During the museum's planning stages, Elie Wiesel (along with Yehuda Bauer of Yad Vashem) led the offensive to commemorate Jews alone. Deferred to as the "undisputed expert on the Holocaust period," Wiesel tenaciously argued for the preeminence of Jewish victimhood. "As always, they began with Jews," he typically intoned. "As always, they did not stop with Jews alone." 66

Yet not Jews but Communists were the first political victims, and not Jews but the handicapped were the
first genocidal victims, of Nazism. 67

Justifying preemption of the Gypsy genocide posed the main challenge to the Holocaust Museum. The Nazis systematically murdered as many as a half-million Gypsies, with proportional losses roughly equal to the Jewish genocide. 68

Holocaust writers like Yehuda Bauer maintained that the Gypsies did not fall victim to the same genocidal onslaught as Jews. Respected holocaust historians like Henry Friedlander and Raul Hilberg, however, have argued that they did. 69

Multiple motives lurked behind the museum's marginalizing of the Gypsy genocide. First: one simply couldn't compare the loss of Gypsy and Jewish life. Ridiculing the call for Gypsy representation on the US Holocaust Memorial Council as "cockamamie," executive director Rabbi Seymour Siegel doubted whether Gypsies even "existed" as a people: "There should be some recognition or acknowledgment of the gypsy people . . . if there is such a thing." He did allow, however, that "there was a suffering element under the Nazis." Edward Linenthal recalls the Gypsy representatives' "deep suspicion" of the council, "fueled by clear evidence that some council members viewed Rom participation in the museum the way a family deals with unwelcome, embarrassing relatives." 70

Second: acknowledging the Gypsy genocide meant the loss of an exclusive Jewish franchise over The Holocaust, with a commensurate loss of Jewish "moral capital." Third: if the Nazis persecuted Gypsies and Jews alike, the dogma that The Holocaust marked the climax of a millennial Gentile hatred of Jews was clearly untenable. Likewise, if Gentile envy spurred the Jewish genocide, did envy also spur the Gypsy genocides In the museum's permanent exhibition, non-Jewish victims of Nazism receive only token recognition.

Norman G. Finkelstein
The Holocaust Industry

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а кто такой этот Norman G. Finkelstein и почему ему нужно верить?
ну бубнит чегото . недовольный.

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ну хотя бы потому, что он университетский профессор. в виду своей профессии, один из тех, кто меньше всего склонен врать, вообще утверждать что-либо, не имея предварительно достаточно документальных материалов, необходимых для обоснования своих взглядов в перспективе всегда жёстских и хорошо проинформированных peer-reviews, которые, если что не так, могут порушить академическую карьеру. тем более в таких тонких вопросах как данный.

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