No wonder charities such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds seem to be more
Posted in General on 22. Aug, 2010
No wonder charities such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds seem to be more successful at attracting members than political parties. It is hard to resist the conclusion that the right and the centre-left, here and in the US, are squabbling over a narrow band of middle-class voters, growing more like each other in the process. It reminds me of that old advert, the one that insisted you wouldn’t be able to tell margarine from butter, which merely drew attention to the poor quality of butter in this country. The only reason I can think of to vote Labour at the next election, or to hope that Mr Gore replaces Mr Clinton as president, is that they are not quite as dire as the alternative.A few weeks ago, I received a letter from a publisher, alerting me to the publication of a controversial new book about the Holocaust. Because I was finishing my own book, I put it to one side and waited for a row to erupt, as it did with absolute predictability last week.
In one sense this proves the author’s point, for Norman Finkelstein is an American academic who claims that guilt about the Holocaust prevents calm discussion of its meaning and the way it has been memorialised, particularly in the US. His book, The Holocaust Industry (Verso), argues that the Nazi genocide has been exploited to extort cash, that many people who claim to be survivors are bogus, and that some Holocaust museums are inspired by Disneyland rather than serious historical research.Some of Mr Finkelstein’s language is intemperate, but it is true that the murder of European Jews by the Nazis has come to occupy a unique place in the annals of suffering. Another new book, The Holocaust: A Short History by Wolfgang Benz (Profile Books), devotes a chapter to what the author calls “the other genocide”, the extermination by the Nazis of between 200,000 and 500,000 gypsies, the Roma and Sinti minorities who died in the camps and mass executions in Poland, the Baltic states, Croatia and Serbia. Most of us, I would guess, are barely aware of this tragedy, just as it took a long time for historians to piece together what happened to homosexual men in the camps.There are hierarchies of suffering and our Eurocentric attitudes are exposed by the comparative neglect of more recent atrocities in Cambodia, where Pol Pot murdered 1.7 million people, and Africa.
Sympathising with victims of the Holocaust has become what a Jewish acquaintance of mine calls a low ticket, in that it does not require further action. I’m sure Mr Clinton says all the right things about the Nazi death camps, but he conspicuously failed to intervene in another act of genocide, in Rwanda in 1994, when 800,000 people were slaughtered. He apologised a couple of years ago, but that omission is another blot on what is already a shameful presidential record.
More from Joan Smith. The BBC has been under intense scrutiny for the past few weeks as the new director-general Greg Dyke has unveiled his “slimming” plans for Auntie. Our sister paper, the Independent, gleefully revealed recently that not one of the chauffeur-driven cars he promised to axe has yet been returned to the garage.
The idea of the BBC economising is hilarious when you consider that its own finance system is so convoluted that most employees do not have a clue what programmes cost in real money. The BBC has been under intense scrutiny for the past few weeks as the new director-general Greg Dyke has unveiled his “slimming” plans for Auntie. Our sister paper, the Independent, gleefully revealed recently that not one of the chauffeur-driven cars he promised to axe has yet been returned to the garage. The idea of the BBC economising is hilarious when you consider that its own finance system is so convoluted that most employees do not have a clue what programmes cost in real money.
But if the BBC is constantly attacked for its spending, its governors and the perceived dumbing down of BBC1, there is one area in which it is without equal. I refer of course to the Proms, which started on Friday and continue until 9 September.