The Issue of Motivation in Different Views of the Holocaust

Ingrid Rimland Zündel re-counts an experience from her early days as a revisionist as an interviewee on a television program called The Learning Channel.

A bad day on the set, one might say. Rimland says she believes the interview never aired.

Beliefs about the Holocaust, along with expression of those beliefs and attitudes towards those holding different beliefs, is a partisan affair, particularly on one side of the issue. Partisanship is, in fact, chief among the accusations made by defenders of the “legacy” view (the one established by and through propaganda during World War II). Of their opponents, these de-fenders of the victors’ view charge motivations of neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism, smearing on what is left of the “tar” produced in such abundance by the wartime Allies while they were bombing Germany back to the Stone Age and invading it from both sides. Only occasionally do these ideological warriors accuse their targets of being German, or of German descent, which many if not most of them, in any case, are not.

By way of riposte, it rarely occurs, except for the case of Ingrid Rimland above, that revisionists level charges of being Jewish, or of being members of Jewish-dominated “industries” such as the media, academia, and government, against their foes. Rather, revisionists tend, most annoyingly, to concentrate obstinately upon issues (questions), evidence, and analysis. Steven Some, chairman of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, even famously complained, “Those Holocaust deniers are very slick people. They justify everything they say with facts and figures.”

When their counterparts are overtly Jewish, as in the cases of the Anti-Defamation League or the Hillel Foundation, of course, the handy countercharge of anti-Semitism is rarely eschewed, nor is its handmaiden, Nazism, or sympathy for its frankly racial ideology. But it remains that revisionists seldom explore, at least publicly, the motivations, sympathies, or affiliations of their opponents (and detractors). I do not here propose any change in that policy; it is inalterably the high road—the only road—to the discovery and delineation of what is true. So I must relegate the present discussion to the status of a mere inquiry into what, if anything, a relaxation of the revisionists’ noble policy might eventuate if it were adopted and pursued to its limits.

Money

The huge amounts of money that continue to wash about the globe in the service of the Holocaust legend have given rise to the ironic ditty, “There’s no business like Shoah business.” The great bulk of the money comes either from tax revenues exacted by force by governments from their populaces or from wealthy donors who amassed their wealth by ostensibly legal means and erect monuments to their (Jewish) piety in “Holocaust studies” departments on hundreds of campuses throughout the world.

These temples to Jewish victimization all share the virtue of providing government-approved tax shelters for the ample incomes of their benefactors. The absence of such tax advantages from most enterprises supporting revisionism is of far lesser consequence to the typically much-less-endowed donors who support them. But the legions of “scholars” and other camp followers mobilized by the countless millions spent by the innumerable public and private institutions such as the tax-funded United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial outnumber the unpaid “corporal’s guards” mounted by revisionist groups by a hundred to one. Quite aside from earning the mercenary’s pay in this conflict, thousands upon thousands of “Holocaust survivors” and “Holocaust victims” (there’s a difference, but both are paid) have presented themselves to receive reparations funded these 62 years now by the taxpayers of Germany. In theory, the prevalence of fraud among such supplicants might be estimated by comparison with the legitimacy of the “injuries” among the occupants of a bus that suffered an accident on a busy city street (such buses are invariably full to bursting by the time police arrive).

Revenge

The military contests ensuing from Germany’s efforts to reclaim territories it lost in World War I offended, inconvenienced, and killed many millions of people in and from other countries. Many of the great numbers of such people who survived World War II bore an everlasting grudge against Germany and its people, including the children and grandchildren of that country’s wartime population. Belaboring the war-ravaged German survivors with eternal damnation for their sins absolutely requires the vigorous and unrelenting celebration of their “Holocaust” as centerpiece to the retributive exercise.

In occasional digressions from their ceaseless pursuit of facts and the evidence for them, the occasional revisionist, such as Freda Utley, has paused to note the undeniable innocence of the great majority of the beleaguered nation’s citizens. Such “Germanophilia” is resolutely condemned as bigotry by the advocates of aggrieved groups. According to them, the irredeemable guilt of each and every German alive at the time or born since is every bit as sacrosanct as the spotless innocence that suffused every victim of National Socialist racial policy through to his or her very soul. To question or investigate any aspect of the Holocaust is to undermine the innate culpability of every German that each bears solely by right of being German. Institutions advancing quite this agenda enjoy tax advantages in the US and elsewhere as organizations combatting hatred and intolerance.

Racial and Spiritual Solidarity

Many of the forces—prosperity, security, scientism, apathy—that have been eroding religiosity throughout advanced societies around the world have perforce also been thinning the devout ranks of Jewry quite as much. Many, if not most, of America’s “Jews” do not practice the religion whose members are called by that name nor, of course, any other religion, unless materialism might be elevated to such a lofty level of devotion. But while a non-practicing Christian, for example, might cease to be a Christian on the score of his dereliction; no one loses membership in a tribe of Israel by way of pietistic lassitude.

One of the reasons for this, aside from familial traditions and sheer genetics, is that a secular “religion” has been erected atop the foundation of the Gospels of the Holocaust. To dismiss obviously mythological tropes such as the parting of the Red Sea or the rain of manna on the starving people of Israel on their trek to the Promised Land is perfectly permissible on the part of the cynical, hard-to-fool Jew of the real world. But the infinite suffering of the millions of martyrs to German—oops, Nazi—tyranny, that is quite literally sacred, and devotion to it confers the privileges of membership not only within the tribe, but in a very privileged elite within the larger society. And conversely, dispassionate analysis of its underlying facts threatens the entire edifice.

Support and Apologetics for the Theocracy

Uniquely among religions in present times, Judaism “owns” a country with nine million inhabitants, territory (depending on what is counted) larger than New Jersey, a small but well-trained and superbly equipped armed forces, and nuclear weapons complete with delivery systems based on land, at sea, and in the air. Israel defines itself as a “Jewish” state, and Jews constitute a majority on the territory acknowledged by the United Nations to belong to it. Like other states besides perhaps Switzerland, Israel commits offenses against countries and individuals both within and outside its territory.

The purported history of the Holocaust has long constituted a traditional rationale for the bellicose foreign policy that it has pursued since its formation in 1948 and the numerous military aggressions it has committed against its neighbors. Israel, with diplomatic privileges in most of the countries of the world and one of the world’s most-feared intelligence apparatuses in the Mossad, likewise constitutes the headquarters and operational base for a program of propaganda and subterfuge by which it manages both mass opinions and governmental policy practically everywhere in the world, but particularly in the United States, where its most-visible political arm is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

Scrutiny of the Holocaust Gospel threatens not only the justifications for that power’s aggressions against people and peoples of the world, but even its very raison d’existence. Its extensive powers of killing, coercion, and surveillance are arrayed against Holocaust revisionism, no matter how honest or well-meaning. Aside from Pariah of the Week Iran, there is no government anywhere that expresses support for any form of Holocaust revisionism, and many governments, such as those of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, and Belgium, provide criminal penalties for anyone who might venture to submit any opinion at variance with whatever account it might be that the state approves.

The Essential Difference

Money, revenge, tribal solidarity—motivations aplenty, each more solid and compelling than the next. Looking for these or any similar motivations in the rewards revisionists can even hope for, much less expect to attain, leads ineluctably to the conclusion that revisionists must just be nuts, even if one were to accept an obsession to get at the truth, or at least to shed the burden of lies and deception.

In fact, a final contrast appears when the two sides’ motivations are compared. Self-appointed analysts of anti-Semitism, and of Nazism to the extent it is seen as being motivated by anti-Semitism, conclude that the attitude is solely the product of ancient, irrational superstitions—an artifact of purely cultural origin having no basis in any reality past or present.

Anyone, however, who considers the motivations for opposing Holocaust revisionism, even if disagreeing with them as operant facts, must grant that they are coldly, calculatedly, unquestionably rational.

1 Smith’s Report. No. 195, February 2013. http://tinyurl.com/mtsrbad

2 Newark Star-Ledger. October 23, 1996.

3 This derisory term was memorably employed by Historian Peter Novick in The Holocaust in American Life (p. 270) to describe the pitifully small numbers of “Holocaust deniers” populating his world.

4 Freda Utley. The High Cost of Vengeance. Henry Regnery Company, Chicago, 1949.