HardNews Magazine, India
Jan 6 2006
Holocaust and the myth of Sisyphus
Led by hardliner Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the
Holocaust-deniers are pushing a new culture of barbarism
Prasenjit Chowdhury Kolkata
Did the Holocaust happen? Is the killing of six million Jews during
the World War II and the systematic pogrom and gassing that led to
the biggest hecatomb of what we know as the `Final Solution’ in
history a mere figment of imagination? Unbelievable it may sound, but
there seems to exist a motley crowd of Holocaust-deniers who believe
that the most graphically documented blot of `man’s inhumanity to
man’ (via the concentration camps and mass deportations) is a
diabolic hoax. A `myth’.
If that sounds like an atrociously preposterous piece of historical
negation and revisionism perpetrated by a motivated bunch of
history-sheeters, witness the deliberations of an international
`educational’ conference on December 11-12, 2006. Titled `Review of
the Holocaust: Global Vision’, held in Tehran, it was hosted by a
crank, dispeller of this `myth’, hardliner Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who went on record some time back as seeking to wipe
Israel off the map. The extraordinary conference was held by the
Iranian Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Policy Centre, attended by 67
scholars from 30 countries, including Europe and the US.
Interestingly, a number of Jewish rabbis and orthodox Jews came
around to reject the existence of Israel, wearing badges, `A Jew, not
a Zionist’. Some came with the Israeli flag crossed out. The
conference has been widely discredited by the European Union, United
Nations Vatican, and condemned by many countries, including the US,
the UK, France, Germany, Russia and Austria.
Although there was a veneer of scholastic objectivity about the
conference, the international cast of established Holocaust-deniers
and implacable foes of Israel included David Duke, a former imperial
wizard of the Ku Klux Klan; Robert Faurisson, a French lecturer
stripped of his academic tenure for his anti-Holocaust opinions; and
Michele Renouf, a London-based associate of the British author David
Irving (Irving is currently serving a jail sentence in Austria for
Holocaust-denial.). Also, there was a group of radical anti-Zionist
rabbis like Rabbi Ahron Cohen representing `Jews United Against
Israel’, who oppose a Jewish state on religious grounds.
The basic contention was simple – that the Holocaust perpetrated by the
Third Reich was a colossal `propaganda myth’ employed by the Zionists
to dislodge the Palestinians from their homeland. That it was
contrived to gain moral advantage by Germany’s politico-military
adversaries, in combination with an amorphous `International Jewish
Conspiracy’, during and after World War II. And that across the
Middle East, contempt for Jews and Zionism is mainstream, as many
believe that the Holocaust has been wildly exaggerated to justify the
creation of the Jewish state in 1948 at the expense of the
Palestinians, a move viewed as yet another example of Western
imperialism.
This is dangerous propaganda, akin to claiming that the `Rape of
Nanking’ never happened or defending Creationism. But when the
historicity of the Holocaust is questioned, the problem is compounded
because the Nazis were meticulous record-keepers. They listed the
names of people sent to Auschwitz, Dachau and other death camps. The
name of Anne Frank, whose diary described living in hiding from the
Gestapo, appears on the list of a concentration camp, where she later
died.
As for more evidence, Germany, in April 2006, decided to open up its
hitherto-closed Holocaust archives, which contain 30 million to 50
million documents. Those records alone provide evidence of how the
Nazis tortured and killed 17 million people, including six million of
Europe’s 8.8 million Jews. Documents like these and the memories of
the few who survived will ensure that history’s darkest hour is never
forgotten.
The rub is that the rationale behind such a `historic’ conference,
many suspect, is not in the sprit of academic probity, but is a
sinister attempt to heighten frenzied anti-Semitism that runs deep in
the collective psyche of the Arab people. Other historians, such as
Arthur Butz, Ernst Zündel and Robert Faurisson, have worked hard to
discredit the prevailing theory that the German regime under Hitler
systematically killed millions of innocent civilians.
The first purveyor of this tripe of Holocaust-denial was Paul
Rassinier, an ex-French Communist Party member turned virulent
anti-communist cum Nazi apologist, who published his seminal work, Le
Passage de la Ligne (Crossing the Line), in 1948, the contention of
which was this: much of that the Nazis are accused of accrues from
`the natural tendency of its victims to exaggerate’.
In the US, the anonymous release of The Myth of the Six Million (a
book actually written by a Harvard-trained history professor named
David Leslie Hoggan, published by Willis Carto), in 1969, and a
booklet Did Six Million Really Die? by Richard Verrall (aka Richard
Harwood, 1974), leader of the British National Front, tried to
question the veracity of the number of Jewish people killed during
the Holocaust.
In late 2005, Ahmadinejad said that if the Europeans insisted the
Holocaust did happen, then it was they who were responsible and hence
they should pay the price. `If you committed this big crime, then why
should the oppressed Palestinian nation pay the price?… This is our
proposal: if
you committed the crime, then give a part of your own land in Europe,
the United States, Canada or Alaska to them (Jews)
so that the Jews can establish their country,’ he said.
That tickles the raw bone of Zionism. Modern Zionism emerged in the
late 19th century in response to the violent persecution of Jews in
Eastern Europe and anti-Semitism in Western Europe. Its founder, the
Viennese Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, argued in his 1896 book
Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) that the best way of avoiding
anti-Semitism in Europe was to create an independent Jewish state in
Palestine. Zionism was named after Mount Zion in Jerusalem, a symbol
of the Jewish homeland in Palestine since the Babylonian captivity in
the sixth century BC. The yearning to return to Zion, the biblical
term for the Land of Israel and Jerusalem, has been the cornerstone
of Jewish religious life since the Jewish exile from the land 2,000
years ago, and is embedded in Jewish prayer, rituals, literature and
culture.
Zionism, the religio-political movement advocating the creation of a
Jewish state in Palestine (Zion meaning the city of Jerusalem), had
been around for half century before the Holocaust, but it had always
been a minority movement among the Jews of Europe. The Holocaust
changed that radically, creating a new sense of dire expediency in
which a Jewish state had to fight its way into being. In the war that
accompanied Israel’s emergence, the Palestinian Arabs, who had been
two-thirds of the population of Palestine, found themselves confined
to 22 per cent of their territory (West Bank and Gaza), prevented by
new Israeli laws from reclaiming the homes and land from which
hundreds of thousands had fled.
As for moral high ground, Nachem Goldman, one of the founders of the
Jewish state and the Zionist movement, has said that it is
`sacrilege’ (he used the Hebrew word) to use the Holocaust as a
justification for oppressing others. He was surely speaking of
Israeli atrocities on the Palestinians and the violent spiral of
reprisal and counter-reprisals.
That is, to question the intent of manipulating the Holocaust is one
thing, but to deny altogether that the Holocaust happened or that it
is `a myth’ is a dangerous travesty of history. To deny that Jewish
deaths during the war were not caused by genocide is actually an
attempt to turn our back on history. History is replete with
instances of mass-killings on a genocidal scale: Soviet
`collectivisation’ of the 1930s, the Armenian massacres of 1915, the
extermination of indigenous people in the US, the Khmer Rouge carnage
in Cambodia and many more (including in India: 1984, Bombay pogrom
1992-93, the Gujarat genocide).
Unfortunately, many of these acts of barbarism do not enjoy the pious
degree of bad faith compared to the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
History is not a subject of dogma. When that happens, history
degenerates into propaganda or counter-propaganda of a very venal
kind.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress