shape in the virtual absence of anti-Semitism, projects deep Jewish hostility that otherwise would have remained better concealed. It is compelled, by both the political purposes and the group psychology that brought it into existence, to disparage non-Jews: the world owes Jews only if the world as a whole is guilty of grievous offenses against Jews. A view of history that of necessity says something good about Jews but bad about almost everyone else is inherently fragile and liable to provoke resentment. Henry Kissinger opposed the construction of the USHMM, fearing that aggressive Holocaust commemoration would provoke anti-Semitism, and he might have been correct. The victors' narrative exiled Germany from civilized humanity while celebrating the heroics of White fratricide; the Holocaust nazifies any assertion of White national consciousness, even in nations with distinguished anti-nazi credentials, thus constructing and potentially unifying its own opposition. National patriotism and belief in the Jewish narrative of horrific persecution are increasingly incompatible, and the descendants of both the winners and the losers of the Second World War have a common interest in repudiating the old mythology of nazi evil, since it has become an ideological weapon against all of us, providing anti-national justification for a host of globalist policies ranging from Third World immigration to NATO's "humanitarian bombing" of the now nazified Serbs, whose wartime heroism we once rightly applauded.
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The Holocaust also suffers from dangerous contradictions. Jews have the power to transform their preferred ideas into our public opinion, but they cannot control the direction in which the ideas subsequently migrate. Alongside the hard Holocaust lessons of White guilt are the soft Holocaust lessons of human brotherhood, which are indispensable to the Holocaust's marketing strategy in the Diaspora as well as formal elements in its multicultural agenda. The survival of the Jewish ethnostate evidently requires daily violation of these humanitarian ideals of tolerance and racial pacificism, which their promoters in the Diaspora never had any intention of imposing on their far-flung brethren but now increasingly find arrayed against the only nation for which they feel any genuine loyalty. Contemporary anti-Zionism is a species of anti-racism, and anti-racialist Holocaust lessons therefore hand anti-Zionism new weapons. Palestinian collective memory tactically calls Arab dispossession in 1948 the Naqba ("Disaster"), a name and an idea clearly modelled on the Zionist Shoah. The competing postcolonial narrative of Palestinian racial victimization, with its calculated nazification of Israel's origins, dominated the 2001 UN Conference on Racism at Durban, where Third World delegates relabeled Zionism as racism and angrily denounced Israeli genocide. For Israel the universalist lessons of the Holocaust are poor camouflage, only revealing Zionism's systematic rejection of the anti-racialism that Jews so aggressively promote everywhere else. The militant Left in the United States and the bulk of liberal opinion in Europe have now abandoned the Jewish state, condemning it as a colonialist project founded on ethnic cleansing and sustained by apartheid. In Israel's ongoing war against brown-skinned Arabs there can be no doubt which side more closely resembles the potent propaganda image of the Nazi. Anti-racialist ideas that effectively serve Jewish interests in the Diaspora become toxic when applied to Israel, and no number of additional Holocaust museums will alter that fact.
Jewish success in propagating such an unstable ideological construction, thereby provoking opposition from nationalists on the Right while strengthening anti-Zionism on the Left, may yet prove a Pyrrhic victory. Holocaust commemoration winnows out friends until only enemies remain, and Jews risk finding themselves alone against the world.
A slightly different version of the preceding essay was published in two parts in the print version of National Vanguard, nos. 124-25.
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