The Anatomy of a Lie

...Yet so have changing intellectual fashions, in particular postmodernist musings that have called into question the very idea of objective truth...

...Here, for instance, is her summary of the "more subtle, sophisticated and, ultimately, more devious approach" of Arthur Butz, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University: "According to Butz the key to perpetrating the hoax was the forging of massive numbers of documents, an act committed [by Jewish organizations] with the complicity of Allied governments...

...Originally published in the French in 1987, it is the work of no less distinguished a figure than Pierre Vidal-Naquet, the renowned historian of the ancient world, who entered the fray against those he dubs the "assassins of memory" almost a decade and a half ago...

...First, any lunacy, if repeated often enough, will take on a life of its own...

...A sinister role has been played, too, by rogue intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, who wrote a preface to a book by France's leading Holocaust denier, and Ernst Nolte, who triggered the notorious "historians' debate" in Germany...

...Think about it: How would you refute Butz' "thesis...

...Assassins of Memory brings together four of Vidal-Naquet's essays which previously appeared in important French media outlets between 1980 and 1987, and a fifth written specifically for the book...

...For when she started her research, the argument that the Holocaust never occurred was indeed a marginal phenomenon...

...This perception also was apparent in the spring 1991 controversy over the decision taken by a large number of American college newspapers—including those at Northwestern, the University of Michigan, Duke, and Cornell—to publish a full-page advertisement of the Committee on Open Debate on the Holocaust promoting the notion that nothing of the kind ever happened...

...one can and should analyze their specific place in the configuration of ideologies, raise the question of why and in what manner they surfaced...

...Each is carefully crafted and brims with learning in the French mode, but ultimately gives expression to a cold fury...

...In an astonishingly short period, however, it has become part of the cultural ethos, achieving a degree of legitimacy even among the educated classes...

...Reviewed by David Singer Editor, "American Jewish Year Book" "When I first began studying Holocaust denial," Deborah Lipstadt notes in her Preface, "people would stare at me strangely...

...In addition, the Holocaust deniers have presented themselves as "revisionists" engaged in the standard process of re-examining the historical record...

...On the contrary, both see themselves as engaged in an uphill battle, because it is evident that the poisonous swill of Holocaust denial will be with us for a long time to come...

...Since this bogus scholarship has gained the greatest currency in France, it is perhaps not surprising that another book unmasking the ugly enterprise has come from there...

...Such is the price to be paid for intellectual coherence...

...And it affords a showcase illustration of the fact that "the sect," to use Vidal-Naquet's term, brings together elements from the extreme Right and the extreme Left...

...The truly astonishing thing is that she did not lose her mind altogether upon entering the fever swamps of Holocaust denial...

...Obsessive anti-Semitism is busy extending its reach: Not only are live Jews intolerable, but dead Jews as well...

...This is a book of stunning relevance...

...Lipstadt observes that during the writing of her book she had "constantly to avoid being inadvertently sucked into a debate that is no debate and an argument that is no argument...

...Robert Faurisson, who inherited Rassinier's mantle as Holocaust denier supreme among his countrymen, has been taken up as a hero by the Left-wing revolutionary group, La Vieille Taupe...

...It is Lipstadt's singular achievement that she provides a coherent account of the whole sordid matter...

...Second, conspiracy theories on a grand scale—and that, at bottom, is what Holocaust denial is all about—are by their very nature beyond refutation...

...As devotees of the Nazis, they have learned two important lessons...

...For those who cannot get enough of the nonsense there is even an annual Holocaust deniers' convention...

...France has the distinction of being the one Western country where a doctorate was awarded for affirming Holocaust denial...

...they carefully drape their writings with footnotes, bibliographies, etc...

...While conceding that it would have been better for a "respectable, mainstream historian" to do the job, the distinguished newspaper did not feel Irving's views automatically disqualified him from any serious work in the field...

...27.50...

...By what process has Holocaust denial entered the domain of factual knowledge and scholarly debate...

...It is necessary, though, to recognize what that means in this context...

...Neither Deborah Lipstadt nor Pierre Vidal-Naquet expresses much confidence that the Holocaust deniers can be easily contained...

...205 pp...

...Hundreds of trained staff members were sent to Europe in the immediate aftermath of the War...

...The Truth at Last, Arthur Butz' The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Fred Leuchter's The Leuchter Report: An Engineering Report on the Alleged Execution Gas Chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland, and Robert Faurisson's The Rumor of Auschwitz: Treatise in Defense Against Those Who Accuse Me of Falsifying History...

...They prepared documents purporting to be official communiques from the highest-ranking offices of the Third Reich...

...Let me confess right off that I was one of those who counseled the author to put her talents to better use...

...Holocaust denial, Vidal-Naquet emphasizes, is "an attempt at extermination on paper that pursues in another register the actual work of extermination...

...How did this insane situation come about...

...Certainly the passage of time has been a factor in and of itself...

...Paul Rassinier, the founding father of Holocaust denial in France, was a lifelong anti-colonialist and pacifist...

...Invariably I would be challenged with the query, 'Why are you wasting your time on those kooks?'" Announcing that her intention was "to write about flat-earth theorists," she adds, "would have evoked no stronger reaction...

...I have nothing to reply to them and will not do so...

...But by far the most important component, Lipstadt stresses, has been the sheer persistence and hard work of cadres of obsessive anti-Semites, who are seeking at once to rehabilitate the Nazis and to rob the Jewish people and the State of Israel of their moral capital with the objective of setting the stage for the next Holocaust...

...Happily, Lipstadt was not to be dissuaded...

...In the main, those who defended running the ad cited First Amendment guarantees (although many of the same student newspapers refused to accept ads for Playboy or cigarettes...

...The Sunday Times is hardly alone in thinking of Holocaust denial as some sort of dissenting scholarly opinion?very much in the minority, to be sure, yet one nonetheless representing a legitimate alternative to the dominant "ex-terminationist" position...

...One example is the furor last July in England after it became known that London's Sunday Times had engaged Holocaust denier David Irving to transcribe diaries of Hitler's Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goeb-bels, discovered in the Russian state archives...

...Mad stuff this, and it is maddening to think it could find a point of entry into the sphere of normal knowledge...

...Lipstadt maintains that the "revisionist" diatribes have become increasingly sophisticated, and she is undoubtedly right...

...Yet the Holocaust deniers have made great strides, and for reasons that are not terribly mysterious...

...Like Lipstadt, he sets strict limits to his engagement with deniers: "I have thus imposed on myself the following rule: One can and should enter into discussion concerning the 'revisionists' ; one can analyze their texts as one might the anatomy of a lie...

...All these "classics," reprinted time and again, probably grace the same shelves that hold back issues of the de-niers' "scholarly" periodical, Journal of Historical Review...

...But there were telling references as well to "diverse opinions and ideas'' and "unpopular views" with regard to the Holocaust that, it was said, needed to be aired...

...They even created false recordings of speeches by Nazi leaders and inserted them into the materials collected by the liberating forces...

...One revives the dead in order the better to strike the living...

...But one should not enter into debate with the 'revisionists.' It is of no concern to me whether the 'revisionists' are neo-Nazi or extreme Left-wing in their politics: whether they are characterized psychologically as perfidious, perverse, paranoid, or quite simply idiotic...

...Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust By Pierre Vidal-Naquet Translated and with a Foreword by Jeffrey Mehlman Columbia...

...Not only were they able to falsify and fabricate at will, but they even succeeded in planting the documents in the correct places so that those who were not part of the hoax would happen upon them...

...Finally, in the new, improved version of Holocaust denial explicit anti-Semitism is strictly eschewed, so that the reader will be drawn into the argument...

...Without being discovered by anyone, they created reports by Ein-satzgruppen commanders listing the precise cities in which massacres had been conducted and the exact numbers of men, women and children who had been killed...

...Her research was prodigious: She worked her way through such vile garbage as Austin App's The Six Million Swindle, Richard Harwood's Did the Six Million Really Die...