carry that weight

We are haunted by ghosts of the past, and the manner in which we deal with them either seems irrelevant and non-meaningful or they are invoked, insidiously, appropriating the theme of malevolence in an act of resurrection that is ultimately nihilistic. All the Western religious identities act in a manner that represses historical and cultural markers- such as the holocaust- by the act of fetish into a wider narrative where myth a memory serve to condition actions which carry the weight of a religious and messianic narrative in all its permutations.

The killings of Jewish children in Toulouse, the diaspora experience opens up, anew, how Jewish identity is haunted by the trauma of the holocaust, and how the psychic baggage is displaced to maintain illusions of stability only to be shattered by a tortured consciousness. One prone to rage and revenge; the holocaust encapsulating overwhelming trauma, yet one so massive it overpowers and limits the integrity of individualism; the limits of commemoration having its parameters defined by the underpinnings of the “enlightenment” , the scientific rationalism that was in part, enabling the mechanism of the destruction into being.

Today, the fallout is that every radical working to arrive at social change is mitigated by the reinforcing belief that mass murder will result; that is, any efforts at a new society will arc between revolution and reaction, emancipation and oppression. The Christian West is also haunted by anxiety: the Turks at the gates of Vienna, domination by Moorish Spain, the lopping off of Christian heads at Rhodes and using them as cannonballs etc. …

So, the deconstruction of the Holocaust to a symbol as part of a  morality tale linked to modernism  overlooks the suffering of its historical victims. This leads to a new iteration of its traumatic effects that often encourages a call for a quick burial. The Shoah as  nihilistic European horror,that of psychic paralysis, or a betrayal that should be forgotten…

Zizek: ( see link at end ): On the other hand, a no less convincing case can be made against the West. It soon became known that the same Danish newspaper which published the Muhammad caricatures, in a blatant display of its bias, previously rejected caricatures of Christ as too offensive. Furthermore, prior to resorting to public manifestations, the Danish Muslims did for months try the “European” path of dialogue, asking for reception with government authorities, etc., and were ruthlessly rejected and ignored. The reality behind all this is the sad fact of the rising xenophobia in Denmark, signaling the end of the myth of Scandinavian tolerance. And, last but not least, what about our own prohibitions and limitations of the freedom of the press? Is holocaust not our sacred untouchable fact? At the very moment when the Muslim protests were raging, David Irving was sitting in an Austrian prison for expressing his doubts about the holocaust in an article published 15 years earlier, and was then condemned to 3 years of prison – so it IS prohibited to doubt the holocaust in our liberal societies…

…Furthermore, the obvious over-reaction to caricatures, rising up to murderous violence and expanding to the whole of Europe or of the West, indicates how the protests are “not really” about caricatures, but about humiliations and frustrations with Western imperialist attitude. Journalists in the last weeks compete with each other enumerating these “real reasons”: Israeli occupation for Palestinians, dissatisfaction with the pro-American Musharaf regime in Pakistan, anti-Americanism in Iran, etc.etc. However, the problem with this excuse is: does the same not for anti-Semitism itself? It is not “really” about Jews, but a displaced protest about capitalist exploitation. So this excuse only makes it worse for the Muslims: why don’t they address the TRUE cause?…

…And, last but not least, what about the brutal and vulgar anti-Semitic and anti-Christian caricatures that abound in the press and school-books in Muslim countries? Where is here the respect for other people and their religion, that they demand from the West? Some Muslim groups replied to the Danish caricatures with their own offensive of caricatures. A Muslim group in Europe distributed on the net drawings of Anna Frank in bed with Hitler. Hamshahri, Iran’s largest selling newspaper, has announced it is holding a contest on cartoons of the Holocaust in response to the publishing in European papers of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. The plan is to turn the tables on the assertion that newspapers can print offensive material in the name of freedom of expression: “The Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let’s see if they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust cartoons.” This exercise is clearly self-defeating: if they really believe that the Danish caricatures of Mohammad were a sacrilegious crime that deserves the harshest punishment, will the holocaust cartoons not repeat the crime? The fact that they are doing it with the excuse “Let us see how tolerant YOU are!” in no way changes this fact. In short, this reaction is a proof that what really matters to the enraged Muslims is a struggle for recognition and respect, a sense of humiliation and hurt pride, NOT religion.

A further proof of this fact is the strange inconsistency in their reference to the holocaust. The Jordanian newspaper Ad-Dustur published on October 19 2003 a cartoon depicting the railroad to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with Israeli flags replacing the Nazi ones; the sign in Arabic reads: “Gaza Strip or the Israeli Annihilation Camp.” This idea that Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians have been comparable to Nazi actions towards Jews strangely contradicts the holocaust denial. Are we not witnessing here yet another example of the joke evoked by Freud in order to render the strange logic of dreams: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms per negationem what it endeavors to deny – that I returned you a broken kettle… Does the same inconsistency not characterize the way radical Islamists respond to the holocaust? (1) Holocaust did not happen. (2) It did happen, but the Jews deserved it. (3) The Jews did not deserve it, but they themselves lost the

t to complain by doing to Palestinians what the Nazis did to them. Speaking in Mecca in December 2005, the Iranian president Ahmadinejad implied that guilt for the holocaust led European countries to support the establishment of the State of Israel: Read More:http://www.lacan.com/zizantinomies.htm