In the early post-war years, denialism was believed to facilitate the ‘coming out’ of Nazis and Nazis in hiding. Only the nullification of the Holocaust could make Nazi-ness, and its derivatives, respectable or acceptable.
Denialism strives to re-legitimise anti-Semitism as a political credo. This is only possible if anti-Semitism is sanitised of its practical apotheosis—Auschwitz. Political and nationalistic anti-Semitism, and political parties devoted thereto, prevalent across Europe before World War II, are undergoing a resurgence in today’s Europe.
Denialism aims to legitimise fascism as a worthy, organic political philosophy. This is only possible if you can divorce fascism from its associated death camp anti-Semitism. If the death camps can be successfully denied, then fascism and anti-Semitism can have nothing to be ashamed of and can, once again, be respectable.
Denialism serves to disestablish the legitimacy of Israel if, indeed, Israel is the consequence and outcome of the Holocaust. This unfortunate and misleading Holocaust = Israel equation, strongly (and, I believe, wrongly) emphasised by former prime ministers David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin, is still, regrettably, pervasive throughout Israel and the Diaspora. If, therefore, the Holocaust can be denied, then so, too, can any rationalisation for the foundation and continued existence of the Jewish state.
Denialism helps establish the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause. By turning Palestinians into the victims, Jews are accused of behaving like the very Nazis whom the Jews ‘falsely’ accuse of genocide. Radical Islam has now adopted all the techniques of an earlier European-Christian anti-Semitism, including Holocaust denialism.
Denialism is used to reconcile the Soviets’ notion of the centrality of their own history of millions lost and their antagonism, especially after the 1967 war, to a Jewry, an Israel or a Zion that has, since 1945, had the pre-eminent claim on having lost six million of its people. To avoid that contradiction, Soviet academicians turned the Nazis into fascists and didn’t mention the centrality, in the Nazi weltanschauung, of anti-Semitism and the ‘Final Solution’. In the end, for them, and for the ears of a world that may have been willing to listen, the only victims of fascism were communists. This phase—together with the Soviet system—has now passed, but it was, for decades, a state-sponsored enterprise in the major academies, more vigorous, more pernicious and much more effective world-wide than the ‘free-enterprise’ efforts of a handful of American denialists like Elmer Barnes, Willis Carto and Arthur Butz.
Denialism counteracts irrational fears of a breaking-up of social consensus in society, particularly when a society is in transition. To focus public attention on an alleged, ethnically identifiable fifth column of ‘others’ offers some grounds for a form of national unity.
Denialism can magnify, in some instances, a particular victim community’s suffering without having to have it compared with, and to be found to be on a lesser scale than, the Holocaust. Deliberate flattening, or even minimising, of the Holocaust magnifies and equalises all atrocities. In a morbid sense, if everyone commits horrors, then not only is no person or group any more guilty than any other, but all humankind has suffered equally—and Jews, therefore, have no greater claim on humanity’s conscience.
Denialism offers a form of ready expression of the hatred of Jews.
Denialism can hurt, shafting corpses with the added indignity of claiming that there were no corpses, and can inflict on Jewish survivors the accusation, even the curse, that their nightmares are just that—very bad dreams. In the words of Vidal-Naquet: denialists ‘are intent on striking a community in the thousand painful fibres that continue to link it to its own past’.[8]
Certainly these denialists know what they’re doing: they learn, refine, become more ‘academic’, more sophisticated, more credible as alternative explainers or revealers of ‘truth’; more subtle and less ‘kooky’ than they appeared immediately after the war. But while they remain professionally isolated within their communities, they are at the same time collectivised. In other words, as disparate as they are geographically, they have turned themselves into a coterie, a cult, a collective who now meet publicly—or who are sometimes prevented from meeting publicly, as in Lebanon in 2001.[9] They are assembled in a fortress of their choosing, as purveyors of hate and merchants of prejudice. While they may have a certain mass appeal, they are no longer viewed as discrete, independent scholars, worthy of attention or of a serious intellectual or academic hearing. They see themselves as an army of combatants, although their visibility renders them more capable of being grouped into an identifiable body, quartered, quarantined and made both ridiculous and unbelievable.
In 2000, and again in 2001, on appeal in senior British courts, the hubris of the new Crown Prince of ridicule, David Irving, ‘the noted British historian, author of more than 20 books’, ensured that a great many Humptys fell off the wall.[10] In July 2001, the three-judge Court of Appeal supported Justice Gray's initial ruling in the libel case of Irving v Lipstadt & Penguin Books. They declared that Irving was ‘one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial…No objective, fair-minded historian would have serious cause to doubt that there were gas chambers at Auschwitz and that they were operated on a substantial scale to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews.’ Justice Gray had concluded: ‘Irving is anti-Semitic. His words are directed against Jews, either individually or collectively, in the sense that they are by turns hostile, critical, offensive and derisory’.[11]