A couple of years ago the world was treated to Roots, a banal, simplistic television series of the "B grade Western" genre, with enough black faces and publicity build up to passively arouse the whole US of A into mental self-flagelation over its iniquitous past.

Technically more proficient, but with similar aims, Holocaust screens in New Zealand with all the razzmataz of the "television series of the decade." The Listener sets itself aflame in enthusiasm, and children are encouraged / warned to watch it for the educational value.

Fortunately for New Zealand, we have neither a recent history of slavery or anti semitism. Apart from the odd nutter who desecrates cemeteries or keeps the family simpleton in the cupboard doing piecework neither is it all likely to occur in the future here either. Thus the morals of the story are not always obvious.

There is also the problem that history dramas using ordinary people to personify whole social groups are fraught with the peril of losing the point of what they are trying to personify by developing individual characters' and situations. Alternatively, television on the clashes of the elites, like the one on Truman and MacArthur, ignores the social and economic forces that create and control such people. The artistic ambiguities can intrude to so disguise the exercise that even the discerning can be duped. The Deer Hunter for example, while very accurately evoking the Vietnamese countryside is simply a revisionist story of the Viet Nam war, dressed up by plagiarising everything from "Gone with the Wind" to "Ryans Daughter". The recent Salient reviewer ignored that such material is an important aspect of a resurgent political movement in the USA which feels deprived in not having a military victory since the Mayaguez was "recaptured."

What is didactic may be more controversial than what is mostly entertainment, but it also permits a smaller number of sharp perspectives. Hearts and Minds is better visual material to understand the Viet Nam experience for its invaders, than the racist myopia of Deer Hunter, just as the BBC documentary series on the slave traffic compared with Roots or the World at War specials last year with Holocaust, gave less scope for misunderstanding of the slave trade or death camps respectively.

The Message of Holocaust

What then is the message of Holocaust? Quite simply it is that it must not happen again. Two very diverse camps take off from this mutual premise; Zionism and what can be generalised as anti-fascism.

The anti-fascist stance sees Nazism as one manifestation of a militaristic, chauvinist, hierarchal, anti-democratic system and a cruel view of fellow man and the world at large. Its victims are minority groups who are either an impediment to the fascist aspirations or an innocent target which is readily indentifiable and made to appear as the threat. Students, 'trade unionists. Communists and liberal clergy are the articulate opposition while Jews, Gypsies, Asians, "mixed bloods" foreigners or blacks are the visible "them".

In Britain for instance, the National Front retains its anti-semitic rhetoric but effectively this is only peripheral and commemorative as there are over a million "coloured immigrants" in Britain; much more obvious as a racist target. If in the 1930s Germany had such a population the Jews may well have been left alone.

So for the anti-fascist, any racist doctrine is an anathema and the lesson of Holocaust is not so much the persecution of Jews by the Nazis, but instead that in any society, no matter what civilicsed, cultured gloss and sensitivity, the Dorffs and Heydrichs can so pervert and rationalise, especially in times of economic crisis, barbarous acts of atrocity. Apart from discerning what Zionism means, a more valid lesson of the Holocaust would be to anticipate the eventual cumulative social effects of exercises like our Prime Minister's brandishing of "Polynesian" TAB slips in Parliament.

So [unclear: than] is nothing unique about the anti-semitism or even the classical fascism. In their wars the United States's governments since 1941 have probably been directly responsible for more civilian deaths than Hitler could total.

The Zionist Perpective

The Zionist also generalises the Holocaust experience. The belief is that the Jew has been persecuted, by the Christians especially, throughout all history and that the only solution to this is to have "his own national centre and constitute a majority in one place", to use the Israeli ambassador's words.

The ambassador gave a copy of the booklet Holocaust to Radio New Zealand to broadcast quotations about how Jews were unable to live in Europe after Hitler was defeated. He also recently warned a meeting in Christchurch of the National Front spreading anti-Semitic propaganda throughout New Zealand. This is probably news to the National Front, but consistent with a Zionist message that enlarges persecution of Jews from being a uniquely European phenomenon at particular stages in history to being globally and eternally omnipresent.

The implications and consequences of this Zionism are profound. For the Middle East it has meant turmoil as hundreds of thousands of Jews displaced the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine to establish the colonialist settler state of Israel. The very Jewish Israel identity necessitated Palestinian Arab Christian and Moslim or neither, being killed off or driven out. The refugees in Jordan and Lebanon are to pay Hitler's debt.

At the psychological level, the mutual "musn't happen again" of Zionist and anti-fascist become polar opposites, for in a tragical historical irony Zionism is a form of fascism.

The anti-semitism of the National Front, if not present, has to be invented or the whole Zionist case falls flat. The Zionist claims a greater suffering for Jews than for any other people, to justify claims over Middle Eastern territory and action that would not be acceptable otherwise. A British parliamentarian is so moved to describe anti-semitism as a bacillus which infects every Gentile and every criticism of Israeli policy becomes for some Zionists, "anti-semitism."

Examined from this viewpoint, Holocaust takes on a new aspect. The film is not a recording of history but a propaganda tool for the present, a billboard for the Zionists to paste their sign on, to maintain the guilt on which the state of Israel trades; conscience traded for money, for arms, for Arab land.

Of these two sides of the film, it is the second that predominates, evident simply in the emphasis in it. That 6,000,000 Jews died in the gas chamber has been etched in our minds ever since Auzwitch was opened and Holocaust is the latest in a long line of works recycling history for our consumption. But how many gypsies, communists, homosexuals, slaves and general dissidents were slaughtered in the death camps? Roughly the same number. The holocaust destroyed far more than international jewry, its origins were far deeper than anti-semitism.

Its failure to adequately draw out these aspcects makes Holocaust a failure as far as being a record of the rise of fascism is concerned. Partly through its format, following the lives of two families, and partly because its success grows from the collective guilt and horror over the persecution of the Jews, it does not assist the viewer in understanding what fascism is, nor how it is caused, nor how to fight against it. The effect, if not the intention, of the film is to provide another boost to the propaganda that Zionism thrives on, the age old persecution of the Jews. The only group that benefits from another shot of guilt is those same Zionists who play on it to justify the acts of their state, Israel.

Salient is interested in receiving other views of the film — but keep them short please.