Methods of genocide denial

Genocide denial is an ugly subject. I wrote a post about a recent variant a few months ago, relating to Ed Herman, one-time collaborator of Noam Chomsky. Herman has devoted himself in recent years to rubbishing the notion that 8,000 Bosniaks were massacred at Srebrenica. In an article last October entitled "Genocide Inflation is the Real Human Rights Threat: Yugoslavia and Rwanda", published in the far-left Z Magazine, he went one better, and insisted: "To an amazing degree, the Western media and NGOs swallowed the propaganda line and lies on Rwanda that turned things upside down."

I was reminded of this monstrous article and of Herman's fellow-travellers when reading this post on the Counterknowledge blog of Telegraph journalist Damian Thompson. It refers to one Robin Philpot, a Canadian journalist and a denier of the Rwandan genocide, whom I had mentioned as one of Herman's sources.

This is the first of two or three posts I shall write about recent instances of genocide denial. I do so to illustrate two points. First, the methods of genocide denial are consistent across time and place. The denial of the Srebrenica massacre really does employ the same methods as Holocaust denial. My second point is that genocide denial is politically heterogeneous. You find it on the Left as well as the far Right, though these tendencies have much in common with each other.

I first came across the phenomenon, in its most notorious and extreme form of Holocaust denial, in my teens. My languages teacher, who had been a child refugee from Nazism and whose parents had died in the camps, told me of an incident that happened when she had been introducing a travelling exhibition about Anne Frank. A prominent local member of the National Front (this was in Leicester, where the organisation received a substantial vote at that time) came up to her afterwards, introduced himself, and handed her a pamphlet. I can't remember it, but I'm certain this pamphlet would have been one called "Did Six Million Really Die?", under the pseudonymous authorship of a "Richard Harwood".

Harwood's real name was Richard Verrall. Verrall was editor of the National Front journal Spearhead. His was the first popular exposition published in English of the notion that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by international Jewry. Over the years I've acquired Verrall's pamphlet and a small library of the main pseudo-scholarly works advocating this view (though if you visit my house, you will not find them on open shelves). These are all either in French or in English; for obvious reasons, this sort of material doesn't get disseminated in Germany.

I give no link, but Verrall's pamphlet is now also widely distributed on the Web on far-right and Islamist sites. Its concluding section begins:

"Without doubt the most important contribution to a truthful study of the extermination question has been the work of the French historian, Professor Paul Rassinier. The pre-eminent value of this work lies firstly in the fact that Rassinier actually experienced life in the German concentration camps, and also that, as a Socialist intellectual and anti-Nazi, nobody could be less inclined to defend Hitler and National Socialism. Yet, for the sake of justice and historical truth, Rassinier spent the remainder of his post-war years until his death in 1966 pursuing research which utterly refuted the Myth of the Six Million and the legend of Nazi diabolism."

Extraordinarily, in a polemic that sets a methodological standard for lying about history, this paragraph includes an important truth. It's not often realised that (as Paul Berman rightly notes in his Terror and Liberalism) Holocaust denial began on the French Left. The first person systematically to advance the proposition that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by international Jewry was Paul Rassinier, a French Socialist and Resistance fighter who had indeed been imprisoned at Buchenwald. There is a fine biography of him by Nadine Fresco, Fabrication d'un antisémite, 1999. As the title implies, Rassinier became an embittered antisemitic crank. He died in 1967 (not 1966 as Verrall/Harwood claims), having acquired a handful of followers. Rassinier's principal disciple, Robert Faurisson, is very much with us.

Noam Chomsky famously provoked controversy by coming to Faurisson's defence in 1981 - ostensibly on grounds of free speech, but in fact with other remarks attached. During the controversy, Chomsky insisted to one critic (for sources, see here): "I see no hint of antisemitic implications in Faurisson's work." Chomsky is not a Holocaust denier, and no serious critic accuses him of being an antisemite. But Chomsky's defence of Faurisson is not the libertarian one, which I agree with, of the right to free speech for Holocaust deniers. He clearly defends the legitimacy of Faurisson's views though not their factual accuracy. If you doubt this, consider Chomsky's remark on the masthead of this site and similar sentiments about far greater men than I, such as Vaclav Havel and the late Abba Eban. In Chomsky's universe, "tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes" is done by liberals and moderate left-wingers. Faurisson genuinely is a racist who does acquiesce in the greatest crime of our age, by denying it even took place. Yet you won't find Chomsky describing Faurisson in the terms he uses to describe, well, me.

The proponents of genocide denial are not a weighty force, and some of them are very trivial indeed. But there are reasons for refuting them.

First, while I don't wish to sound melodramatic, once you let go by default the arguments of Herman and others, you have in effect granted the legitimacy in debate of the equivalent methods of reasoning of Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial, pace Chomsky's frivolous and absurd remarks, necessarily has malevolent implications.

Secondly, it's surprising how some of the propositions of genocide deniers can insinuate themselves into respectable forums without their being recognised as such. I noted an example last year when the novelist Kurt Vonnegut died. In his best known work, Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut directly relies on the discredited claims of my reader David Irving concerning the death toll at Dresden. Portraying the Allies as war criminals while downplaying the crimes of the Nazis is one the techniques of Holocaust deniers such as Irving.

Thirdly, there is matter of honour. It is plainly not logically impossible that fewer than 8,000 men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica; but the means by which Herman and his followers advance that conclusion are a violation of the methods of critical inquiry. That's what is wrong with genocide denial - not that it's an offence to our feelings, but that it's an offence against historical truth.

Fourthly, while the proponents of genocide denial are on the fringes of Western intellectual life, this is not necessarily true elsewhere. Holocaust denial has gained ground in the Muslim world. In particular, it's espoused by the puppet-president of a state that seeks a nuclear capability and anticipates the extinction of the Jewish state.

Comments

[Mikey]

Interestingly Norman Davies in his book Europe: A History (London: Pimlico, 1997)p. 415 also relies on David Irving for an account of the bombing and the death toll at Dresden: "A British historian has suggested a range of 120-150,000." A look at the end notes on page 1,173 of that book shows exactly which "British historian" Davies had relied on.

[Ollie]

Mikey - I noticed that as well. I guess in Davies's defence the book was published the year before the truth behind Irving's "approach" to history became general public knowledge in the Deborah Lipstadt/Penguin Books trial.

[peter]

"Thirdly, there is matter of honour."

You are very correct to say this. We dishonour the memory of those who died if we do not fight every instance of genocide denial, despite this being a task without any apparent end.

On the matter of Chomsky, as you probably know, although not a Holocaust-denier, he certainly skirted (at least, for a time) with denial of the genocide undertaken by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Do you know of any apology he has ever made for falsely claiming that reports of this genocide were fabricated?

[Albert Seligman]

Ollie, with all due respect, David Irving had long been recognised as a liar by mainstream historians before the libel trial and certainly reviled as an anti-semite by civilised people since the mid 1970s.

Norman Davies had no reasonable excuse for citing Irving or even for honouring him with the title of "historian".

[RCH]

I have in front of me the 2002 edition of Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. Far from updating their shoddy work, they have kept to citing the lowest known estimate of 750,000 dead under the Khmer Rouge ("the most careful currently available in print to our knowledge" p. 263)

... when the scholarly consensus is more than twice that.

Why would Herman and Chomsky cut a figure of genocide in half, erasing nearly a million victims of Pol Pot? I'll leave the reader to ponder that for himself.

[Michael Santomauro]

[Racist spam deleted and nutter blocked]

[Bartholomew]

Who are these cranks who feel the need to paste long essays rather than just give a link? The procedure in the comment above is the same as we see with Creationism: any nuance, development, or debate among scholars is presented as some amazing concession that no-one has noticed before and therefore evidence that the whole subject is a hoax.

I find this 2000 essay by DD Guttenplan from The Guardian to be a useful introduction to the scholarly field.

[Gil]

It is safe to say that there is a fairly close correlation between the views of those who deny the Holocaust and their eliminationist attitude toward Jews.

[Oliver Kamm]

"Who are these cranks who feel the need to paste long essays rather than just give a link?"

This particular crank, Michael Santomauro, runs a Holocaust denial site and has used his own commercial venture to flood people with unsolicited antisemitic material, as he has just done to me. The NYT reported his activities in 2003:

Users of a well-known roommate-matching service in Manhattan say that after signing up with the service they began receiving e-mail messages from a Holocaust-revisionist Web site run by the service's founder.

Michael Santomauro, who started the Roommate Finders service in 1979, also runs a Web site called RePortersNoteBook.com that is critical of Jews and Israel, with headlines like "How Kosher Is the Holocaust Story?" Several users of Roommate Finders said similar material began landing in their electronic mailboxes soon after they gave their addresses to the service.

I will defend Santomauro's freedom of speech, which is in no wise abridged by his being instantly deleted and banned from this site.

[Putzi]

Oliver, I can agree that you have to delete this post.

But I would have been - let's say - even more impressed, if you would have dealt with his krank "arguments" on a point-to-point basis, thereby rebutting them.

For example: his claim that the Polish authorities have conducted chemical tests, etc. This just can't be true, can it? (If it were, it would be truly shocking!)

And he implies that Hilberg (Hilberg, of all people!!) says there is no proof that Hitler knew about the camps. I am sure that this is a lie, and that Hilberg does no such thing!

You just need to rebut and to expose the untruths - that surely is the best and strongest weapon against these people?

[SteveF]

Putzi,

I would be very surprised if Hilberg said that. He may have said that no written order from Hitler has yet been found (to my knowledge - which is limited). However, Hitler certainly knew about the camps and Hilberg would have been well aware of the evidence. For example, Goebbels wrote in his diary on 12/12/1941:

Bezüglich der Judenfrage ist der Führer entschlossen, reinen Tisch zu machen. Er hat den Juden prophezeit, daß, wenn sie noch einmal einen Weltkrieg herbeiführen würden, sie dabei ihre Vernichtung erleben würden. Das ist keine Phrase gewesen. Der Weltkrieg ist da, die Vernichtung des Judentums muß die notwendige Folge sein.

With respect of the Jewish Question, the Führer has decided to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they again brought about a world war, they would live to see their annihilation in it. That wasn't just a catch-word. The world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence.

[dirigible]

"But I would have been - let's say - even more impressed, if you would have dealt with his krank "arguments" on a point-to-point basis, thereby rebutting them."

Refutations of such "arguments" are also all over the internet.

There are better things to do than endlessly refuting the same falsehoods.

[Oliver Kamm]

Putzi, I don't tailor my response to racist nutters or anyone else with the primary aim of impressing you. My website is not a venue for debating the merits of the propositions of Holocaust deniers, and that's that.

On the matter of Hitler's knowledge of and role in the Holocaust, see The Unwritten Order: Hitler's Role in the Final Solution, 2005, by Peter Longerich (one of the expert witnesses for the defence in the David Irving libel suit of 2000). On the fraudulent claims of investigations done by the Institute of Forensic Research in Krakow, you can read the Institute's real report here. Note in particular: "The present study shows that in spite of the passage of a considerable period of time (over 45 years) in the walls of the facilities which once were in contact with hydrogen cyanide the vestigial amounts of the combinations of this constituent of Zyklon B have been preserved."

Michael Santomauro, I see you've tried to post your cut-and-paste job again. You have been blocked from this site, so begone.

[Marc]

The claim about the Polish authorities really needs some kind of citation. But, if this is the same matter referred to in the Lipstadt trial then it is true that the Auschwitz authorities found high cyanide traces in the rooms used for delousing but much lower quantities in the gas chambers. This is, however, to be expected - the concentration of cyanide used to kill lice is orders of magnitude greater than that needed to kill humans.

[Putzi]

Sie wollen Ihre Leser nicht beeindrucken? Wirklich??

What can I say? Perhaps this is why the English are such wonderful people: they are like the Germans, yet with the gift of modesty too! :-)

[Oliver Kamm]

Das ist richtig. Ich habe kein Interesse, an, Sie zu beeindrucken.

[Gavin]

Albert, it's worse than you think - Irving's figures for the number of dead involved in the bombing of Dresden have been suspect since 1966, when he had to write a letter to "The Times" correcting his use of a forgery to inflate the total. In respect to Dresden, his real nature was evident long before the seventies, and Norman Davis' citation of him in 1997 should be even more discreditable as a consequence. The real problem with Irving was that so few British historians were willing to confront his abuse of the process of historical inquiry, even in the seventies, when this had become apparent to others. Speaking as a British historian myself, I blame the reluctance of British historians in general to grapple with original German source material and call Irving's bluff as a result.

[Mikey]

For the best discussion about Irving's massive exaggeration of the amount of deaths at Dresden, I thoroughly recommend the following book:

Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust and the David Irving Trial, (New York: Basic Books, 2002)

Richard Evans is Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University and he acted as the chief historical advisor in the David Irving v. Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt trial. Evans and his assistants took the trouble to check the source material that Irving had used which of course included the fictitious estimate of 250,000 deaths that had been leaked by the Goebbels propaganda machine in a forged document known as TB47. Evans shows (p. 170) that the original document put the actual deaths at 20,204 with an expectation that deaths could rise to 25,000. In the forgery that Irving had used, a zero had simply been added hence multiplying the amount of actual deaths ten fold.

I am not sure if the "Ollie" that responded to my first comment in this thread is Oliver Kamm, but I am quite surprised by the statement. Irving's views on the Holocaust have been discussed much earlier than when Davies wrote his book. For example Gill Seidel in her book published in 1986, The Holocaust Denial: Antisemitism, Racism and the New Right (Leeds: Beyond the Pale Collective) had a long discussion on Irving. Deborah Lipstadt in her book first published in 1993 in the USA by Free Press, a division of Macmillan and in 1994 in the UK by Penguin books, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory also accused Irving of being a Holocaust Denier. I find it difficult to accept that Norman Davies was not aware how controversial David Irving was by the time he wrote his own book. I cannot excuse him for using such a discredited person as a source.

What concerned me further was that I sourced a copy of the book by Davies that I mention at the British Library of Political & Economic Science which is the library of London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). The particular copy had a library sticker on it saying something like, "Recommended text."