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Holocaust Revisionism
and Neo-Nazism:
They are Not the Same!
By Paul Grubach
One of the most damaging, oft-repeated and
false accusations leveled against Holocaust revisionism is that
it is part of an extremist neo-Nazi movement, the ultimate purpose
of which is to destroy democratic political systems and reintroduce
Nazi totalitarianism. Expressing this widely held sentiment, a major
opponent of Holocaust revisionism, Dr. Michael Shermer, described
Holocaust revisionists as a "small but vocal group of anti-Semites,
neo-Nazis, and political radicals who would like to see the return
of National Socialism."[1] Shermer
imputes to all revisionists a covert desire to restore the Third
Reich, or bring on a Fourth. A cursory review of the evidence will
easily demonstrate the falsity of this claim.
Laird Wilcox, an expert on political extremism, estimated in
1989 that a minority (up to 25%) of Holocaust revisionists were
Nazi apologists, which means of course that the vast majority (75%)
at the time were not.[2] In the
decade that followed Wilcox's estimate, revisionism has attracted
a much wider audience which surely reduces this figure significantly.
Holocaust revisionism's opponents like Shermer make it a point to
ignore this important piece of evidence whenever they invoke the
"revisionism-equals-Nazism" canard.
The father of Holocaust revisionism,
Paul Rassinier,
was a pacifist, former Communist and left-wing socialist who opposed
the Nazis during WWII, and because of his activities in the French
Resistance was interned by the Germans in Nazi concentration camps.[3]
Indeed, this association of liberal and left wing intellectuals
with Holocaust revisionism has continued in France to this day.
The French-Jewish historian and bitter opponent of revisionism,
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, has noted that at the core of revisionism in
France is a left-wing , revolutionary group, La Vielle Taupe.[4]
The French revisionist scholar,
Dr. Robert
Faurisson, is a life-long apolitical liberal who never had any
sympathies with Nazism. Another prominent, left-of-center French
intellectual who is sympathetic to Holocaust revisionism is Serge
Thion.
The famous French political philosopher, Roger Garaudy, is a
former leftist Communist theoretician who converted to Islam. He
is also a noted proponent of Holocaust revisionism in France.
One of the premier spokesmen for Holocaust revisionism in America
is Bradley Smith.
His present wife is of Mexican descent and his ex was Jewish. For
numerous years prior to his involvement with revisionism he was
a liberal free speech advocate who described himself as a Libertarian.
Clearly, he hardly fits the mold for a neo-Nazi.
Prominent American revisionist author and activist
Michael Hoffman II has
expressed stringent criticism of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. He wrote:
"Hitler was a disaster for Germany.
He took fully legitimate ideas about organic community and rootedness
to the soil and twisted them into a modern counterfeit. In the
name of fighting the Bolshevik police state, he created one
of his own. In the name of military prowess, he rendered his
people defenseless before the merciless devastation of RAF bombers
of the British Empire. He crusaded against Communism and ended
up Communizing half of Europe. Hitler is the pre-eminent failure
and incompetent of this historical era."[5]
Regarding Nazism as a political system, Hoffman's judgment is
equally harsh and accurately reflects the consensus of opinion among
many revisionists who I have associated with:
"The Nazi system was suited to
an ant-hill comprised of servants, lackeys and toadies automatically
obeying "supreme leaders" whose vision was corrupted by the
mindless adulation they commanded. How I chuckle sardonically
when I stand amid howling Jewish mobs and bands of know-nothing
reporters as they accuse all revisionists of trying to "revive
Hitler" and having a "secret agenda" of "neo-Nazism."[6]
Clearly, this is hardly the talk of a "neo-Nazi."
The fact of the matter remains is that Holocaust revisionists
cannot be politically stereotyped, as they represent a wide range
of political opinion, leftist, liberal, libertarian, centrist, conservative,
rightist. There is indeed also a visible minority of neo-Nazis that
consider themselves Holocaust revisionists, but the vast majority
of revisionists cannot be categorized as such. Holocaust revisionism
is an historical school of thought and not a political movement.
In their Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never
Happened and Why do They Say It? , Michael Shermer and co-author
Alex Grobman write: "Some Holocaust deniers, particularly those
with extremist right-wing leanings, might gain greater acceptance
if the crime (of the Holocaust) attached to fascism had never actually
happened. Without the Holocaust perhaps fascism would be a more
acceptable alternative to democracy."[7]
Long before the Holocaust legend, a majority of people in the
Western democracies rejected totalitarian fascist movements, thus
showing that fascism is not an acceptable alternative to democracy
in the minds of most European peoples.
Stephen Roth, a former director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs
(London), proceeds to explain why he believes that Holocaust revisionism
is the most effective weapon in the "neo-Nazi" arsenal:
"If the crimes of the Nazis can
be wiped off the record of history, if the Nazi regime can be
whitewashed and made to appear as admittedly somewhat disciplinarian
and tough on law and order but basically harmless and more efficient
than our allegedly lax Western democracies with their growing
disorder, their crimes, violence, and riots, then the neo-Nazis
would have won a great victory. The system advocated by them
would also look harmless and acceptable, and the ideological
resistance to it, largely based on awareness of the horrors
of the past, would be undermined, particularly among younger
people who have no personal experience of Nazi rule."[8]
Should the revisionists succeed in convincing the peoples of
the Western democracies that the "gas chambers" never existed, the
vast majority would still harbor considerable resistance to the
philosophy, political system, and policies implemented during the
Third Reich. The National Socialists advocated a command state,
with one-party control of society and censorship of the press. By
contrast, inherent in the modern political culture of the West is
acceptance of a multi-party state, independence of the press from
overt political control, and a disdain for open regimentation.
Indeed, historian Francis Nicosia considers this an important
factor in England's refusal to ally with National Socialist Germany
during the 1930s. He points out that there was a fundamental irreconcilability
between the National Socialist and English political philosophies
and systems.[9]
Furthermore, the populations of the democracies, particularly
America, seem fixed in the belief that a certain quota of disorder
and dishonor, from riots and street crime to political and economic
corruption, is an acceptable price to pay for the maintenance of
the democratic society.
If Holocaust revisionism is not a neo-Nazi movement, why do its
opponents and critics continually label it as such?
What they are trying to accomplish, I believe, is very simple.
If people end up believing that Holocaust revisionism is, in essence,
a neo-Nazi movement, many will be convinced that due to this association
that the principal tenets of revisionism are false and perhaps even
evil. This is an ad hominem line of "reasoning" which is logically
fallacious but very psychologically appealing to large segments
of the population. The truth or falsity of a theory (such as Holocaust
revisionism) is independent of the political leanings of its proponents.
As the philosopher of science Karl Popper noted, it doesn't matter
where hypotheses come from, only whether they explain the evidence
they are based on, whether they are subject to disproof, and whether
they can hold up to attempts to disprove them.[10]
In short, this "revisionism-equals-Nazism" accusation is simply
an ideological battering ram utilized by revisionism's opponents
to discredit and undermine Holocaust revisionism.
NOTES
[1] Online: www.skeptic.com/wpbwt.html
See point #2.
[2] Laird Wilcox, "The Spectre Haunting Holocaust Revisionism,"
Revisionist Letters, Spring 1989, p. 8.
[3] See the biographical material of Paul Rassinier by various
authors in Paul Rassinier, The Holocaust Story and the Lies
of Ulysses: A Study of the German Concentration Camps and the Alleged
Extermination of European Jewry (Institute for Historical
Review, 1978).
[4] Pierre Vidal-Naqet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on
Denial of the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 1992),
pp.116-120.
[5] Michael Hoffman II, The Great Holocaust Trial,
Third Commemorative Edition, (Wiswell Ruffin House, 1995), p.136.
[6] Ibid.
[7] p.16.
[8] Michael Curtiss, ed., Anti-Semitism in the Contemporary
World (Westview Press, 1986), p.222.
[9] Francis Nicosia ,The Third Reich and the Palestine
Question (University of Texas Press, 1985), p.77.
[10] Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth
of Scientific Knowledge (Basic Books, 1962), passim.
© Copyright 2001, Paul Grubach
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