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.