Last week I published an article noting that although technology industrialist Elon Musk probably ranks as the most powerful and influential individual in the Western world, he recently humbled himself, deeply apologizing for some of his casual criticism of Jewish activities and pledging to mend his ways.

Traveling to Israel, he met with that country’s president and posed for photo-ops with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, promising to combat “antisemitism” on his Twitter platform. A few weeks later he undertook a pilgrimage to Auschwitz, making even stronger commitments to Jewish leaders, denying that he harbored any antisemitism in his own heart, and publicly declaring that he regarded himself as “aspirationally Jewish.”

These remarkable events reminded me of that famous incident of the Middle Ages in which Emperor Henry IV of the Holy Roman Empire had “gone to Canossa” and prostrated himself before Pope Gregory VII, seeking forgiveness for his challenge to the supreme authority of the Catholic Church:

Musk was only the latest and most extreme example of the many wealthy and powerful Gentiles who have publicly bent their knees in submission to Jewish power. Even if totally spurious, accusations of “antisemitism” have often proven fatal to the careers of even the highest-ranking individuals, and shortly before Musk’s submission, two presidents of Ivy League universities were politically brow-beaten and then forced to resign over their unwillingness to prohibit pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses, a sudden purge that was absolutely unprecedented in the history of American academia.

This is certainly an odd situation, warranting careful analysis and explanation. The word “antisemitism” merely means criticizing or disliking Jews, and in recent years, Israel’s partisans have demanded with some success that the term should be extended to encompass anti-Zionism as well, namely hostility to the Jewish state.

But let us suppose that we concede the latter point and agree with pro-Israel activists that “anti-Zionism” is indeed a form of “antisemitism.” Over the last few months, the Israeli government has brutally slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless civilians in Gaza, committing the greatest televised massacre in the history of the world, with its top leaders using explicitly genocidal language to describe their plans for the Palestinians. Indeed, the South African government submitted a 91 page legal brief to the International Court of Justice cataloging those Israeli statements, prompting a near-unanimous ruling by the jurists that millions of Palestinians faced the prospect of genocide at Israeli hands.

These days most Westerners claim to regard genocide in a decidedly negative light. So does this not syllogistically require them to embrace and endorse “antisemitism”? Surely a visitor from Mars would be very puzzled by this strange dilemma and the philosophical and psychological contortions it seems to require.

It is rather surprising for the extremely “politically correct” ruling elites of America and the rest of the Western world to be loudly cheering on the racially-exclusivist State of Israel even as it kills enormous numbers of women and children and works very hard to starve to death some two million civilians in its unprecedented genocidal rampage. After all, the far milder and more circumspect regime of Apartheid South Africa was universally condemned, boycotted, and sanctioned for merely the tiniest sliver of such misdeeds.

I think that part of the answer to this puzzle may be found in a famous literary work from a couple of generations ago. In 1962 British writer Anthony Burgess published his dystopian black comedy novel A Clockwork Orange, which was soon made into an Oscar-nominated film of the same name directed by Stanley Kubrick. The protagonist was Alex, a violent young hoodlum, and according to the plot government operatives subjected the miscreant to aversion therapy, severely conditioning him to avoid certain thoughts and behaviors lest he become physically ill.

As I wrote in a 2018 article, generations of Jewish media control and strident Jewish political activism have successfully subjected the 99% Gentile populations of the Western world to exactly this same sort of psychological process, with enormous social and political consequences, as we are now seeing unfold during the astonishing slaughter in Gaza:

I believe one factor is that over the years and the decades, our dominant media organs of news and entertainment have successfully conditioned most Americans to suffer a sort of mental allergic reaction to topics sensitive to Jews, which leads to all sorts of issues being considered absolutely out of bounds. And with America’s very powerful Jewish elites thereby insulated from almost all public scrutiny, Jewish arrogance and misbehavior remain largely unchecked and can increase completely without limit.

I’ve also sometimes suggested to people that one under-emphasized aspect of a Jewish population, greatly magnifying its problematical character, is the existence of what might be considered a biological sub-morph of exceptionally fanatical individuals, always on hair-trigger alert to launch verbal and sometimes physical attacks of unprecedented fury against anyone they regard as insufficiently friendly towards Jewish interests. Every now and then, a particularly brave or foolhardy public figure challenges some off-limits topic and is almost always overwhelmed and destroyed by a veritable swarm of these fanatical Jewish attackers. Just as the painful stings of the self-sacrificing warrior caste of an ant colony can quickly teach large predators to go elsewhere, fears of provoking these “Jewish berserkers” can often severely intimidate writers or politicians, causing them to choose their words very carefully or even completely avoid discussing certain controversial subjects, thereby greatly benefiting Jewish interests as a whole. And the more such influential people are thus intimidated into avoiding a particular topic, the more that topic is perceived as strictly taboo, and avoided by everyone else as well.

For example, about a dozen years ago I was having lunch with an especially eminent Neoconservative scholar with whom I’d become a little friendly. We were bemoaning the overwhelmingly leftward skew among America’s intellectual elites, and I suggested it largely seemed a function of our most elite universities. Many of our brightest students from across the nation entered Harvard and the other Ivies holding a variety of different ideological perspectives, but after four years departed those halls of learning overwhelmingly in left-liberal lock-step. Although he agreed with my assessment, he felt I was missing something important. He nervously glanced to both sides, shifted his head downward, and lowered his voice. “It’s the Jews,” he said.

One especially troublesome aspect of this near-total Jewish domination lies in the nature of the Jewish religion, especially in its traditional Talmudic form. As I explained in the same article:

If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.

Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory, to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.

As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict.

Obviously the Talmud is hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these days, and I would suspect that except for the strongly Orthodox and perhaps most rabbis, barely a sliver are aware of its highly controversial teachings. But it is important to keep in mind that until just a few generations ago, almost all European Jews were deeply Orthodox, and even today I would guess that the overwhelming majority of Jewish adults had Orthodox grand-parents. Highly distinctive cultural patterns and social attitudes can easily seep into a considerably wider population, especially one that remains ignorant of the origin of those sentiments, a condition enhancing their unrecognized influence. A religion based upon the principal of “Love Thy Neighbor” may or may not be workable in practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy Neighbor” might have long-term cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond the direct community of the deeply pious. If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past.

Throughout nearly their entire history in the Western world, Jews have existed as relatively small and weak minorities, so these troublesome aspects of traditional Jewish doctrine and belief were never able to manifest themselves except in the most secretive or attenuated fashion. But with Jews being the dominant, fully-empowered majority in the lands of Greater Israel, the world is seeing those attitudes expressed in their full force upon the hapless Palestinians.

As has been thoroughly documented, a very substantial fraction, perhaps even an outright majority of all the Israelis who died on October 7th were killed by their own trigger-happy military forces, in many cases becoming the deliberate victims of the notorious “Hannibal Directive.” Many others were IDF soldiers, security personnel, or armed civilian militiamen, and therefore perfectly legitimate targets of warfare. Putting all these elements together, I think that the number of unarmed Israelis killed by Hamas fighters may have been as low as 100 to 200, with many or most of those deaths being accidental, a conclusion supported by the statements of released hostages, who emphasized their decent and respectful treatment by their Hamas captors. Indeed, the relatively small number of unwarranted killings by Hamas militants has forced pro-Israel propagandists to promote the most outrageous sort of atrocity-hoaxes, ranging from forty beheaded Israeli babies to babies baked in ovens to Hamas gang-rapes and sexual mutilations, none of which seem to have any reality.

So in retaliation for perhaps 100 to 200 killings of unarmed civilians, the Israeli government has now gleefully slaughtered tens of thousands of helpless Palestinian civilians while apparently seeking to raise that body-count into the millions.

According to Max Blumenthal, public opinion surveys indicate that up to 98% of the Israeli public supports these exceptionally brutal retaliatory measures or even regards them as insufficiently strong. Numerous personal videos on TikTok, Telegram, and other platforms show ordinary members of the Israeli public gleefully mocking dead or starving Palestinian civilians, while Israeli troops have been just as sadistic in their destruction of civilian infrastructure and brutal killing of unarmed Palestinians, including women and children. Examples of public torture or cold-blooded murders seem increasingly common. Given these facts, several Grayzone videos have reasonably described Israel as an extremely sick society.

What is wrong with Israelis?@MaxBlumenthal takes a searing look at the societal sickness that exploded into the open after October 7, as Israelis of all walks of life took to social media to mock the suffering of Palestinians, flaunted war crimes and clamored for genocide pic.twitter.com/TgVs1G4HgH

— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) December 28, 2023

Fyodor Dostoevsky of Czarist Russia ranked as one of the greatest European writers, author of the classic novels Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and many other works. But although nearly all of his writings were translated into English and made easily available, his Diary of a Writer has remained obscure, and some have speculated that the reason may have been his brief 1877 remarks regarding Russia’s small Jewish minority. Although he recognized the plight of the Jews, who were sometimes oppressed or mistreated by the overwhelmingly Russian majority, he claimed that they greatly exaggerated their suffering and he also candidly speculated how they themselves would treat the Russians if the shoe were on the other foot and they were the ones with the upper hand.

However, at times, I was fancying: now, how would it be if in Russia there were not three million Jews, but three million Russians, and there were eighty million Jews,—well into what would they convert the Russians and how would they treat them? Would they permit them to acquire equal rights? Would they permit them to worship freely in their midst? Wouldn’t they convert them into slaves? Worse than that: wouldn’t they skin them altogether? Wouldn’t they slaughter them to the last man, to the point of complete extermination, as they used to do with alien peoples in ancient times, during their ancient history?

Dostoevsky died in 1881, but his prophetic words came to pass in 1917 when the Bolsheviks, whose leadership was overwhelmingly Jewish, seized power. Once they had established their new Soviet regime, they implemented an unprecedented slaughter of their Gentile subjects by bullets and starvation over the next couple of decades, a reality almost totally suppressed both at the time and subsequently by their ethnic cousins in overwhelmingly Jewish Hollywood and by Jewish political pressure across most of the rest of the media. As I wrote in 2018:

Indeed, the topic of Communism raises a far larger issue, one having rather touchy implications. Sometimes two simple compounds are separately inert, but when combined together may possess tremendous explosive force. From my introductory history classes and readings in high school, certain things had always seemed glaringly obvious to me even if the conclusions remained unmentionable, and I once assumed they were just as apparent to most others as well. But over the years I have begun to wonder whether perhaps this might not be correct.

Back in those late Cold War days, the death toll of innocent civilians from the Bolshevik Revolution and the first two decades of the Soviet Regime was generally reckoned at running well into the tens of millions when we include the casualties of the Russian Civil War, the government-induced famines, the Gulag, and the executions. I’ve heard that these numbers have been substantially revised downwards to perhaps as little as twenty million or so, but no matter. Although determined Soviet apologists may dispute such very large figures, they have always been part of the standard narrative history taught within the West.

Meanwhile, all historians know perfectly well that the Bolshevik leaders were overwhelmingly Jewish, with three of the five revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors coming from that background. Although only around 4% of Russia’s population was Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that Jews constituted perhaps 80-85% of the early Soviet government, an estimate fully consistent with the contemporaneous claims of Winston Churchill, Times of London correspondent Robert Wilton, and the officers of American Military Intelligence. Recent books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Slezkine, and others have all painted a very similar picture. And prior to World War II, Jews remained enormously over-represented in the Communist leadership, especially dominating the Gulag administration and the top ranks of the dreaded NKVD.

Both of these simple facts have been widely accepted in America throughout my entire lifetime. But combine them together with the relatively tiny size of worldwide Jewry, around 16 million prior to World War II, and the inescapable conclusion is that in per capita terms Jews were the greatest mass-murderers of the twentieth century, holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin and with no other nationality coming even remotely close. And yet, by the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last one hundred years have somehow been transmuted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe.

Although I have always generally accepted the mainstream scholarly account of the early decades of the Bolshevik regime and the enormous numbers of its human victims, a little hesitancy sometimes remained in the back of my mind. I had wondered if it could really have been possible for those heavily Jewish Bolshevik leaders to have willing slaughtered or starved to death so many millions, even tens of millions of their helpless fellow countrymen. But after seeing the unfortunate developments currently unfolding in Gaza, those slight nagging doubts have completely evaporated.

Similarly, anyone reading the contemporaneous accounts of Central Europeans describing the tumultuous first half of the twentieth century have sometimes encountered puzzled statements of how such seemingly meek and mild Jewish writers and intellectuals were suddenly transformed into bloodthirsty fiends once empowered by a Bolshevik uprising or ruling regime. I’d always wondered if those observations, mostly written in faded, long-forgotten works, were really true or were instead wildly exaggerated elements of anti-Jewish propaganda. But once again events in Gaza now seem to have completely vindicated and confirmed those widespread claims of the past.

As I emphasized in another 2018 article, such extreme Jewish behavior may also be a density-dependent phenomenon, with high concentrations of Jews working themselves into a terrible ideological frenzy, leading to extremely bloody actions that they might have been less willing to endorse under different circumstances.

Furthermore, this situation is exacerbated by the common tendency of Jews to “cluster” together, perhaps representing just one or two percent of the total population, but often constituting 20% or 40% or 60% of their immediate peer-group, especially in certain professions. Under such conditions, the ideas or emotional agitation of some Jews probably permeates others around them, often provoking additional waves of indignation.

As a rough analogy, a small quantity of uranium is relatively inert and harmless, and entirely so if distributed within low-density ore. But if a significant quantity of weapons-grade uranium is sufficiently compressed, then the neutrons released by fissioning atoms will quickly cause additional atoms to undergo fission, with the ultimate result of that critical chain-reaction being a nuclear explosion. In similar fashion, even a highly agitated Jew may have no negative impact, but if the collection of such agitated Jews becomes too numerous and clusters together too closely, they may work each other into a terrible frenzy, perhaps with disastrous consequences both for themselves and for their larger society. This is especially true if those agitated Jews begin to dominate certain key nodes of top-level control, such as the central political or media organs of a society.

Whereas most living organisms exist solely in physical reality, human beings also occupy an ideational space, with the interaction of human consciousness and perceived reality playing a major role in shaping behavior. Just as the pheromones released by mammals or insects can drastically affect the reactions of their family members or nest-mates, the ideas secreted by individuals or the media-emitters of a society can have an enormous impact upon their fellows.

A purely Jewish state such as Israel contains the highest density of Jews so as a consequence we are witnessing the most extreme form of such behavior.

The film version of A Clockwork Orange was released in 1971 and when I watched the clip on Youtube I noticed something intriguing. According to the plot, Alex was psychologically-conditioned against violence by being forced to watch horrifically violent acts on the screen while being made ill with drugs. But although some of the images shown fell into that category—planes dropping bombs during wartime—many others merely showed Nazi parades and Adolf Hitler reviewing his huge array of German supporters at a public rally, scenes containing no visible violence whatsoever. So apparently in the America of the early 1970s, mere Nazi imagery was inherently considered “violent,” either reflecting an earlier conditioning process or more likely intended to now produce exactly that result in the audience.

The director was Stanley Kubrick, widely acclaimed as one of history’s greatest film-makers, whose credits include a long list of such landmark productions as Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odysesy, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket. As someone who spent decades near the top of the Hollywood talent hierarchy, Kubrick surely would have been privy to many important realities that never reached our mainstream newspapers or history books, with his insider knowledge perhaps further enhanced by his personal roots as a Jewish New Yorker.

In the 1990s Kubrick hired Frederic Raphael, also Jewish, to work with him on the screenplay to his last film. Given Kubrick’s background, many were surprised when Raphael later reported that the famed director declared to him that Adolf Hitler had been “right about almost everything,” while also disparaging the landmark Holocaust film Schindler’s List, produced and directed by his good friend Steven Spielberg, a revelation that greatly shocked the latter when he learned of it.

That final 1999 film by Kubrick was Eyes Wide Shut starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Despite the director’s enormous stature and his two extremely bankable stars, he had encountered considerable difficulties in getting it produced, with the project consuming many years of effort and only reaching the theaters after Kubrick’s sudden death from a heart-attack at the untimely age of 70, just days after he had shown his completed film to the studio executives. The plot was a strange and extremely conspiratorial one, telling the story of two affluent, successful New Yorkers who were suddenly drawn into a secretive hidden world, in which the ultra-rich and powerful regularly engaged in ritualistic sex orgies in enormous private mansions, with potentially deadly consequences for outsiders who revealed those facts. Ironically enough, some of the key scenes were filmed at the palatial estate of the British Rothschilds, themselves the subjects of many such notorious conspiratorial beliefs.

Despite featuring such top stars the box-office results suggest that the film lost money or barely broke even. But if Eyes Wide Shut had instead been released during the later Jeffrey Epstein scandal or the somewhat related QAnon/Pizzagate controversy, I suspect that enormous audiences might have flocked to it. During the last couple of decades, the notion that our world is controlled by hidden forces whose existence remains unreported in our mainstream media outlets has become far more widespread. The Epstein case certainly raised strong suspicions that many of the individuals at the top of our society were subject to sexual blackmail at the hands of secretive, nefarious organizations.

Our memory sometimes plays tricks on us. I’d last watched A Clockwork Orange more than a decade ago and vaguely remembered that the horrifying visual images Alex had been forced to watch were those of the Nazi death camps. So I was surprised to discover that instead they only showed Hitler peacefully reviewing his massed Nazi supporters at a huge popular rally. But I suspect that if the 1971 film had been produced in the 1980s or later, Holocaust imagery would have dominated those scenes, perhaps even to the exclusion of anything else.

Over the last generation or two, the extent to which Hollywood and the broader media have conditioned the population of the Western world with the story and images of the Holocaust is absolutely extraordinary. As I explained in 2018:

According to Finkelstein, Hollywood produced some 180 Holocaust films just during the years 1989-2004. Even the very partial subset of Holocaust films listed on Wikipedia has grown enormously long, but fortunately the Movie Database has winnowed down the catalog by providing a list of the 50 Most Moving Holocaust Films.

Some 2% of Americans have a Jewish background, while perhaps 95% possess Christian roots, but the Wikipedia list of Christian films seems rather scanty and rudimentary by comparison. Very few of those films were ever widely released, and the selection is stretched to even include The Chronicles of Narnia, which contains no mention of Christianity whatsoever. One of the very few prominent exceptions on the list is Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ, which he was forced to personally self-fund. And despite the enormous financial success of that movie, one of the most highly profitable domestic releases of all time, the project rendered Gibson a hugely vilified pariah in the industry over which he had once reigned as its biggest star, especially after word got around that his own father was a Holocaust Denier.

It is important to recognize that the conditioning process controls the behavior of even those unaffected by it. Although Emperor Henry IV did not himself accept the supremacy of the Pope, most of his vassals and subjects did, so he was forced to submit. Similarly, the personal views of Elon Musk regarding antisemitism or the Holocaust are less important than the power those notions seem to exert over so many of his customers, employees, and business associates.

The Economist is probably the world’s most influential print publication and last week its cover focused on the tremendous importance of “Ending the Middle East’s Agony.” Yet its leader on that topic opened with the words “In the months since Hamas committed the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust…” Constant, overwhelming media conditioning has ensured that the European events of more than three generations ago still remain central to the thinking of most of the Western world.

I recently considered ordering some books from Amazon related to the Holocaust, and noticed that one of these, hardly obscure, was ranked by that website as roughly the 7,100th most popular title in that genre. This indicates the vast number of Holocaust works that have been published in English, probably totaling at least ten or twenty thousand and perhaps representing a substantial fraction of all the books relating to the events of World War II.

Yet this is a relatively new development. In a number of articles, I’ve emphasized that from soon after the end of World War II until the early 1960s the colossal events of the Holocaust—certainly the greatest crime ever committed in the history of the world—had received almost no mention anywhere from mainstream American journalists or historians and the same was apparently true for the rest of the Western world. Indeed, no intelligent, thoughtful individual who carefully read our major newspapers, magazines, and books from (say) 1947 to 1959 would probably have ever even suspected that any Holocaust had occurred, an absolutely extraordinary historical fact.

This very striking point had originally been made to me years ago in the pages of The Holocaust in American Life, a widely-praised if controversial book published in 1999 by Prof. Peter Novick, a historian who founded the Jewish Studies program at the University of Chicago. Having recently focused once again on this issue, I decided to reread Novick’s work for the first time in five or six years, and was well-rewarded for my effort, as it fully confirmed all my recollections.

Some of the facts that Novick raises near the beginning are remarkable. The 1938 German Kristallnacht riots in which dozens of Jews had been killed spent more than a full week on the front pages of the New York Times, yet America’s Jewish-owned newspaper of record hardly gave even a sliver of that coverage to the Holocaust when it began a few years later, consigning reports of hundreds of thousands or millions of Jews being killed in very grotesque fashion to small items buried in the back pages. The Zionist movement in the Middle East took much the same position, with their flagship newspaper the Palestine Post treating those stories with equal disdain, relegating them to just a couple of paragraphs often on the inside pages and totally overshadowed by minor local political disputes. Given such obvious Zionist disregard for those wartime claims of Jewish extermination, it is hardly surprising that in 1940 and 1941 a small right-wing Zionist faction, led by a future prime minister of Israel, made repeated attempts to join the Axis military alliance of Hitler and Mussolini.

Novick notes that even after the end of the war, when the Allies publicly declared at Nuremberg that the Nazis had brutally exterminated six million Jews, surveys taken of American Jewry revealed that around half of them regarded those figures as totally ridiculous, perhaps exaggerated by a factor of five or ten. Lt. Col. Leonard Weinstein served on Eisenhower’s staff and was heavily involved in Jewish community activity, but when he was informed that a million or two million Jews had been killed at Auschwitz, he was absolutely astonished and said he’d never heard of such a thing. And Novick emphasizes that while Jewish awareness of the Holocaust was hardly substantial, Gentile awareness was totally negligible. Indeed, popular representations of Axis atrocities focused almost entirely upon those committed by the Japanese, including such incidents as the notorious “Bataan Death March,” while relatively little attention was given to any German war-crimes.

According to Novick, an important reason that the mainstream media, whether Jewish or Gentile, treated those Holocaust stories with such tremendous disdain was that many of the senior editors remembered that during the First World War two decades earlier they had been completely deceived by the many ridiculous anti-German atrocity-hoaxes manufactured by Allied propagandists leaving them very reluctant to repeat that humiliating mistake. And as it happens, many of the major Holocaust stories did indeed fall into exactly that same category. For example, Novick reports that “the most important single report on the Holocaust that reached the West” during those years was provided by the World Jewish Congress, whose informant claimed to have “personal knowledge” that Jewish corpses were being rendered into soap, an assertion now uniformly dismissed as pure fiction.

Although by late 1944 three-quarters of the American public had been persuaded that the Germans “murdered many people in concentration camps,” the most common estimate of that total was 100,000 or less.

Novick’s extensive scholarship seemed to fully confirm my understanding of the pattern of coverage. The reality of the Holocaust was widely ignored or disregarded during the Second World War even as it was actually occurring. The Holocaust then received a major burst of public attention and media coverage around the time of the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunals at which the Allies tried, convicted, and executed many of the defeated Nazi leaders, with the extermination of the Jews being one of the major charges against them. But soon afterwards, the Holocaust once again almost totally disappeared from Western media coverage and public attention until the beginning of the 1960s.

As Novick so forcefully puts it at the start of one of his postwar chapters:

Between the end of the war and the 1960s, as anyone who has lived through those years can testify, the Holocaust made scarcely any appearance in American public discourse, and hardly more in Jewish public discourse—especially discourse directed to gentiles.

Although Jewish publications did still occasionally refer to the Holocaust during this period, they generally did so in a rather strange manner. For example, in 1952 Stalin executed the overwhelmingly Jewish Communist Party leadership of Czechoslovakia in one of his periodic purges, leading Commentary and the New Leader to describe the deaths of that handful of Jewish appartchiks as being very similar to Hitler’s Holocaust: “He will finally wipe out the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe…The parallel to the policy of the Nazi extermination is almost complete.” Apparently the difference between less than a dozen Jewish victims and six million deaths was not considered significant. Indeed, as a consequence of those events the ADL and other leading Jewish organizations publicly declared that Communism and Nazism were “basically identical” in their policies towards Jews. Organizations and publications that take such a cavalier attitude to factual realities hardly inspire great confidence in their other claims, whether past or future.

Perhaps the most substantive and influential Jewish treatment of the topic during this period came in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the classic 1951 work of political philosophy published by Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish emigre scholar who had come to America in 1941 and spent the next decade heavily immersed in Jewish and Zionist circles. Given the very considerable length and depth of the book, she had probably begun working on it during the Nuremberg Tribunals or in their immediate aftermath, and she devoted several pages to the Holocaust, drawing upon the facts documented during those landmark war crime trials. However, her personal expertise and focus was philosophy and ideology rather than history, so she primarily emphasized that the fanatical Nazi project to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews severely detracted from the German war effort, thereby demonstrating the utter “madness” of Hitler and his ruling regime.

In a lengthy footnote, she also debunked some of the popular misconceptions surrounding that issue, pointing out that the gripping visual images of starved, emaciated corpses and survivors that had so horrified the American public at the end of the war were totally unrealistic and had nothing to do with the Holocaust since the Germans hadn’t used starvation as their method of killing. Instead, she suggested those scenes reflected the total breakdown of German organization in the last days of the war due to America’s strategic bombing campaign, a claim that many others have more recently made.

Rereading Novick’s book did remind me of one important point that I’d previously forgotten. Raoul Hilberg’s weighty 1961 volume The Destruction of the European Jews is universally acknowledged as having ignited the scholarly study of the Holocaust. But Novick suggests that the considerable success of Hilberg’s book, which eventually launched an entire scholarly discipline, was probably due to its fortuitous timing.

During the 1930s the Zionist movement had forged an important economic partnership with Nazi Germany, which laid the basis for the eventual creation of the state of Israel. The Nazi liaison officer to the Zionists was Adolf Eichmann, who studied Hebrew and became known as something of a philo-Semite. After the resounding Allied victory in the war, those dangerous secrets of Zionist history were deeply suppressed, but during the mid-1950s they suddenly threatened to leak out again into the media, perhaps with very serious political repercussions for Israel’s standing with America and the other Western nations. Possibly as a consequence, the Israeli government soon undertook a major effort to track down and eliminate their former close Nazi collaborator. After kidnapping Eichmann in 1960, the Israelis staged a high-profile show trial heavily focused upon the horrors of the Holocaust and culminating in Eichmann’s 1962 execution. Novick plausibly argues that Hilberg’s book owed much of its success to its release in the middle of that media extravaganza.

Thus, the combination of the Eichmann trial and Hilberg’s book meant that during the early 1960s the Holocaust for the first time began receiving some attention in the mainstream media and also gradually became a topic of serious academic study. Many of those researchers had posts in the newly-established Jewish Studies programs that proliferated at American universities as part of the broader ethnic studies movement of the late 1960s. But this media coverage was hardly enormous, and it may not have much penetrated into the American consciousness outside the Jewish community or Jewish activists.

According to Novick, the crucial development was the involvement of Hollywood, beginning in 1978 with the TV miniseries Holocaust starring James Woods and Meryl Streep, which for the first time firmly established that narrative in Western popular consciousness. Watched by nearly 100 million Americans, it was widely described as providing more information about that historical event to more Americans in four nights than the combined total of all past media coverage over the previous thirty years. I’ve sometimes suggested that television broadcast may have been the first time most Americans had ever heard of that enormous wartime crime. Novick notes that NBC’s huge marketing campaign was dwarfed by a vastly larger effort undertaken by all the various Jewish organizations, leading to the inescapable conclusion that Hollywood and Jewish activists working together did indeed create the Holocaust.

With Hollywood dominating global entertainment, the effect was also felt far outside our own borders, notably in Germany. As Novick puts it, thirty years of German silence on Nazi war crimes was suddenly overturned by a lavish Hollywood production, based upon the important principle that seeing is believing.

Novick’s important historiographical analysis was glowingly praised by many leading Jewish scholars, but other researchers sharply disputed it, so I recently read one of the main academic rebuttals to get the other side of the story. After the Holocaust turned out to be a fairly short 2012 collection of essays edited by David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, bearing the descriptive subtitle “Challenging the Myth of Silence.”

I wasn’t greatly impressed by the contents, and felt that the book actually seemed to reinforce Novick’s case. The contributors included more than a dozen historians who had carefully scoured the media and literature of the period for evidence to refute Novick’s thesis, but they seemed to come up almost totally empty. They described some some sharp denunciations of antisemitism, whether in Hitler’s Germany or Truman’s America, but except for a short spike right around the time of the Nuremberg Tribunals, there was almost no indication in the media that any Holocaust had ever occurred. There were occasional glancing references to the Nazis having killed Jews, but in nearly all these cases the implied death-toll could just as easily have been six hundred as six million, and indeed in the bitter postwar struggle over Palestine, some of the angry Zionists and their American polemicist allies sometimes denounced the British for being almost as cruel to the Jews as the German Nazis had been.

The only major exception to this climate of near total silence was found in the newly created State of Israel, which featured a very widespread and popular Holocaust literature throughout this period. But most of this material consisted of bizarre accounts of sadomaschistic sexual perversion in Nazi death camps, and over the years these have gradually been recognized as merely being pornographic fiction.

Meanwhile, other academics of widely different ideological perspectives seem to reach conclusions very similar to those of Novick. Norman Finkelstein’s lengthy review of Novick’s work soon appeared in the London Review of Books and eventually led him to extend the latter author’s analysis and publish The Holocaust Industry in 2005, which became an international bestseller. Although the two scholars diverged in their emphasis and their sharp ideological differences provoked some hostile exchanges—Novick was a mainstream liberal Zionist and Finkelstein a fervent anti-Zionist—I think that their descriptions were quite complementary.

Finkelstein’s area of historical expertise is the Middle East and his brief foray into the subject of the Holocaust was probably inspired by what he regarded as its very pernicious political impact upon the Israel/Palestine conflict. But around the same time I’d originally read Novick’s book, I also read those of Holocaust experts Deborah Lipstadt and Lucy Dawidowicz, and found that they fully confirmed and amplified Novick’s conclusions, although they presented their findings in a very different tone and manner.

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