Friday 27 September 2013

The Holocaust (1978 TV-Mini) vs. Shoah


"Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc.... 

This forgetting is still too dangerous, it must be effaced by an artificial memory. 

This artificial memory will be the restaging of extermination - but late, much too late for it to be able to make real waves and profoundly disturb something."




"NEVER AGAIN."

"Untrue and offensive"

"NEVER AGAIN."



Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on The Holocaust vs. Shoah from Spike1138 on Vimeo.


"I have said before that I am not a historian, and when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust, it is the historians that should reflect.

But in general, I can tell you that any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crimes the Nazis created towards the Jews as well as non-Jews is reprehensible and condemnable. Whatever criminality they committed against the Jews, we condemn."

He basically says exactly the same thing as Amadinijaad did, but uses more tactful language.

He's saying "The 6 million thing is bullshit", without directly referring the 6 million.

Ahmadinejad was notorious for going around saying "the Holocaust is a myth and they lie about it".

But the siege of Troy is a myth; the Kennedy Assassination is a myth; 9/11 is a myth; al-Qaeda is a myth.

Saying something is a myth is not the same as saying its not true or it didn't happen - there are countless real things and real events that are consciously mythologised to drive public policy.

Philip Zelikow wrote that paper on The Power of Public Myth - in reference to Pearl Harbour, and put it into practice by co-authoring Thirteen Days, which was his version of the Cuban Missile Crisis repurposed for propaganda purposes.

And then he wrote the 9/11 Commission Report, before the commissioners began hearing testimony.

And the Holocaust (as distinct from Shoah), IS a myth, we know it is - codified in the 1978 TV Miniseries, that's what the Holocaust *is*; the foundational myth of the apartheid State of Israel.

Holocaust, of course, means "burnt offering", a sacrifice demanded by YAWH of the Israelites; Shoah, I seem to recall, means something closer to "the sadness", which is accurate to the experience of European Jewry during these years; "Holocaust", isn't - Hitler wasn't sacrificing Jews in the Reich, but it IS an accurate turn of phrase from the point of view of the Zionist movement who leverage the deportations and refugee crisis to push their Jewish insurgency in Palestine and further their armed struggle to achieve an ethnically pure Jewish state. And close all the mixed swimming baths in Jerusalem.

Rouhani and Ahmadinejad are BOTH right, and their positions are in no way incompatible, although Ahmadinejad, for his rabble-rousing, was far more pissed off an militant about it the way he expressed himself, playing to the crowd.

https://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/baudrillard-simulacra_and_simulation.pdf


But it seems there's just no pleasing some people (at the New York Times)....


Well, he wouldn't have done, would he? Farsi is a 4000 year old language ! There is no Farsi word for "Holocaust" ! 

But there is in German - it's "Holocaust".


I'm also fairly sure "reprehensible" has no direct Farsi synonym.


Now, the Holocaust and Public myth:



HOLOCAUST

"Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc. This forgetting is as essential as the event, in any case unlocatable by us, inaccessible to us in its truth. This forgetting is still too dangerous, it must be effaced by an artificial memory (today, everywhere, it is artificial memories that efface the memory of man, that efface man in his own memory). This artificial memory will be the restaging of extermination - but late, much too late for it to be able to make real waves and profoundly disturb something, and especially, especially through a medium that is itself cold, radiating forgetfulness, deterrence, and extermination in a still more systematic way, if that is possible, than the camps themselves. One no longer makes the Jews pass through the crematorium or the gas chamber, but through the sound track and image track, through the universal screen and the microprocessor. Forgetting, annihilation, finally achieves its aesthetic dimension in this way - it is achieved in retro, finally elevated here to a mass level.

Even the type of sociohistorical dimension that still remained forgotten in the form of guilt, of shameful latency, of the not-said, no longer exists, because now "everyone knows," everybody has trembled and bawled in the face of extermination - a sure sign that "that" will never again occur. But what one exorcises in this way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced, because it has always been in the midst of currently reproducing itself, and precisely in the very form in which one pretends to denounce it, in the medium itself of this supposed exorcism: television. Same process of forgetting, of liquidation, of extermination, same annihilation of memories and of history, same inverse, implosive radiation, same absorption without an echo, same black hole as Auschwitz. And one would like to have us believe that TV will lift the weight of Auschwitz by making a collective awareness radiate, whereas television is its perpetuation in another guise, this time no longer under the auspices of a site of annihilation, but of a medium of deterrence.

What no one wants to understand is that Holocaust is primarily (and exclusively) an event, or, rather, a televised object (fundamental rule of McLuhan's, which must not be forgotten), that is to say, that one attempts to rekindle a cold historical event, tragic but cold, the first major event of cold systems, of cooling systems, of systems of deterrence and extermination that will then be deployed in other forms (including the cold war, etc.) and in regard to cold masses (the Jews no longer even concerned with their own death, and the eventually self-managed masses no longer even in revolt: deterred until death, deterred from their very own death) to rekindle this cold event through a cold medium, television, and for the masses who are themselves cold, who will only have the opportunity for a tactile thrill and a posthumous emotion, a deterrent thrill as well, which "vill make them spill into forgetting with a kind of good aesthetic conscience of the catastrophe.

In order to rekindle all that, the whole political and pedagogical orchestration that came from every direction to attempt to give meaning to the event (the televised event this time) was not at all excessive. Panicked blackmailing around the possible consequence of this broadcast on the imagination of children and others. All the pedagogues and social workers mobilized to filter the thing, as if there were some danger of infection in this artificial resurrection! The danger was really rather the opposite: from the cold to the cold, the social inertia of cold systems, of TV in particular. It was thus necessary that the whole world mobilize itself to remake the social, a hot social, heated discussion, hence communication, from the cold monster of extermination. One lacks stakes, investment, history, speech. That is the fundamental problem. The objective is thus to produce them at all cost, and this broadcast served this purpose: to capture the artificial heat of a dead event to warm the dead body of the social. Whence the addition of the supplementary medium to expand on the effect through feedback: immediate polls sanctioning the massive effect of the broadcast, the collective impact of the message - whereas it is well understood that the polls only verify the televisual success of the medium itself. But this confusion will never be lifted. From there, it is necessary to speak of the cold light of television, why it is harmless to the imagination (including that of children) because it no longer carries any imaginary and this for the simple reason that it is no longer an image. By contrast with the cinema, which is still blessed (but less and less so because more and more contaminated by TV) with an intense imaginary - because the cinema is an image. That is to say not only a screen and a visual form, but a myth, something that still retains something of the double, of the phantasm, of the mirror, of the dream, etc. Nothing of any of this in the "TV" image, which suggests nothing, which mesmerizes, which itself is nothing but a screen, not even that: a miniaturized terminal that, in fact, is immediately located in your head - you are the screen, and the TV watches you - it transistorizes all the neurons and passes through like a magnetic tape - a tape, not an image."


Anyone contributing edits to the following page is defininitiomally bold - by doing so, you will certainly end up on a list somewhere...


See, it's not a documentary....


UPDATE: -

Oh. Apparently there is.








However, if the word itself predates 1933, the ADL and AIPAC are still going to kick up a stink.

As will the Persian Jews of Tehran, but for entirely different reasons....

Persian Jews & Religious Freedom In The Islamic Republic of Iran from Spike1138 on Vimeo.


"Well, you can't just go swilling booze right there in front of the Mullahs, but..."

It may be true that Islam is the official State Religion of Iran - but Christianity, specifically Anglicanism is the official State Religion of the United Kingdom, and there, as here, there are guarantees of religious liberty and a (somewhat) functional representative system government..

Unlike in the State of Isreal, gerrymandering cannot occur and religious and ethnic minorities (in this case, 25,000 Jews) are guaranteed a seat at the table in the Assembly.




Prior to the 1978 miniseries, and to this day, Jews did not use the term "Holocaust" to refer to the Jewish experience under the German Reich; it was (and is) "Shoah", or "the sadness".

Like 9/11, "The Holocaust", as such is a public myth; prior to 9/11, Philip Zelikow wrote an essay/postion paper on "The Power of Public Myth", with reference to Pearl Harbour - there is still differing accounts as to whether it was he (Zelikow), Rabbi Dov Zakheim or Paul Wolfowitz who authored the line in "Rebuilding America's Defences that went "this process of change is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic catalysing event - like a New Pearl Harbour", but that Zelikow was then appointed Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission (replacing Henry Kissinger after 3 days), and that Zelikow then drew up an outline, summary and conclusion to the final report before the commission ever began to hear evidence is not disputed.

"Holocaust" means "burnt offering" in Hebrew - that is not an accurate description of the Jewish experience under the German Reich, any more than it is of that of Communists, Romany peoples or homosexuals, whose plight was largely and completely ignored until the premier of "Bent", well into the early 1980s, some few years after "The Holocaust" was first broadcast.

I never use the term - I find it inadequate and patronising, a blunt instrument of propaganda and political wedge for all who adopt it.

No comments:

Post a Comment