The real Holocaust denial
Sam Smith, who edits the Progressive Review, on The real Holocaust denial:
The jailing of Holocaust denier David Irving in Austria is a reminder of how easy it is to imitate evil even as one excoriates it. The law that convicted Irving is of the sort the Nazis would have invoked, albeit for far different purposes, and was a routine offense in Orwell’s 1984. Many fail to see this irony because they are engaged in the greatest Holocaust denial of all: a refusal to look seriously at why there was a Holocaust in the first place. To blame it all on anti-Semitism is as dangerously ahistorical as to deny its existence. Yes, Jews were the victims, but why did an ancient and widespread prejudice produce such an extreme result in this case?
We avoid this question because it takes us places we don’t want to go. Like the role of modern bureaucracy and technology in the magnification of evil. Like the commingling of corporate and state interests in a way the world had never seen before. Like the failure of Germany’s liberal elite to stand effectively against wrong eerily echoed today in the failure of America’s liberal elite to do likewise.
Some of the most important lessons of the Holocaust are simply missed. Among these, as Richard Rubenstein has pointed out, is that it could only have been carried out by ‘an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy….
…The seeds of the Holocaust can thus be found in the trenches of World War I. Individuals had became no better than the bullets that killed them, just part of the expendable arsenal of the state.But we don’t talk about this do we? We don’t teach our children about it, do we?
The problem with using the outcome rather than the origins of the Holocaust as our metaphor and our message is that we are totally unprepared for those practices, laws, and arguments that can produce similar outcomes. We study the death chambers when we should be learning about the birth places.
December 16th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
The seeds of the Holocaust lie in the First World War. Between the Wars, the German population came to believe that “the Jews” were in part responsible for Germany’s defeat by causing the US to enter the War on the side of the Allies. An objective historical investigation of the Holocaust is long overdue. It was such a pivotal event and led directly to the founding of the state of Israel. And undeniably Israel and Jews worldwide have milked it for every ounce of sympathy. So why not examine the evidence to determine whether the authorised version is an exaggeration? It may turn out that it’s an understatement. But Austria imprisoning an historian like David Irving is a travesty of justice, paving the way to thought crimes. The truth does not need laws to protect it. Lies on the other hand …