Archive/File: people/l/lipstadt.deborah/press/washinton-times.0793 Last-Modified: 1994/07/29 Copyright 1993 News World Communications, Inc. The Washington Times July 18, 1993, Sunday, Final Edition SECTION: Part B; BOOKS; Pg. B8 LENGTH: 951 words HEADLINE: Debunking those who say the Holocaust never occurred BYLINE: Alvin H. Rosenfeld BODY: Thanks to the recent opening of major Holocaust museums in Washington and Los Angeles, a great deal of public attention is once again focused on the Nazi crimes against the Jews. While there are those who are critical of these museums, few would argue that they can serve no useful purpose. On the contrary, as recent polls have shown, a disturbingly large number of Americans seem never to have heard of Auschwitz and do not know what the Holocaust was. If these two museums can help correct such a shocking state of ignorance, they will prove their worth many times over. With respect to knowledge of the Nazi crimes, however, it is not just ignorance that we have to contend with but, worse still, programmatic attempts to undermine historical truth and subvert public memory of the Holocaust. As Deborah Lipstadt shows in her clarifying new book, denial of the Holocaust is being promoted actively today by individuals and groups who are determined to replace the historical record of the Nazi period with a blatantly fictitious pseudo-history of their own making. As she convincingly argues in "Denying the Holocaust," those involved in this defamation seek to "reshape history in order to rehabilitate the persecutors and demonize the victims." Their ultimate aim is to restore credibility to a neo-fascist political agenda, one that resembles the racist and extreme nationalist authoritarianism of Nazi Germany. In order to revive interest in such a program, however, they must first remove the scandal from the history of the Third Reich by "exposing" the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews as a "hoax." One of the virtues of Miss Lipstadt's important book is that it argues that this massive lie needs to be taken seriously. While in its American form it has existed to date mostly on the fringes of the far right, Holocaust denial has begun to find its way into the mainstream of our culture by posing as the "other side" of an ongoing "debate." Miss Lipstadt describes how a new "controversy" about Nazi crimes has begun to make its appearance on popular radio and television talk shows and also on college campuses. While most people presumably will recognize this display of bad faith for what it is, the steady repetition of lies, no matter how blatant, is bound to have a corrosive effect and, over time, can begin to undermine the foundations of historical truth and moral reasoning. That, of course, is precisely the aim of those who engage in this vicious assault, and Miss Lipstadt has done us a valuable service by analyzing and exposing the outrage in fine detail. It could not have been a pleasant task for a serious researcher to wade through books with such titles as "Debunking the Genocide Myth," "The Myth of the Six Million," "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century," "The Hitler We Loved and Why," "The Holy Book of Adolf Hitler" and "Did Six Million Die?" These are the kinds of books that the author examines. She shows that they all employ rhetorical strategies of misstatement, distortion, suppression and denial of evidence and other forms of misrepresentation. These characteristics only serve to reveal the fact that this "research" is all the product of wild anti-Semitic obsession and willful delusion. Like other morally polluted works, such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the genre is political pornography at its most extreme, yet that is no guarantee that it will not have an audience. Indeed, there evidently are sizable numbers of readers as well as purveyors of such books. Miss Lipstadt cites the latter by name - among them Austin App, Lewis Brandon, Arthur Butz, Willis Carto, Robert Faurisson, Dietlieb Felderer, Richard Harwood, David Irving, Fred Leuchter, Paul Rassinier, Bradley Smith. She also describes the often sordid nature of their careers and deftly exposes the bogus nature of their enterprise. Moreover, she offers a helpful exposition of the historical and ideological roots of the revisionist movement and links its aims to resurgent racist and nationalist movements that have once again become a prominent part of contemporary political culture in Europe and on the far-right fringes of America. She shows how there has been a direct progression from earlier efforts to justify Nazi crimes to more recent efforts to deny them altogether as a Zionist hoax. Not surprisingly, she finds a confluence of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial circles and believes there is a strengthening of ties among these groups. It is disturbing but necessary to recognize that they exist in a social and political climate that has also given us skinheads, Nazis and other racists who openly flaunt the symbols of the Third Reich as part of a campaign of aggression against "foreigners," Jews and others they happen to dislike. In such a climate, Holocaust denial, Miss Lipstadt believes, will grow in intensity and increasingly find its way from the disreputable precincts of the racist right toward the respectable mainstream. "We have only witnessed the beginning of this movement's efforts to permeate cultural, historical, and educational orbits," she warns. As "Denying the Holocaust" makes abundantly clear, it is a warning that reasonable people should not ignore. Alvin H. Rosenfeld is director of the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program and professor of English at Indiana University. ***** DENYING THE HOLOCAUST: THE GROWING ASSAULT ON TRUTH AND MEMORY By Deborah E. Lipstadt Free Press, $22.95, 278 pages REVIEWED BY ALVIN H. ROSENFELD GRAPHIC: Photo, Deborah Lipstadt ; Book Jacket, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
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