Petuaohingtenposi Book World

petuaohingtenposi Book World 1.KG1;01 , MIL LK 13111 Itt3 SI•1111-li 11:41 `11,3 ilia/. 1_0 471 emu 1.; ist 4Fr, alusTNArION av PiAIAN ■LLOArRIJ FUR FOR THE WASHPNIGFON POSt • Sink(DAY„ .4.11_4( k.„. 1993 Antisemitic History: The Fate of the 6 Million DENYING THE HOLOCAUST ment literally steals millions of dollars from The Growing Assault on you and other U.S. taxpayers. The thief is the Truth and Memory corrupt, bankrupt government of Israel . By Deborah E. Upstadt And the theft is perpetrated primarily through Free Press. 278 pp. $22.95 the clever use of the Greatest Lie in all history—the lie of the 'Holocaust.' " By Paul Johnson This particular statement was put out by an organization called the Institute for Historical NTISEMITISM is one of the oldest Research, a pseudo-academic body that has and most persistent of human delu• been one of the most energetic exponents of sions. Some Jews resignedly believe Holocaust-denial. In 1979 it held the first "Re- it is ineradicable. It is protean and visionist Convention" in Los Angeles. The takes countless different forms, so that it is MR had been founded the year before by peculiarly resistant to empirical disproof: Lewis Brandon, who was born in 1951 in Nailed in one shape, it instantly reappears in Northern Ireland and has a long record of fas- another, often contradictory one. The fact of cist activities on both sides of the Atlantic. His the Holocaust ought to have ended antisem- real name was William David McCalden, itism everywhere, forever. The characteristic though he also operated as David Stanford, response of the antisemites has been to deny David Berg, Sonda Ross and David Finkel- that it happened, and to posit the existence of stein. Behind McCalden was an older man yet another secret Jewish conspiracy to foist called Willis Carto, identified by the Anti-Def- onto a gullible world the myth that six million amation League as the most important and Jews were killed by the Nazis. professional antisemite in the United States. In fact, Holocaust-denial is now the fastest- Born in 1926 in Indiana, Carta was a member growing and probably the commonest form of of the John Birch Society until he quarreled antisemitism. In the United States, where it with its founder, Robert Welch. He then set appears regularly on the campus and in innu- up his own organization, which eventually merable extremist publications of both Left emerged as the Liberty Lobby and by the and Right, it is easily given a current political 1980s had an annual income of close to $4 context. Thus: "Each year a foreign govern- million. This financed the IHR and its. publi- cation, Spotlight, which by the early 1980s Paid Johnson is a British historian whose claimed a circulation of 330,000 and was con- books include "A History of the Jews" and nected with other antisemitic outlets such as "Modern Times• The World from the 1920s to the American Mercury. Washington Observer the 1990s." Newsletter and —Co-Winged on page 14 Denying The Holocaust Continued from page I . Noontide press. All assiduously propagate Holocaust-denial, The U.S. is not the only country where this form of antisemitism flourishes. It is to be found all over Europe, particularly in France and in former communist states, in Latin America and even in Japan, where Jews are rare but extremist groups WAAL CORPS PHOTO plentiful. It takes many forms. Some Some of the dead prisoners found by the U.S. Seventh Army at Dachau deniers say that the Holocaust was a complete fabrication from start to finish. Others, such as President Tudjman of Croatia, claim that the numbers of Jews killed has been hugely and deliberately exagger- ated: Tudjman insists that only 900,000 Jews died, Another ap- proach is to produce "scientc ev- written a useful work on the presen- idence" that Jews who died in the tation of the original Holocaust story death camps could not have been in the American media, has now prtr killed in the way historians and war- duced a documented history of the crimes tribunals have asserted. In rise and spread of HoloCaust-denial. particular, deniers claim that Zy- Her object was two-fold. First, she ldon-B gas was totally inappropriate wanted to establish—and does so as a homicidal agent. A Boston en- gineer called Fred A. Leuchter, who beyond any doubt—that denial activities in no case spring from gen- specialized in constructing execution apparatuses, was sent out to Ausch- uine efforts to question or revise established history or from any con- witz and Majdanek to collect "foren- sic samples" and on his return pro- cern for the truth, but are conducted duced a report that concluded there by convinced fanatics whose antisemitism long antedated any "scien- had never been homicidal gassings tific" interest in Holocaust studies. A at these sites. Yet another common few gullible fish, like Noam Cho- tactic is to attack the authenticity of The Diary of Anne Frank, which has msky, may have been hooked, but the vast majority of explicit deniers sold over 20 million copies in scores :if countries as well as being made are motivated simply by hatred of Jews. Second, Lipstadt fears that in into a prize-winning play and movie. today's intellectual climate of decon- For countless people, it personifies the tragedy and horror of the Ho- struction, where it is a campus game locaust. But deniers claim that the to overturn established truth and Diary is a post-war invention, writ- Atte& ilDtPc34.3t-klid.l.i.5 findiug .a. ten by a professional New York play- receptive audience among young wright in collaboration with Anne Frank's father. EBORAH LIPSTADT, who teaches religious studies at Emory Univer- sity and who has already people. speech, however outrageous, is zeal- If the second point is valid, and ously protected by the First Amend- fear that it is, Lipstadt has produced ment, litigation was successfully an effective antidote. By simply trac- conducted against the IHR. These ing the origins and spread of denial- court cases are most instructive. Al- theory and its endless manifesta- though, as Lipstadt says, a law court tions, she provides the best possible is not the ideal arena for establishing refutation of its conclusions by de- historical truth, it is an objective fo- monstrating, with names, dates and rum whose findings are generally ac- quotations, that it has from start to cepted by the public, and in every finish been inextricably associated case where the reality of the Holo- with extremists of the vilest kind. caust has been tested there, it has She shows that the arguments of the eventually been vindicated. deniers, when they are specifically Moreover, the fact that evidence formulated, have no scientific or his- of the Holocaust has been success- torical basis. The book is particularly fully validated in the courts makes it useful in demolishing the Zyklon-B easier to pursue the second method and Anne Frank versions of the slan- of dealing with the plague: to de- der. It is, in fact, an essential text stroy its intellectual respectability. that journalists and teachers ought In the long run, the only way to to have handy whenever this form of eradicate antisemitism is to make it antisemitism makes its appearance. impossible for any politician, jour- Some will question Lipstadt's wis- nalist, writer or academic who holds dom in dealing with the subject at antisemitic views, including Holo- such length, thereby giving it fur- caust-denial, to be taken seriously, ther publicity. They are mistaken. We have come a long way._since There are really only two effective 1945 in attaining this objective, and ways of dealing with blatant anti- in the end we shall get there, Lip- semitism. One is the use of the law: stadt's book is an important step for- Lipstadt shows that specific statutes ward because it means that, hence- have been employed both in Europe forth, any opinion-former who tries and Canada to expose and combat to deal in this particular antisemitic Holocaust-deniers, and that even in coin can easily be shown to be using the United States, where freedom of false currency. ■ .

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