Shoah business

The historian Michael Burleigh often writes good sense, so I'm sorry to see him adding his voice to the chorus now opposing what it likes to call, with such delicate taste, 'the Holocaust industry'. He does so in a piece taking off from the David Irving affair. Burleigh laments what he sees as an 'unwholesome' contemporary obsession with the Nazis, and in that context writes:

This Holocaust industry amounts to a secular religion. Tony Blair's Government has encouraged establishing this cult through a wholly unnecessary Holocaust Day. The cult has its priesthood, ever ready with words of encouragement or censure from far away Los Angeles.
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The industry is also not very good at asking such questions as why we need to know, down to the last pornographic detail, everything that happened to Jewish people in Hitler's gruesome imperium...

Michael Burleigh it was who, only a few weeks ago, was regaling us on TV with the negative effects ('Dark Enlightenment') of the decline of religion in Europe. The declining religion in question was Christianity - one whose adherents have, for more than two millennia, rather gone out of their way to remember and ponder the significance of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, of course, is believed by these adherents to be the Son of God. Even so, one might think that the fate and the torments of several million people could be studied and memorialized just a few decades after the event without eliciting this scornful and diminishing taunt - 'the Holocaust industry'.

That is not to say that there is not bad work, indifferent writing, third-rate cultural production, bad and even exploitative argument, about the Holocaust. But of what major topic is this not true? And there is also first-rate work, exceptional writing, fine poetry and literature and film, and careful scholarship, about the Holocaust. But Jeez, isn't it all a bit much? They lose six million and just can't stop going on about it. And some others even join them in doing so. What a palaver. No business like Shoah business. I nearly died laughing.

Yes, a people who lost a third of their number, and two-thirds of their number within Europe, have a certain understandable (remember that word?) preoccupation with the experience, and many minds, not all of them Jewish, have found in the experience matter meriting close study as well as other types of reflection. Much has been produced, much learned, a certain amount obfuscated; good work has stood alongside bad and indifferent work. That's all. 'Holocaust industry' is base mockery of a vast human tragedy and the response to it. It's worthy of Norman Finkelstein, and unworthy of Michael Burleigh.