The History That Dares Not Speak Its Name

The poem “Two Loves” was published in Britain in 1894. Its final line, referring to “the love that dare not speak its name” became known thereafter as a reference to homosexuality, or what then was often freely called faggotry, or today is respectfully referred to as alternative sexual preference. There is today, and has been since at least 1945, a line of historical inquiry whose name, if it or even sympathy for it, becomes attached any public person in the West, spells instant professional death for that person and, in many countries, fines and time in jail. Its factually false name in the mouths of those seeking to demonize both it and any person who presumes to tolerate it is “Holocaust denial,” usually accompanied by unfounded imputations of racism and Nazi sympathies, or at least the intention of pandering to these leanings in others. “Holocaust denier” is freely used as an all-purpose tar brush the same way “nigger lover” was used within my lifetime to tar anyone who advocated equal rights and treatment by the government for all and every person regardless of the color of their skin.

No outlet, or publisher, would allow the “faggot” label to appear anywhere the name of Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc. But Jeremy Corbyn is widely proclaimed to have consorted with Paul Eisen, a longtime-known “Holocaust denier.”

That the public, including the media and academia, still today even tolerates, much less in the slightest way credits such a scurrilous pejorative is a damning testament to popular attitudinal inertia, much the way the public countenanced slavery and arguments in its favor at least until the time the Civil War decimated the manhood of the United States in the mid-Nineteenth Century.

Those today familiar with the numerous and conclusive disproofs of the central elements of the legally enforced Holocaust narrative who admit respect for those findings are in a far worse position than any known Abolitionist in the heart of antebellum Georgia would have been, even if their lynchings today are merely social, financial and professional rather than physical, as was done to hundreds of putative perpetrators in Germany in the evil aftermath of World War II in Europe.

Today, the reversal of popular sympathy for adverse views on homosexuality and racial equality is so thorough that not only have terms like “faggot” and “nigger lover” utterly vanished from the public lexicon, it has become literally a (“hate”) crime to apologize in any way for their use in the present or the past. While blasphemy laws are everywhere now an artifact of the distant, superstitious past and memorials are erected to women executed four hundred years ago as witches, the smear term “Holocaust denier” reigns at the top of a short list of similar dog whistles, most of them starting with the freely slung word “extremist.”

A vestige from the dark past thus befouls the pages, even the headlines of books by would-be scholars such as Dr. Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University falsely applying the term to Mr. David Irving of No University in her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust. The New York Times would not publish the terms “faggot” or “nigger lover” in its august pages, but like every other eminent newspaper in the world, it freely quotes and applies “Holocaust denier” to persons who are anything but that. Such is propriety, ever the refuge of the worst scoundrels. Organizations such as Amazon.com, no doubt seeking to avoid being called upon to prove the accuracy of the term where they might use it, settle on branding such material “offensive” and base their censorship decisions on that catch-all term.

Hatred, the now-prohibited emotion routinely ascribed to persons who pursue Holocaust history in the wrong ways, is most-often found in its most-virulent forms in those imputing it to others. The hatred implied in the derogatory use of the term is best captured by Joseph Sobran’s famous (re-)definition of the term “anti-Semitism.” Sobran quipped that, while once an anti-Semite was a person who hated Jews, today a person so-called is, in fact, a person hated by Jews. Or, to spell it out, a hater was once a person who hated. Today, such a person is one who is hated.