Relativism, however convoluted, sounds far more legitimate than outright denial. These German historians have created a prototype that may prove useful for the deniers. In the future, deniers may adopt and adapt a form of relativism as they attempt to move from well outside the parameters of rational discourse to the fringes of historical legitimacy. Rather than engage in outright denial they will espouse more opaque quasi-historical arguments that confuse well-meaning and historically ignorant people about their motives.[1]
Denial aims to reshape history in order to rehabilitate the persecutors and demonize the victims. What relativism seeks to do is not that different. It, too, attempts to rehabilitate the perpetrators, and if in the course of that rehabilitation a certain re-evaluation of the victims occurs, so be it.[2] In the years to come, as relativism increasingly becomes the deniers’ protective veneer, distinguishing between these two groups may grow more difficult.
If Holocaust denial has demonstrated anything, it is the fragility of memory, truth, reason, and history. The deniers’ campaign has been carefully designed to take advantage of those vulnerabilities. While there is no precise means of gauging their success, there are enough signs on the horizon—many of which I have examined in the previous pages—to offer some assessment. Right-wing nationalist groups in Germany, Italy, Austria, France, Norway, Hungary, Brazil, Slovakia, and a broad array of other countries, including the United States, have adopted Holocaust denial as a standard facet of their propaganda.{25} Whereas these groups once justified Nazi murder of the Jews, now they deny it. Once they argued that something quite beneficial to the world happened at Auschwitz. Now they insist that nothing did. Their antisemitism is often so virulent that the logical conclusion of their argument is that though Hitler did not murder the Jews, he should have. Since they are intent on weakening liberal democratic institutions, Holocaust denial constitutes a seminal weapon in their arsenal. Though they have fomented social upheaval and in certain instances caused significant physical harm, the threat posed by these groups is limited because they are so easily identified. Their dress, behavior, and tactics leave no doubt as to who they are. We know them by their shaved heads, leather jackets, tattoos, terror tactics (including murder), swastikas, cries of sieg Heil, and Nazi paraphernalia-laden rallies. They are as identifiable as a group of Ku Klux Klan members fully bedecked in white-sheeted regalia, chanting racist slogans, and carrying a fiery cross through a black neighborhood. They cause havoc and strike justifiable fear into the hearts of their potential victims. But their outward demeanor is like a flashing yellow light warning the innocent passerby of the danger. No one can mistake them for anything but exactly what they are: neofascists, racists, antisemites, and opponents of all the values a democratic society holds dear. The chance of their attracting a wide following from the general public is slim.
The deniers also sport an outward veneer, but rather than expose who they are, it camouflages them. The stripping away of the deniers’ cloak of respectability—which was one of the main objectives of this book—reveals that at their core they are no different from these neofascist groups. They hate the same things—Jews, racial minorities, and democracy—and have the same objectives, the destruction of truth and memory. But the deniers have adopted the demeanor of the rationalist and increasingly avoided the easily identifiable one of the extremist. They attempt to project the appearance of being committed to the very values that they in truth adamantly oppose: reason, critical rules of evidence, and historical distinction. It is this that makes Holocaust denial such a threat. The average person who is uninformed will find it difficult to discern their true objectives. (That may be one of the reasons why Canadian high school teacher James Keegstra was able to espouse Holocaust denial and virulent antisemitic theories for more than a decade without any protest being mounted against him. He made them sound like rational history.)
The deniers will, to be sure, cultivate this external guise of a reasoned approach all the more forcefully in years to come. They will refine this image in an attempt to confuse the public about who they really are. Any public contact with white-power and radical right-wing groups will be curtailed. People without identifiable racist or extremist pasts will be drafted for leadership positions. The Willis Cartos, who have spoken of the need to prevent the “niggerfication” of America, will increasingly recede into the background as their public roles are diminished. Young men and possibly even women (at the moment there are no prominent women deniers) with pseudotraining in history will be sought out to become the symbolic vanguard of the movement. Overt expressions of antisemitism will be restrained so that those who fail to understand that Holocaust denial is nothing but antisemitism may be fooled into thinking it is not.
We have already seen frightening manifestations of the success of this approach on the various campuses where students, faculty, and administrators declared Bradley Smith’s ad not to be antisemitic. If Smith succeeded so easily on campus, imagine the success he might have among groups who are even less accomplished at critical reasoning! This tactic has been particularly successful in Australia and New Zealand, where, under the guise of defending free speech, the Leagues for Rights—which in essence are nothing but Holocaust-denial organizations—have successfully attracted individuals who would normally have eschewed antisemitic activities. This strategy is behind some deniers’ calls for a change in the IHR’s methodology. They argue that it should place less emphasis on the Holocaust and instead make it only one among the many “hoaxes” they address. This call does not stem from a genuine broadening of their interests or a lessening of their obsession with Jews. It is rooted in their desire to achieve some academic legitimacy. As long as they appear to be consumed with this single issue, that respectability and acceptance will elude them. What they project as a widening of their interests is merely a tactic designed to gain access to the mainstream.
A strategic change will also mark the activities of the racist, neo-Nazi, ultranationalist groups. So easily identifiable by their outer trappings, they will adopt the deniers’ tactics, cast off the external attributes that mark them as extremists, and eschew whatever pigeonholes them as neofascists. They will cloak themselves and their arguments in a veneer of reason and in arguments that sound rational to the American people.[3] The physical terror they perpetrate may cease, but the number of people beguiled by their arguments will grow. They will begin to espouse a form of denial that hovers between the relativism of the German historians’ debate and the outright lies seen so often in these pages—a metamorphosis that will make it easier for them to attract new adherents. This pseudorespectability will render them more appealing to a younger, economically disenfranchised segment of the lower middle class, who see themselves living on the brink of failure in the midst of a prosperous society whose benefits are not available to them. This is as true for the United States as it is for Germany, France, and Austria.[4]
1
Countries such as the United States, where the degree of ignorance about historical matters is legendary, are particularly susceptible to this kind of rewriting of history. In 1990 only 45 percent of Alabama high school seniors knew that the Holocaust was the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews. It is telling that many of those who gave the wrong answer thought that the United States had committed the Holocaust against the Japanese with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (
2
The same kind of rehabilitation is evident in France among the highest reaches of the political and judicial establishment. President François Mitterrand recently had a wreath placed on the grave of the Vichy leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, who collaborated with Nazi Germany and was directly responsible for the deportation of thousands of Jews. Pétain, who in World War I was commander in chief of the French forces, was convicted of treason by a French court in 1945. Mitterrand insisted in a radio interview that present-day France should not be held responsible for the crimes of the Vichy regime. While the contemporary French government does not bear “guilt” for Vichy’s actions, honoring one of the perpetrators with a presidential wreath sends a revisionist message to the population at large. It revises the historical perception of France’s role in the Holocaust. It can, and already has, become part of a historical whitewash.
Another form of French historical revisionism has been the refusal of French courts to try Vichy war criminals for their actions. The courts have thrown out these indictments, though the Supreme Court recently reinstated one of them. Thus far no citizen of France has been tried for crimes against humanity (
3
This tactic was evident in the 1992 attempt of the Cincinnati Ku Klux Klan to erect a cross on city property during the Christmas season. They claimed it was part of their campaign to remind Cincinnatians of the religious significance of the holiday. It was a way for the Klan to present itself as more than just a racist organization.
4
It will prove particularly true for those beset by what my colleague David Blumenthal has termed “alterphobia”—the fear of the other. The other may be homosexuals, women, foreigners, Jews, people of color, or all of the above.