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Entry: Willing Executioners?--The Holocaust, Germans, and Collective Guilt Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/willing_executioners_the_holocaust_germans_and_collective_guilt#28674 Post contents: Mr. de Zayas argument would be self-evident if we did not operate in the West under the assumption that collectively the Germans were guilty, and that therefore all crimes committed against the Germans, were a mere retribution, a form of raw cosmic justice embodied in the persons of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. On these lines Daniel Goldhagen’s indictment of the Germans as ‘willing executioners’ attempted to give a new lease of life to the spurious anthropology put forward by the Frankfurt School in the effort to denazify and reeducate the defeated Germans. This spurious anthropology postulated as the eternal German national character an ‘authoritarian personality’ marred by sado-masochism and compulsive anti-semitism, and whose only solution lies on state-driven ‘Mass Pedagogy’ (Volkspädagogik), and ‘Mass Re-Education’ (Volkserziehung). The Freudian savvy of the Frankfurtians came in handy for the task since the whole process of re-education was –and still is- carried out through carefully crafted conditioning techniques such as mass-media aversion therapy. Denazification developed into a totalitarian practice of its own, and came to the US – with its implicit double standards- already in the 1970s in the form of Political Correctness, the present dominant ideology. In the war memories of de Gaulle, Churchil and Eisenhower, you will not find a mention of the word Holocaust. And in the online proceedings of the Nuremberg trials (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/imt.htm ), you will find 3 mentions of the word Holocaust: one referring to generic German crimes (not exclusive towards Jews), and to referring to the devastation of Dresden and Germany itself. If you do a search in the electronic full-text version of the massive, 32 volume World History (Propyläen-Weltgeschichte) published between 1960 and 1965, you will not find a single mention of the term 'Holocaust'. The series was edited by Golo Mann, Alfred Heuß and August Nitschke all respected Historians in denazified Germany. The timing of its arrival in the US is important because it coincides with the emergence of the term ‘Holocaust’ as shorthand for the persecution of the European Jews during WWII. Norman Finkelstein argues that the rise of the Holocaust industry coincided with the Israeli success in the 1967 preemptive attack against Syria, Egypt and Jordan. At that moment, the image of a defenseless little David fighting against the Arab Goliath had become untenable and required a redoubling of the Hasbara efforts in the West. It is important to keep the historical perspective of how the term Holocaust evolved, and to what political ends it is used, so that we can understand why all children born today in the West, three generations after the crimes committed during WWII, are still being denazified. A brave new world indeed, this one of ours. Sent at: 2008 12 02