Word count: 855 | Reading time: 4 min read
Pretzel Logic
Did it happen or didn’t it? Though it is always fair, and important, to question history, to re-examine our evidence and challenge our assumptions, the fact that there is so much doubt about the existence of Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews is disturbing.
On so many levels.
The survivors are rapidly dying off. Personal recollections are dying with them, making it easier to continue the lie that the Holocaust is nothing more than an imaginary figment of opportunistic Zionists.
Which brings us to the case of Irving v. Lipstadt, a nasty little tête-à-tête currently taking place before a British magistrate.
In 1993, Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book called Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.
Now, seven years later, she’s being sued for libel by a British writer named David Irving, who didn’t like Lipstadt’s portrayal of his efforts to deny the existence of the death camps.
In 1994, her book was published in England, where Irving filed suit. Under British law, it is up to Lipstadt to prove, in essence, that the Holocaust did take place and that Irving has dabbled in misleading pseudo-science to make his case. (See Sam Adams’ story last week on Mr. Death, the new documentary about Fred Leuchter, an engineer who tried to prove that the Germans did not have the technology to gas millions of Jews. Irving has used Leuchter to help make his point. Leuchter’s work has since been discredited.)
There are some who say, don’t worry. The Jews were gassed and otherwise murdered and tortured at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and a network of other death camps and that’s just the way it was and there’s plenty of evidence to prove it.
Me, I’m a father of three. I’m concerned because my children, third-generation kin of victims and survivors, never got to meet my cousin Muni, whose arm bore the blue numbers of a death camp inmate. To me, the numbers were an always-present reminder of the time Muni spent in the concentration camps. And the friends and family he watched die.
I worry that, without such vivid reminders to my children and their generation and beyond, the extermination of millions of human beings will become no more than a myth. I worry that, absent such readily verifiable proof, future generations, who will rely increasingly on the Internet for information, will be easily swayed by charlatans who sing a good song and dance a good dance with both the truth and the facts.
In a way, maybe it is a good thing to put the Holocaust on trial. So that, finally, the disingenuous diatribes of the deniers can be dismissed.
Not silenced.
Never silenced. Because, no matter how misinformed — even if he is professing the same type of logic that has some people believing the moon landing never happened, that we were all duped in a massive government conspiracy — David Irving has every right to believe what he wants and say what he will.
And maybe, just maybe, Irving has done us all a favor.
There are those who are sick of hearing Jews complain about the Holocaust. There are those, like Irving, who don’t believe it happened.
Irving’s own actions have brought this to a head, even for people who no longer want to know. A verdict for the defendant — and all the evidence gathered to lead up to such a decision — would be further proof to blunt the argument of Holocaust deniers.
But this is a libel case we’re talking about here, which, as a defendant in a couple of my own cases, makes me worry about the outcome of this trial.
Even with a preponderance of the evidence showing that the Holocaust took place, Lipstadt could still be found to have libeled Irving, a decision that he would use to lend credence to his slanted version of history, even if that is not what the judge intended.
Ultimately, this is not just about the Jews.
Millions of people in many places have been or are currently being systematically eliminated. In Cambodia, Chile, Indonesia. In Russia and China. And all over the Balkans. Jews may have been on the top of the hit list, but we have plenty of company on the charts.
By grasping at straws, by weaving disparate strands of theory into a supposedly whole cloth, Irving and others have tried to re-examine history, but have failed, miserably, to prove their hypotheses.
By denying the extermination of the Jews, Irving would not only be dead wrong, which is his right. He would squander a golden opportunity to understand how men and women can be goaded, cajoled or otherwise convinced to kill millions of their countrymates.
The more we understand this dynamic, the better chance we have of preventing it from recurring — despite our species’ love of mass bloodshed.
It’s one thing to re-examine history.
It’s another to rewrite it, and then sue an author who pointed out those revisions.
