Isn't David Irving the "historian"/writer who was discredited in court by Deborah Lipstadt? He's not exactly a reliable source lol.
Since Ames was merely an ignorant political hack transmitting the opinions of others, I focused on Lipstadt, his key source. Anyone who has spent much time on the comment-threads of relatively unfiltered websites has certainly encountered the controversial topic of Holocaust Denial, but I now decided to try to investigate the issue in much more serious fashion. A few clicks on the Amazon.com website, and her 1993 book Denying the Holocaust arrived in my mailbox a couple of days later, providing me an entrance into that mysterious world.
Reading the book was certainly a tremendous revelation to me. Lipstadt is a professor of Holocaust Studies with an appointment in Emory University’s Department of Theology, and once I read the opening paragraph of her first chapter, I decided that her academic specialty might certainly be described as “Holocaust Theology.”
The producer was incredulous. She found it hard to believe that I was turning down an opportunity to appear on her nationally televised show. “But you are writing a book on this topic. It will be great publicity.” I explained repeatedly that I would not participate in a debate with a Holocaust denier. The existence of the Holocaust was not a matter of debate. I would analyze and illustrate who they were and what they tried to do, but I would not appear with them…Unwilling to accept my no as final, she vigorously condemned Holocaust denial and all it represented. Then, in one last attempt to get me to change my mind, she asked me a question: “I certainly don’t agree with them, but don’t you think our viewers should hear the other side?”
Lipstadt’s absolute horror at having someone actually dispute the tenets of her academic doctrine could not have been more blatant. Surely no zealous theologian of the European Dark Ages would have reacted any differently.
The second chapter of her book supported that impression. Since many of the individuals she castigates as Holocaust Deniers also supported the Revisionist perspective of the underlying causes of the First and Second World Wars, she harshly attacked those schools, but in rather strange fashion. In recent years, blogger Steve Sailer and others have ridiculed what they describe as the “point-and-sputter” style of debate, in which a “politically-incorrect” narrative is merely described and then automatically treated as self-evidently false without any accompanying need for actual refutation. This seemed to be the approach that Lipstadt took throughout her rather short book.
For example, she provided a very long list of leading academic scholars, prominent political figures, and influential journalists who had championed Revisionist history, noted that their views disagree with the more mainstream perspective she had presumably imbibed from her History 101 textbooks, and thereby regarded them as fully debunked. Certainly a Christian preacher attempting to refute the evolutionary theories of Harvard’s E.O. Wilson by quoting a passage of Bible verse might take much the same approach. But few evangelical activists would be so foolish as to provide a very long list of eminent scientists who all took the same Darwinist position and then attempt to sweep them aside by citing a single verse from Genesis.
Lipstadt seems to approach history much like a Bible-thumper, but a particularly dim-witted one. Moreover, many of the authors she attacked had already become familiar to me after a decade of my content-archiving work, and I had found their numerous books quite scholarly and persuasive.
Barnes, in particular, figured quite prominently in Lipstadt’s chapter and throughout her book. The index listed his name on more than two dozen pages, and he is repeatedly described as the “godfather” of Holocaust Denial, and its seminal figure. Given such heavy coverage, I eagerly examined all those references and the accompanying footnotes to uncover the shocking statements he must have made during his very long scholarly career.
I was quite disappointed. There was not a single reference I could find to his supposed Holocaust Denial views until just the year before his death at age 79, and even that item is hardly what I had been led to believe. In a 9,300 word article on Revisionism for a libertarian publication, he ridicules a leading Holocaust source for claiming that Hitler had killed 25 million Jews, noting that total was nearly twice their entire worldwide population at the time. In addition, Barnes several times applied the word “allegedly” to the stories of the Nazi extermination scheme, a sacrilegious attitude that appears to have horrified a theologian such as Lipstadt. Finally, in a short, posthumously published review of a book by French scholar Paul Rassiner, Barnes found his estimate of just 1 million to 1.5 million Jewish deaths quite convincing, but his tone suggested that he had never previously investigated the matter himself.
So although that last item technically validated Lipstadt’s accusation that Barnes was a Holocaust Denier, her evidence-free claims that he was the founder and leader of the field hardly enhanced her scholarly credibility. Meanwhile, all the many tens of thousands of words I had read by Barnes suggested that he was a careful and dispassionate historian.
A notorious incident that occurred soon after the Bolshevik Revolution came to my mind. Eminent philologist Timofei Florinsky, one of Russia’s most internationally renowned academic scholars, was hauled before a revolutionary tribunal for a public interrogation about his views, and one of the judges, a drunken Jewish former prostitute, found his answers so irritating that she drew her revolver and shot him dead right there and then. Given Lipstadt’s obvious emotional state, I had a strong suspicion that she might have wished she could deal in a similar fashion with Barnes and the numerous other scholars she denounced. Among other things, she noted with horror that more than two decades after his 1940 purge from public life, Barnes’ books were still required reading at both Harvard and Columbia.
All of us reasonably extrapolate what we already know or can easily check against what is more difficult to verify, and the remaining chapters of Lipstadt’s book left me very doubtful about the reliability of her work, all of which was written in a similar near-hysterical style. Since she had already been vaguely known to me from her well-publicized legal battle against historian David Irving more than a dozen years earlier, I was hardly surprised to discover that many pages were devoted to vilifying and insulting him in much the same manner as Barnes, so I decided to investigate that case.
I was only slightly surprised to discover that Irving had been one of the world’s most successful World War II historians, whose remarkable documentary findings had completely upended our knowledge of that conflict and its origins, with his books selling in the many millions. His entire approach to controversial historical issues was to rely as much as possible upon hard documentary evidence, and his total inability to locate any such documents relating to the Holocaust drove Lipstadt and her fellow ethnic-activists into a frenzy of outrage, so after many years of effort they finally managed to wreck his career. Out of curiosity, I read a couple of his shorter books, which seemed absolutely outstanding historiography, written in a very measured tone, quite different from that of Lipstadt, whose own 2005 account of her legal triumph over Irving, History on Trial, merely confirmed my opinion of her incompetence.
Lipstadt’s first book Beyond Belief, published in 1986, tells an interesting story as well, with her descriptive subtitle being “The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945.” Much of the volume consists of press clippings from the American print media of that era interspersed with her rather hysterical running commentary, but providing little analysis or judgment. Some of the journalists reported horrifying conditions for Jews in pre-war Germany while others claimed that such stories were wildly exaggerated, with Lipstadt automatically praising the former and denouncing the latter without providing any serious explanation.
Lenni Brenner’s remarkable book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators had been published three years earlier. Although I only discovered it very recently, any half-competent specialist in her own topic would surely have noticed it, yet Lipstadt provided no hint of its existence. Perhaps the reality of the important Nazi-Zionist economic partnership of the 1930s, with Nazi officials traveling to Palestine as honored Zionist guests and leading Nazi newspapers praising the Zionist enterprise might have complicated her simple story of fanatic German Jew-hatred under Hitler steadily rising towards an exterminationist pitch. Her faculty appointment in a Department of Theology seemed very apt.
Lipstadt’s wartime coverage was just as bad, perhaps worse. She cataloged perhaps a couple of hundred print news reports, each describing the massacre of hundreds of thousands or even millions of Jews by the Nazis. But she expressed her outrage that so many of these reports were buried deep within the inside pages of newspapers, a placement suggesting that they were regarded as hysterical wartime atrocity propaganda and probably fictional, with the editors sometimes explicitly stating that opinion. Indeed, among these under-emphasized stories was the claim that the Germans had recently killed 1.5 million Jews by individually injecting each one of them in the heart with a lethal drug. And although I don’t see any mention of it, around that same time America’s top Jewish leader Rabbi Stephen Wise was peddling the absurd report that the Nazis had slaughtered millions of Jews, turning their skins into lampshades and rendering their bodies into soap. Obviously, separating truth from falsehood during a blizzard of wartime propaganda was not nearly as easy as Lipstadt seemed to assume.
Ordinary Americans were apparently even more skeptical than newspaper editors. According to Lipstadt:
Writing in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, [Arthur] Koestler cited public opinion polls in the United States in which nine of ten average Americans dismissed the accusations against the Nazis as propaganda lies and flatly stated that they did not believe a word of them.
Lipstadt convincingly demonstrated that very few Americans seem to have believed in the reality of the Holocaust during the Second World War itself, despite considerable efforts by agitated Jewish activists to persuade them. Over the years, I have seen mention of numerous other books making this same basic point, and therefore harshly condemning the American political leaders of the time for having failed “to save the Jews.”
Analyzing the History of a Controversial Movement
www.unz.com
