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Joan Acocella   The New Yorker   06-Apr-1998   MPD and the Jewish Holocaust
"In this promise of an alternative truth what the disadvantaged were given was not a place in the world but a sort of refugee camp, where they could go on dreaming the same dreams as before, based on their history of powerlessness." � Joan Acocella
The two quotations at the bottom of the present page are taken from Joan Acocella, The Politics of Hysteria: Over the past twenty years, multiple-personality disorder has been used to explain the behavior of thousands of American women.  How was it allowed to happen?  The New Yorker, 6 April 1998, pp. 64-79.

The subjects of Acocella's article are the related topics of multiple-personality disorder (MPD), satanic-ritual-abuse (SRA), and recovered memory (RM).  In reading this stunning article, I could not help noting similarities between the MPD/SRA/RM industry and the Holocaust industry.  The first sentence of the second Acocella quote below, "If one were so minded, one might suggest that M.P.D. was an anti-feminist conspiracy," could be re-written as "If one were so minded, one might suggest that the Holocaust industry was an anti-Semitic conspiracy," and the remainder of the paragraph might apply to Jewish-Gentile relations without any re-writing.  How so?

The Jewish Holocaust � the first great tragedy to befall the Jewish people in this century � has been followed by the second great tragedy � unrestrained fantasizing about the Holocaust.  In the words of Israeli journalist Boaz Evron:

Two terrible things happened to the Jewish people during this century: [First, t]he Holocaust and the lessons drawn from it.  [Second, t]he non-historical and easily refutable commentaries on the Holocaust made either deliberately or through simple ignorance and their use for propaganda purposes among non-Jews or Jews both in Israel and the diaspora constitute a cancer for Jews and for the State of Israel.  (Boaz Evron, Holocaust, a Danger for the Jewish People, published in the Hebrew journal Yiton 77, May-June 1980)

As in the case of MPD/SRA/RM, the Holocaust story too has become, to use Acocella's expressions, "too extravagant," at which point it is "attacked" and the situation "becomes clear."  Yes, the parallel is close.  Jerzy Kosinski's calumniation of the Polish nation in The Painted Bird was too extravagant.  The Simon Wiesenthal-Morley Safer invention of the greatest pogrom of the war in which, prior to occupation by German forces, Ukrainians were supposed to have killed five to six thousand Jews in three days in Lviv was too extravagant.  Neal Sher's creation of the myth of "Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka" so as to permit the attempted murder of John Demjanjuk was too extravagant.  Canadian Justice Minister Anne McLellan's persecution of Ukrainian septuagenarians for the crime of having been conscripted into the German armed forces when they were teenagers is too extravagant.

Yes, these extravagances are being attacked.  Yes, these extravagances are a "cancer for Jews and for the State of Israel," just as if they had been part of an anti-Semitic conspiracy.  Yes, the situation is being clarified.  Yes, what the Holocaust industry is giving world Jewry is "not a place in the world but a sort of refugee camp, where they could go on dreaming the same dreams as before, based on their history of powerlessness."


And, once dwelt upon, such memories tended to generate others....  By such means, the R.M. movement persuaded hundreds of thousands of women that they were part of a world-wide sisterhood of sex-abuse victims, condemned for the rest of their lives to live out the consequences of the trauma � like survivors of the Holocaust.  (It was from the Holocaust victims that the R.M. claimants took their name: they, too, were "survivors.")  (Joan Acocella, The Politics of Hysteria, The New Yorker, 6 April 1998, pp. 64-79, p. 73)

If one were so minded, one might suggest that M.P.D. was an anti-feminist conspiracy.  But it was less a conspiracy than a reflex of our current politics.  Year after year, disadvantaged groups knock on the door of the society, protesting their position.  The society offers reparation.  Some mechanisms of reparation � affirmative action, for example � are practical and useful, aimed at giving the group a genuine place in the world, but they take effect slowly.  In the interim, other consolations are offered, such as the idea that the society works not by one set of truths but by many, and that every group is entitled to its own "narrative."  Fed this fantasy, the disadvantaged group goes off and makes up its own narrative, until, very soon, the story becomes too extravagant.  At that point, it is attacked, and then the situation becomes clear: that in this promise of an alternative truth what the disadvantaged were given was not a place in the world but a sort of refugee camp, where they could go on dreaming the same dreams as before, based on their history of powerlessness.  (Joan Acocella, The Politics of Hysteria, The New Yorker, 6 April 1998, pp. 64-79, p. 79)


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