The holocaust denial conference

The stage does not lack candidates, but Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, would certainly make any shortlist of international pantomime villains. A year ago he described the holocaust as a myth:

'If someone were to deny the existence of God... or prophets and religion, they would not bother him. However, if someone were to deny the myth of the Jews' massacre, all the Zionist mouthpieces and the governments subservient to the Zionists tear their larynxes and scream against the person as much as they can.'

This year, Tehran is playing host to delegates from 30 countries for a conference entitled 'Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision'. In case you missed the call for papers, the Iranian foreign minister has summarised the objective of the conference 'to create an atmophere to raise various opinions about a historical issue. We are not seeking to deny or prove the Holocaust.'

Maybe not, but this implies a debate when, as Deborah Lipstadt has pointed out, the issue is 'not a matter of debate.' Or, to be more precise, it should not be a matter of debate as to whether the holocaust happened or not - or an argument about numbers (of the 'did six million really die?' school). Historians have long struggled to get to grips with the problem of representing the genocide: for example, the Historikerstreit debate of the 1980s - which encompassed a widely-nuanced range of functionalist and intentionalist approaches - sought to either contextualise the holocaust or cement its unique place in history. The debate was kickstarted by Ernst Nolte in 1986, when he contended that the holocaust was unique only in the technical means employed by the Nazis, but was otherwise comparable to other mass murders. The backlash against this argument was that it detracted from the specifically horrifying aspect of the holocaust - the systematic, industrial and ideologically motivated extermination of European Jews.

Nolte's approach arguably could facilitate evasive and apologetic statements regarding the Nazi 'final solution', but both sides of the argument are dangerous because they encourage the formation of a hierarchy of terribleness. Geoff Eley has noted that:

'To insist upon the uniqueness of the event is a short step to insisting on the exclusiveness of interpretation which asserts an empathetic privilege and even a Jewish proprietorship in the subject.'

It is not so much the notion of Jewish proprietorship that has caused the present controversy as Israeli proprietorship. Indeed, several Jews, some from the small anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect, are in attendance at the Iranian conference. While holocaust denial has long been the preserve of the European and American far right (David Duke is also a delegate), it has increasingly found a niche in the Middle East. Here, it is less to do with neo-Nazi politics, but more to do with the presence of the state of Israel - or, what Duke describes as 'the number one terrorist state in the world.' The Iranian foreign minister has suggested the event is necessary in order to respond to lack of free speech in the west about the holocaust, which he claims is used to justify the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.

For rational, educated people, this conference, which refers to 'supposed gas chambers', the 'alleged final solution' and places David Irving (currently languishing in an Austrian prison) under the heading of 'truth', should be dismissed as nonsense, or a postmodernist joke taken too far. The event has already attracted widespread criticism.

Alongside the criticism, however, comes the cleverly intertwined debate on free speech. Ahmadinejad has suggested that the western world does not allow 'any investigation' into the holocaust. David Duke, moreover, has stated that 'It's a shame that Iran, a country we often call oppressive, has to give this opportunity for free speech'. This debate has already made it into the mainstream media: see this February 2006 op-ed piece from the LA Times, for example: 'Freedom is a principle that must be applied indiscriminately.'

The problem for historians, however, is not so much the question of free speech, but the much greater problem of (historical) truth. The holocaust presents historians with 'the limits of representation' - how can one begin to understand the actions of those men and women who played a part in the Nazi machinery of extermination? Is it simply impossible to separate the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group from political or moral considerations? The significance of genocide is frequently cited in aphorisms about ‘learning from the past’, yet historical events do not allow the construction of infallible models for 'doing it better'. As Yehuda Bauer has pointed out, it is also possible to twist and mould the ‘lessons’ of the Holocaust for different individual and group agendas. At the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, for example, the Israeli government stated that 'the historical and educational purpose of the trial should be emphasised, that the historical consciousness in connection with the Holocaust of the European Jewry find its full meaning.' The government did not, however, place emphasis on the purely political implications of the trial for the young state of Israel.

The holocaust is still a young event: survivors remain as living testimony against the deniers. The historian carries the enormous burden of carrying on this work once the last survivor has died. The holocaust deniers, however, will never be satisfied. The basic holocaust denial argument is that Hitler’s intention was not to annihilate the Jews, but instead to pursue a policy of emigration, which became a logistical impossibility with the onset of war. The apparent Jewish declaration of ‘war’ on Nazi Germany by the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann (who declared Jewish allegiance to the side of democracy) meant that, technically, the Nazis could intern the Jews as an internal threat to security. Once the Jews had been put into ghettoes or concentration camps, the deniers argue that no systematic mass genocide occurred. They do admit to a limited amount of random slaughter, but assert that most Jewish death, which they measure in hundreds of thousands rather than millions, was due to typhus epidemics or organisational chaos towards the end of the war.

To put forward this argument, over the past few decades, denial has taken a more insidious form, one giving it an air of academic respectability and rationality - of which the Tehran conference is only the latest manifestation. The methodology of this form of denial is to present what appears to be a systematic analysis and conclusion of why the Holocaust could not have happened. The aesthetic of these works is important – there is a significant difference between them and a neo-Nazi pamphlet. Instead, the views contained within ‘academic’ denials are subtler: they quote at length and provide large numbers of footnotes and references. This type of intellectual façade emerged in the 1970s, such as the work of Arthur Butz, an Illinois Professor of electrical engineering and author of ‘The Hoax of the Twentieth Century’ in 1976. Similarly, Richard Harwood (the pseudonym for Richard Verrall, who was the editor of the British neo-fascist National Front newspaper ‘Spearhead’) wrote a booklet called 'Did Six Million Really Die? The Truth at Last' in 1974. Lipstadt has noted that, because 'at first glance it seemed to be a sober scholarly effort, many outside the circle of deniers were confused by the claims it made.' In 1978 the 'Institute for Historical Review' (unfortunately, its acronym is the same as the Institute for Historical Research) was founded to promote 'revisionist' (i.e.) denial arguments.

Holocaust deniers will lie and deceive, they will be selective in what evidence they use: they will scavenge what is useful and discard what is not. They will, like so many modern television health show presenters, invest themselves with invented academic status. To argue with a holocaust denier is aking to beating your head against a brick wall: as Roger Eatwell has pointed out, they based much of their argument on 'an unattainable conception of proof'.

Preserving the legacy of the holocaust should neither be the sole responsibility of the Jewish people or of historians. Indeed, a wide debate on the causes, course and consequences of the genocide is to be encouraged, in order to foster whatever comprehension can be gleaned from the incomprehensible. The words that are emanating out of Iran at the moment are not however calculated towards this end, however, and the crude veneer of scholarly debate does not disguise the blatantly propagandistic purposes of the conference.

Rabbi Cohen, one of the Jewish attendees to the Tehran conference, has criticised those who assert the 'exclusivity' of the holocaust: "They have the audacity to think that they can prevent the Almighty from repeating a Holocaust. This is heresy." The way things are going, divine intervention may not be necessary.