The new antisemitism: Holocaust denial in the post-truth era

In 2000, controversial historian David Irving lost his emotive libel case against the American academic, Lipstadt, who accused him of Holocaust denial and falsification of history in her book ‘Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory’. He sued her for defamation, correctly alleging that what she had written damaged his reputation as a popular writer and expert on Nazi Germany and the Second World War. Her charges also affected his earnings as his formerly esteemed reputation was built on his claims to have discovered more original sources, making him more accurate and thorough than other historians.

The defence opted for ‘justification’ – deciding to prove that Lipsdat’s claims against Irving were factually correct, an absolute defence in the eyes of the law.

Therefore, Irving’s writings and speeches were evaluated by Cambridge professor, Richard J Evans.  He discovered a sinister quality of manipulation and falsifications inherent in Irving’s work, such as words inserted and omitted from documents, mistranslations and misdating.  Although such errors are commonplace in historiography, all of these errors lent support to Irving’s central contentions: that there were no mass gassings of Jews, Hitler had no knowledge of the ‘Final solution’, that there was no centrally orchestrated extermination of the Jews, and the overriding evidence for the systematic murder of the Jews had been fabricated after the war.

Irving arriving for trial 

If Irving’s errors were merely careless, his mistakes of fact and quotation would have a random effect on his work.  However, the effect was anything but random, indicating that the mistakes were deliberate.

Subsequently, Irving comprehensively lost the case and was ordered t pay 2 million pounds in legal costs, which led to his bankruptcy.  The fascinating case received massive publicity and became the subject of several books, such as Evan’s own ‘Lies about Hitler’. It was depicted by two documentaries, and ore recently a new film, Denial.

Although this trial ended with the righteous verdict of the racist and outspoken Neo-Nazi being publicly discredited and bankrupted, the very same case is being replayed countless times across the internet.  The key difference however, is the absence of academics and the rationality of a court.  The proliferation of Holocaust-denying websites allow people to refuse to accept the facts, and in a state of perpetual ignorance, tout their obnoxious falsehoods as absolute truth.  On the internet, all opinions are equal, meaning that some can be deluded into believing the Holocaust was a Jewish conspiracy, orchestrated from the shadows of the US government,  to win achieve Zionism’s end goal of acquiring Jerusalem as the Jewish national home.  Such websites disturbingly utilise the infamous ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, an antiemetic forged document alleging the existence of a global Jewish conspiracy controlling the world from the shadows.  Being an ambassador to the Holocaust Educational Trust, having heard the gruesome testimony of numerous survivors and having actually stood inside the intact gas chambers of Auschwitz I, a terrible manifestation of the most abhorrent chapter in the history of the world, the stupidity of such views beggars belief.  However, the deeper you go into the web, the more outrageous and disturbing the prejudice becomes, even in our enlightened and apparently educated society, antisemitism is alive and well.

Nazi propaganda depicting Jews as the shadowy rulers of the World, a resurgent theme.

Although such beliefs are the most distressing, they are certainly the minority view.  The most popular form of Holocaust denial is not attributing the genocide to a worldwide Zionist conspiracy, but is a new form of ‘soft’ Holocaust denial.  This is the suggestion that the mass murder of the Jews was simply another genocide amongst many, however terrible it may have been.  Anyone who has ever studied the Holocaust knows that this is not the case.   While millions of other victims of Nazism – Slavs, Gypsies, the mentally ill and homosexuals, and numerous others – were seen as obstacles to the ascension of German power, the purity of the Aryan ‘master race’, the implementation of Lebensraum, the Jews were regarded very differently.  They were perceived by Nazi doctrine as the ‘world enemy’, perpetrators of a global conspiracy aimed at the destruction of the pseudo ‘Aryan’ race.  They were an existential threat, not simply ‘untermenchans’ (subhuman), so had to be killed wherever found. Thus, they were singled out by the Nazis, and even by the common soldiers of the Wehrmacht during their conquest of Europe and parts of Russia, for particularly sadistic treatment

The Holocaust is therefore far more than another set of massacres.  

Not just another genocide

That is why it is commemorated on 27^th January.  Even the White House is guilty of this ‘soft’ denial, its statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day made no mention of the Jews at all, citing ambiguities of ‘inclusivity’.  But the Nazis weren’t inclusive; it was only the Jews whom they attempted to systematically exterminate wherever they could be found, in their millions, in shooting pits, in ghettoes in gas chambers.  The enduring conspiracy of Jews manipulating the world’s markets even reared its ugly head during the recent election, Donald Trump, who asserted that ‘Crooked Hillary’, ‘meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty’ and that Jews ‘control the levers of power’, has now moved into the Oval Office.

Due to the internet, hard and soft Holocaust denial are firmly back in mainstream society.  Of these two evils, ‘soft’ denial is in my opinion the most sinister of the two.  As the survivors of the Holocaust pass from the world into the aloof pages of history, soft denial, increasingly being legitimised threatens to make the untold evils of the Holocaust disappear from popular consciousness, amid rising Anti-Semitism.  This malevolent ignorance can only be combatted by the facts.  Education is crucial, and the efforts of organisations such as the Holocaust Educational Trust are becoming increasingly crucial.

Bibliography

‘Denial on Trial’ – BBC History magazine February 2017 – Professor Richard J Evans

‘Denial’: How to deal with a Conspiracy Theory in the era of Post Truth’ – Conspiracy and Democracy Project, University of Cambridge