Читаем After America полностью

The day before, he’d been given another photocopy—this time of the original construction plans, signed by Heinrich Himmler, for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, wherein one million Jews would be killed.

“Here is a copy of the plans,” Mr. Netanyahu said to the assembled ranks of world leaders. “Is this too a lie?”

And so at the dawn of the twenty-first century, one head of government holds up the documents for the “Final Solution” to “the Jewish problem” because another head of government insists, repeatedly, that no such event ever took place. This is the state to which the United Nations has fallen after six decades posing as Lord Tennyson’s Parliament of Man: a sane man is obliged to prove to lunatics that the Holocaust actually happened.

One sympathizes with the Israeli Prime Minister, reduced, seventy years after Neville Chamberlain, to standing before the world waving pieces of paper from Herr Hitler. But he’s missing the point. Ahmadinejad & Company aren’t Holocaust deniers because of the dearth of historical documentation. They deny it because they can, and because it suits their own interests to do so, and because, in the regimes they represent, the state lies to its people as a matter of course and to such a degree that there is no longer an objective reality, only a self-constructed one.

And once you’re in the business of constructing your own reality, even internal logic is not required. In Iran, many of the same people who deny the first Holocaust are planning the second one. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, I’ve run into folks who simultaneously believe (a) that there was no Muslim involvement in the attacks of September 11, and (b) it was a tre-mendous victory for the Muslim people. Incidentally, by “the Muslim world,” I don’t just mean the Middle East: according to one poll, only 17 percent of British Muslims believe there was any Arab involvement in 9/11, and a majority of British Muslims—56 percent—believe there was no Arab involvement.² And yet many British Muslims have marched in the streets under posters hailing the “Magnificent Nineteen” who carried out the attacks.

So we already live in a world in which there is insufficient agreed reality.

After America, there will be even less. To be sure, whatever the president of Iran might believe, there are plenty of fellows, even at the UN General Assembly, who understand that, yes, Auschwitz was built and, yes, many Jews died there. EU prime ministers ostentatiously participating in the annual Holocaust Memorial Day observances are certainly aware. Yet even they felt it was not, in diplomatic-speak, helpful for Mr. Netanyahu to belabor the point with President Ahmadinejad. The New York Times offered an online analysis in its dull blog, the Lede: dredging up the Holocaust business was a bit of artful misdirection from the hardline Netanyahu.³ As Robert Mackey explained, “his decision to engage so passionately with Iran’s president… helped to change the subject from a conversation that presents difficulties for Israel’s leader—how to make peace with Palestinians without alienating his supporters.”

Ah, so that’s why he did it. The whole heads-of-state-who-deny-the-Holocaust thing was a cunning distraction by the Zionist Entity.

During Israel’s famously “disproportionate” 2006 incursion into Lebanon, a reader reminded me of an old gag:

“Great idea,” says his deputy. “Er, but who would we play?”

“Israel, of course.”

Ha-ha. It always had a grain of truth, now it’s the whole loaf.

Think of how the Prime Minister of Israel feels at the UN. And then picture what’s left of the United States after global eclipse. Obama and the leftists notwithstanding, the effect of American retreat from superpower status will not be a quiet life but a future as the Zionist Entity writ large—no longer the Great Satan, but forever the Great Scapegoat. As Richard Ingrams wrote in Britain’s Observer the weekend after 9/11: Who will dare to damn Israel?⁴