CHAPTER ONE - NEGATIONISM IN GENERAL
Negationism means the denial of historical crimes against
humanity. It is not a reinterpretation of known facts, but the
denial of known facts. The term negationism has gained currency
as the name of a movement to deny a specific crime against
humanity, the Nazi genocide on the Jews in 1941-45, also known as
the holocaust (Greek: fire sacrifice) or the Shoah (Hebrew:
disaster). Negationism is mostly identified with the effort at
re-writing history in such a way that the fact of the Holocaust
is omitted.
The negationists themselves prefer to call themselves
revisionists, after all they think that there is nothing to deny
or negate, and that the known facts of history are a
fabrication which will be exposed when history is given a second
look or revised. Many commentators use the two terms
interchangeably, and it has become impossible to use the word
revisionism (once used as a Maoist term for Khrushchev's
destalinization) except in the sense of negationism. Only a
few purists, like the Flemish scholar Gie van den Berghe (working
at the Institute for the History of World War 2 in Brussels),
insist on the distinction between negationism alias revisionism,
and the legitimate revisionism. Revisionism stricto sensu is
then defined as the normal activity of historians, viz. the
reassessment of given historical facts.
For instance, when a country has won a war, its official
historians will often write a version of the history of the war
in which the dates and figures are correct, but into which a very
slanted interpretation is woven (with all the guilt and the
barbarity being ascribed to the opponent): it is then the duty of
historians to re-analyze the facts and give a new and more
balanced interpretation. Such revision of the established
story is often controversial, as it is usually an attack on
the version preferred by established political interests. But
normally, after some turbulence, the revisionists' critique is either
rejected as too extreme, or incorporated in a more advanced and more
balanced official version of history. This way, revisionism stricto
sensu is part of the normal progress of scientific history-writing.
By contrast, in negationism, facts are not re-interpreted but denied.
As the term revisionism has become ambiguous, we will not
use it here. The pollution of language with unclear terminology
is a problem closely related to that of history falsification, so
in this context ever more than elsewhere, we prefer clear
terminology. We will therefore speak of negationism on the one
hand, and re-interpretation of history on the other.
1.1. BONAFIDE RE-INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY
Before we describe the problem of negationism, let us first
look at the bonafide revision of the history of Nazism and the
Holocaust, in order to avoid confusion between the intellectual
crime of negationism and the proper task of historians to re-
investigate and re-assess known and undisputed historical facts.
The history of Nazism is a complex one, and it is only natural
that historians do not take received wisdom and dominant
interpretations for granted. Even if some negationists with a
political axe to grind would deny facts, sincere historians still
have a professional duty to study these facts more closely sine
ira nec studio (without aversion nor preference) and to amend
interpretations which on closer analysis are no longer
sustainable.
One point of discussion among historians, already since the
early fifties, has been the degree of intentionality of the Nazi
genocide on the Jews, on the extent to which the Holocaust had
been pre-planned. The intentionalist theory says that the Nazi
leadership knew from the very beginning (early 1920s) that, once
it got the chance, it would exterminate the entire Jewish
population living within its domains. The functionalist
theory says that the decision to send the Jews to the gas
chambers was only the culmination of a process which had
started with far less
drastic measures, but in which each new phase made the next and
uglier phase thinkable as well as technically within reach.
Today, the intentionalist explanation has been largely
abandoned for the functionalist one (though the remaining
intentionalists may tell you the opposite). The gas chambers had
not been planned years in advance, but were the culmination of
a succession of two strings of events (a possible third contributor
will be dealt with later).
The one escalatory process goes from general anti-Jewish
propaganda through cancellation of Jews' citizenship (1935),
exclusion of Jews from professional and economic life (1938),
encouraged emigration of Jews, violence against Jewish
establishments by Nazi thugs, internment of Jews together with
political opponents in work camps, herding of Jews in occupied
territories into ghettoes, pogroms with the aid of local
militias, deportation of German Jews and political opponents to
camps in the occupied territories (because German public opinion
couldn't stomach too much repression under its own eyes), killing
these prisoners on a less systematic scale or letting them die
through hardships, and finally the industrial-scale extermination
in the gas chambers.
It is established that as late as 1940, the Nazi final
solution (Endlosung) consisted in the removal of all Jews from
German-held territories, either to Palestine (in co-operation
with the Zionist movement 1937-39) or to an area in the colonial
world, notably Madagascar. But Britain did not want to let large
numbers of Jews into Palestine, nor did any country agree to take
in large numbers of German Jewish refugees, and when Germany lost
the Battle of Britain in 1940, it became clear that the colonial
world was going to remain out of reach. So, something else had
to be tried.
The other tributary to the final extermination campaign was
the forced sterilization of carriers of hereditary diseases,
followed by the euthanasia programme which, between 1939 and
1941, killed 70,000 handicapped and mentally deranged people as a
matter of racial purification. it had to be stopped because of
massive protest from the German public opinion and the Churches,
but it had given the Nazis a taste of how to extreminate on an
industrial scale, and also taught them that the only politically
feasible way to do it, even in wartime, was under maximum
secrecy.
The decision to resort to the total extermination of the Jews
was announced by Hermann Goering on 31 July 1941 and finalized in
detail at the Wannsee conference on 20 january 1942. A small
extermination camp had already been started one month earlier in
Chelmno. The decision to physically liquidate the Jews had not
yet been taken in 1922 or even 1933. The Germans who had voted
for the Nazis had voted in many cases for anti-Judaism, but not
for the Holocaust. That at least is the functionalist assessment
of the historical material, corroborated by a lot of research
since the early fifties. The intentionalist theory, which says
that the Holocaust had been the Nazi action programme from the
start, is still popular in anti-German stereotyping but has
little to recommend itself among historians.
A second case of bonafide re-assessment of the history of
Nazism and the Holocaust, concerns the question of whether the
Holocaust has a unique status in history, recently highlighted
in the so-called historikerstreit (German: "struggle among
historians"). Among German historians, a lively debate was
started in 1986 when Ernst Nolte questioned this uniqueness.
There are two different aspects to this uniqueness question.
The first concerns the comparative assessment of the Nazi crimes
with such a comparison and deride it as a trick to minimize
and banalize the Nazi crimes. Other historians, and not only
Nolte, maintain that the comparison holds in most respects.
Stalin's massacres of the kulaks, of (suspected) political
opponents and their families, of the educated classes among
subject nations (Poles, Estonians), etc., were wellplanned,
large-scale, systematic, merciless and ideologically motivated.
The number of Stalin's victims exceeded that of Hitler's (when
the German army entered the Soviet Union, it was welcomed as a
liberator in many places, but it lost that credit by treating the
Slavas as Untermenschen, less-than-humans). More importantly,
Stalin's massacres largely preceded Hitler's: in the 1930s alone,
he had between 15 and 20 million people killed, a number of
victims per decade literally unprecendented in world history.
When in 1950 the leftist intellectuals Sartre and Merleau-Ponty
joined the debate on the concentration camps and the bloody
repression in the Soviet Union, they acknowledged that Hitler's
camps owed a lot to Stalin's camps.
So, the possible third contributor mentioned above, which
should be considered when we investigate the determinants of the
Holocaust, was the inspiring example of Stalin's massacres on a
scale which Hitler tried (but failed) to emulate. Of course the
Nazi crimes cannot be explained as a simple reaction to and
imitation of Stalin's (and Lenin's) crimes; but there is no doubt
that the new horizons in organised mass murder which Stalin had
opened have contributed to the very thinkability of the
Holocaust. They also created an intense fear of Communism, the
sense of an all-out struggle for life against this Bolshevik
barbarity, which in turn made extreme steps against all who could
be accused of any kind of association with Communism (including
the Jews, via "the Jew Karl Marx") acceptable to many Germans;
and which convinced many Europeans of the need to collaborate
with the Nazis as a comparative lesser evil.
It was already in about 1950 that historians had sought a
common denominator for Nazism and Stalinism, which was found in
the concept of totalitarianism. The pro-socialist spirit of the
times did not receive this concept very well, and in circles
where double standareds for Hitler and Stalin are still upheld,
you will be told that the concept of totalitarianism was a
failure. The Historikerstreit was, in a sense, a new episode to
the totalitarianism debate, but focusing more on events and
actions than on ideology and structures. However, the German
anti-Communists weakened their case by drawing an exaggerated
parallel between Nazi Germany and Communist East Germany:
equating Stalin's brutality and authoritarianism with Hitler's is
defensible, but equating Honecker with Hitler and the Berlin Wall
with Auschwitz is of course exaggerated.
There is a second aspect to the uniqueness debate,
highlighted in public forums in the U.S. since the seventies:
there is an argument over the claim made by many Jews (like the
Nobel-prize winning writer Elie Wiesel) that the Holocaust is an
unspeakably unique, un-analyzable and incomparable event. This
attitude is closely linked with the (outdated) intentionalist
theory: the unique thing about the Jewish genocide as compared
with other mass-murders is that there was an ineffable diabolical
will behind it. Nazism embodied the fullest manifestation of an
age-old intention of the world to destroy the Jews. Every
attempt to historicize the Holocaust, to explain it with universal
socio-political, economical and cultural factors, is a sacrilege,
a breach of taboo: the factors which might explain other
massacres do not apply here, the Nazi holocaust was nothing but
pure naked Evil. This claim to uniqueness in suffering is the
observe side of the claim to being God's chosen people. In fact,
as large sections of the Jewish community outside Israel are
losing their religious fervour (parallel to the secularization of
the Christian communities), the Holocaust memory has started to
replace the Torah (the five books attributed to Moses) as the
cornerstone of Jewish identity.
This claim to uniqueness has become more insistent as
international sympathy for Israel waned. After the 6-day war in
June 1967, Israel had come to be regarded as a considerable
military power imposing its will on occupied territories, not a
David but a Goliath. With the Yom Kippur war of 1973, sympathy
continued to decrease, and Arab oil power forced Western
governments to become friendlier towards the Arab states and more
aloof from Israel. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the
suppression of the Palestinian revolt (intifada) brought Israel a
continued decrease in international sympathy. Almost in direct
proportion to this shift in the international attitude to the
state of Israel, the Holocaust gets more and more emphasized as
the foundation myth and justification of Israel and of its
policies. Another factor in the increased sacralization of the
holocaust is a cultural and political shift within Israel, where
the Zionist founders generation with its forward-looking no-
nonsense project of building a modern state is being replaced by
more traditionalist tendencies which keep on cultivating the
memories of persecution.
Efforts to study the Holocaust in the historical context
easily get branded as a lack of respect for the victims and their
next of kin, as an attempt to banalize the Holocaust, or as a
veiled attempt to deny it. Other genocides can be called unique
in their own way, but did not have the same absolutely evil
quality that Auschwitz had. Auschwitz is a turning-point in
history, changing our ethical view of mankind, our esthetics
("can one still write poetry after Auschwitz?" - Sartre) and
metaphysics ("It is stupid and reprehensible to continue
philosophizing after Auschwitz just like before..." - Lyotard).
It was not a historical but a metaphysical and religious event, a
kind of reverse theophany (God's manifestation in the stream of
history), or rather diabolophany (devil-manifestation).
According to Rabbi Emil Fackenheim, the Holocaust was the only
example of Absolute Evil.
A dispassionate historian cannot subscribe to this uniqueness
claim. The Holocaust is merely one in a series of genocides.
Without anyhow denying the Holocaust, we should put it in the
perspective of other crimes against humanity (nor just crimes
against Jewry). And we should keep in mind that all people who
suffer, who are pushed into suffering with their entire being and
have little occasion to contemplate other people's suffering,
tend to over-estimate the comparative horror of their own
suffering.
Within one century after Columbus' arrival, the entire native
American population of the Caribbean islands was exterminated,
probably 8 million people. In continental Latin America, only
12 million people survived after a century of colonization -
while the population in 1492 is estimated at up to 90 million.
True, many died because of new diseases which the colonizers had
involuntarily brought with them, and many died not by massacre
but under the hardships of slavery (which also happened to many
prisoners in the Nazi work camps), but the number of literally
massacred people still amounted to millions. In North America
too, the 2 million native inhabitants of Patagonia (southern
Chile and Argentina) were gradually but systematically killed to
the last, as were all the inhabitants of Tasmania in a single
campaign, and most of the aboriginals of Australia: in these
cases, the genocide was entirely intentional.
The number of Africans killed in the age of the slave trade
and colonial conquest has been estimated at up to 50 million. It
has been said that Europeans found the Holocaust so gruesome
because the things which they had considered acceptable in the
case of black savages had now been committed on white
Europeans. In the conquests of America and Africa, the same
psychology was at work as in Auschwitz: the inferior races had to
make way (or Lebensraum, living space) for the superior race.
In some cases the massacre was functional, the result of an
unplanned escalation. In others however, the massacre was
entirely intentional and pre-planned.
Between 1915 and 1917, the Turks massacred nearly 1.5 milion
Christian Armenians, nearly the entire population of Western
Armenia, or almost half of all the then living Armenians.
Another million survived deportation thanks to the timely defeat
of the Ottoman empire: the Turks' goal was the total
extermination of the Armenians, nothing less. In relative though
not in absolute figures this is worse than what Hitler did to the
Jews. Western Armenia has been entirely cleared of its original
population, and the remaining church buildings are used by the
army as targets for artillery practice.
Even outside the Islamic and the European sphere, genocides
are not unknown: the 19th-century Zulu emperor Shaka purposely
exterminated subdued populations in the order of magnitude of a
million. In antiquity, the Assyrians, like early Stalins, both
massacred and deported entire nations.
Of the Gypsies, at least 400,000 were killed in the same
annihilation camps as the Jews, and some more Gypsies were killed
in ordinary massacres. It is remarkable that the Gypsies are
hardly ever mentioned in connection with the Nazi extermination
campaign, as are the estimated 6 million Russians who died in
Nazi captivity (apart from another 20 million Russians who died
in war circumstances). Then again, it is only natural: all
people who have suffered, complain of (or at least notice) a
general lack of interest from outsiders in their experiences.
The remarkable thing is rather the enormous attention which has
been given to the genocide committed on the Jews.
This attention is not out of proportion, and is in principle
a good thing; but its justification, viz. "beware not to let this
happen again", is in stark contradiction with the unicity claim.
It is precisely because non-demonic, purely human factors may,
in a given historical configuration, converge to cause a genocide,
of which the Nazi Holocaust is merely an outstanding example,
that we have to study past genocides like the one in Auschwitz in
order to avoid similar events in the future. If Auzchwitz had
been a totally unique event beyond human understanding, there
would be no fear of repetition and no need to study it.
It would be a bit harsh to say it before a Jewish audience,
but it is nonetheless an incontrovertible fact: one of the
earliest genocides has been described and ideologically motivated
in their own sacred Scripture, the Tenakh (acronym from Torah +
Naviim + Ketuvim, i.e. Moses' Regulations, Prophetic books, and
Writings; known to Christians as the Old Testament). The
massacres of neighbouring nations and all kinds of idolaters by
the prophets and established kings of the Promised Land were not
even the worst. The worst was in the very beginning, when the
Israelite people conquered this Land which they claim Yahweh had
promised them.
In the books Deuteronomy, Numbers and Joshua, we read how
Moses and his successor Joshua receive orders from their god
Yahweh to exterminate the entire population (women, children and
even animals included) of the cities in the Promised Land, then
known as Kanaan (Deut.2:34, 20:12-17), as well as in all cities
where idolatry was practised (Deut.13:13-17). In cities outside
Kanaan, they could take booty and slaves, but the men had to be
killed. At Yahweh's explicit command, all the men, women and male
children of Midian (outside Kanaan) were killed, and the virgin
girls and the cattle distributed among the Israelites (Num.31:7-
18). Inside Kanaan, the Israelites had no mercy, and the book
Joshua describes how the populations of Jericho, Ai, Makkeda,
Libna, Lakis, Eglon, Hebron, Debir and its vassal cities, were
exterminated (Jo.6:21-27, 8:24-29, 10:28-39). Joshua created
Lebensraum for the chosen people by exterminating the Kanaanites,
with God on his side: "This way Joshua conquered the land: the
hill country, the suthern desert, the lowlands, the coastal
strip, and he killed all the kings. He did not let anyone escape
and he destroyed every living being, just like Yahweh the god of
Israel had ordered." (Jo.10:40)
Many Bible scholars believe that this story is highly
exaggerated: the Israelite conquest of Kanaan took place some 7
centuries before the Bible text was edited, and its description
may have been adapted to suit the ideological needs of the
Israelite people and its priestly class at the time of writing.
Probably Moses had led a fairly small group which had to settle
amid existing populations, on whom the cult of Yahweh (and with
it, the integration into the Israelite nation) was imposed
only gradually. Nonetheless, the story as it is, and which is revered
as revealed Scripture, does contain an ideology of genocide, no
matter what lofty ethical or religious insights may be present in
other parts of the Bible.
It would be unfair to hold the present-day Jewish community
guilty of an effective commitment to this ideology of God-
ordained self-righteousness at any cost, including genocide.
Even if there is an amount of self-righteousness in the Israelis'
attitude in the occupied territories, it is nothing but gross
rhetoric to say that Israeli occupation is the new Nazism, as
was claimed in a UN resolution, now repealed). Even the crassest
fundamentalists are not calling for a Joshua-style terror
campaign: the Jews regard Joshua as part of their history, not to
be disowned, but not to be repeated in the modern world either.
Today, Israel is the most democratic, humane and tolerant
society in West Asia. If it claims defensible borders and
sufficient territory, this is a legitimate secular claim,
especially if one considers the most likely alternative, viz. the
incorporation into the Islamic world with its retrograde,
financial and dictatorial regimes which threaten to destroy
Israel. The Arab world, itself the result of ruthless conquest,
and which continues to expand at the expense of internal
minorities like the Kurds, Assyrians (Aramaic-speaking
Christians) and Berbers, is in no position to criticize Israel's
desire for safe territory for its dense population.
Nevertheless, even if the God-ordinated genocide attributed
to Moses and Joshua has not been emulated by the Jewish people,
its scriptural sanction has certainly played a destructive role
in history. One cannot deny that the Biblical injunctions to
destroy Pagans by all means has contributed to the extreme self-
righteousness against Pagans which Christianity has displayed
duirng its most expansive phases.
The extermination of native populations in America and
Oceania by Christians could not have taken place on the same
scale if those populations had not been Pagans. Modern
Christians claim that not the missionaries but the uneducated and
un-Christian gold-seekers were responsible for the plight of
the native Americans; but even if we disregard the destructive
role played by many misionaries, the fact remains that even the
most illiterate Christian adventure remembered one thing from his
Christian upbringing, viz. that Pagans are inferior to Christians
and that in dealing with them, different ethical standards apply.
Intra-Christian wars were never that extreme, and the worst wars
in Christian Eruope before the secularization of politics in
the 18th-19th century was precisely religious wars against Pagans or
heretics: the war of the Teutonic Knights against the Baltic
Pagans (ending in the annihilation of Paganism by the 15th
century), the Crusade against the Manichean Cathar sect in
southern France (1209-29, an intentional genocide), the "thirty
years' war" between Catholic and Prostestant powers (1618-48,
killing 5 million Germans, one third of the population).
Islam is another zealous successor to Moses' heritage: its
destruction of Pagan populations and cultures was always
committed in the belief that the same God who had Moses' enemies
wiped out, had now ordained the Islamic trail of conquest and
destruction. This conviction immunized mujahedin against doubts
arising in their conscience.
The occurence of genocide in Jewish Scripture has of course
been pointed out by people who want to justify their anti-Jewish
feelings or policies. The latest example is the Croatian
president, Franjo Tudjman who has been trying to explain to the
world why the Croatian government during World War 2 had killed
so many Jews. According to newspaper reports, he has written a
book in Croatian in 1989, titled Wastelands: Historical Truth, in
which he refers to the Bibical narrative and comments that for
the Jews, "genocidal violence is a natural phenomenon... It is
not only allowed, but even recommended". This may win him some
sympathy among supporters of the Palestinian cause, but it is
quite misplaced: the anti-Jewish violence of the last centuries
and especially of the Nazis and their Croatian allies had nothing
to do with the gruesome way in which Moses and Joshua conquered
the Promised Land. The contents and orientation of the Jewish
religion have fundamentally changed since the days of Moses, and
the Jews have practised live and let live for many centuries,
during which they contributed immensely to the economic and
intellectual life of their host countries.
Genocide is not natural to any any individual or nation. The
behaviour of human beings is conditioned not so much by their
blood or ancestry or nationality, but by their thinking.
Genocide is the outcome of an ideology. It could happen to
Moses' Israelites and to Hitler's Germans, to the Caliph's Turks
and to the colonizing Europeans, because they believed that
genocide was justified as a means to a superior goal. Each of
the genocidal movements believed it was a kind of chosen people,
destined to rule a specified part of the world (as in the case of
Christianity, Colonialism, Islam and Communism).
While there are differences of method and quantity, it must
be clear now that the difference between the Nazi genocide and
other genocides is not absolute and metaphysical. So, the
comparative assessment of Hitler's and Stalin's massacres, and
the comparative assessment of the genocide on the Jews and the
genocides on the Red Indians, Black Africans, Tasmanians,
Armenians, Gypsies and other nations, are legitimate objects of
study. They don't need suspect political motives. On the
contrary, it is the refusal to address these topics of history,
the desire to prevent such lines of study, that demonstrates
political compulsions.
1.2 DENYING THE HOLOCAUST
A wholly different matter from re-interpretation of
known historical facts, is the denial of these facts. In
Europe we have the negationism of a handful of historians
and extreme-right groups concerning the Nazi extermination
campaign against the Gypsies and the Jews, which took place
between 1941 and 1945. Their claim is that this Nazi
extermination campaign is in fact a concoction. The
widespread belief that the Holocaust did take place, would
merely be the work of a conspiracy.
There is, according to the negationists, no dearth of
motives for floating the concoction of the Holocaust. The
two most important ones concern the Communists and the
Jews.
In order to legitimate their own horrible regime, the
Communists had to print Fascism (a term often used when
Nazism is meant) in the most terrible colours. It is true
that they always throw the swearword Fascist at everyone:
from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the Dalai Lama, every decent
human being who stands in the way of Communism gets branded as
a Fascist. Now, according to the Negationists, the
Communists had to invent gruesome crimes for Fascism, and to
make the sting of the swearword Fascist sharper. A case
in point, they argue, is the massacre of Polish officers at
Katyn: blamed on the Nazis by the Soviets (an allegation
adopted by the other Allies, so that as late as 1989 the
British Foreign Office still denied that evidence for Soviet
responsibility existed), but in fact committed by the Soviets
themselves. If the Communists could falsely accuse the
Nazis about Katyn, why not about Auzchwitz?
But more than the Communists, it was the Jews who,
according to the negationists, had every reason to invent
the Holocaust myth. Look at its effects: the immediate
outcome of the successful spreding of the Holocaust myth
was that in 1948 the United Nations could not deny the Jews
their new state Israel, and that this new state could at
once claim huge reparation payments from Germany. Today the
Holocaust memory is the justification of Israel's political
claims to safe, defensible borders - which
effectively means the annexation of the occupied
territories. The last two decades, Western support for
Israel has become less unconditional, and to reclaim this
support the Holocaust memory has been made more insistent,
with the orchestrated flood of books and films about the
Holocaust.
So, according to the negationists, the victims were in
fact the aggressors. With fakes photographs and false
testimonies by tutored eyewitnesses the Jews framed the
Nazis on a huge and horrible crime of genocide which had
never been committed. After all, the declaration of war by
France and Britain against Germany in 1939 had been arranged
by the Jewish conspiracy which controlled finance (and
therefore politics) in those countries. And the Zionist
leader Chaim Weizmann had immediately declared that in this
war all the Jews would be on England's side. So, the war
itself had been forced on Germany by the Jews, and the
Holocaust myth was the next element in this Jewish conspiracy
aimed at sucking Germany's blood and resources. That is very
briefly the negationists' position on why this Holocaust story
was made so popular.
The negationist position is not widely believed, in fact
it is widely detested as the motivated history-distortion
which it really is. In France and Germany, publishing
negationist writings is punishable by law (in Germany,
denial of the massacre of Germans in ex-German territories
in 1945 was equally made punishable). Negationism can boast
of only a few academics in its ranks, most academics will
have no truck with it, and some have published thorough and
precise refutations of negationism. Most of the negationist
publications are pamphlets of a pitiable intellectual
calibre. Yet, a few academic-looking institutes for
"revision of the history of World War II" have been set up,
notably the Institute for Historical Review in California.
And at least a few negationist academics and writers are
clever polemists and have managed to create a semblance of
respectability for negationism in some circles.
The methods of the negationists are intellectually quite
objectionable, they do all the things which are in the
"don't" column of methodological vademecums. For instance,
they commit unbelievable feats of "quoting out of context".
I realize that it is often a cheap excuse in polemical
forums to allege quoting out of context: it is done when
you cannot escape the conslusions which your opponent has
drawn from your own side's statements. By invoking (without
specifying) the all-redeeming context, you can claim that
the analyzed statement really meant something else than your
opponent had assumed in making his analysis. Nevertheless,
the false allegation can only work because the genuine
product, quoting out of context, does exist. The
negationists shamelessly change the meaning of sentences by
plucking them from their contexts. Whenever one of their
opponents, in the middle of a systematic refutation of
negationism, dares to concede that "there are contradictions
in the testimony of ex-prisoner X", or that "no records are
extant from concentration camp Y", they quote this one line
and go on to conclude that this opponent "has had to revise
his earlier belief in the Holocaust under the impact of new
findings".
For example, they eagerly quote the German historian
Martin Broszat's statement that there were no gas chambers
designed for largescale killing in the German Reich. Yes,
that is what he said, and he was probably right: no matter
how gruesome otherwise, the camps inside Germany, like
Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, did not contain such gas
chambers. For, Broszat continues but the negationists omit,
"the mass destruction of Jews by gassing was mostly done in
the occupied territories".
Negationist pamphlets are often very unashamed to
announce from the beginning that they are not meant to do
history, but merely want to take an unprejudiced look at
the allegations of Nazi genocide. Some of their more
pretentious publications have a lot of academic-looking
references and quotations (referring mostly to other
negationist authorities and to the pamphlet liteature), as
well as out-of-context quotes from original Auschwitz
testimonies and research, in which witnesses a charge are
turned into witness a decharge. Negationist publications
also contain a lot of plain lies, apparently counting on the
public's lack of time and means to check sources.
In every document they know how to select a line in
their own favour. If a judge convicts them because of their
negationism, they clamour that it is outside the judiciary's
competence to judge historical methods and theories (apart
from seeing it as proof of the omnipresent Jewish
conspiracy); but when a judge refrains from passing
judgement on their methods and theories, they explain it as
a vindication of negationism. When the leading French
negationist professor Faurisson was convicted several times
on charges of slander and incitement to racial hatred, but
not because of his history distortion, he claimed that
henceforth nobody had the right to denounce his method, and
that "it is now permitted to declare that the gas chambers
have not existed".
Their easiest technique of deception consists in simply
keeping all the evidence for the Holocaust out of the view
of the readers, or in denying its existence. The numerous
testimonies by camp survivors and Nazi officials (of whom
some to appease their conscience, had already leaked the
truth to the outside world during the war) are simply not
mentioned at all, except if seemingly gross contradictions
or mistakes can be shown in them, so as to create the
impression that the Holocaust myth is based on the
rantings of a few paranoid misfits.
They challenge the established historical certainty of
the Holocaust not with precise questions and challenges to
competent historians, but with stunts and bluff aimed at the
broader public. Thus, in 1979 the Institute for Historical
Review promised $ 50,000 to whomever could prove that
people had been gassed in the Nazi camps. The small print
said that candidates for the prize must have seen someone
being gassed, must submit an autopsy report of a victim
gassed with Zyklon-B gas. After one year, it announced
triumphantly that the prize could not be awarded as no one
had come forward with the proof. Actually, the items
demanded by the Institute are available, but most self-
respecting historians have decided to boycott the negationists
completely, as even a public trial of strength
would only give them publicity (apart from the fact that
most relevant original documents were in pre-glasnost Soviet
and Polish hands). In my opinion, it is better to face the
negationist challenge head-on, and to confront them with the
evidence they defiantly ask for.
The chief argument of the negationists is that the
evidence given for the Holocaust is flawed. There are
indeed some flaws in the available evidence for the
Holocaust. To start with, there is comparatively little of
it. It most camps the Nazis had thoroughly destroyed all
the evidence by the time the Soviet and Anglo-American
forces moved in. Moreover, the evidence available is in
coded language, because the Holocaust was conducted as a
secret operation: hardly anywhere in the Nazi documents is
it written explicity that people have been gassed.
Nevertheless, the remaining evidence is still overwhelming:
testimonies by camp guards and Nazi officials, given during
trial or as a voluntary act; testimonies by transport
workers, chemical engineers and people otherwise connected
with the material realization of the Holocaust; diaries by
prisoners, survivors in all kinds of forums after the
liberation. The code to the secret language of Nazi
documents has been revealed by Nazi officials.
The other flaw in the available evidence, and which is
always the negationists' crowning argument, is the
contradictions and inaccuracies of the camp survivors'
testimonies. For instance, people have claimed that fellow
prisoners had been gassed in camps in which no gas chambers
ever existed. Or, the authentic diaries of some prisoners
give a very different picture from the version which they
gave in interviews after the war. Of course, if one does
not select merely the flawed pieces of testimony, but keeps
an eye on the general body of evidence, such inaccuracies,
contradictions and in some cases even lies, are only what
one can except when people testify to what they have
experienced of a real event. These things can be explained
with our general knowledge of human psychology: e.g., there
is a kind of envy among people who have suffered when they
find that people who have gone through more spectacular
suffering get all the attention, and so they make their own
story a bit more interesting. Even after an ordinary
traffic accident, people's versions differ, yet there is no
doubt about some basics, such as the actual occurrence of
the accident. Digging up inaccuracies in a few testimonies
in order to deny the entire body of evidence is the safest way
of lying: you pronounce correct judgements about some of
the parts, and merely by acting as if these few parts
constitute the whole, you implicitly tell a huge lie about
the whole.
Finally, the negationist position is sought to be given
some credibility by discrediting the forum where the
Holocaust was officially put on record: the Nurnberg trial.
Jurists now knowledge that the Nurnberg trial violated some
rules of justice, esp. by thwarting the rights of the
defence, and by judging on the basis of retro-active laws
created ad hoc. When German officers who had committed
crimes against huminity in odedience to orders, justified
these with the universally valid rule of military discipline
Befehl ist Befehl (an order is an order), it was ruled
that military orders should not be obeyed when they violate
certain human principles (in emulation of this ruling,
German courts have recently convicted East German soldiers
who had obeyed the order to shoot people who tried to cross
the Berlin wall; the mixed feelings over this judgement have
brought the dissatisfaction with the Nurnberg trial back to
mind). Worst of all, the Nurnberg trial was a cynical farce
to the extent that some of the parties sitting in judgement
were just as guilty of war crimes and crimes against
humanity, starting with the Soviet Union.
And yet, it is obvious that all these flaws in the
judicial treatment of the Holocaust and of those responsible
for it, do not make any difference to the question whether
the Holocaust actually took place. The negationists will
always try to pick on their opponents' presentation of the
facts, to pull the attention away from the facts themselves.
In their attempts to convince public opinion, the
negationists currently benefit from a few circumstances.
Firstly, there is a feeling that the Holocaust is over-
exploited. In certain Jewish circles an excessive
cultivation of the Holocaust memory seems to have taken
place. Therefore the Holocaust memory is seen by some as an
instrument of Jewish self-aggrandizement, and as the bedrock
of Israeli self-righteousness. This perception is
especially strong in pro-Palestinian circles.
Similarly, there is an impression of self-rightneousness
in high-profile anti-Nazi spokesmen. Some statements by the
French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld have created irritation,
e.g. that the leftist lawyer Jacques Verges was "a shame for
his profession" by accepting the offer to defend the war
criminal Klaus Barbie (while defence of criminals by lawyers
is the former's right and the latter's job). Klarsfeld's
action in Germany in 1992 against restrictions on the
massive immigration of Romanian Gypsies was equally
considered misplaced and self-righteous: any country has a
right to its own immigration policy, and Germany had a much
more generous refugee policy than any other country (it
accepted 2 lakh refugees from Yugoslavia, France less than
1,000). This type of self-rightousness is perceived as a
consequence of the Holocaust credit, and so, many people
would like the Holocaust talk to stop for a while. That
does not amount to an endorsement of negationism, but the
negationists take heart from any change of public mood that
weakens the indignation over the Holocaust.
In this connection, there is also a perception that the
Jewish-controlled press reduces the death toll of Nazism
to the Jewish victims, omitting the Gypsies and the many
millions of Polish, Ukranian and Russian victims in work-
camps and battlefields; and also omitting the victims of
Allied war crimes (apart from Stalinism, these comprise the
bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima etc., and the several
hundreds of thousands of German soldiers starved in Allied
camps even after the end of the war, plus the crimes
committed by real and fake resistance groups after the war).
This way, in those circles where anti-Judaism in mild or
strident form had been common, the old irritation with the
Jews finds itself confirmed when the Holocaust memory is
raked up once too often. The sacralization of the Holocaust
paradoxically feeds negationism.
Considering what the Jewish people has gone through, I
still find it unacceptable to say that Jews exploit the
Holocaust memory. It is not of the Jews but of the leftists
that one can say stay are exploiting the Holocaust memory.
After the fall of Soviet Communism, the trend to fill the
media with reminders of the Holocaust, coupled with warnings
that we should not let it happen again, has reached an
unprecedented intensity. Never before have we seen so many
documentaries of the Holocaust on TV. Worse, leftist
journalists now routinely show film material of trains to
Auschwitz while talking about present-day rightist parties
that have emphatically distanced themselves from the
rightism of the 1930s: a Goebbelsian use of the Holocaust.
The reason is obvious: after the loss of face which
Gorbachov and Yeltsin have inflicted on them, they need an
anti-Fascist fever as a new legitimation and as a
distraction of the public's attention. The trial of the
Communist Party in Moscow occasioned one revelation after
another, e.g. about the Soviet financial support to front
organizations in the West (such as the peace movement),
but reporting has been scant. From our press coverage, you
would get the impression that economic inefficiency was
Communism's only crime. So many survivors of the Gulag
camps can finally speak out, but instead we get to see
Auschwitz survivors.
The collaborators with Stalinism in our press will go to
any length to keep attention away from their own sins, and
they have no scruples in using even the Holocaust victims as
a cover. The public indignation with this shameless
manipulation of the Holocaust memory by leftists is entirely
justified. Fortunately (and unlike the opposition to the
so-called Jewish Holocaust exploitation), this has not led
to any signs of willingness to go to the other extreme, viz.
to tolerate negationism. Still, the Holocaust negationists
enjoy these transparent acts of desperation by the Gulag
concealers.
A second factor which favours acceptance of negationism
on some scale, is the martyrdom suffered by some
negationists. The leading negationist Faurisson has been
beaten up by a group of Jewish youngsters, sending him into
hospital for weeks. Of course, an idea is not worth more
simply because some fool has suffered for it, but the aura
of martyrdom still has its effect. More generally, there is
a sense of unfair treatment by the media and the judiciary.
For example, the French extreme-right leader Jean-Marie
Le Pen has been convicted for saying on TV in 1987 that the
gas chambers were merely a detail in history. Even his
rightist colleagues trying for respectability disowned him:
the Flemish Vlaams Blok leader Filip Dewinter announced that
any party member found propagating negationism would be
thrown out of the party, and the German Republikaner leader
Franz Schoenhuber emphatically said that the Holocaust must
not be minimized or denied, and that a renewed German self-
respect should not be based on the denial of this horrible
episode. However, Le Pen's supporters have pointed out that
in the same interview he had clarified that by gas chamber
he had only meant the method used for killing (which is
indeed a minor issue), not the killing itself. In that
case, it is not strictly true that he was guilty of
negationism. However, in other contexts he has been very
ambiguous about the issue, and most French negationists look
up to him as their champion.
Because of the propaganda value of martyrdom, it is not
surprising that there are indications of provocation: the
negationists seem deliberately to provoke Jewish
organizations and Holocaust survivors to file complaints,
for the sake of publicity and for creating a martyrdom aura
with the Jews once more in the role of the villains.
A new factor that may increase the audience of the
negationists, is that with the fall of Communism, we now get
to hear the voice of the Central-and East-European peoples,
most of which have quite a record of collaboration with the
Nazis. In the 1920s and 30s, the leader principle was in,
and most of these countries had their own authoritarian
rulers. When faced with a choice between Hitler and Stalin,
they opted for Hitler. Many of these pro-Hitler leaders and
militiamen were slaughtered by the Communists, making them
national heroes whose memory has been cherished all through
the Communist winter. Now that national history is being
revived, these nations do not want to be stigmatized as
accomplices in the Holocaust, because to them, collaboration
with Hitler had other motives than the extermination of the
Jews. On the other hand, their regimes mostly did practise
their own brand of anti-Judaism, and when the Jews were
rounded up, they did not exactly obstruct these Holocaust
preparations. Still, for a fair assessment of the Hitler-
Stalin period, these nations would prefer to see some other
dimensions highlighted than just the Holocaust, to which it
is too often reduced. Moreover, the anti-Fascist propaganda
which they were fed under Communist rule had equally de-
emphasized the Jews and emphasized the Communists as targets
of Nazi persecution. Some Holocaust-denying voices have
already been raised in these countries.
In spite of somewhat favourable circumstances and of
their own clever manipulations, the negationists are bound
to fail. Thus, in 1991 the Spanish Supreme Court has
convicted Leon Degrelle, a veteran pro-Nazi leader from
Belgium living in exile in Spain, for his describing the
Nazi genocide as "a Jewish fabrication", and similar
negationist statements. Spain has no law against
negationism, but Violeta Friedman, a Jewish-Hungarian
survivor of the Nazi camps (in which her parents were
killed) invoked the ordinary laws against slanderous
publications. Lower courts ruled that an individual cannot
claim to be the victim of slander. But the Supreme Court
ruled in her favour, and prohibited further public denials
of the Holocaust.
Similarly, in the 1991 elections for the post of
governor of Louisiana, the Republican candidate David Duke
had been an advocate of negationism. Now he disclaims this
position, but certain sins remain unforgivable for very
long. President Bush, even though himself a Republican,
advised the voters to elect the Democratic candidate,
because: "I think that someone who has denied the Holocaust,
should not ever be allowed to take a leadership position."
The president did not deny Mr. Duke the freedom to voice his
negationist position, nor did he try to prevent his standing
for elections, but he made it clear that he rejected this
shameless falsehood of negationism, even at the cost of his
own party's immediate interest.
These incidents should make it clear that negationism is
simply not accepted. It is useful to keep this determined
rejection in mind as a standard when considering other
negationisms. Some of them are championed by governments
and intellectuals even though they are just as objectionable
as Holocaust negationism.
1.3 LEFTIST NEGATIONISM
In the late 1970s, the negationists found an
unexpected ally when some French leftists, grouped around
Pierre Guillaume and his publishing-house La Vieille Taupe,
took up their defence. Within the Left wing of French (let
alone European) politics, this is an insignificant fringe
group, but the reasons for their support to negationism are
interesting.
The more immediate reason for leftist negationism is the
current leftist support to the Palestinian cause. The
sacralization of the Holocaust as the foundation myth of the
Israeli state goes hand in hand with attempts to strengthen
the struggle against Israeli policies by denying the
Holocaust. Even quite apart from negationism, the extreme
Left has been the first to break the taboo on estimating the
Jewish death toll in the Holocaust at less than 6 million.
After glasnost, the authorities in Poland have declared that
according to their first-hand information, the death toll in
Auschwitz was only 1.5 million, less than 1 million of them
Jews. The earlier official version had been 4 million,
while Jewish organizations had assumed it was some 2
million. At any rate, if the Polish authorities have given
correct figures, and the Auschwitz number is decreased, then
the total Holocaust death toll must also be decreased to
less than 6 million. The most reliable sources now agree on
around 5.3 million as the total count of Jewish victims of
Nazism. But somehow no one dares to amend the established
number of 6 million, for fear of being branded a negationist.
It was in the Belgian Marxist-Leninist (and strongly
pro-Palestinian) weekly Solidair that I read for the first
time that "5.1 million Jews" had been killed by the Nazis.
But here we are not dealing with small corrections in
the figures, but with a fundamental denial of the Holocaust
itself. Unlike most Marxists, the ones under consideration
have taken their support to the Palestinian cause as far as
denying what they consider the connerstone of the "greater
Israel" ideology, viz. the holocaust memory.
The deeper reason for leftist negationism is that the
extreme hostility between Nazism and Jews regardless of
their class, is in conflict with Marxist theory. Of course,
rivalry and even war between capitalists (Jewish vs. German
capitalists, German vs. French-British colonial capitalists,
etc.) does fit the theory. But the Nazi plan to destroy all
the Jews is a different matter, outside the grip of Marxist
theory. Marxists define Fascism as merely an extreme phase
of capitalism, just like imperialism and colonialism were
necessary phases of capitalism. Already in 1953, some
Trotskyites had made the analysis that the Holocaust was a
extremely useful propaganda instrument for Anglo-American
capitalism to differentiate itself from its fascist twin-
brother. Thanks to the Holocaust, the capitalists could
impress upon the minds that there was a radical difference
between Fascism, which had committed the Holocaust, and
democracy, which had fought Fascism and stopped the
Holocaust. This covers up the reality that Fascist and
democratic capitalism are merely two faces of the same
monster. The people's struggle should be directed against the
Fascist phase of capitalism (which amounts to collaboration
with the non-Fascist phase of capitalism), but should be against
capitalism as such, without getting confused by intra- capitalist
family struggles between Anglo-American and Axis capitalists.
In a sense, the fact of the holocaust escaped Marxist
theory as understood by the La Vieille Taupe group. So that
was too bad for the fact: it had to be denied. As Alain
Finkielkraut has commented, the Holocaust was "an event too
many", and the dogmatic Marxists chose "for doctrinal
faithfulness and against the complexity of the facts".
Interestingly, these
leftist negationists integrated the more conventional
Marxist explanation for anti-Judaism, viz. the scapegoat
theory. They accept that until 1945 the Jews were a
scapegoat held up by the capitalists in order to channel the
proletariat's discontent away from its proper target,
capitalism (in accordance with this view, Franz Neumann had
predicted in 1942 in his analysis of Nazism that the
extermination of the Jews was excluded because of their
political importance as scapegoat). But in and since 1945,
it is the fascists who have been turned into a kind of
scapegoat: they are blackened and covered with contempt in
order to channel discontent away from its proper target,
viz. capitalism as the culprit for everything, towards this
one particular form of capitalism, which was already
neutralized and no longer useful anyway. The Holocaust is
merely a dummy created by capitalism to distract socialist
combattivity and to instill in the supporters of Anglo-
American capitalism a sense of moral superiority.
This leftist denial of the Holocaust fact is apparently
an aberration from what was originally a justifiable (within
Marxist theory) critique of the use of the Holocaust fact as
an alibi for Anglo-American capitalism.
A cornerstone of the leftist-negationist argument is the
testimony immediately after the war, and the books written
later by Paul Rassinier, a socialist who had survived the
Nazi camps, though handicapped. This embittered man had
depicted the Holocaust as nothing but a propagandistic
concoction. As an authentic leftist and victim of Nazism,
he was the perfect witness for the negationist position.
Those who can keep the proper over-all perspective, will be
able to make the unpleasant but inescapable judgement that
Paul Rassinier had projected his own experience in
Buchenwald (where no Jews were gassed) as a general
description of the events in the Nazi camps. I do not want
to judge too harshly on a man who went through such
suffering, but the armchair historians who selectively
highlighted his version because it was useful to them, are a
different matter. Lifting a few convenient but untypical
testimonies out of the enormous corpus of evidence is a
wellknown method of distorting the picture.
For the rest, the leftist-negationist argument is a
pitiable list of contradictions and bad reasoning. For
instance, one of their stalwarts, Vincent Monteil, writes
that "a large-scale genocide is impossible without gas
chambers, and therefore no genocide has taken place": even
if we allow for his presupposition that the gas chambers
have already been exposed as a myth, it is quite stupid to
assume that in the absence of gas chambers, those who intend
to commit genocide could not find alternative tools (which
would declare most historical cases of genocide impossible).
Leftist negationism regardng the Nazi holocaust is of
course only a foonote in the much more general negationism
practised by most leftists, hard and soft, regarding the
crimes of Communist regimes. So many fellow-travellers
visited the Soviet Union, closed their eyes for inconvenient
facts, wilfully believed only what their official guide told
them, and propagated a rosy picture of Stalin's brave
achievements. Many social-democrat leaders from the West
regularly went to Moscow for consultations, and started
friendship associations with Communist countries, to spread
a more unprejudiced picture of their regimes. Even today,
some of them declare that they don't regret this stab in the
back of those countries' oppressed populations When in 1989
the Soviet authorities finally admitted Stalin's guilt in
the Katyn massacre, I have not heard any of the Soviet
supporters outside the Soviet bloc apologizing for
propagating the Katyn lie until reecently.
A well-known early case of Communist negationism put on
trial, was the Kravchenko affair. In 1944 Viktor Kravchenko
had escaped from the Soviet Union, and in his book "I chose
freedom" (1946) he exposed Stalinist repression. French
Communists decried his testimony as a CIA concoction, but
Kravchenko charged them with slander. In court, testimonies
by Gulag (Russian acronym: "chief bureau of camps") camp
survivors were countered by fellow-travellers, who alleged
that any claims contradicting their own impressions were
mere Cold War propaganda. But Kravchenko won his case.
In 1949, David Rousset, who had survived the Nazi camps,
invited other camp survivors to support his appeal to have
the Soviet camps investigated as well. When he published
the Soviet "code of forced labour", it was too much for the
communists, and they accused him of having fabricated all
his information. Rousset alleged slander and won his case.
In his standard work on negationism, "De Uitbuiting van de
Holocaust" ("The Exploitation of the Holocaust", from which I
have borrowed much of the information for this chapter),
the Flemish scholar Gie van den Berghe observes about the
Rousset trial: "The mass of evidence could not convince the
Gulag deniers. They used the same arsenal of arguments
which the negationists use today...Testimonies of escaped
prisoners were rejected as mystifications, and fellow-
travellers effortlessly concluded, from the fact that they
had not seen the Gulag camps, that these could not exist."
What makes this communist negationism worse, is that it took
place even while, in the camps of the Gulag archipelago, the
crime was still being committed
The leading leftist intellectuals Jean-Paul Sartre and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty joined the public debate surrounding
the Rousset trial. They acknowledged that Stalin's camps
had inspired Hitler who merely had to add the technical
novelty of the gas chambers. Yet they refused to denounce
the Soviet camps because the Soviets acted in good faith,
deserved the benefit of the doubt, and were in any case the
lesser evil compared to a counter-revolution in the
fatherland of socialism. They denounced Rousset as a man
blinded by hatred and objectively feeding Cold War
propaganda.
As Sartre's position (to which he stuck even when
Merleau-Ponty grew away from Communism, and even after he
himself broke with the Parti Communiste) shows, some people
don't feel the need to deny crimes against humanity becase
they consider them justified. This is not abnormal if you
have the proper viewpoint, like Sartre's formula: "Every
anti-Communist is a dog". Till today, die-hard Communists
defend Stalin's, Brezhnev's, Mao's and Pol pot's massacres.
Often they combine this with a minor negationism, alleging
that the figures have been exaggerated and at least some of
the crimes fabricated by the CIA.
Thus, in his analysis of the Gorbachov revolution: "USSR,
de Fluwelen Contrarevolutie", Ludo Martens, president of the
minuscule Belgian Marxist-Leminist party, writes that
Stalin's crimes were partly inevitable mistakes, partly
Western concoction and fantasy, and partly justified. For
this unrepentant Stalinist, Stalin's terror against the
Kulaks was a necessary and justified class struggle. In his
party paper Solidair, he has argued that the organized
famines in Ukraine had been a piece of Hitlerian propaganda.
He used a familiar negationist technique: create suspicion
about one of the sources reporting the facts (viz. Randolph
Hearst's news agency, which had signed an agreement with
Hitler for exclusive rights to sell international news),
keep other sources out of the picture, and suggest that the
facts have only existed in this one source's version.
Another stalwart of the same party, Dr. Kris Merckx,
goes one step further. In reply to an article about the
Marxist double standards by the philosopher Prof. Etienne
Vermeersch, he denies that Stalin committed massacres:
"Etienne Vermeersch...writes about the mass murderer
Stalin. Immediately after World War 2, this gossip was only
believed among Nazi collaborators... In those days, people
still knew that the first stories about millions of people
killed by Lenin and Stalin had been launched by a certain
Adolf Hitler. In 1926... Hitler wrote: In Russia the Jew
went around with truly fanatical ferocity. He killed about
30 million people, partly by inhuman torture, partly by
organized famine. These and other lies have not withstood
the test of World War 2. The Soviet nations have inflicted
the decisive defeat on the Nazis.. because they identified
with the socialist regime and were willing to bring the
greatest sacrifices for it. This would not have happened if
the regime had meant terror and oppression for them. And
yet, in our media and schools, people speak of the mass-
murderer Stalin without blinking."
The editors of the paper (Humo 19/11/1992) reply:
"Whatever nonsense Hitler may have written about the Soviet
Union in 1926, at that time Stalin was only just beginning to
build his reputation of paranoid dictator... His forced
collectivization and the great purification (which reached
its peak in 1934-38) created a wave of terror in the Soviet
Union. Reducing Stalin's disgraceful reputation to Hitler's
mendacious demagogy, is itself a crass case of demagogy, and
an insult for the many (including sincere communists) who
later bacame Stalin's victims."
About the heroism of the Soviet people's patriotic
resistance in spite of Stalinism: "It is true that Stalin
had reduced his terror to a milder level, and his share in
victory should not be minimized, but the Nazis' defeat does
not erase his crimes. The great combattivity of the Soviet
nations need not - considering the Nazi atrocities in Russia
- be reduced to the general popular reverence for Stalin that
you suggest. By your logic, Napoleon's Russian defeat
proves that the people all venerated the Czar. You are
right in remarking tht Prof. Vermeersch's list [of crimes
against humanity] is not complete, but then, neither is
yours. That is all the more deplorable because Stalin still
has a model role in your vision of the future. At the last
May Day celebration, the Marxist-Leninist party president
Ludo Martens has said in so many words that the choice of
the future will ultimately be one between Hitler and
Stalin."
It should be borne in mind that the number of people
killed by the Soviet regime between 1917 and 1985 is
estimated at between 34 million (on the basis of official
figures) and 67 million (according to Alexsandr
Solzhenitsyn). In the same order of magnitude we find
Tse-tung's number of victims (some 30 million), during the
communist take-over, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural
Revolution. Till today, there is a Chinese Gulag
archipelago in the occupied territories of Tibet (including
Chinghai), East-Turkestan and Inner Mongolia. Over a
million Tibetans have died because of Communist massacres
and organized famines; forced sterilizations (which the 1948
UN convention on genocide considers a full-blooded act of
genocide) have taken place on a proportionately large scale.
But this is hotly denied or at least strongly minimized by
the regime and its supporters abroad.
Like the Holocaust negationists, our Communist
negationists prefer to de-emphasize the real issue, and to
draw the attention towards fault-finding with the victims,
and towards the aggressor's glorious achievements. Thus the
old system in Tibet was an obscurantist, archfedual, even
cannibalist theocracy, and the Tibetans have been lucky to
be forced into enjoying the benefits of Maoism. While the
communist version of pre-communist history (defended abroad
by A.T. Grunfeld in: The Making of Modern Tibet) is a grim
caricature, it is true that Tibetan society needed social as
well as material modernization; but this does not justify
the occupation of the country, any more than it would
justify the European colonization (which had equally been
advertised as a generous act of helping the natives to
modernize). Non-colonized Japan adopted modernization much
faster and more smoothly than any colonized country, and
left to itself, the modernization which had already been
started by the 13th Dalai Lama would certainly have picked
up momentum over the years and done a lot more good to Tibet
than any colonization could. At any rate, none of these
considerations anyhow justifies the gradual genocide which
the Chinese occupiers have been carrying out in Tibet.
Like the Holocaust negationists, our Communist
negationists are very inventive when it comes to explaining
away inconvenient facts. In 1989, when journalist and
Tibet-lover Frans Boenders had reported how he had heard a
long round of shooting from his hotel room in Lhasa, the
president of the Belgo-Chinese Freindship Association
dismissed the report, saying that Mr. Boenders, because of
his lack of familiarity with local culture, had mistaken
festive fireworks for gunfire. Some months later, a
defecting Chinese official revealed that 1988-89 had been a
time of intense repression in Tibet, including a razzia with
460 people killed in April 1989.
So far, the collapse of Soviet Communism has not triggered
any audible soul-searching among its erstwhile
supporters. The small minority which sticks to Marxist
orthodoxy, thinks it has nothing to apologize for. Among
those who had believed in Communism (like myself, briefly)
but turned away from it long before Gorbachov, many have
spoken out clearly and forcefully against this criminal
system (e.g. the actor-couple Yves Montand and Simone
Signoret, and the nouveaux philosophes like Andre
Glucksmann). But among those who stayed with Communism
until the accomplished facts overtook them, the attitude is
more one of quietly passing on to the middle-ground of
social and political life, with a minimum of comment on this
counter-revolution which Marx had not foreseen. In Europe,
these ex-Communists are presently trying to hijack the Green
(ecologist) movement, dropping some of their Marxist
rhetoric in the process, but still retaining a lot of the
Marxist agenda (even while Communist rule has brought about
the biggest ecological disasters).
The ones least influenced by the collapse of Communism
are the soft-leftists, such as Christians for socialism
and liberation theologians: even after Gorbachov, they kept
on passing resolutions demanding the abolition of private
property, and organizing peace demonstrations directed
solely against the US, as if they had never heard of Li Peng
or Saddam Hussein. On the negationist front they will not
deny historical facts too openly but they continue to
quietly ignore them. Just like before Gorbachov, when they
paid their respects to the Soviet system and
ignored the persecution of their co-religionists as a minor
aberration,they still refuse to pay attention to the decades
of persecution, and they still denounce anti-Communist
statements as anti-progressive Cold War rhetoric,etc.
Lazy-minded people who have acquired a leftist bias after
long-term uncritical consumption of propaganda, will not
shake off their thought-habits until the same stigma
attaches to Communism as to Fascism.
1.4 ISLAMIC NEGATIONISM
One party which could have an interest in Holocaust
negationism, is the Palestinian people. I do not know of an
official negationism in the Palestinian Liberation
Organization, but in conversation with Palestinians abroad I
have heard negationist positions more than once. Even if
Palestinians do not want to deny the Holocaust, at lest they argue
that this topic should take a back seat for a while,
because now it is being kept alive artificially in order to
underpin Israel's claim on the Palestinian homeland.
In the Arab world at large, there has occasionally been
official support for negationism. In 1976, the Saudi
representative at the U.N. denied in a speech that the
Holocaust had occured. Hussein Sumaida, the young Iraqi spy
who recently defected, has written in his memoirs how in
school he had never learned of the persecution of the Jews
by the Nazis, but all the more about the Jewish conspiracy
and about the great realizations of Hitler's Third Reich.
I would not make too much of the great admiration which
Fascism had evoked among the Muslims, as among many Third
World populations. It is true the Baath Party in Syria and
Iraq was modelled on Mussolini's Fascist Party. Sir
Mohammed Iqbal has written a eulogy for Mussolini. The
Yugoslavian Muslims collaborated with the fascist regime in
Croatia, and their grand-mufti exhorted them to serve in the
Fascist Ustasha militia. Muslim nations (Tatars, Kalmuks,
Balkars, Chechens, Ingoosh) in the Soviet Union fought
alongside the Nazi invader. The grand-mufti of Jerusalem
made a pact with Hitler, if only because he too had wanted
to get rid of the Jews once and for all. But let us assume
that all that happened because they didn't realize the
ultimate consequences of Nazism, or because colonized people
had no reason to believe the anti-Fascist war propaganda put
out by the colonial powers, themselves veterans of many a
massacre. Even then, there is a lot of post-war writing in
the Islamic world which restates the Nazi propaganda against
the Jews, and for that, there is no longer an excuse.
In the first 1989 issue of Islamic Order, a quarterly
published in Karachi, there is an article by Ausaf Saied
Vasfi, titled Beware Arafat Beware. It is published
"courtesy Radiance, Delhi", which means at least two
English-language Islamic papers have published it; and it is
by no means the only article of its kind which is currently
being fed to the Muslim public. The article states that the
sources of Zionism are chiefly these two: the Talmud and the
Protocols of the Sages of Zion.
The Talmud is of course the chief Jewish scripture, a
comment on the Tenakh (Old Testament), and forms a decisive
reorientation of the Jewish religion: a pluralistic
interpretation of the Biblical texts, recognizing that each
interpretation (including the literal one) is always a
limited human attempt to understand the unlimited profundity
of God's word, and allowing for different levels of
understanding (literal, hermeneutical, allegorical,
mystical). In the Talmud, Judaism transcends in
substantial measure its exclusivistic orgins (which would
unfortunately be re-actualized by Christianity and Islam),
and develops the typical emphasis on intellectual
investigation which will make the Jewish community such a
cradle of powerful minds.
But the starting thing about Mr. Vasfi's article is that
he presents the Protocols of the Sages of Zion as a source
of Jewish inspiration, apparently ignoring the well-known
fact that it was nothing but a forgery made by the Czar's
secret police in order to underpin the theory of a Jewish
conspiracy to control the world. In all seriousness, he
tries to prove the Jewish world conspiracy with quotes from
the Protocols, like this one: "And the weapons in our hands
are limitless: ambitions, burning greediness, merciless
vengeance, hatred and malice... It is from us that the all-
engulfing terror proceeds... By these acts all states are in
torture... We will not give them peace until they openly
acknowledge our international Super-Government and with
submissiveness."
Mr. Vasfi lists the occasions when Jews have been
banished from countries, and comments with a rhetorical
question: "The question is: why?" And then he recounts the
story of the successive confrontations between Mohammed and
the Jews of Medina, which proves the Jews' propensity to
mischief. And they have remained mischievous: the Kemalist
revolution in Turkey which brought down the khilafat "was
planned and executed by the International Jewry", and "the
entire Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was engineered by the
Jews". It should be made clear that such sweeping
allegations are nothing but the well-known stock-in-trade of
anti-Judaism.
In late 1992, Western negationist groups had announced
a negationist conference, due to take place in Sweden. The
Swedish government prohibited the initiative. Among the
participants: the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Palestinian
Hamas, two Iranian-backed Islamic organizations.
Saudi Arabia is the chief sponsor of negationist
activity in the West. The American negationist author
William Grimstad has been exposed as being on the Saudi
secret service's payroll. In 1981, his books, including
Antizion and The Six Million Reconsidered, were sent, along
with other negationist literature, to one thousand British
political and business leaders, by the Rabita, the Islamic
World Council, from Pakistan. The Iranian embassies are
also distribution centres of negationist and anti-Jewish
material
In her otherwise meritorious book "The Holocaust Denial" ,
the British leftist authoress Gill Seidel concludes a list
of Islamic-sponsored negationist initiatives with the remark
that "of course there is nothing intrinsically anti-Semitic
to Islam as a religion". That is evidently the Marxist
perception propagated by Maxime Rodinson, but it is
historically inaccurate. Mohammed had all the Jews in his
domain banished, enslaved or killed. After that, the Jews
outside Arabia were allowed to survive under a number of
humiliating conditions. They were kept down and exploited,
and there were frequent progroms, as described by Bat Ye'or
in her book "The Dhimmi". They were the target of Islamic
hatred simply because they rejected Islam, but also for a
more specific reason: they had deleted from their revealed
Scripture all references to Mohammed, the future and final
prophet.
Apart from the complicity of Muslims in Holocaust
negationism, there is a far more pervasive participation of
Muslims in a different negationism which concerns Islam
directly. In Turkey most people, from the top down, deny the
genocide on the Armenians during World War 1 (Which Hitler
invoked as a precedent of successful, unpunished genocide).
The general who led the operations against the Armenians has
a statue in Ankara. This genocide had been declared a jihad
by the last caliph, who had fullest authority to make such
declarations.
In 1974, the Turkish representative in the U.N. Human
Rights Committee demanded the scrapping of the paragraph (in
the preparatory report on the prevention and punishment of
genocide) referring in diplomatic terms to the Armenian
genocide. As Turkey is a cornerstone of the NATO alliance,
it manages to get a lot of passive Western support for its
attempts to whitewash its own past. The paragraph was
scrapped, and the document now only refers to the Nazi
genocide. But in recent years, both the U.N. and the
European Parliament have adopted resolutions condemning the
Armenian genocide, which the Turkish government has angrily
kept on denying.
In the next chapter we shall see that the Armenian
genocide was by far not the only crime against humanity
committed by Islam, nor the only one which is now being
hotly denied in a campaign of negationist propaganda.
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