Simon Elmer
It should surprise no-one that, in the middle of the 6-month liquidation of the Gaza concentration camp by the Israel Defense Forces, the UK film industry released not one but two films about the ‘Holocaust’.[1]
One Life, a UK film about a British man who helped Jews from German-occupied Czechoslovakia, was released in the UK on 1 January, 2024, when the death toll in the Gaza Strip had passed 30,000; and The Zone of Interest, a UK/US/German co-production about the commandant of Auschwitz, was released in the UK on 2 February, when a further 5,000 Palestinians had been added to the list of the dead.
Since then, the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 40,000, more than a third of them children, during which The Zone of Interest has won Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, Outstanding British Film at the BAFTAs, the Grand Prix at Cannes, and won or been nominated for over 120 awards in the US, UK and Europe. Indeed, the films produced by the Holocaust Industry and awarded by the film industry have kept pace with the theft and murder of Palestinians since at least 1967, because that industry has always been a product of US foreign policy.
HISTORY OF AN INDUSTRY
According to the ‘List of Holocaust films’ compiled on Wikipedia, there have been 494 films made about the ‘Holocaust’ between 1940 and 2023, five of them made last year alone. But what purpose does this industry serve? To answer this question, we should look not only at the politics of the films — which includes the viewer positions they invite us to occupy, the identifications they encourage us to make, and all the other strategies of narrative and documentary cinema — but also when they were made; for, ultimately, it is the historical context in which and for which a work of art is made that determines its historical meaning. There are other meanings, too, outside that context; but films are increasingly expensive things to make and distribute — The Zone of Interest had a budget of $15 million — particularly the products of Hollywood cinema that have produced the lion’s share of the Holocaust Film Industry. As such, they cannot be separated from the politics of their financing, which includes, of course, the support network of media promotion and institutional awards.
According to the Wikipedia list — for which I am not claiming any definitive record but which will serve for the purposes of this article — here are the number of Holocaust narrative films/documentaries made by decade:
- 1940s: 18 / 10 = 28
- 1950s: 09 / 01 = 9
- 1960s: 16 / 10 = 26
- 1970s: 25 / 06 = 31
- 1980s: 27 / 29 = 56
- 1990s: 42 / 72 = 114
- 2000s: 42 / 68 = 110
- 2010s: 44 / 49 = 93
- 2020s: 16 / 11 = 27 (so far)
That’s 238 narrative films and 256 documentaries making a total of 494 ‘Holocaust’ films in 84 years. And it’s these, above other products of the Holocaust Industry — the books, museums, tourist trails, school and university courses and the institutions of Zionism — that have been responsible for shaping the opinions of the audience that, today, watches on news programmes, chat shows and social media as the genocide in Gaza unfolds before its eyes.
Read it all: https://off-guardian.org/2024/04/28/zones-of-interest-the-holocaust-industry-in-film/
For 84 years, the declared reason for the Holocaust Film Industry and its vast apparatus of funding, distribution, critical acclaim and awards has been ‘never again’. But the sanctification of the Shoah by Hollywood and other film industries of the West serves a very different political purpose today. No matter what and how many atrocities the State of Israel commits against the Palestinian people, Zionists can (and do) claim that it’s ‘not comparable’ to the ‘Holocaust’, and therefore, in their eyes, justified. We’ve seen this most recently in the repeated attempts by Zionists to refute the estimates of the killed and wounded in Gaza released by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, as though 30,000 dead would be an acceptable death toll whereas 42,000 is an obvious Hamas lie. Every official memorialisation of the past is an enjoinder — made with varying degrees of bribery and threats — to forget what is happening in the present. This, and not remembering the victims, is the ultimate function of the Holocaust Industry in Film. Remember Palestine.
Simon Elmer is the founder of Architests for Social Housing, and author of The Great Reset: Biopolitics for Stakeholder Capitalism. His recent books include The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (2022), as well as two volumes of articles on the UK biosecurity state, Virtue and Terror and The New Normal, both published in 2023.
NOTES
1. A translation of the Greek holocaustoma, meaning a ‘burnt offering’, ‘Holocaust’ was used by the Fathers of the Christian Church to translate the complex sacrificial doctrine of the Bible; but it was also used by them as a polemical weapon against the Jews to condemn blood sacrifice. During the pogroms of the Middle Ages, the term was increasingly used to describe massacres of Jews in Europe. The semantic history of the word ‘Holocaust’, therefore, is essentially Christian, and its continued use in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Century to describe the systematic killing of millions of Jews and other ‘subjects of the state’ under the Third Reich attempts to de-historicise, sanctify and ultimately obscure the causes and mechanisms of what was a historically, politically and legally contingent series of events. Indeed, the sanctification and Christianisation of the genocide of European Jewry is one of the prime goals of the Holocaust Film Industry. For this reason, I only use this word in quotation marks, and refer to the events it describes with the Hebrew word Shoah. See Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive; translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Zone Books, 2002), pp. 28-31.[back]
2. Last year, The Sunday Times Rich List estimated Leonard Blavatnik’s wealth at £28.625 billion, making him the third richest person in the UK, in which he holds dual citizenship with the USA. Blavatnik is Chairman and President of Access Industries Holdings, whose current holdings are businesses in oil, petrochemicals, power generation and biotechnology, and as of 2017 is the world’s largest producer of aluminium. During Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s privatisation programme, Blavatnik became one of the richest of a generation of post-Soviet oligarchs, making a fortune in the newly privatised oil sector and the notorious ‘aluminum wars’ in which an estimated 100 people were murdered. Blavatnik began buying up aluminium plants at knockdown prices and became a leading player in the Russian market; then diversified into coal, making a huge profit on a coalfield in Kazakhstan. Blavatnik was one of a group of oligarchs in the consortium that partnered British Petroleum to create TNK-BP, one of the largest oil companies in Russia, of which he was a director. Born in the Ukraine, Blavatnik became a British citizen in 2010, and has since donated £94,500 to the Conservative party. That same year, Blavatnik also donated £75 million to the University of Oxford to establish the new ‘Blavatnik School of Government’, whose stated purpose is ‘to develop innovative and productive collaborations with governmental and non-governmental organisations, including private sector companies.’ In 2017, donations of £50 million to the Tate Modern purchased his name on the new wing of the gallery, the ‘Blavatnik Building’, and £5 million to the Victoria and Albert Museum was sufficient to have the new entrance to the museum named ‘Blavatnik Hall’. The same year, Blavatnik was knighted for ‘services to philanthropy’. In 2018, Blavatnik purchased the lease on the Theatre Royal Haymarket from the Crown Estate for £45 million, and was one of the sponsors of Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932, the anti-Soviet exhibition held at the Royal Academy to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution. That same year, Blavatnik donated $200 million to Harvard Medical School, but in 2023 this was halted until Harvard addresses what Blavatnik called its ‘rampant anti-Semitism’. A friend of Israel President, Benjamin Netanyahu, Blavatnik is a member of the academic board at the University of Tel Aviv, and he holds similar advisory positions at the University of Cambridge and Harvard Business School. Blavatnik is listed as one of the executive producers of The Zone of Interest.[back]