Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYin the sense of article 130 German Penal Code. Nothing is known aboutthe initiation of an investigation against the author, though, and if theassumption should turn out to be correct that this omission happenedbecause the “downplaying” did not happen with the purpose of exoneratingthe Germans but quite to the opposite, then one would have togrant the revisionists another victory, although this one would not beeasily discernible.Peter Novick’s 2001 book Nach dem Holocaust. Der Umgang mitdem Massenmord [Engl.: The Holocaust in American Life] also found awidespread response. A major part of it is an example of “Jewish selfcriticism”primarily linked to the behavior of American Jews. ForNovick says that they are “the most affluent, educated, influential and inevery regard most successful group within the American society” havingto endure no discrimination or disadvantages. But the identity, indeedthe very existence of this group, so Novick continues, is threatenedin an extreme [way] by its low birth rate and numerous mixed marriageswith non-Jewish Americans, which is why this group turns the big massmurder in Europe into a tool of self-preservation – only from that perspectivecan “the furious insistence on the singularity of the Holocaust”be understood, so Novick. Hence they are as a general rule not willingto adopt the maxims of science, because: “To understand somethinghistorically means to be aware of the complexity, to have a sufficientdistance, to see it from several perspectives, to accept the ambiguity(even the moral {p. 4} ambiguity) of the motives and behavioral attitudesof the protagonists.” And Novick even reminds us that the Jewishorganizations in the U.S. have not always fought for the singularity ofthe Holocaust, but that they were instead primarily busy fighting theequation “Jew = communist” right up to the middle of the early 1960s,yet that this task was difficult for comprehensible reasons. Hence, hewho wants to talk about the “final solution” with arguments has to includecontexts of multifarious kinds according to Novick, and he mustnot base himself on terms such as “singularity” and “incomparability”right from the start. 4 But it goes without saying that this does not meanthat the revisionists are right, who reject the applicability of these terms.Even Yehuda Bauer, probably the most reputable Holocaust researcherin the world, knows better than to isolate the “final solution”from the outset and to remove it from all specific historical contexts. Heuses the term “redemptive anti-Semitism” coined by Saul Friedländer,yet does not restrict it to “animosity toward Jews” but instead extends it288