Anti-Semitism Is an Ancient Plague of Hatred

The good news is that David Irving, a Holocaust denier, was found by the London High Court to be a Holocaust denier. The bad news is that this finding, as damning as it is for Irving, won’t put an end to Holocaust denial.

This week, a British judge rejected Irving’s claim of having been libeled by Deborah Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books. The judge found that Irving is indeed, as Lipstadt had written, a Holocaust denier. He also agreed that Irving, the British author of numerous books on World War II, manipulates history in order to make it conform to his anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi political and racial beliefs.

Despite Britain’s legal system, which heavily favors the person who claims libel, Irving’s suit could not have been lost more decisively.

But this loss is unlikely to deter other Holocaust deniers or diminish their future audience. Despite the fact that Holocaust deniers have lost previous cases, they persist in their claims, and their audience persists in listening to them.

Why this persistence of Holocaust denial? After all, denying that the Holocaust happened--that Nazi Germany murdered close to 6 million Jews during World War II and that they did it by systematically gassing, shooting and starving them in the effort to exterminate every Jew they could find--flies in the face of mountains of incontrovertible evidence, not only from eyewitnesses but also from the Germans’ own documents. Holocaust deniers are not only liars; they are marginal figures whose lies should be ignored as absurd. Arguing with them makes no greater sense than arguing with someone who claims that slavery never existed in the United States. So why do Holocaust deniers keep up their denials? And why does anyone listen?

The most important reason for Holocaust denial, especially in the United States and Western Europe, is the persistence of anti-Semitism. The reality of the Holocaust is, quite simply, inconvenient to anti-Semites. The Holocaust gave that ideology a particularly bad name. Seeing Jews as greedy, clannish and conspiring controllers of capital and the media was once an acceptable prejudice, even in refined society. The use of such stereotypes to justify genocide made those stereotypes unacceptable not only in polite company but almost everywhere. Having pushed the vilification of the Jews to its utmost extreme, the Nazis sullied that vilification for those who sought to again express it. If the Holocaust could be erased as history--if its reality could be denied, and if that denial were believed--then anti-Semitism might once again be an acceptable doctrine in social, religious and political discourse.

But why do persons who are not themselves anti-Semitic lend a receptive ear to the anti-Semitically-driven arguments of Holocaust deniers?

It is, in fact, an element of human psychology that provides the most fertile intellectual soil in which Holocaust denial can take root. That element is the difficulty, even now, of assimilating the notion that such an extreme and fantastic event was ever possible.

After all, the Holocaust seemed, to many, unbelievable before it happened, while it was happening and after it happened. Despite Hitler’s warnings before the war of what would happen to the Jews, hardly anyone believed him. During the war, many Jews, even as they were being starved or killed in ghettos, couldn’t allow themselves to believe that the most cultured nation on Earth really planned to kill every one of them that it could find, and that it had prepared gas chambers to do so. And, after the war, the evidence of the killing enterprise left many observers so stunned, and so unwilling to consider its implications for the possibilities of human evil, that they wanted not to think about the subject, to forget about it and to move on to other things. Who wants to focus on the fact, or even believe, that humanity is capable of such inhuman deeds?

And now, even for those who know the evidence very well, the Nazi project to murder an entire people, and to do so with the ferocity, efficiency and technological precision that only a modern state can muster, can seem unbelievable.

And if it can seem unbelievable even to someone who knows it’s true, how much more unbelievable, in the literal sense, must it seem to persons who are innocent of such knowledge, and who therefore are vulnerable to the crackpot ideas of deniers?

Anti-Semitism is an ancient plague. One of its modern weapons is Holocaust denial. As discredited as that weapon is, it will continue to be fired. And, because of the Holocaust’s almost unimaginable nature, that weapon will, even among good and fair people, sometimes find its receptive--and destructive--mark.