Germans of Jewish descent protest faked Armenian genocide

[Heat]

Germans of Jewish descent protest faked Armenian genocide
Source: Trend
Author: J.Shakhverdiyev
24.04.2006

http://www.trend.az/?mod=shownews&news=18658&lang=en

[Gavur]

Cozy Seder In Armenia

Federation of Jewish Communitites of CIS, Russia
April 25 2006

YEREVAN, Armenia - Passover events held in the Mordechai Navi Jewish
Community Center brought together a great number of participants
this year. Tables were set with traditional dishes, Passover symbols
laid on a silver keara, sparkling wine glasses and matza, which was
delivered from Israel.

Mrs. Lea Peremysler, the hostess of this home-like Seder, lit festive
candles and recited blessings.

Rabbi Gersh Meir Burstein discussed the traditions of a Passover
night. During this night, Rabbi Burstein helped the participants
feel the unity of the Jewish people and recounted the story of their
deliverance from slavery.

Michael Levitin, a journalist of Forward and World Jewish Digest
magazines of New York, was present at this evening. It was a great
surprise for him to witness a Jewish community celebrating Passover
in such a friendly atmosphere. He acknowledged afterwards that he
hasn't experienced such Seder in a very long time.

By the end of the feast Rabbi Burstein blessed community members and
shared the afikomen, the last piece of matza, with the participants
of the Seder.

[Gavur]

Our Holocaust - and others´

By Benyamin Neuberger

http://www.hyetert.com/haber3.asp?AltYazi=Haberler+%5C%3E+D%FCnya&Id=20994&DilId=2

Last Update: 28/04/2006 10:03

In Israel, there is a conviction that the Holocaust is unique, that it cannot be compared to any other case of genocide. This perception is irrational, problematic from the moral perspective and also contrary to its aim - the intensification of Holocaust awareness.

I have just returned from Rwanda, where the genocide of the Tutsi people was carried out a dozen years ago - about 1 million people were murdered in three months. I stood at the Murumbi site and I learned that in this place, 54,000 Tutsi were murdered in cold blood. There are only four known survivors. One of them stood there before me and told me about babies who were flung live into pits, which were covered with dirt. I saw skeletons, and clothes taken from those who were murdered. I could not help but recall my visit to the Nazi death camps in Poland. However, we have been taught that it is forbidden to compare.

In Nyanga, I visited the ruins of a church into which, in those terrible days of April 1994, 2,000 Tutsi were forced. They were abandoned by a Hutu priest, who handed them over to the Interahamwe militia, who murdered all of them. Again I recalled synagogues that were set on fire by the Nazis, with their Jews inside, but I had to fight this memory, because after all, it is forbidden to compare.

The time has come to say that the approach that negates comparison does not stand the test of reason. After all, anyone who says that it is forbidden to compare says this after he has made the comparison. Comparison does not mean that everything is identical - but rather that there is a similarity, and there could also be a difference. There is no contradiction between comparing the Holocaust to other cases of genocide and the statement that the Holocaust is the largest genocide.

The fight to isolate the Holocaust and disconnect it from the slaughter of other peoples is in any case a lost cause. More and more books are being published that deal with comparisons. Recently, the International Association of Genocide Scholars was founded, and the foremost researchers at universities in America and Europe are members.

The approach that the Holocaust must not be compared to other genocides has meant that a high school student in Israel knows nothing about the genocide of the Armenian people, the genocide in Rwanda or even the slaughter of the Roma, or Gypsies, during World War II. Teaching of the Holocaust in a way that presents only Jewish uniqueness leads to a conviction that the Jewish people will always dwell alone, that gentiles must not be considered, that all of them are Amalek, and therefore universal morality and international law are of no importance.

A number of years ago I participated in a conference at Bar-Ilan University that was devoted to a discussion of the trips to Poland undertaken by Israeli teenagers. The woman responsible for the trips at the Ministry of Education spoke about their aim - strengthening the high school students' Jewish identity and Zionist consciousness. In answer to the question of whether the trips have a humanistic aim as well, an outrageous answer was given: "We don't have time for that."

We should instill awareness of the Holocaust that leads to conclusions about the need for a Jewish state and an army, but also universal lessons about respect for every human being and every people and opposition to all discrimination, racism and oppression. Such an awareness can be instilled by means of teaching the Holocaust alongside the study of other cases of genocide.

On this issue we can in fact learn from Rwanda. When they talk about the lesson of "never again" they stress "never again genocide" of any people anywhere. In contrast to us, who do not know anything about the genocide in Rwanda, they know a great deal about the Jewish Holocaust. And at their Yad Vashem, in their capital, Kigali, there is a corner that deals with the Holocaust, the genocide of the Cambodian people and other cases of genocide.

The writer is a professor of political science at the Open University and the author of "Rwanda 1994: Genocide in the Land of a Thousand Hills."

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Denying the undeniable

By Yossi Sarid

http://www.hyetert.com/haber3.asp?AltYazi=Haberler+%5C%3E+G%FCncel&Id=20992&DilId=2

"The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide" by Yair Auron, Transaction Publishers. (The Hebrew version has been published in Israel by Maba: 308 pages, NIS82.)

Only after Yair Auron's book appeared in English in America and Britain was the Hebrew version published here. Perhaps this is no coincidence. Israel, which officially denies the Armenian genocide, also officially denies its documentation.

Auron extensively discusses Israel's attitude to genocide in general, and the Armenian genocide in particular. The appearance of the word "denial" in the book's title is no happenstance. We Jews are the first to express shock and outrage when our Holocaust is denied, overtly or covertly, yet we turn our backs on the catastrophes of others. Unfortunately, even the Israeli academic community is not strenuously trying to increase knowledge of other people's genocides. Is this because it does not want to augment pain in the world?

The history of humanity's inhumanity along the path to hell is strewn with instances of genocide. In the last century alone, more than 140 million human beings were murdered, and the thirst for human blood has yet to be satisfied. As these lines are being written, genocide is being committed in Darfur, in western Sudan, and the world goes about its business without even a murmur of protest, as if complicity in these atrocities paralyzes it. However, as in the story of Cain and Abel, the blood that has been shed cries out. But even here in Israel, nobody is apparently listening. We may be Jews but our ears are uncircumcised (metaphorically).

We need not compare holocausts or genocides to understand, and identify with, the suffering of other nations. The Jewish Holocaust was so satanic that it allows - even obligates - us to share the suffering and pain of others, but it does not allow us any monopoly on genocide. Even if we share others' suffering and pain, we will still have heavy surpluses left over.

My teacher and mentor, Prof. Yehuda Bauer, one of the greatest contemporary Holocaust scholars, makes precise distinctions and definitions in a letter he wrote me following a recent article of mine that appeared in Haaretz:

"I believe there is no contradiction between the Holocaust's unprecedentness and its universal implications. I am not saying the Holocaust is unique because if it were, we could not study it, because it would be beyond the realm of human history. It would be an unrepeatable event that occurred because of suprahuman or subhuman forces at work in history. Nonetheless, the Holocaust was unprecedented; that is, it can serve as a precedent. That is precisely what happened, even if only partially, in Rwanda.

"This unwieldy word 'unprecedentness,' although nonexistent in Hebrew or English, is a more precise term for describing the Holocaust's nature. We can define the Holocaust as the 'genocide committed against the Jewish people by the Germans and their collaborators during the Second World War.' To call another nation's genocide a 'Holocaust' would place all instances of genocide under the rubric of the Jewish catastrophe and such an act would contribute nothing to the clarification or commemoration of each specific genocide or to attempts to prevent such events. I believe one universal sign of any genocide is the targeting of a specific, unique group for mass murder. This targeting is itself universal in every genocide. Thus, I object to giving one nation's genocide the same name as that of another's. 'Genocide' encompasses all instances of such mass murder. The Holocaust is the most extreme case of genocide so far, but there is no guarantee that a case equally or more extreme will never occur. As the most extreme case, it could serve as a paradigm for future genocides. That is the thinking of the International Task Force for Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, jointly sponsored by 24 nations, and that is how the Holocaust is perceived by the group I head, a team of activists committed to preventing genocide that has prioritized Darfur in its agenda because today a horrific genocide is taking place there." This is the core of Prof. Bauer's letter, which contains many important insights and clarifications.

More acts of genocide and politicide were committed in the 20th century than in any other, and it is sometimes called "the century of genocide" or "the century of violence." The first known instance of genocide in the previous century was in Namibia, but it has been largely ignored, almost forgotten. The second was the genocide committed against the Armenians by the Turks, and its memory persists despite all Turkey's efforts to make the world forget.

One person who is among the leaders in the struggle to prevent the world from forgetting is Prof. Yair Auron. He is also one of the few Israelis who have redeemed the Jewish people's and Israel's name, although Israel is so fearful of offending Turkey that it is willing to bend fundamental principles in order not to displease the Turks. For interests of realpolitik, Israel is guilty of complicity in denying the Armenian genocide. Thus, how can we accuse other nations of debasing themselves by denying the Holocaust for reasons of realpolitik? Despite the admitted importance of Israel's relationship with Turkey, it is regrettable and depressing that it forces Israel to adopt a policy of official denial that could backfire on us one day, when other nations do unto us what we are doing unto others, and which we hate so much. Genocide must never be denied, no matter what the reasons or the identity of the murderers and their victims.

One could argue that, had the world not adopted a policy of "back to business" in the face of the Armenian genocide, turning its back and closing its eyes, the Jewish Holocaust might never have happened. The German National-Socialists derived much encouragement from the complacency, indifference and silence of the world's nations, and decided that the world would not excessively protest or be overly shocked or outraged if, after the Armenians, the next genocidal victim would be the Jews, whose blood is no redder. In one famous speech, Hitler himself referred to the Armenians' fate as he hinted what the Jews could expect. Ignoring one genocide will bring on another, and the murderers usually emerge from the dark, foul-smelling cave their predecessors inhabited. Those who have thus far not understood that point - and many Israeli leaders belong in that category - will certainly understand it after reading Auron's book. One cannot warn humanity of tomorrow's genocide without exposing yesterday's and recognizing it and its atrocities.

For Armenians everywhere, Israel's and the Jewish people's attitude toward their catastrophe is crucially important. They need our recognition because we are genocide's natural, historical victims and because it is vital in their struggle to perpetuate their genocide's memory and implications. They seek Jerusalem's leadership; yet that city, which envelopes itself in a silence that speaks volumes, is surrounded by hills of indifference.

Perhaps today, with the world more open to the Jews' suffering, we ourselves can open up more to the Armenians'. In September 2005, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously resolved that January 27 would be the day of international commemoration of the Holocaust and its victims. The world's nations will henceforth annually observe that date, the anniversary of the Red Army's liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. I am certain that the day is not far off when the Armenians' tragedy will similarly be internationally recognized. I want to see Israel champion that cause.

"The Banality of Denial" is not just a fascinating, informed research document; it also challenges all genocide-deniers. It is a credit to its author and his colleagues who refuse to accept the denial policy of Jerusalem, whose walls are now sadly being guarded by the blind, the deaf and the mute.

Yossi Sarid's latest book "Papiczek: He Didn't Know His Name" has been published in Hebrew and English by Yad Vashem and Yedioth Ahronoth/Hemed Books.

[bell-the-cat]

universal morality and international law are of no importance.

Was that what was carved on the foundation stone of the State of Israel?

[Heat]

Israel, which officially denies the Armenian genocide, also officially denies its documentation.

Weren't you the one that was saying israel doesn't deny the AG but only refuses to recognize the AG? I'm pretty sure that's what I read in another thread.

Yehuda Bauer - "the Holocaust was unprecedented"

"This unwieldy word 'unprecedentness,' although nonexistent in Hebrew or English, is a more precise term for describing the Holocaust's nature."

More uniqeness BS.

We can define the Holocaust as the 'genocide committed against the Jewish people by the Germans and their collaborators during the Second World War.' To call another nation's genocide a 'Holocaust' would place all instances of genocide under the rubric of the Jewish catastrophe and such an act would contribute nothing to the clarification or commemoration of each specific genocide or to attempts to prevent such events.

Thus, I object to giving one nation's genocide the same name as that of another's.

What a bunch of horse manure.

Then why doesn't he object the the term "Holocaust" being used for jews since it was already used for the Armenian catastrophe?

Israel is so fearful of offending Turkey that it is willing to bend fundamental principles in order not to displease the Turks.

Not true.

For interests of realpolitik, Israel is guilty of complicity in denying the Armenian genocide. Thus, how can we accuse other nations of debasing themselves by denying the Holocaust for reasons of realpolitik?

Never mind the other nations. Would israel engage in denying the shoah "for interests of realpolitik"?

When they talk about the lesson of "never again" they stress "never again genocide" of any people anywhere.

This isn't true either. When they say "never again", they mean "never jews again", otherwise there wouldn't have been genocides in East Timor, Rawanda, Sudan etc.

The same thing goes for the BS claim that it happened to the jews first. "First they came for the jews and I said nothing because I wasn't a jew". This is absolute horse xxxx and everyone knows it.

Then they tried to pull a similar scam in Schindler's List. Toward the end of the movie, Schindler is shown being presented with an inscribed gold ring by the Jews he rescued. We are told that the inscription is from the Talmud, "He who saves a single life, saves the entire world." (This quotation also appears on posters advertising Schindler's List in video stores and schools, apparently having been selected as the film's motto by its promoters).
The saying has a nice, warm, humanistic tenor, but there's just one problem: that's not what the Talmud says. The actual Talmud verse states, "Whosoever preserves a single soul of Israel, Scripture ascribes to him as if he had preserved a complete world" (Tractate Sanhedrin 37a). The Talmud only praises the saving of Jewish lives. In Spielberg's non-stop deception, even the documented contents of Jewish books are falsified.

[Heat]

Was that what was carved on the foundation stone of the State of Israel?

Apparently so.

[Heat]

“We should properly use the term “Holocaust” to describe the policy of total physical annihilation of a nation or a people. To date, this has happened once, to the Jews under Nazism.”

Page 38
The Holocaust in Historical Perspective
Yehuda Bauer

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Assaults on Truth and Memory: Holocaust Denial in Context
by Ward Churchill

Part 1
Where scholars deny genocide, in the face of decisive evidence that it has occurred, they contribute to a false consciousness that can have the most dire reverberations. Their message in effect is: [genocide] requires no confrontation, no reflection, but should be ignored, glossed over. In this way scholars lend their considerable authority to the acceptance of this ultimate human crime. More than that, they encourage--indeed invite--a repetition of that crime from virtually any source in the late or distant future. By closing their minds to the truth, that is, scholars contribute to the deadly psycho-historical dynamic in which unopposed genocide begets new genocides.

-Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen and Robert Jay Lifton "Professional Ethics and Denial of the Armenian Genocide" 1995

Of all the intellectual monstrosities arising during the course of the late 20th century, one of the most vicious and factually indefensible has been that 'school of historical revisionism" known as "Holocaust denial." Its proponents purport to have "proven" that the systematic nazi extermination of somewhere between five and six million Jews did not occur. Such genocidal dimensions were never really part of the nazi character, they argue. Rather, the whole idea of a Holocaust perpetrated by the Third Reich is instead a colossal and sustained "propaganda myth" contrived for purposes of gaining moral advantage by Germany's politicomilitary adversaries, in combination with an amorphous "International Jewish Conspiracy," during and after the Second World War.

Probably the first purveyor of such tripe was Paul Rassinier, a former French communist party member turned virulent anticommunism cum nazi apologist, who published his seminal work on the topic, Le Passage de la Ligne (Crossing the Line), in 1948. In the main, his position can be reduced to a simple duality: first, that much of that for the nazis are accused accrues from "the natural tendency of its victims to exaggerate"; second, that to the extent atrocities happened at all in the nazi death camps, they were more the responsibility of the victims themselves--who, Rassinier claimed, had been placed "in charge" by their SS keepers--than of the SS or nazism more generally.

Rassinier's themes were quickly picked up by pro-Nazi/anti-Semitic figures in the United States, men such as the evangelical "Christian" publicist W.D. Herrstrom (Bible News Flashes), white supremacist publisher James Madole (National Renaissance Bulletin), open national socialists like George Lincoln Rockwell and Gerald L.K. Smith (The Cross and the Flag), and eminent Smith College historian Harry Elmer Barnes. The latter, with release of his The Struggle Against Historical Blackout in 1947, can be said to have set down the ideological/theoretical framework within which Rassinier, Smith, Herrstrom and their ilk could pretend to at least marginal "scholarly" credibility.
By the late 1950s, the emerging "field" of Holocaust denial in the U.S. had produced its first genuine "academic specialist," Austin J. App, a professor of English literature at the University of Scranton and, later, at LaSalle College. App's tactic was to place Rassinier's form of "logical" denial on a tentatively "scientific" footing, developing an obfuscatory "statistical profile" of pre- and postwar European demography through which conventional estimates of six million Jewish victims of nazi exterminators might be challenged as "grossly inflated." This, in turn, was linked to a polemic against German indemnification of surviving Jews in which Germany rather than Judaica was presented as the "real victim" of the "Myth of the Final Solution."
@g the second half of the 1960s, and throughout the '70s, App's sort of "scholarship" began to take hold on North America's extreme right, and, increasingly, to cross-pollinate with European strains of itself. In the U.S., 1969 saw the anonymous release of The Myth of the Six Million, a book actually written by a Harvard-trained history professor named David Leslie Hoggan, published by Willis Carto, founder of the neo-Nazi Liberty Lobby and owner of the openly fascist Noontide Press, and introduced by E.L. Anderson, a contributing editor for what was then Carto's main periodical publication, American Mercury. In England, Richard Verrall (a.k.a., Richard Harwood), leader of the British National Front and publisher of a neo-Nazi tabloid, Spearhead, followed suit with the of 1974 publication of a booklet entitled, Did Six Million Really Die?

A couple of years later in the U.S., an MIT/University of Minnesota graduate named Arthur R. Butz, employed at the time as a professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, moved things forward by publishing The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry. In this book, it is argued on a supposedly technical basis that the mass gassings and cremations of Jews and others documented during the Nuremberg Trial as having taken place at locations like Auschwitz (Oswiecim) and Treblinka "simply could not have occurred," given "the rather obvious technological limitations" of the equipment used. At this point, it is fair to say that all the cornerstones for a comprehensive "rebuttal" of the Holocaust as an historical fact had been laid.

Advent of the Institute for Historical Review
In 1978, the various international strands of Holocaust denial began to be consolidated under the rubric of a Los Angeles-based entity called the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), funded by Willis Carto and headed by a former British National Front officer named William David McCalden.9 In addition to unrestricted access to what had become Carto's own primary periodical publication, The Spotlight, and Noontide Press, his book-publishing concern, the IHR quickly established its own "academic" organ, The Journal of Historical Review, and a book publishing operation under its own imprimatur. Moreover, in 1979, it initiated a series of "scholarly conferences'’ known as International Revisionist Conventions-to bring together and coordinate the activities of deniers the world over.

One of the IHR's first moves was to utilize the mass media to place Holocaust denial squarely before the public by issuing an "open challenge to peddlers of the Holocaust hoax." A $50,000 reward was offered to "anyone able to prove, through the offering of tangible evidence, that a single Jew was ever gassed by the government of the Third Reich."" Although it was later established that the challenge constituted fraud--it having been demonstrated to a court's satisfaction that the IHR never seriously intended to pay the proffered award--it had accomplished its objective: seemingly serious questions concerning the historical fact of nazi genocide had been raised in the public consciousness.

These were concretized to a considerable extent during the 1980s via the case of Ernst Zundel, a German immigrant to Canada and ardent Nazi, who was charged by Crown Counsel with instigating social and racial intolerance through his publishing house, Samisdat Press. During his first trial, in which the IHR arranged for him to be represented by attorney Douglas Christie and otherwise assisted by an "expert" witness, French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, Zundel was convicted and sentenced to serve 15 months in prison. He was then able to win an appeal on procedural grounds and was retried in 1988.

During the second trial, Christie and Faurisson brought in yet another expert, prominent British denier David Irving. Between the three, a strategy was hatched-presumably under a variation of the theory that it could be established that "the truth is the best defense" wherein the thesis advanced by Arthur Butz would be "scientifically" corroborated. For this purpose, they retained the services of Fred A. Leuchter, reputedly "an engineer, skilled in the functioning of gas chambers," who, as a consultant to prison administrations across the U.S., "specialized in constructing and installing execution apparatus." Shortly, having been dispatched to Auschwitz/Birkenau and Majdanek on "site visits," Leuchter submitted a detailed report holding that it was "chemically and physically impossible for the Germans to have conducted gassings" in those camps.

Although it was quickly established in court that Leuchter lacked even the most rudimentary engineering credentials--his sole degree turned out to be a BA in history from Boston University--his "findings" had already caused something of an international media sensations
Although these were debunked almost as rapidly as their author, with the result that Zundel was convicted and sentenced to serve nine months in jail, the IHR immediately launched an intensive campaign to capitalize on the popular first impression it had achieved.

In this, the institute has relied primarily on the talents of a California-based publicist named Bradley Smith who packaged and promoted Leuchter's discredited material as if were the very essence of 'scientific research"-or at least a tenable "point of view," intrinsically worthy of inclusion in the academic agenda-while concentrating his energy on obtaining ad space trumpeting this notion in campus newspapers across the country. Hence, by 1992, it was observable that the IHR had managed to shift the sordid fabrications comprising Holocaust denial from the outermost lunatic fringe of social discourse into the vastly more legitimate arenas of First Amendment debate and scholarly dialogue.

Although there is a marked tendency in mainstream circles to scoff at the potential public impact of the "progress" made by the IHR and its cohorts since 1978 in their increasingly sophisticated marketing of "bad history," numerous indicators suggest the effect has already been substantial. A spring 1993 Newsweek poll, for example, indicated that nearly forty percent of adult Americans expressed "doubts" as to whether a European Holocaust of the magnitude depicted in standard histories occurred during World War II; a substantial portion questioned whether anything truly definable as genocide happened at all. This, among a population which, in 1950, evidenced nearly universal acceptance of the historical realities involved.

In Italy, a similar poll conducted during 1992 revealed that close to ten percent of the adult population had become "convinced" that the Holocaust is a myth; another quarter the matter was "overstated." In a 1991 Gallup poll conducted in Austria, more than half of all adults expressed one degree or another of "reservations" about conventional historiography on the nazi genocide. Similar circumstances seem to prevail in England, France, Germany and Canada. In most cases, the extent and degree of societal skepticism expressed regarding the Holocaust can be correlated fairly well to a marked resurgence of nazi-style extreme right-wing racism over the past fifteen years, all of it acted out with mounting fervor in the "real world."

A Firm Rebuttal
Comes now Deborah Lipstadt, Dorot Chair in Modem Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, with what is probably the first comprehensive public effort at rejoining the rising tide of Holocaust denial. Her book, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: The Free Press, 1993), is thus a milestone of sorts, trying as it does not only to rebut the deniers' arguments point-by-point, but to place their activities in the broader sociopolitical panorama which gives them potency.
Of necessity, the weight of Lipstadt's presentation rests on providing the information th at thoroughly debunks the sort of intentional misinformation by which deniers have adorned themselves with a veneer of superficial plausibility. For example, with regard to Paul Rassinier's contention, subsequently developed by Barnes and App, that the number of Jewish victims of nazi genocide was deliberately inflated by Zionists in order to "swindle" an insupportably high level of reparations from the post-war West Germany govermnent, she goes directly to the 1951 source documents in which Israeli officials pressed their claims.

The government of Israel is not in a position to obtain and present a complete statement of all Jewish property taken or looted by the Germans, and said to total more than $6 thousand million. It can only compute its claim on the basis of total expenditures already made and the expenditure still needed for the integration of Jewish immigrants from Nazi-dominated countries. The dumber of these immigrants is estimated at some 500,000, which means a total expenditure of $1.5 thousand million.

The author then proceeds to state the obvious: "It hardly seems necessary to point out that the money the state received was based on the cost of resettling survivors, had Israel wanted to increase the amount of reparations it obtained from Germany it would have been in its interest to argue that fewer than six million had been killed and managed to flee to Israel." From there, she is positioned to expose the assorted pontifications of Barnes as the uninterrupted string of lies and obfuscations they actually are. Turning next to App, she demolishes the tautological and statistical sleights-of-hand by which he purportedly demonstrated that genocide was never part of the nazi agenda.

With these mainly polemical opponents out of the way, Lipstadt trains her guns on the more recent pseudoscientific postulations of others, such as Butz, Faurisson and Leuchter. Here, largely because of the sheer extent and solidity of the base of technical literature available to her in formulating her refutation, she is devastating. By the time she is finished, the author has utterly dismembered every known variation of such shopworn revisionist themes as Zyklon-B being a chemical appropriate only for delousing rather than extermination of human beings, the gas chambers at Auschwitz and elsewhere being "ill designed" to serve the purpose ascribed to them, and the crematoria at such facilities being "inadequate" to handle the volume of corpses "allegedly" run through them.

[Heat]

Part 2

In framing her responses, Lipstadt does a further great service by setting out a sort of typology of Holocaust revisionism. Not everyone involved, she maintains, is as crude as the outright deniers like Butz, Faurisson, Leuchter, Carto, Irving and Zundel. Others, like Rassinier, Barnes, Hoggan and App, might be better understood as "minimizers"; that is, those who engage in a range of sophistries designed to make the magnitude of the Holocaust appear less than it was. From there, by carefully mixing known facts with their fictions, the latter group advances false sets of moral comparisons--e.g., the nazi extermination center at Auschwitz was "really no different" than the concentration camps at Dauchau (false); and Dauchau wasn't all that different from the camp at Manzanar in which Japanese Americans were interned by the U.S. government during the war (true). Therefore the nazi treatment of untermenschen was "no worse than" that accorded by the U.S. to its "Jap" minority (false)--which the author rightly describes as being "immoral equivalencies."

The trick to a proper understanding of Holocaust revisionism, Lipstadt points out, is in seeing how these three somewhat different elements interact in a mutually supportive fashion. This consideration leads her to examine not only the main flow of Holocaust denial and minimization, but its antecedents and certain of its contemporary counterparts. The former brings about an exploration of post-World War I "Germanofilic" revisionism, not only an the part of the young Harry Elmer Barnes, but also a number of other academic luminaries like Sidney B. Fay and Charles A. Beard.44 These are treated in combination with such anti-Semitic/pro-Nazi champions of interwar isolationism as North Dakota Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye, Washington's Democratic Senator Homer T. Bone, California Republican Senator Hiram W. Johnson, Mississippi's Democratic Congressman John E. Rankin, aviation hero Charles A. Lindberg, and industrialist Henry Ford.

Barnes's work [in particular won a broad popular audience in the United States and abroad ... [He] used his World War I revisionism to propound the isolationist cause. Even before World War II had ended he was challenging the official -version of its history. He was part of a small group of isolationists who tried to resurrect the movement’s reputation and to sully Roosevelt's. They were funded by prewar isolationists, including Charles Lindberg and Henry Ford.

This context was as indispensable to the birth and eventual maturation of Holocaust minimization and denial, Lipstadt contends, as the actions and pronouncements of more than a few established and highly visible political figures are to its increasing acceptability. Salient in this regard was U.S. President Ronald Reagan's 1986 official "gesture of reconciliation" with Germany's nazi past, laying a commemorative wreath near the graves of SS troops in Bitburg. At the same time, Reagan informed the press that he would be unwilling to make a similar gesture at the site of a death camp because Germans "have a guilt feeling that's been imposed upon them and I just don't think it's necessary." This, taken in combination with syndicated columns questioning orthodox Holocaust historiography by former Reagan press chief cum presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan,49 should remove any mystery as to how an unabashed white supremacist and outright denier like David Duke might have been deemed a reasonable addition to the state legislature by Louisiana voters in the late 1980s.

The same sort of dynamic is evident in France, where President Francois Mitterand ostentatiously conducted a wreath-laying ceremony at the grave of Marshal Philippe Petain, head of the collaborationist World War II Vichy government which, among many other offenses--he was convicted of treason by a French court in 1945-assisted the nazis in rounding up Jews for deportation and extermination. Mitterand's symbolic but official forgiveness of Petain's criminality is reflected far more concretely in an across-the-board refusal of French lower courts to accept indictments of former Vichy officials charged with complicity and/or direct participation in all manner of wartime German atrocities. To date, despite an abundant record in this regard, no French citizen has ever been tried, much less convicted or punished, for perpetrating crimes against humanity.

A similar phenomenon has been manifested in Germany, as is evidenced in the quasi-official renderings of such reactionary nationalist historians as Hellmut Diwald, Andreas Hillgruber and Michael Sturmer. Diwald, in his 1978 Geshichte der Deutschen (History of the Germans), attempted to establish a genuinely immoral equivalency when he argued that the displacement of Germans from eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War constituted a crime "on par with" those perpetrated by the nazis against the Jews, Poles, Slovenes, Ukrainians and many others. Hillgruber followed up in 1986 with Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des deitschen Reiches und das Ende des europdischen Judentums (Two Kinds of Downfall: The Shattering of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry), a narrower but more refined argument to much the same effect. Such "interpretations" underpinned open calls by Sturmer-Chancellor Helmut Kohl's historical adviser at the time of Bitburg-for a more general rewriting of history to "alleviate Germany's obsessive guilt" over the Holocaust, thereby facilitating "a rebirth of German pride and patriotism."

It is to these much more diffuse, institutionalized and ubiquitous symptomologies of denial, rather than the blatant crudities of Rassinier and Butz, that we must address ourselves, Lipstadt contends, if we are ever to rid ourselves of the hideous implications represented by the deniers themselves. "If Holocaust denial has demonstrated anything," she observes, "it is the fragility of memory, truth, reason, and history." The object, of course, is to affirm and reinforce each of these as natural societal barriers against repetition of that which is being denied and forgotten. "When we witness assaults on truth," she says, "our response must be strong, though neither polemical nor emotional. We must educate the broader public and academe about this threat and its historical and ideological roots. We must expose these people for what they are," most especially when they-like Reagan, Mitterand, Kohl and the intellectuals in their service-occupy positions of elite authority.

Degeneration
Had Denying the Holocaust ended there, or, more accurately, had it been constrained to encompass only the material summarized above, it would be an altogether good and useful book, one which might be recommended to the broadest possible readership. Unfortunately, Lipstadt incorporates a subtext into her final chapter which undoes quite a lot of the good she might otherwise have accomplished. Moreover, she does so with a heavy overload of precisely the distortions, polemicism and emotion-laden prose she herself condemns.

The problem emerges most clearly when, in conjunction with her rebuttal of German conservatives historians, she takes up the work of Ernst Nolte, a neoliberal known mainly for his masterly historical/philosophical analysis of fascism, published during the early 1960s. At issue is the evolution of Nolte's handling of the Holocaust in and since the 1976 publication of his Deutschland und der kalte Krieg (Germany and the Cold War), in which he has shown himself to be increasingly prone to an "historicization" of nazi genocide by way of contrasting and comparing it to other phenomena, including the Turkish extermination of Armenians in 1918, the Stalinist program against Ukrainians during the 1930s, the American performance in Vietnam during the 1960s and early 1970s, and the Khmer Rouge "autogenocide" of the mid70s.
Although there is much that is problematic in what appears to have motivated Nolte to bring his usual methodology to bear with respect to the Holocaust-as well as in his attribution of motivations to some of the historical figures he treats (e.g., Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot)-this has been critiqued rather severely by the prominent left social philosopher Jurgen Habermas, in a series of essays which ushered in the so-called Historikerstreit ("Historians' controversy") of 1986 in Germany. It is telling that Lipstadt offers not so much as an oblique reference to Ha bermas or his arguments. This is because she not especially concerned in Nolte's case with debunking a minimization or denial of the Holocaust at all. Indeed, she acknowledges that he not only affirms its occurrence, but that it occurred in its full dimensions What she has in n-dnd instead is to use Nolte as a vehicle upon which to attack comparative methods per se.

This is accomplished via an uninterrupted transition from Lipstadt's solid denunciations of Diwald's, Hillgruber's and Sturmer’s spurious attempts to equate German suffering under the Soviets with that of the Jews under nazism, to her purported rebuttal of Nolte's much broader sets of comparisons, all four of which are thereby lumped together as a unified whole. As the first three men's comparisons are not only inaccurate but immoral, so too are Nolte's and, by extension, comparison by anyone of any phenomenon to the Holocaust. All efforts to contextualize the latter- "relativizing" it-are by definition at least as reprehensible as denial itself in Lipstadt's scheme of things.

These historians are not crypto-deniers, but the results of the work are the same: the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction... Ultimately the relativists contribute to the fostering of what I call the "Yes, but" syndrome... Yes, there was a Holocaust, but it was essentially no different than an array of other conflagrations in which innocents were massacred. The question that logically follows from this is, Why, -then, do we "only" hear about the Holocaust? For the deniers and many others who are "not yet" deniers, the answer to this final question is obvious: because of the power of the Jews. "Yes, but" is a response that falls into the gray area between outright denial and relativism. In certain respects it is more insidious than outright denial because it nurtures a form of pseudo-history whose motives are difficult to identify. It is the equivalent of David Duke without his robes (emphasis added).

This, from a woman who claims to reject "immoral equivalencies." The wild sweep of her brush not only smears Nolte with the same tar as Hillgruber and Diwald-or Paul Rassinier and David Irving, for that matter-but also such decisively anti-nazi historians as Joachim Fest, who have defended Nolte's comparativist methods while disagreeing with many of his conclusions. By the same token, the splatters extend without nuance or distinction to a host of emphatically progressive scholars like David Stannard, Ian Hanxxxx and Vahakn Dadrian, each of whom has argued the case that one or more other peoples has suffered a genocide comparable to that experienced by the Jews without attempting to diminish the gravity and significance of the Holocaust in the least (if anything, they endeavor to reinforce its importance as an historical benchmark). Even Jewish scholars like Israel Chamey and Richard Rubinstein, and nazi-hunter Simon Weisenthal, who acknowledge similarities between the nazi genocide and those undergone by Armenians, Poles, Gypsies, American Indians and others, are necessarily encompassed within Lipstadt's astonishing definition of neo-Nazi scholarships.

What has happened is that, in her project's final pages, the author has subtly-one might say deceptively-substituted one agenda for another. Without pause or notification, she shifts from the entirely worthy objective of systematically exposing, confronting and repudiating those who deny the existence of the Holocaust as an historical reality to a far more dubious attempt to confirm the nazi genocide of European Jewry as something absolutely singular, a process without parallel in all of human history.69 There is a tremendous difference between the two propositions, yet Lipstadt bends every effort to make them appear synonymous. In effect, any and all "failures" to concede the intrinsic "phenomenological uniqueness" of the Holocaust is to be guilty of denying it altogether.

Hence, a Joachim Fest is to be seen as the "moral equivalent" of a Paul Rassinier, an Ian Hanxxxx as equaling a Richard Verrall, an Israel Chamey equating to an Arthur Butz. All of them being "cut of the same moral cloth," all are to be equally vilified and discredited. Ultimately, only the Truth of the exclusivity of the Holocaust remains unscathed. The fundamental and deliberate distortions of Lipstadt's formulation speaks for itself. It is a lie, or complex of lies, consciously and maliciously uttered, lies of a type which readily conform in their magnitude and intent to those of the very deniers Lipstadt has devoted the bulk of her text to combating. In the end, Denying the Holocaust is thereby reduced by its author to an exercise in holocaust denial.

Uniqueness as Denial
Nowhere is Lipstadt's allegiance to the kind of duplicitous argumentation deployed by deniers more obvious than when, during her polemic against Ernst Nolte, she "explains" why the mass internment of Japanese-Americans by the United States in 1942 is different in kind, not just from outright extermination programs, but from nazism's policy as a whole: "In [an] attempt at immoral equivalence, Nolte contends that just as the American internment of Japanese Americans was justified by the attack on Pearl Harbor, so too was the Nazi "internment' of European Jews. In making this comparison Nolte ignores the fact that, however wrong, racist, and unconstitutional the U.S. internment of the Japanese (emphasis added), the Jews had not bombed Nazi cities or attacked German forces in 1939. Even his use of the term internment to describe what the Germans did to the Jews whitewashes historical reality."

Actually, what Nolte argues is that neither example is more justified than the other, a very different position from that of which he is accused. Secondly, Lipstadt's conversion of Japanese-Americans into 'Japanese" within the space of a single sentence is illuminating. Plainly, the misrepresentation-magically transforming a racially-defined group of American citizens into subjects of a hostile foreign power-is vital to her position. Equally plainly, an identical notion-that the Jews comprised a foreign and racially-hostile element within German society-was a crux of Hitlerian ideology. The nazis held, falsely, that Jews thus comprised an inherent "Fifth Column" within German-held territory, a myth duly adopted by David Irving and other deniers to justify Jewish internment (but not extermination, since they claim it did not occur). The U.S., for exactly similar reasons, contended that Americans of Japanese extent constituted a comparably subversive element, a glaring untruth Lipstadt seconds without hesitancy or equivocation.76 In any event, "internment" is a word which sanitizes the experiences of both the Japanese-Americans and the Jews.

Whatever Nolte's shortcomings, and they are many, it is Lipstadt, not him, who is ignoring facts here, forming a methodological symmetry with the deniers. The same may be said with respect to her cavalier dismissals of any possibility for legitimate comparison between the Jewish experience under the nazis and that of other peoples slaughtered as a matter of state policy during the twentieth century. Take "the brutal Armenian tragedy" of 1918, in which well upwards of a million people were killed and millions more subjected to a "ruthless Turkish policy of expulsion and resettlement." This was "horrendous," Lipstadt informs us, "but it was not part of a process of total annihilation of an entire people," so it is not comparable to the Holocaust.
This "yes, but" conclusion is immediately followed by others. The "barbaric" Khmer Rouge extermination campaign in Cambodia? It was "conducted as part of a brutalizing war" in which "imagined collaborators"-a million of them?-were "subdued and eliminated. "What the Nazis did to the Jews, unlike what the Khmer Rouge did to the Cambodians, was "gratuitous." Besides, Cambodia is a backwards kind of place, not "a prosperous, advanced, industrial nation at the height of its power" like Germany, so the fate of its population apparently doesn't count as much as the fate of more advanced mortals." Hence, it is obviously "immoral" to compare the Khmer Rouge genocide to that perpetrated by nazism.