Let this point not be misunderstood. The deniers have the absolute right to stand on any street corner and spread their calumnies. They have the right to publish their articles and books and hold their gatherings. But free speech does not guarantee them the right to be treated as the “other” side of a legitimate debate. Nor does it guarantee them space on op-ed pages or time on television and radio shows. Most important, it does not call for people such as Chomsky to stand by them and thereby commend their views to the public.[5]
We have only witnessed the beginning of this movement’s efforts to permeate cultural, historical, and educational orbits. They must be taken seriously: Far more than the history of the Holocaust is at stake.
While Holocaust denial is not a new phenomenon, it has increased in scope and intensity since the mid-1970s. It is important to understand that the deniers do not work in a vacuum. Part of their success can be traced to an intellectual climate that has made its mark in the scholarly world during the past two decades. The deniers are plying their trade at a time when much of history seems to be up for grabs and attacks on the Western rationalist tradition have become commonplace.
This tendency can be traced, at least in part, to intellectual currents that began to emerge in the late 1960s. Various scholars began to argue that texts had no fixed meaning. The reader’s interpretation, not the author’s intention, determined meaning. Duke University professor Stanley Fish is most closely associated with this approach in the literary field.{67} It became more difficult to talk about the objective truth of a text, legal concept, or even an event. In academic circles some scholars spoke of relative truths, rejecting the notion that there was one version of the world that was necessarily right while another was wrong.{68} Proponents of this methodology, such as the prominent and widely read philosopher Richard Rorty, denied the allegation that they, believed that two incompatible views on a significant issue were of equal worth.{69} But others disagreed. Hilary Putnam, one of the most influential contemporary academic philosophers, thought it particularly dangerous because it seemed to suggest that every conceptual system was “just as good as the other.”{70} Still others rightfully worried that it opened the doors of the academy, and of society at large, to an array of farfetched notions that could no longer be dismissed out of hand simply because they were absurd.
Nonetheless, as a methodology this approach to texts had something to recommend it. It placed an important, though possibly overstated, emphasis on the role played by the reader’s perspective in assigning meaning to a text. It was also a reminder that the interpretations of the less powerful groups in society have generally been ignored. But it also fostered an atmosphere in which it became harder to say that an idea was beyond the pale of rational thought. At its most radical it contended that there was no bedrock thing such as experience. Experience was mediated throughone’s language. The scholars who supported this deconstructionist approach were neither deniers themselves nor sympathetic to the deniers’ attitudes; most had no trouble identifying Holocaust denial as disingenuous. But because deconstructionism argued that experience was relative and nothing was fixed, it created an atmosphere of permissiveness toward questioning the meaning of historical events and made it hard for its proponents to assert that there was anything “off limits” for this skeptical approach. The legacy of this kind of thinking was evident when students had to confront the issue. Far too many of them found it impossible to recognize Holocaust denial as a movement with no scholarly, intellectual, or rational validity. A sentiment had been generated in society—not just on campus—that made it difficult to say: “This has nothing to do with ideas. This is bigotry.”
This relativistic approach to the truth has permeated the arena of popular culture, where there is an increasing fascination with, and acceptance of, the irrational. One area in which this has been evident is in the recurring debate regarding the assassination of President Kennedy. While there is reason to question some of the conclusions of the Warren Commission, the theories regarding the killing that have increasingly gained acceptance border on the irrational. Notions of a conspiracy within the highest echelons of American government are readily accepted as plausible. According to Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, a coup d’état was underway in the United States, with the collusion of the vice president, Joint Chiefs of Staff, chief justice of the United States, FBI, CIA, members of Congress, and the Mafia. Stone’s film imposed a neat coherence on a mass of confusing information, providing a self-contained explanation for what still seemed to be an unbelievable event. Many reviewers and moviegoers alike pondered these charges with great seriousness.
In another debasing of history, serious credence has been given to reverse racist charges about white scholarship. Some extremist Afrocentrists, who rightfully assert that Africa’s role in shaping Western civilization is too often ignored, would have us believe that the basis of all intellectual and scientific thought as we know it originated on that continent. Leonard Jeffries, professor of Afro-American studies at New York’s City College, has declared blacks to be “sun people” and whites “ice people.” All that is warm, communal, and full of hope comes from the former; all that is oppressive, cold, and rigid from the latter.{71} In these instances, history is rewritten for political ends and scientific historiography is replaced, in the words of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard, with “ideological conformity.”{72} Scholars who might once have dismissed these outlandish views feel compelled to treat them as having some validity.
These attacks on history and knowledge have the potential to alter dramatically the way established truth is transmitted from generation to generation. Ultimately the climate they create is of no less importance than the specific truth they attack—be it the Holocaust or the assassination of President Kennedy. It is a climate that fosters deconstructionist history at its worst. No fact, no event, and no aspect of history has any fixed meaning or content. Any truth can be retold. Any fact can be recast. There is no ultimate historical reality.
Holocaust denial is part of this phenomenon. It is not an assault on the history of one particular group. Though denial of the Holocaust may be an attack on the history of the annihilation of the Jews, at its core it poses a threat to all who believe that knowledge and memory are among the keystones of our civilization. Just as the Holocaust was not a tragedy of the Jews but a tragedy of civilization in which the victims were Jews, so too denial of the Holocaust is not a threat just to Jewish history but a threat to all who believe in the ultimate power of reason. It repudiates reasoned discussion the way the Holocaust repudiated civilized values. It is undeniably a form of antisemitism, and as such it constitutes an attack on the most basic values of a reasoned society. Like any form of prejudice, it is an irrational animus that cannot be countered with the normal forces of investigation, argument, and debate. The deniers’ arguments are at their roots not only antisemitic and anti-intellectual but, in the words of historian Charles Maier, “blatantly racist anthropology.”{73} Holocaust denial is the apotheosis of irrationalism.
5
Chomsky’s behavior can be contrasted with that of thirty-four of France’s leading historians who, in response to Faurisson’s efforts, issued a declaration protesting his attempt to deny the Holocaust. The declaration read in part: “Everyone is free to interpret a phenomenon like the Hitlerite genocide according to his own philosophy. Everyone is free to compare it with other enterprises of murder committed earlier, at the same time, later. Everyone is free to offer such or such kind of explanations; everyone is free, to the limit, to imagine or to dream that these monstrous deeds did not take place. Unfortunately, they did take place and no one can deny their existence without committing an outrage on the truth. It is not necessary to ask how