The Rise and Rise of Holocaust Denial
But the appeal of these false hopes for human nature cannot be denied. All these moments of micro-compassion, these stories, might be true locally, but they are false globally; they are the moral equivalent of Holocaust denial.
Which brings us to the subject of Holocaust denial and the ongoing argument about the history of evil.
The continued rise of Holocaust denial: that may well be the most remarkable Hitler-related development since the first publication of this book. And not just the massive Internet-bred tidal wave of toxic filth that washes up on websites worldwide along with instant access to Mein Kampf (17 million copies printed by some estimates—even before Internet distribution) or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Judging from Google hits and chat room stats, there are more people who believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion than ever.
When the first edition of Explaining Hitler came out, Holocaust denial was mainly the province of skinhead neo-Nazis, addled pseudo-intellectuals, and one individual whose anti-Semitic pseudo-history one can observe in my David Irving chapter. (In April 2000, a British judge issued a ruling in a libel trial involving the courageous writer Deborah Lipstadt which said Irving was “an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist, and that he associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.) But now Holocaust denial has not only the allegiance of the addled and Machiavellian anti-Semites but a vast new audience who have endowed it with a geopolitical rationale. An ideological agenda for anti-Semitic anti-Zionism: The Jews invented the Holocaust in order to guilt-trip the world into giving them sovereignty over Israel. You would be surprised (or perhaps not) to discover how prevalent some variety of this narrative has become among those who want to de-legitimize and ultimately erase the state of Israel (and usually “remove” its Jews, as well).
An entire nation, Iran, has seen its leadership endorse this version of Holocaust denial. Even, notoriously, sponsoring a worldwide conference of Holocaust-denying “scholars” to substantiate this fabrication. A nation which, of course, denies that the original Holocaust happened but nonetheless has leaders who have endorsed the idea of perpetrating another one. As early as 1999, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president of Iran, announced that he did not fear a nuclear exchange with the state of Israel, because, although Iranians might lose millions of lives, there would be millions left alive and a billion and half Muslims in the world, but in Israel, there would be “nothing left on the ground.” Something that’s useful to remind those who quibble that a later Iranian leader, Ahmadinejad, who expressed his fervent hope that Israel would be “wiped off the map,” merely meant that the state, the regime, the lines on the map would be erased. It was just a metaphor. . . .
Hitler lives in threats to repeat his crime.
And it is worth remembering, as well, when there is talk about how the new “moderate” Iranian leader, Hassan Rouhani, has backed off the official state stance of Holocaust denial. No, rather he has said that he would just “leave it to the historians” (“let the historians reflect”) as to how many, if any, Jews had been killed by Hitler. This “not taking a position,” applying the much-derided “he said/she said” doctrine to the question of the Holocaust’s facticity, is one of the subtle new guises Holocaust denial has taken.
Meanwhile, if you want the final word on the matter, the true position of the state from the mouth of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the one who truly rules Iran, there’s a sickening statement posted on his English-language website as I write that denounces “the myth of the massacre of the Jews known as the Holocaust.” Case closed.
Holocaust Inconsequentialism
But more subtle and more insidious versions of Holocaust denial have continued to emerge in the decade or so since this book was first published. I’d like to talk about the varieties of Holocaust denial by expanding upon the discussion I had in the book about “the history of evil” with philosopher Berel Lang.
Lang is one of the most brilliant and courageous thinkers I encountered in writing this book. Emeritus Chairman of the Philosophy Department at New York State University’s Albany campus, he is an exacting writer who tangles with the most complex and perplexing questions. I was fortunate to come upon a brief essay he wrote on the question of whether there could be “a history of evil,” which means: did evil evolve? Beginning with the first murder, Cain and Abel, and reaching an end point in Hitler. Is it possible to imagine an evil greater, more malignant than Hitler’s? How does one measure evil? By quantity—body count? By intent? Is there an algorithm? The technical philosophical term for the ultima Thule, the endpoint of evil, is “malignant wickedness,” which means the conscious desire to do evil knowing that it’s evil. Not with Trevor-Roper’s conviction of rectitude.
Can we envision a qualitative point beyond that, beyond Hitler, or merely a quantitative one?
In my conversation with Lang, I had suggested Holocaust denial might be considered a further step in the evolution of evil because it owned the evil of the Holocaust—amongst themselves, most deniers know it’s a cruel anti-Semitic game—yet demonstrated that it was possible to torment the souls of the dead beyond the grave. Holocaust denial not only robbed the graves of their bodies but condemned those who had been murdered to characterization as liars and fabricators, twisted the knife into their already violated souls.
Lang had countered by saying he thought he’d come upon a subtler, more insidious sort of Holocaust denial: “Holocaust indifference.” It was a phrase he used when writing about the postwar career of Martin Heidegger, once a world-renowned philosopher for his almost incomprehensible, some said incoherent, meditations on Being, Time, the World Spirit, and human identity. Heidegger had also shown himself an eagerly sycophantic Nazi follower once Hitler came to power, getting himself appointed rector of the University of Freiburg where he gave pro-Hitler lectures wearing a Nazi uniform, denounced Jews, and got the Jews on the faculty fired forthwith.
After the war, after exploiting his prewar love connection with Hannah Arendt (as credulous and deceived about Heidegger, it seems, as she was about Eichmann) to obtain de-Nazification, he settled into a quiet, bucolic existence, occasionally issuing polemics mainly about the evils of industrialized agriculture. Sounding, as some have mocked him, like a locavore avant la lettre. Industrialized agriculture was evil. Nothing about industrialized murder or what it might have meant for the World Spirit. It might as well not have happened, but he’s okay that it did. Holocaust indifference.
Indeed, as Lang found to his incredulity, not once did this man who pronounced on history and human nature with such sweeping majesty find it in him to utter or indite a single word about the murder of 6 million Jews in which he shared complicity with all others who wore the Nazi uniform and saluted (and enabled) Hitler. Holocaust indifference! Worse than denial because the knowledge is there and yet it doesn’t make a difference.
I found myself thinking of another variation on this, which I call “Holocaust inconsequentialism.” It was Cynthia Ozick who called my attention to the phenomenon. Five years after the publication of Explaining Hitler I published a five-hundred-page compilation of essays on contemporary anti-Semitism to which Ms. Ozick contributed a stunningly powerful afterword, in the course of which she singled out for particular scorn a remark made by Ian Buruma, the Dutch journalist.
In writing about the 1981 Israeli raid on Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, Buruma, in a caustic aside, called it shameful and unnecessary that Menachem Begin, the prime minister who ordered the raid, had alluded to the Holocaust as one of his justifications for preventing the development of weaponizable nuclear fuel at the reactor. What Begin had said at the time was that in making a terribly difficult decision he knew would be (initially) condemned by most of the world, but he was thinking about the million and a half children murdered in the Holocaust. And how much it weighed on his mind that a single Iraqi nuclear weapon derived from Osira
k fuel enrichment (the whole purpose of the plant) would put an entire new generation of Israeli children and citizens in peril of a Second Holocaust. Was it shameful, as Buruma contended? No, it was Buruma, Ozick argued, who exhibited a shamefully “obstinate indifference to the moral realities of human behavior and motivation.”
Holocaust indifference. For some reason, Buruma felt the need to scold Begin. For what? For acting on the basis of history, a history that made Begin’s forebodings more, rather than less, likely, as Kertész pointed out. That something so incomprehensible and unimaginable had actually happened once meant it was no longer unimaginable that it could happen again.
Buruma was shaming Begin for the crime of making a historical analogy. “Is the imagination’s capacity to connect worthy of such scorn?” Ozick wrote.
Thus the more inclusive category of “Holocaust inconsequentialism.” The Holocaust happened in history but for one reason or another one is not allowed to use or allude to its facticity in making judgments about how to act in the future (Godwin’s Law of Geopolitics?). No denial it existed, just denial it should have any consequences. One can see Holocaust inconsequentialism even—or especially—in those like Claude Lanzmann who attempt to sacralize the Holocaust, to privatize it for their own personal construal, denounce anyone who deviates from his approach.
And it is here we come to what I believe is the most urgent mission of this Afterword: to set the record straight on Lanzmann’s blatant misinterpretation of one of the great writers on the Holocaust, Primo Levi.
“L’Affair Rosenbaum”
It wasn’t my idea of a Parisian affair, but that was the banner headline—“L’AFFAIR ROSENBAUM”—across two facing pages of an issue of the Parisian glossy news magazine Le Figaro that appeared shortly after the French publication of this book. A debate on facing pages between me and Claude Lanzmann over the issue of Hitler explanation, the legitimacy of which (as you can see in chapters 6 and 7) Lanzmann has declared himself Final Arbiter and Lord High Executioner of all others. A debate that came down to my exposure of his misreading of the words of Primo Levi. If I risk repetition, so be it, for all I know some may only read this Afterword and Primo Levi deserves justice.
Levi, you probably know, is an Auschwitz survivor, one of the most highly regarded writers and thinkers about the Holocaust. At issue were the chilling words Levi heard harshly thrown in his face on his first day in Auschwitz, the words Lanzmann utterly misread to support his war against the question “Why?”
I have made it my mission, in homage to Levi (such a more complex and interesting thinker than Lanzmann), to distinguish what Levi was actually trying to say on this crucial question from Lanzmann’s opportunistic obfuscation, since Lanzmann’s misrepresentation of Levi is still quoted as if it were gospel. And he conspicuously avoided the challenge I made to the reading in his contribution to Figaro’s “L’Affair Rosenbaum.” So let me briefly compress the way Lanzmann distorts the Primo Levi aphorism. It is no small point; it is at the heart of the debate of the question of explanation, the very epistemology of it.
In his book, If This Is a Man, Levi tells the story of his first day at Auschwitz. No food or water for days. Freezing cold, but dying of thirst, he opened a window in his confinement hut to break off an icicle outside for water. An SS Camp guard shouted at him to stop. Verboten!
To which Levi had the temerity to ask “Why?”
In response to which, Levi writes, the SS guard harshly told him, “Hier ist kein warum” (“Here there is no why”). Which Levi takes as meaning “Here—in the Auschwitz/death camp world, a world ruled by SS mass murderers—there is no why, no asking questions.” Because any question was a challenge to authority. The power of the guard is absolute—one could be executed simply for asking why a guard asks one to do something.
And so yes, in the death camps there was no “Why,” no one was permitted to ask for explanation. But Levi did not wish to deny “Why” to everyone outside of Auschwitz. Not to himself or others. He devoted the rest of his life and his eloquent words to seeking an answer to the question “Why” and if he did not find one (there is a dispute about whether he died from an accidental fall or killed himself), it is tragic to see a central tenet of his thought misrepresented.
But Lanzmann—either out of obtuseness or opportunism—misuses Levi’s quote to indict all explanation—all attempts to ask “Why”—even by Jews, even by Auschwitz survivors. Indeed I describe in chapter 15 how he uses it as a verbal club to personally denounce and cruelly insult an actual Auschwitz survivor in a public forum—for wishing to explore the question. In Le Figaro I once again taxed him with the misappropriation of an SS death camp guard’s words to assail Jews who ask “Why” as well as appropriating the moral authority of Primo Levi to do so. And then demanding that we follow his command, the Lanzmann variation of the SS command as if it were a Commandment writ on a stone tablet: No “Why,” Now and Forever.
Instead, he bloviates with immense self-sacralizing self-importance: “The Holocaust is first of all unique in that it constructs a circle of flames around itself,” he says, “the limit not to be broken because a certain absolute horror is not transmittable.” Because the horror is not utterly and totally transmittable, we must not attempt to transmit anything about it! We must be content just to know it exists. But how do we know it exists if it is not “transmittable”? By watching Shoah, Lanzmann’s film! Seriously! That seems to be the only permissible way. By putting a circle of flame around the “untransmittable,” Lanzmann succeeds in doing what the inconsequentialists and the deniers also do—removing the Holocaust from history, from a search for origins, from the scrutiny of, and effect upon, subsequent history.
It’s madness. But Lanzmann exploits the unexamined moral seriousness he ascribes to himself—and has ascribed to him—for having made a nine-and-a-half-hour film about it. Intellectually he has little more going for him than that epic running time, a length that people have unfortunately mistaken for wisdom. It’s a disgrace that he is allowed to get away with his high-flown sophistry to silence all others on the subject.
Someone needs to speak up for the traduced spirit of Primo Levi. If not now, when?
The Degenerate Artist
I’d like to add a final thought that came to me only recently about the nature of Hitler’s evil, whether it can even be called evil, and whether we believe evil exists. A question that is intimately bound up in the question of whether we believe free will exists. The specific impetus for this final thought, not a final solution but a possible one, was the discovery in Munich in early November 2013 of a huge collection of stolen or “appropriated” art that had been hidden in a house by a Nazi specialist in “degenerate art.”
You’re probably familiar with the story. Most of the pieces seemed to have come from the notorious 1937 Hitler-inspired exhibit. It was a treasure trove of work by artists now recognized as some of the greatest of the twentieth century. Picasso, Renoir, Munch, Chagall, and the like. The kind of art Hitler hated and he commissioned a museum exhibit entitled “Degenerate Art” to prove to the German people the dangers of Jewish-inspired modernism. Apparently some 1,500 pieces of this now priceless treasury were found hidden in the Munich home of a man named Gurlitt, who had gathered them and supported himself by periodically selling them.
The whole affair made me think about the relationship between Hitler and art and evil again. The problem with calling Hitler evil is the problem of consciousness and free will. The trend of late has been to deny free will’s ability to choose evil. (Denial again!) Evil choices and evil acts are now said to be the product of a defect to be found in the DSM-V or locatable on an fMRI scan. The product of determinism, not choice. I had advanced a notion in the book that one of the most heuristic ways of looking at Hitler was to see him as he saw himself from the very beginning in Vienna: as an artist. A failed artist, but one who was then able to put himself in a position where he could create a kind of art of evil.
“A
rt of evil” in this context is not an empty phrase. In one sense, he was using genocidal means to re-sculpt the human genome by carving off entire chunks (Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs). Ascribing to Hitler an artistic consciousness is important in the discourse about the very possibility of evil. In an age when neuroscience is replacing evil with neural-defect diagnoses like psychopath and sociopath, which see evil as the result of brain defect or malformation. With free will considered an illusion, there is no evil because there is no choice, only determinism. Artistic consciousness may be its last validation, the last refuge from determinism. It is hard to ascribe every efflorescence of artistic consciousness, every brush stroke or musical note or poetic image, to some materialist or behaviorist syndrome in the brain.
The “Degenerate Art” collection reminded me of something Berel Lang had said about the connection between the artistic consciousness and the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, he began by quoting Primo Levi: “Primo Levi used the phrase ‘needless violence’ to describe the death camp experience. It’s the element of gratuitousness but it’s more than gratuitousness. There seems to be this imaginative protraction, elaboration one finds best exemplified in art forms and which in art we usually take to be indicative of a consciousness, an artistic consciousness.”
Explaining Hitler Page 66