In Japan, an array of antisemitic books have reached the best-seller list in recent years. Masami Uno, the author of some of the most popular of these books, asserts that Jews form a “behind-the-scenes nation” controlling American corporations. His books link Jews to Japan’s deepest economic fears, declaring America a “Jewish nation” and proclaming Jews responsible for Japan bashing. Uno, whose books have sold millions of copies, has told Japanese audiences that the Holocaust is a hoax and the Diary of Anne Frank full of “lies.”50 Holocaust denial in Japan must be seen as part of the country’s revisionist attitude toward World War II in general. Japan has ignored those aspects of the war that focus on its own wrongdoings. Japanese textbooks distort the historical reality of the Japanese “rape of Nanking,” calling it the “Nanking Incident.” No mention either is made of the medical experiments conducted by the Japanese on prisoners of war, or the army’s exploitation of Korean “comfort women.” Even the attack on Pearl Harbor is presented as a defense tactic which the Japanese were compelled to take because of America’s refusal to acquiesce to reasonable Japanese demands. The use of Koreans as slave labor is also left unmentioned in official war histories.51 Since the Holocaust deniers try to prove that it was the Allies, not the Axis, who committed atrocities during World War II, Holocaust denial may find an increasingly receptive audience in Japan, particularly if the economic situation there worsens and a scapegoat is needed.
Not surprisingly, given deniers’ objective of delegitimizing Israel, Arab countries have proven particularly receptive. During the 1970s, when Holocaust denial was first trying to present itself as a credible academic enterprise, Saudi Arabia financed the publication of a number of books accusing Jews of creating the Holocaust hoax in order to win support for Israel. These books were distributed worldwide.52 Articles denying the genocide against the Jews have appeared in publications of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, an affiliate of the International Red Cross. The latter published an article charging that “the lie concerning the existence of gas chambers enabled the Jews to establish the State of Israel.”53 Another article in a Palestinian journal chided Jews for complaining about gestapo treatment when they were really “served healthy food” by the Germans.54 Arabs have long argued that Israel was created by the United Nations because the world felt guilty over Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. The deniers’ claims add fuel to these charges. Not only did the world, as Robert Faurisson said to me, displace one people “from its land so another could acquire it,” but Holocaust denial proves that it was deceived into doing so.55
The confluence between anti-Israel, antisemitic, and Holocaust denial forces was exemplified by a world anti-Zionist conference scheduled for Sweden in November 1992. Though canceled at the last minute by the Swedish government, scheduled speakers included Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan, Faurisson, Irving, and Leuchter. Also scheduled to participate were representatives of a variety of antisemitic and anti-Israel organizations, including the Russian group Pamyat, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, and the fundamentalist Islamic organization Hamas.56
Echoes of Holocaust denial have also been heard from individuals who are not associated with extremist or overtly antisemitic groups. In an interview with Esquire magazine in February 1983, Robert Mitchum, who played a leading role in the television production of Herman Wouk’s World War II saga, Winds of War and War and Remembrance, suggested that there was doubt about the Holocaust. Asked about the slaughter of six million Jews, he replied, “so the Jews say.” The interviewer, incredulous, repeated Mitchum’s comment verbatim, “So the Jews say?” and Mitchum responded, “I don’t know. People dispute that.”57
The editor of The Progressive, a socialist monthly, recently observed that while he is used to receiving a significant amount of “crackpot mail,” the material he receives from Holocaust deniers is a “more subtly packed, slicker” form of hate propaganda. Despite its restrained and objective tone, he wondered who if anyone might be convinced by such “pernicious rot.” His question was answered when he received a letter from a high school senior who described himself as eager for articles that grappled with difficult ideas. He complimented the editor for the wide variety of topics covered in the magazine but urged that he also address “controversial ideas about the Holocaust” such as the existence of gas chambers. The editor, himself a survivor of the Holocaust, wrote the young student assuring him that if he meant to suggest that there were no gas chambers he was wrong. The student sent back a strongly worded challenge asking the editor to reveal precisely how many gas chambers he had actually seen and how he had managed to survive.58
In Illinois, two parents have conducted an extremely focused letter campaign against the state law that mandates teaching of the Holocaust in all schools in the state. Though many of their arguments are the standard charges repeated ad infinitum in denial publications, these parents have added a new element, threatening to withdraw their children from classes that taught the history of the Holocaust to protect them from “this highly questionable and vulgar hate material.”59 Their letter, sent to thousands of people including elected officials, educators, academicians, and parents, asked recipients to ponder how it was that a small minority was able to use the school systems and to “manipulate our children for their political and national purposes.”60
The inroads deniers have been able to make into the American educational establishment are most disconcerting. Defenders—Noam Chomsky probably the best known among them—have turned up in a variety of quarters. The MIT professor of linguistics wrote the introduction to a book by Faurisson. Faurisson, whom the New York Times described as having “no particular prominence on the French intellectual or academic scene,” has argued that one of the reasons he does not believe that homicidal gas chambers existed is that no death-camp victim has given eyewitness testimony of actual gassings.61 This argument contradicts accepted standards of evidence. It is as if a jury refused to convict a serial killer until one of his victims came back to say, “Yes, he is the one who killed me.” Such reasoning is so soft that it makes one wonder who could possibly take him seriously. Moreover, it ignores the extensive testimony of the Sonderkommandos who dragged the bodies from the gas chambers.
Chomsky contended that, based on what he had read of Faurisson’s work, he saw “no proof” that would lead him to conclude that the Frenchman was an antisemite.62 According to Chomsky, not even Faurisson’s claims that the Holocaust is a “Zionist lie” are proof of his antisemitism. “Is it antisemitic to speak of Zionist lies? Is Zionism the first nationalist movement in history not to have concocted lies in its own interest?”63 That students editing a college newspaper or television producers interested in winning viewers should prove unable to make such distinctions is disturbing. That someone of Chomsky’s stature should confuse the issue is appalling. Indeed, it was this kind of reasoning that led Alfred Kazin to describe Chomsky as a “dupe of intellectual pride so overweening that he is incapable of making distinctions between totalitarian and democratic societies, between oppressors and victims.”64 Though Chomsky is his own unique case, his spirited defense of the deniers shocked many people including those who thought they were inured to his antics.
In his essay Chomsky argued that scholars’ ideas cannot be censored irrespective of how distasteful they may be.4* Throughout this imbroglio Chomsky claimed that his interest was Faurisson’s civil rights and freedom to make his views known.65 During the past few years, as deniers have intensified their efforts to insinuate themselves into the university world by placing ads denying the Holocaust in campus newspapers, echoes of Chomsky’s arguments have been voiced by students, professors, and even university presidents. (See chapter 10 for additional information about denial on campus.) In response to student and faculty protests about the decision of the Duke Chronicle to run an ad denying the Holocaust, the president of Duke University, Keith Brodie, said that to have done otherwise would have “violate
d our commitment to free speech and contradicted Duke’s long tradition of supporting First Amendment rights.”66 Brodie failed to note that the paper had recently rejected an ad it deemed offensive to women. No one had complained about possible violations of the First Amendment.
Let this point not be misunderstood. The deniers have the absolute right to stand on any street corner and spread their calumnies. They have the right to publish their articles and books and hold their gatherings. But free speech does not guarantee them the right to be treated as the “other” side of a legitimate debate. Nor does it guarantee them space on op-ed pages or time on television and radio shows. Most important, it does not call for people such as Chomsky to stand by them and thereby commend their views to the public.5*
We have only witnessed the beginning of this movement’s efforts to permeate cultural, historical, and educational orbits. They must be taken seriously: Far more than the history of the Holocaust is at stake.
While Holocaust denial is not a new phenomenon, it has increased in scope and intensity since the mid-1970s. It is important to understand that the deniers do not work in a vacuum. Part of their success can be traced to an intellectual climate that has made its mark in the scholarly world during the past two decades. The deniers are plying their trade at a time when much of history seems to be up for grabs and attacks on the Western rationalist tradition have become commonplace.
This tendency can be traced, at least in part, to intellectual currents that began to emerge in the late 1960s. Various scholars began to argue that texts had no fixed meaning. The reader’s interpretation, not the author’s intention, determined meaning. Duke University professor Stanley Fish is most closely associated with this approach in the literary field.67 It became more difficult to talk about the objective truth of a text, legal concept, or even an event. In academic circles some scholars spoke of relative truths, rejecting the notion that there was one version of the world that was necessarily right while another was wrong.68 Proponents of this methodology, such as the prominent and widely read philosopher Richard Rorty, denied the allegation that they, believed that two incompatible views on a significant issue were of equal worth.69 But others disagreed. Hilary Putnam, one of the most influential contemporary academic philosophers, thought it particularly dangerous because it seemed to suggest that every conceptual system was “just as good as the other.”70 Still others rightfully worried that it opened the doors of the academy, and of society at large, to an array of farfetched notions that could no longer be dismissed out of hand simply because they were absurd.
Nonetheless, as a methodology this approach to texts had something to recommend it. It placed an important, though possibly overstated, emphasis on the role played by the reader’s perspective in assigning meaning to a text. It was also a reminder that the interpretations of the less powerful groups in society have generally been ignored. But it also fostered an atmosphere in which it became harder to say that an idea was beyond the pale of rational thought. At its most radical it contended that there was no bedrock thing such as experience. Experience was mediated throughone’s language. The scholars who supported this deconstructionist approach were neither deniers themselves nor sympathetic to the deniers’ attitudes; most had no trouble identifying Holocaust denial as disingenuous. But because deconstructionism argued that experience was relative and nothing was fixed, it created an atmosphere of permissiveness toward questioning the meaning of historical events and made it hard for its proponents to assert that there was anything “off limits” for this skeptical approach. The legacy of this kind of thinking was evident when students had to confront the issue. Far too many of them found it impossible to recognize Holocaust denial as a movement with no scholarly, intellectual, or rational validity. A sentiment had been generated in society—not just on campus—that made it difficult to say: “This has nothing to do with ideas. This is bigotry.”
This relativistic approach to the truth has permeated the arena of popular culture, where there is an increasing fascination with, and acceptance of, the irrational. One area in which this has been evident is in the recurring debate regarding the assassination of President Kennedy. While there is reason to question some of the conclusions of the Warren Commission, the theories regarding the killing that have increasingly gained acceptance border on the irrational. Notions of a conspiracy within the highest echelons of American government are readily accepted as plausible. According to Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, a coup d’état was underway in the United States, with the collusion of the vice president, Joint Chiefs of Staff, chief justice of the United States, FBI, CIA, members of Congress, and the Mafia. Stone’s film imposed a neat coherence on a mass of confusing information, providing a self-contained explanation for what still seemed to be an unbelievable event. Many reviewers and moviegoers alike pondered these charges with great seriousness.
In another debasing of history, serious credence has been given to reverse racist charges about white scholarship. Some extremist Afrocentrists, who rightfully assert that Africa’s role in shaping Western civilization is too often ignored, would have us believe that the basis of all intellectual and scientific thought as we know it originated on that continent. Leonard Jeffries, professor of Afro-American studies at New York’s City College, has declared blacks to be “sun people” and whites “ice people.” All that is warm, communal, and full of hope comes from the former; all that is oppressive, cold, and rigid from the latter.71 In these instances, history is rewritten for political ends and scientific historiography is replaced, in the words of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard, with “ideological conformity.”72 Scholars who might once have dismissed these outlandish views feel compelled to treat them as having some validity.
These attacks on history and knowledge have the potential to alter dramatically the way established truth is transmitted from generation to generation. Ultimately the climate they create is of no less importance than the specific truth they attack—be it the Holocaust or the assassination of President Kennedy. It is a climate that fosters deconstructionist history at its worst. No fact, no event, and no aspect of history has any fixed meaning or content. Any truth can be retold. Any fact can be recast. There is no ultimate historical reality.
Holocaust denial is part of this phenomenon. It is not an assault on the history of one particular group. Though denial of the Holocaust may be an attack on the history of the annihilation of the Jews, at its core it poses a threat to all who believe that knowledge and memory are among the keystones of our civilization. Just as the Holocaust was not a tragedy of the Jews but a tragedy of civilization in which the victims were Jews, so too denial of the Holocaust is not a threat just to Jewish history but a threat to all who believe in the ultimate power of reason. It repudiates reasoned discussion the way the Holocaust repudiated civilized values. It is undeniably a form of antisemitism, and as such it constitutes an attack on the most basic values of a reasoned society. Like any form of prejudice, it is an irrational animus that cannot be countered with the normal forces of investigation, argument, and debate. The deniers’ arguments are at their roots not only antisemitic and anti-intellectual but, in the words of historian Charles Maier, “blatantly racist anthropology.”73 Holocaust denial is the apotheosis of irrationalism.
Because the movement to disseminate these myths is neither scholarship nor historiography, I have chosen to eschew the term revisionism whenever possible and instead to use the term denial to describe it. The deniers’ selection of the name revisionist to describe themselves is indicative of their basic strategy of deceit and distortion and of their attempt to portray themselves as legitimate historians engaged in the traditional practice of illuminating the past. For historians, in fact, the name revisionism has a resonance that is perfectly legitimate—it recalls the controversial historical school known as World War I “revisionists,” who argued that the Germans were unjustly held responsible for the war and that consequently t
he Versailles treaty was a politically misguided document based on a false premise. Thus the deniers link themselves to a specific historiographic tradition of reevaluating the past. Claiming the mantle of the World War I revisionists and denying they have any objective other than the dissemination of the truth constitute a tactical attempt to acquire an intellectual credibility that would otherwise elude them.
Revisionism is also the name given to a more contemporary approach to historical research. Associated with the noted historian William Appleman Williams, a past president of the Organization of American Historians, it addresses itself to questions of American foreign policy particularly as they relate to the origins of the Cold War and the conflict between the West and the Communist world. Because this form of revisionism is critical of American foreign policy, which it sees as motivated by a desire for hegemony via open-door imperialism, it is a useful model for the deniers.74 While many historians strongly disagree with its particular bias, all agree that for the “Wisconsin school,” as Williams’s followers came to be known, and its descendants, the canons of evidence are as incontrovertible as they are for all other historians. In contrast, evidence plays no role for deniers.
Finally I abjure the term revisionist because on some level revisionism is what all legitimate historians engage in. Historians are not just chroniclers—they do not simply retell the tale. Each one tries to glean some new insight or understanding from a story already known, seeking some new way of interpreting the past to help us better understand the present. That interpretation always involves some constant “re-visioning” of the past. By its very nature the business of interpretation cannot be purely objective. But it is built on a certain body of irrefutable evidence: Slavery happened; so did the Black Plague and the Holocaust.
Denying the Holocaust Page 3