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From Eugene Weixel,
published on togethernet, from his blog:
My debate with Sue Blackwell, friend of Palestinian and Jew, about the holocaust.
There are so many comments over on my item about "right to return" that someone visiting this blog might miss something interesting: my debate with an English lady who feels she is a friend to Palestinians and Jews too, about the events in Nazi occupied Europe during the 30's and 40's. I'm putting it over here. wiotrh all my dyslexic typos (proving how tired and rushed I was making these posts) so it doesn't get lost: Sue Blackwell said...
Levi9909 said...
(The article is quite long and is viewable on this blog) Ibrahamav said...
Sue Blackwell said...
SnoopyTheGoon said...
6:50 PM
Sue B said...
Hey Eugene! This shiksa socialist in Birmingham (UK) thinks that post was brilliant. And since you ask people to link to your site, I've put one in from my website on Palestine and Israel. Check it out: www.sue.be/pal Since you link to Lenni Brenner I presume you don't mind being listed under "anti-Zionist Jewish sites" (click on "Zionism") but if you'd prefer me to put you somewhere else, just let me know. Sue Blackwell
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said... Hello sue! Thanks for your support. Link me under any classification you deem appropriate. Y'all come back soon, okay?
Hey! I'm Jewish and I'm offended by this blog. I look pretty much the same age and size as you but I don't go round calling myself "fat old Jewish guy from London." But I've linked you all the same in spite of you being a self-hating fat oldie.
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said... If you called yourself "Pots and Pans" it would be alright by me. Thanks for the link Levi, and relax. Now, life is not so bad is it?
Sue Blackwell said... Well, Levi9909, I was just wondering how long it would be before the phrase "self-hating" appeared in the comments on this blog. But apparently Eugene is a "self-hating fat oldie" not a self-hating Jew. So that's all right then. LOL.
Michael Brenner said... Oh yeah, beautiful post. From now on, I'll say that pro-Palestinian will use any Jew they can find to make their case for them, even the fat old Jewish guy who lives in the projects.
I see that the "we're not antisemites we're anti-Zionists even though we have no problem with people who traffic in classic Jewish stereotypes" crowd is here, including the Christian fundamentalist nutjob turned radical nutjob from London who tried to launch a boycott of Israeli universities who offer Arabs the best education in the Middle East, the self-hating Stalinist who throws a hissy fit when someone writes comments on his blog that doesn't toe the party line, and even the Middle East editor of Global Voices, who doesn't understand why Jews find articles from Nationalvanguard.com offensive.
All so that they don't have to confront anyone who actually disagrees with them since that might require actually dealing with the reality, which is that most Jews believe in the right to self-determination and right to one Jewish state in the sea of Muslim states with much worse human rights records.
Yes, a beautiful post for the fat old Jewish guy who lives in the projects. It's too bad that you don't want your right of return, but somehow, I don't feel too bad about it.
Anonymous said... Dear Eugene, I am grateful for this post. Your honesty and earthiness is most welcome. I was born into exile, my folks were expelled/deported from their homes in Palestine in '48. I don't hear many Israelis questioning this event, questioning their moral obligation to the Palestinians. Instead, we get labelled as anti-semites, or, as in your case 'self-hating', for speaking out for our basic rights. Up until early last century, Palestinians of all backgrounds lived side by side. I always get a kick out hearing Palestinians being wrongly labelled as anti-semites; Palestinians are semites! I guess that makes Palestinians 'self-hating semites'(???). Anyhoo, I don't have you linked up, but rest assured you will be as soon as my blog is sorted out. Peace.
annie said... Divide and conquer, distract and destroy... interesting thing about the insults carefully chosen by Tim to dismiss those who dared enthusiastically support you speaking out on the Palestinian right of return. Take for instance the hot button issue of Holocaust denial. Not hard for Tim to find my web page of published letters and actually see that over and over again I in fact, use a capital "H" and refer to the Holocaust with horror, too frequently in fact for some peace activists who think such a response on my part helps empower the whole Holocaust industry thing. Who knows- they might be right. Meanwhile, from what I have seen Sue Blackwell, very active with advocating boycotts, is totally repulsed by any hint of Holocaust denial. She's no dummy. But then again- neither are Zion-Nazis: Divide and conquer....
Insults and targeted character assassinations are quite a Zio-Nazi art form. Carefully chosen barbs that aren't as sloppy as they might appear. Intentionally trying to fracture, undermine, and dissolve resistance to Israeli racism. By the way that Tim phrased it , you would have no way of knowing unless you already did that Al Awda is the Palestine Right to Return Coalition. The primary goal is advocating human rights, mainly by educating the international community to fulfill its legal and moral obligations vis-a-vis Palestinian refugees based on The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International law and through the implementation of United Nations Resolutions upholding the inalienable right of Palestinians to return to their homes of origin and to restitution of all their confiscated and destroyed property (see fact sheet). ( I confess I didn't write that part- just did a quick cut and paste from the Al Awda page) Sure wish I had a zingy line to finish with- but I don't.
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said... I'm going to post an excellent item by Paul Eisen about this whole "Holocaust thing."
Well, you're certainly Jewish enough for Hitler to kill, but not jewish enough to be actually Jewish. You just happened to have been accidentally born to Jewish parents. Go figure.
(so that's the flavor of the zionist attack, now here comes Sue and the "anti zionist" attack:) Eugene please do not give space on your excellent blog to Holocaust revisionists like Paul Eisen and his soulmate Israel Shamir. They do no favours to the Palestinians, and by suggesting that all Jews are Zionists of one sort or another Eisen is insulting all those Jews who genuinely oppose Zionism - which apparently includes yourself. I have a whole page about these people at:
http://www.sue.be/pal/nazis.html
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said... Dear Sue: I am saddened by your post here at this blog. Let me tell you why.
I have been aware of the differences between you, and Paul Eisen, and Israel Shamir. I have participated in Shamir's group togethernet at yahoo and have corresponded briefly with both of them prior to starting this blog, not about this blog but about a world of issues and opinions.
I can feel your opinions because two years ago ago they were mine more or less too. I think they are honest on your part but off the mark, and seriously so. However, I did not attack or even bring up this difference with you because people who oppose the Israeli state or even who oppose its actions need to show as much unity as is possible. It's not as though the zionists are on the run and we have the luxury of a cat fight, a public one at that.
Let me tell you how broadly I mean this. I have differed with Shamir on some things on his yahoo group, and trust me when I say I despise a David Duke. (Read my post about tripping over the code of military justice, it's a true story) and in that I have not changed a whit, except perhaps I'm stronger about racism.(Read my stuff about NYC snatching Black and Hispanic Kids and locking up their parents).
However, I have not sought to go out of my way to amplify differences with Shamir. He has guts like few others and he tells the truth about Israel, about Judaism and about zionism. and he does not say, nor does Eisner, that there are no anti zionist Jews. In fact they point out, at least Shamir does, how few and far between they are and how little they (we) represent. If anything, in being the exception for the present we tend to prove the rule.
Shamir thinks a Jew can and has to stop being one. I frankly don't know if this is either possible or entirely desireable. I've gone back and forth on this inside my own head, but I'm satisfied to go on living and be who and what I am, which is a commie pinko Jewish subversive.
Shamir has an honest opinion.
If I can dialogue with the zionists who have come here to my blog to disrupt and threaten, if I could want with all my might to have my pieces about Child Welfare be in the Zionist newspapers here in New York, why on earth would I not dialogue with any other racist?
It's Bloomberg's New York where a Black man with a clean police record has a harder time in getting a job than a white felon. it's Zuckerman's Daily News that demonized the Black people of New Orleans, and though David Duke copied his garbage and put it on his website, like a dog yapping and running alongside his master, it's no doubt who does the most damage.
When I use the term "Zionazi I mean it.
Then Sue gets a little Nudge from the Zionist peanut gallery: "I have a whole page about these people at: http://www.sue.be/pal/nazis.html"
Now, honey cake, you can add your dear ole Eugene to the list. He belongs there.
Next time choose your friends more carefully.
Oh, gosh, you have been already told so. Repeatedly, too...
And Sue Comes through.... Sue B said...
"People who oppose the Israeli state or even who oppose its actions need to show as much unity as is possible" - sorry Eugene, I want no unity with Holocaust deniers and anti-semites. (I know that "unity" stuff is exactly what Shamir says. BTW I don't believe he is even Jewish, not that it matters.)
Choice quote from Eisen: "True, there was little hard evidence, but what there was could so easily be made to fit. After all, everyone knew that the Germans had engaged in purposeful mass extermination of Jews therefore 'special treatment' and 'deportation to the East' must be euphemisms for extermination, and any sealed chamber attached to a crematorium especially if used for disinfestations by gas, must have been a homicidal gas chamber."
If that's not Holocaust denial I don't know what is. You really want "unity" with such people?
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said... Dear Sue,
I don't want to end up mixing apples and oranges here. I've read what David Irving said at his trial in Canada and I've read quite a lot more.
I know enough about Shamir to say he hates what the Nazis did in the USSR and the rest of Europe. I know he was and still is pro Soviet in fact.
I read Eisen's stuff pretty closely. He is referring to holes in the official or accepted, or taught to the school children in Harlem version of what took place in Europe between 1938 and 1945.
The holes in that narrative are glaring. Sue when I was a boy I knew that four million Jews wee murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz and that the toal of Jews murdered was six million.
Now they say one million or one and a half million or perhaps six hundred thousand were murdered at Auschwitz, yet the official total six million (or five million one hundred thousand if you read Raul Hillberg) remains. Isn't there an inconsitency here? Have you read Arno Mayer?
The stories I grew up on, about the human flesh rendered into soap, about the whole vicinity around Auschwitz stinking from the ashes of human beings, about gas chambers in Dachau are just not true. And there is a challenge to the notion that the gas chambers at Auschwitz and crematoria there could have physically been accessories to the number of said to be murdered inmates, and I have not seen any rebuttal. If you have, please p[ost it here on my website.
I'm not making light of what the Nazis did, Sue, nor do I think Eisen is, nor Atzmon, nor Shamir. I have a problem though with little children being indoctrinated with propaganda that was used to justify the imperialist side of World War Two (it seved other purposes as well, even contradictory ones, but still war propaganda.) Worse this narrative serves as Zionist propaganda and indoctrination.
Let me take it one step further. Holocaust propaganda serves to shield the most priviledged group (religion, ethnicity,nationality, call it what you will, what "the Jews" are is a mystery to me) from just crticism of many of its members and of its collective conduct.
About "unity":
In a united front diverse and even antagonistic forces work or fight in one direction on one or several related matters in which they share common interest. "One direction" doesen't mean in lockstep on all matters. If Shamir and my differences of opinion were important at this moment I'd be bringing them out in detail. In fact they're hypothetical and theoretical for the most part.
Shamir shakes the Jewish world and that's a good thing!
Paul Eisen's stuff?
To quote you quoting Paul Eisen: "'Choice quote from Eisen: "True, there was little hard evidence, but what there was could so easily be made to fit. After all, everyone knew that the Germans had engaged in purposeful mass extermination of Jews therefore 'special treatment' and 'deportation to the East' must be euphemisms for extermination, and any sealed chamber attached to a crematorium especially if used for disinfestations by gas, must have been a homicidal gas chamber.'"
Even Yehuda Bauer said that the story of Wannsee is a myth.
What the Nazis did to the Jews was bad enough Sue. It was part of their anti Communist crusade (a fact buried today in "the narrative" - an insult to those who fought the Nazis from the start.)
It was bad Sue but it was not the crime of all history, it does not equal the ongoing holocaust of hunger and death from curable disease that kills as many children every year as the Nazis are said to have killed the Jews over seven years, it does not equate with the slave trade.It might be right up there with the slaughter of the Indochina war and other crimes too.
Sue B said... I'm not an expert on the Holocaust and I don't have as much time as you do, Eugene, otherwise I'd start my own blog! I will respond to just a few of your points and let others deal with the rest of them, if anyone else is still reading this. You said in an earlier post: >I did not attack or even bring up this difference with you because people who oppose the Israeli state or even who oppose its actions need to show as much unity as is possible. It's not as though the zionists are on the run and we have the luxury of a cat fight, a public one at that. Well if you prefer to continue this debate off-line you are welcome: I have sent you my e-address. But I thought the whole point of blogging was to have one's arguments in a public forum. You can't expect to post several pages of crap by Paul Eisen and not get a response, indeed I'm sure you were trying to provoke one and that's what you got. You suggest that Eisen is merely referring to the "holes" in the official version. But the passage I quoted indicates to me that he is denying the existence of gas chambers at all, not just quibbling over the numbers who died in them. And I'm sure most people would read it the same way. > And there is a challenge to the notion that the gas chambers at Auschwitz and crematoria there could have physically been accessories to the number of said to be murdered inmates, and I have not seen any rebuttal. If you have, please post it here on my website. Try this one: http://www.holocaust-history.org/ auschwitz/body-disposal/ Of course Zionists make propaganda out of the Holocaust, distort it, divert money intended for the survivors etc. etc. But you don't counter that propaganda by encouraging people who deny the existence of gas chambers. I'm all for bona-fide academic research which gets us closer to the real numbers and the whole truth about the Holocaust - including the millions of non-Jewish victims who are often overlooked. To say that there have been other acts of genocide and the Nazi holocaust was not unique is not at all the same thing as denying what the Nazis actually did. To anyone in the UK I would recommend the current BBC2 series "Auschwitz, the final solution" which is shown around 8.15 on Saturdays. It includes numerous interviews with both survivors and perpetrators. Perhaps Eisen thinks they were all lying? This will be my last post on this page - I'll see y'all elsewhere on the web before long.
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said... http://www.vho.org/GB/c/ CM/jcz.html Sue, try that one on for size if you have the time.
You're right,a blog is exactly a place for controversy. I was not looking for attacks from within the camp opposed to Israel and its actions to the level of calling activists like Eisen a nazi. I think that's over the top, Sue.
Here's the kernel of your argument with Eisen (correct me here if I'm wrong): "'Choice quote from Eisen: "'True, there was little hard evidence, but what there was could so easily be made to fit. After all, everyone knew that the Germans had engaged in purposeful mass extermination of Jews therefore 'special treatment' and 'deportation to the East' must be euphemisms for extermination, and any sealed chamber attached to a crematorium especially if used for disinfestations by gas, must have been a homicidal gas chamber.'"
It seems quite reasonable to me that Paul could be speaking of Dachau, a camp I knew of as a boy. You will have to agree that the war propaganda that identified Dachau as a place of mass gassings and creamations turned out to be false. It turns out that indeed there was a gas chamber at Dachau in which clothing of inmates was in fact rid of lice. As distateful as that expresson is it's accepted today. http://www.scrapbookpages.com/ DachauScrapbook/GasChamber/Index.html
Gas Chambers at Dachau "Baracke X, erected May 1942 to April 1943. It was to serve both as a killing facility and to remove the dead, but the gas chamber in the middle of the building was not used for mass murder. Survivors have testified that the SS did, however, murder individual prisoners and small groups here using poison gas." Building where Dachau gas chamber was located The photograph above, taken in May 2003, shows the building where the infamous Dachau gas chamber is located. The gas chamber room is right behind the white table, which has a memorial inscription to the victims. The low shrub on the left hides a memorial plaque on the ground which marks the spot where the gallows stood.
When soldiers of the US Seventh Army arrived on April 29, 1945 to liberate the concentration camp at Dachau, they found that the inmates in the camp, who were predominantly Communists and other anti-Nazi political prisoners, had organized into an International Committee headed by a Belgian Communist named Albert Guérisse who was using the fake name of Patrick O'Leary and pretending to be Canadian. Patrick O'Leary spoke perfect English and he and his fellow Committee members were very anxious to give a guided tour of the camp to the American heroes and the newspaper reporters who accompanied them. They particularly wanted to show them the five gas chambers outside the prison compound in the new crematorium building, named Baracke X. Many of the soldiers and newspaper reporters who took this tour wrote their descriptions of the gas chambers. I have put these eye-witness descriptions on a separate page.
The official report of the US Seventh Army was printed as a book entitled Dachau Liberated: The Official Report of The U.S. Seventh Army, Released Within Days of the Camp's Liberation by Elements of the 42nd and 45th Divisions. The following quote is from this book:
"When the American troops arrived on 29 April 1945, there were approximately 32,500 estimated internees of all nationalities, the Poles predominating. During this period, the camp was notorious for its cruelty, but within the last six or eight months, some 'token' improvement was noted in the treatment of the internees. However, the new crematorium was completed in May 1944, and the gas chambers, a total of five, were used for the executions and the disposals of the bodies."
Shortly after the liberation of Dachau, the American Army released a photograph which clearly showed that a gas chamber was in operation there. The photograph was published in American newspapers and magazines and was then shown in a traveling exhibit which started in St. Louis and ended in Washington, DC. Films of Dachau taken at the liberation of the camp were shown in the weekly newsreels in American movie theaters. American congressmen traveled to Dachau in early May 1945 and stood in the largest gas chamber, examining its fake shower heads. Their Congressional Report, based on this visit, was entered into the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg as evidence that a homicidal gas chamber was used to murder prisoners at Dachau.
After the liberation of Dachau, the Army quickly set up a museum in the new crematorium and General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered that as many American soldiers as possible should be brought to the camp to view the evidence of Nazi atrocities, particularly the notorious gas chamber disguised as a shower room. However, Eisenhower himself never visited any of the three major Nazi concentration camps in Germany, nor did he mention any gas chambers in his book, Crusade in Europe.
At the Nuremberg war crimes trial, eye-witness testimony about prisoners being killed in the Dachau gas chamber was given by Dr. Franz Blaha, a Czech Communist who was a prisoner in the camp and a prominent member of the International Committee at Dachau. At the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi war criminals, a film was shown which included some footage of the Dachau gas chamber. Visitors to the Memorial Site can see the gas chamber footage from this film in a 22-minute movie shown every half hour in the museum.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, there was no doubt whatsoever in anyone's mind that there was indeed a homicidal gas chamber in the new crematorium building at Dachau and that prisoners in the camp had been murdered there. In 1972 a fictional Hollywood film called Justice at Nuremberg confirmed this belief. Dachau was the only concentration camp mentioned in the movie, giving some people the impression that 6,000,000 Jews had been gassed to death there.
Up until 1960, it was an accepted fact that a gas chamber, disguised as a shower room, had been used to murder prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp. Then on August 19, 1960 on page 16, Die Zeit, a German magazine, published a letter from Martin Broszat, head of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Herr Broszat stated that the Dachau gas chamber had never been completed and had not been put into operation..."
Ah, yes, the movie "Judgement at Nuremberg" by which I a youth learned that the Jews were mass murdered at Dachau. I was like the entire generation of Jewish youths at that time indoctrinated and traumatized by a Hollywood lie. For shame!
Guttenplan in The Guardian:
"Although the grisly tale of the soap figured in some of the earliest accounts of Nazi-occupied Europe, it is now rejected by historians as a fabrication - similar to the atrocity stories of Allied propaganda during the first world war. Dachau did have a gas chamber, but it was never used. This week the BBC referred to the "death camp" at Belsen, but there were no gas chambers at Belsen.
Nor did the Nazis come first for the Jews; as Peter Novick explains in his brilliant and provocative new book, The Holocaust in American Life, "First they came for the Communists" - a circumstance acknowledged by Niemöller, who continued, "but I was not a Communist - so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat - so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew - so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left who could stand up for me." The Holocaust Museum in Washington DC is just one of those who, in Novick's phrase "prudently omits" Communists from Niemöller's homily.
But prudence and political calculation have influenced our knowledge of the Holocaust from the beginning. Even the word itself - from the Greek holos, for whole, and kaustos, for burnt - is contested. In some circles, the Hebrew word Shoah, meaning destruction, is preferred. The Princeton historian Arno Mayer coined the term "Judeocide" to describe the subject of his study Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? For a long time after the war, the fate of European Jewry was hardly mentioned, partly because, as the cartoonist Art Spiegelman's father says in Maus, his survivor's tale in cartoon format, "No one wants anyway to hear such stories," and partly because in camps liberated by British and American troops including Dachau, Belsen and Buchenwald, only a minority of the prisoners were Jews. In Ed Murrow's famous 1945 broadcast from Buchenwald the words Jew and Jewish are never spoken.
In her first book, Beyond Belief, Lipstadt wrote that even when confronted by the evidence, many correspondents were reluctant to admit to themselves and their readers the reality of genocide. She attributes some reluctance to anti-Semitism. Novick, who teaches history at the University of Chicago, suggests a different reason for postwar reticence: with the realignment of the cold war, talk of the Holocaust was inimical to US interests. In 50s America few besides Communists shouted "Remember the six million!"
or most Americans, including Jews, the Holocaust was "the wrong atrocity" - mention of it was at best an embarrassment, at worst a cause for suspicion. Today the Holocaust is ubiquitous. Films such as Schindler's List, television programmes, novels, memoirs all add to what we know - or think we know - about what Raul Hilberg called "the destruction of the European Jews". His book with that title was published in 1961. The first reviews were mostly hostile: it was years before Hilberg won prizes. Merely consider the reception of Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments (1995) to see how much has changed: it won the National Jewish Book Award for autobiography. Even after evidence mounted that Wilkomirski was really Bruno Dössekker, a Swiss musician whose account of a childhood in the camps is fictional, Fragments attracted readers, such is the appetite for Holocaust literature.
How did this change come about? Novick mentions a gradual easing of the cold war, outbreaks of neo-Nazism in Germany and the US, the 1952 publication of Anne Frank: The Diary of A Young Girl, adapted to stage and screen. But the single greatest catalyst was the trial of war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Much of the initial response was negative. But as the trial wore on, the mass of detail overcame scepticism. The trial was televised, and for the first time the American public was confronted with the Holocaust distinct from the general carnage of war.
Now, nearly 40 years after, Eichmann's name again echoed in a court. For over nine weeks in Courtroom 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice the Holocaust has been on trial as Charles Gray presided over David Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd and Deborah Lipstadt. Towards the end of the trial, which, thanks to British libel laws, forced Lipstadt to prove the truth of the claim in her book Denying the Holocaust that Irving knowingly distorted or suppressed evidence regarding the Nazi massacre of European Jewry, it was announced that the Israeli authorities had agreed to release Eichmann's diaries. But the problem of Lipstadt and her lawyers couldn't be solved by new evidence. The problem was how to interpret what was already there.
To Irving, author of numerous books on the Third Reich, the Holocaust is "an ill-fitting legend". He didn't deny many Jews died; he denied that any of them were killed in gas chambers, that Hitler directly ordered the annihilation of Jewry, and that the killings were in any significant way different from the war's other atrocities.
In Hilberg's insight, the destruction of European Jewry was a bureaucratic process, the result of "a series of administrative measures". In their pursuit of the Endlösung - the Final Solution to the Jewish question - the Nazis left the detritus of any large organisation: memoranda, requisition forms, purchase orders and blueprints. A million Jews were murdered at Auschwitz and all had to be taken there by train in the middle of a war in which the railways were the lifelines of the German army. The Zyklon B gas to kill them had to be paid for. And the ovens that disposed of the bodies had to be specially built, by Topf and Sons, a firm that patented the design. For each Stück - piece, as the Nazis referred to a Jew - processed, items had to be accounted for: money, dental gold, hair. Hilberg mapped this bureaucracy in three volumes, but the essential facts are in a series of tables. Deaths by cause shows that more than 800,000 Jews died from "ghetto-isation and general privation," more than 1.3m by "open-air shootings," and up to 3m were murdered in camps - as many as 2.7m in specialised extermination centres such as Sobibór, Treblinka, and Belzec; 150,000 died in other camps, including concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald.
In deaths by country, Hilberg's list ranges from the 3m Jews of Poland to the fewer than 1,000 from Luxembourg, and in deaths by year charts the genocide's rise and fall. But the total is the same: 5.1m Jews. Other historians dispute Hilberg's arithmetic, arguing for 6m. Scholars remain divided on when and why the Nazis shifted from encouraging Jewish emigration (which saved half of Germany's Jews) to extermination (which murdered 90% of Greece's Jews). They argue about the role of the camps in the German economy.
Irving used these disagreements to get into the debate. But his arguments were of a different order. He filed for libel in September 1996; that spring, his US publishers, St Martin's Press, had cancelled the publication of his Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. Given his history, controversy was to be expected, even courted. Publishers Weekly pronounced the book "repellent"; Jewish organisations expressed outrage; Deborah Lipstadt was quoted as saying that St Martin's would hardly sign up a white supremacist for a book on race relations.
St Martin's at first stood firm, but between a March Daily News report about the uproar and Frank Rich's April New York Times column calling Irving "Hitler's Spin Artist," it lost nerve and cancelled publication. The principal effect of this, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out in Vanity Fair, was to transform a man with "depraved ideas" about the Holocaust into a poster boy for free speech. This lent the book the cachet of suppressed literature. and gave rise to Gordon Craig's declaration, in a review in the New York Review of Books, that "silencing Mr Irving would be a high price to pay for freedom from the annoyance that he causes us". Craig continued: "He knows more about National Socialism than most professional scholars in his field, and students of the years 1933-1945 owe more than they are always willing to admit" to his research. "Such people have an indispensable part in the historical enterprise, and we dare not disregard their views." On Tuesday, Mr Justice Gray found otherwise.
The argument is familiar. In the late 70s, French intellectuals were convulsed over l'affaire Faurisson. Robert Faurisson, professor of literature at the University of Lyons, wrote in Le Monde the "good news" that the gas chambers had not existed. "The alleged Hitlerian gas chambers," he said, "and the so-called genocide of the Jews form a single historical lie whose principal beneficiaries are the State of Israel and international Zionism."
Hitchens described Irving as "not just a Fascist historian, but a great historian of Fascism". He also assumed that what Irving really wanted was a debate with his critics. If that had been Irving's objective, all he had to do was bide his time. "Someone," Hitchens asserted, "will no doubt pick up where St Martin's left off." Instead, Irving blamed Lipstadt for his troubles in the US and sued her and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel in England. At which point it became more difficult to defend the proposition that what was at stake was Irving's freedom of speech.
Faurisson's chief antagonist, French classicist Pierre Vidal-Naquet, argued : "To live with Faurisson? Any other attitude would imply that we were imposing historical truth as legal truth, which is a dangerous attitude." Vidal-Naquet opposed his government's use of torture in Algeria and supports the rights of Palestinians. Perhaps because both his parents were deported by the Nazis (his mother died in Auschwitz), he felt it just as important to expose Faurisson's distortions as to support his right to distort. His scepticism about the role of the state has no echo in Lipstadt, unlike his argument against debating the Holocaust.
He wrote: "Confronting an actual Eichmann, one had to resort to armed struggle and, if need be, to ruse. Confronting a paper Eichmann, one should respond with paper... In so doing, we are not placing ourselves on the same ground as our enemy. We do not debate him; we demonstrate the mechanisms of his lies and falsifications, which may be methodologically useful for the younger generations." We need only set this passage from Assassins of Memory, his restrained, yet devastating, response to Faurisson, beside a similar passage from Denying the Holocaust to see the extent of Lipstadt's indebtedness. "Not ignoring the deniers does not mean engaging them in debate; it means not doing that. We cannot debate them for two reasons, one strategic and the other tactical... The deniers long to be considered the "other" side. Engaging them in discussion makes them exactly that. . They are contemptuous of the very tools that shape any honest debate: truth and reason. Debating with them would be like trying to nail a glob of jelly to the wall." Though she relies on his arguments, Lipstadt is no Vidal-Naquet. She lacks his intellectual breadth, clarity of thought and expression, and, sadly, his stature as a Jew who has never confined his political engagement to Jewish causes.
In Israel, as you might expect in a country where in the 40s the slang for Holocaust survivor translated as soap, the battle over representing the Nazi genocide has always been bare-knuckled and open. The arguments go back to the war, when supporters of mainstream Zionism sought to discredit the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe (agitating noisily for rescue) as a vehicle of the right-wing Zionist terrorist group Irgun. As indeed it was. David Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders were not thought lessly "writing off" European Jewry, Peter Novick says, but just making a "chilling... appraisal of what was and was not possible".
Though it is impolite to mention it, there are still live questions about the Holocaust. The dispute between intentionalists, who say that genocide was always part of Hitler's plan, and functionalists, who argue the Final Solution evolved in response to changing conditions and fortunes of war, is far from settled. Another open, though stifled, question is about the number of survivors. Irving's claim that Jews inflated the number of victims to extort money from Germany merely demonstrates his ignorance. The payments to Israel were for resettling refugees, and it would have been in Israel's interest to exaggerate the number of survivors, not the number of victims. But that doesn't mean there weren't individuals who, to qualify for payment, claimed to have spent the war hiding in Poland when they had been living, in relative safety if not comfort, deep in the Soviet Union.
More delicate is the question of survivor testimony. According to Elie Wiesel: "Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened." Would Wiesel censure Lipstadt for saying: "Lots of survivors who arrived at Auschwitz will tell you they were examined by [Dr Josef] Mengele. Then you ask them the date of their arrival, and you say, 'Mengele wasn't in Auschwitz at that point'." Would he censure her, or any historian, for daring to ask for evidence, documents, corroborating testimony? That is what historians do. And when they are prevented from doing it, either by Jewish groups who feel that the Holocaust belongs to them or by Zionists seeking to preserve Israel's "moral capital", the result is a blurring between memory and propaganda that serves only the interests of the Nazi perpetrators and their political legatees.
Yet time and again those who insist on the truth in all its complex, unsentimental, paradoxical, and ambiguous detail are shouted down. It isn't only anti-Semites who, in T S Eliot's phrase, find a "large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable". The many obstacles thrown up by the history of our understanding of the Holocaust make Judge Gray's ruling all the more remarkable.
But his reasoned arguments are unlikely to make an impact on either the Holocaust deniers or their opponents. Holocaust deniers, as the latest incarnation of a paranoid tradition, are by nature impervious to fact. For them, Irving's defeat confirms his martyrdom; the scale of his undoing proves the power of the forces against them. For the growing Holocaust industry, victory over Irving is more likely to be a stimulus than a restraint.
In her statement after the trial, Lipstadt described the struggle against denial as unending. Let me be clear: Lipstadt deserved to win. But the encouragement that her victory will give to some groups supporting her - such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews or the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai Brith - in their efforts to police public discussion of the Holocaust and of Israeli policies, is no cause for celebration.
Thanks to the efforts of her lawyers and their experts, we now know a great deal about what is wrong with Irving's scholarship. But the trial did not contribute to our understanding of the Holocaust. There was one aspect of Judge Gray's decision that, left unchallenged, will make greater understanding of the Holocaust even less likely. Time and again, he referred to what an "objective historian" might do. But if judges aren't historians, historians shouldn't be expected to be judges. Irving's problem wasn't detachment but dishonesty. The Holocaust has always had a political as well as historical meaning; in America, that meaning has shifted a great deal from the days when conservatives saw a Communist behind every mention of the 6m.
Perhaps with Irving safely consigned to the dustbin of history, the rest of us can join the debates that, in scholarly circles, have raged for some time. This may mean giving up comfortable certainties about the distinctness of Jewish suffering, the exterminationist nature of German anti-Semitism and the redemptive force of Zionism. But if the effect of the Irving decision is to strengthen the hand of those who wield the Holocaust like a totem, or a truncheon, then truth and history might as well never have had their day in court.
• DD Guttenplan is currently writing an account of the trial for Granta Books, to be published next year. A longer version of this was first published in Atlantic Monthly.
This really will be my last say on this page! Look, Eugene, Paul Eisen's article "The Holocaust wars" is on the Zundel site. Zundel is a full-blown Holocaust denier. He is currently on or awaiting trial for Holocaust denial in Germany, having been extradited from Canada. Eisen writes a passionate defence of Zundel, describing him as a "gentle, good-humored man, kind and honest" etc. etc. This is the man who was involved in a book called "The Hitler We Loved and Why". Eisen's eulogy is here: http://www.zundelsite.org/zundel_persecuted/may20-05_eisen.html I rest my case m'lud.
Anonymous said... You rest your case Sue? And what case would thast be? You don't want to be associated with "deniers" and "anti-semites", would you care to define what you meant by those terms? And what narrative of the Holocaust are you going with? And just because Zundel links to Eisen, then you assume Eisen is a denier? This is your argument?
Fat Old Jewish Guy Who Lives In The Projects said... Wow am I tired. I had a few days vacation, then I fell ill for a few days. I used these days to a large extent right here. NO. the sick days were for real. I have the kind of a job that a sixty year old man cannot do while he's actually sick, it's tough tough tough tough tough, not like blogging. My job is at night and it's taxing a hell. Sometimes, like today, I have an errand or two to do in the daylight hours. then I come to my computer, rub my eyes, and go for it. Like most night workers I sleep in fits and starts; two hours here, three hours there, unless I take some Niteall or Valerian. Even then it tends to be fits and starts so it may seem as though I'm always here! Anyhow,it seems we really are rapping up this Sue B adventure.I think I pretty much took her position apart and so she runs to Zundel. She runs to Eisen's defense of Zundel. I recommend everyone read that article. I'm going to put a link up to it. Eisen is defending Zundel's right to speak.Also as a fellow anti zionist he is closing ranks in the face of the enemy. Zundel is sentimental about Hitler. A lot of Germans are. Why? Well you don't have to be a nazi or even like them to want to understand how they came to power. Hitler and the nazis played on a vast antipathy for communism in Germany. Germany had been sundered by the revolutionary upheavals after the First World War,led largey by Jews. I like Rosa Luxemburg! But as in moist revolutions, it's a determined minority who support it until it's won. Rarely is it a majority even of the working class. Well, if a revolution loses, you know the story: "nobody likes a loser." Sadly the reds lost. Those then determined to finish off Bolshevism had the momentum and the result was Hitler. To get this traction Hitler not only pushed fantasy and mytholgical supremacism (like the zionists and Judaists do), he also delivered for a lot of people. And guess what? Not a few subjectively good Germans, who were kind to children and animals, who honored their parents and gave to charities were motivated by love for their neighbors and culture liked Hitler, and werent particularly angry at Jews, either. In fact in the elections running up to Nazi power, the played down the whole Jewish Card. They were more about "Law and order" as well as "us (Germans) against them" (the world), not unlike Jewish paranoia also. That kind of stuff sells. Anyhow not for nothing did millions of Germans, including some really nice guys and gals, stupidly follow Hitler to the gates of hell, just as Jews who are charming and have great senses of humor and love children and animals are also zionazis.To fight this stuff you have to understand it and not simply trash the confused. Of course in war it's different. You demonize every soldier on the other side no matter how stupidly naive and idealistic he is. After all, you are tryint to get other nice guys worked up enough to go out and try to kill them at the peril of their own lives. So Zundel is another of these nice guys who happens to be a non zionist racist and non zionist anti communist who has spent years of his life attacking a mytholgy that demonizes his own people. NAzis did lots of horrible crimes in WWII. So did allies. Except for the Soviet people, the Chinese revolutionaries and the antifascist fighters in the underground movements no one was really on the side of the angels in that scrap. Except for those above mentioned the war was a vicious scramble to redivide and suck the life out of most of the world and its resources, people included. The imperialists who were last at the table, like Germany, Italy and Japan, were no worse for wanting "their fair share" of the booty than were those who got there first, Britain, France and the United States, for not wanting to allow them to the table. Anyhow I ramble. Goodbye Sue it's been good to know you. You hae not rested any case and it's past my bedtime. I deny that the Jews are the people who have suffered more than all others. I deny that the Jewish people were helpless victims. I deny that Hitler was primarily about Jews - he was about destroying the Soviet Union, just like the zionists and Pat Buchanan were together. G'night.
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