"Black Book of Communism" and Holocaust Denial

Ben Norton tweeted over a month ago about a Holocaust-denier exercise, which first came to my attention this morning:

How the US government, US-funded fact-checking websites, NGOs, and leading media outlets constantly spread discredited death counts that whitewash the genocidal crimes of Nazi Germany in order to demonize communismhttps://t.co/81xSGUCmXJ

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 1, 2017

Norton's citation is to his article Why Are the Trump White House and Media Citing an Antisemitic Book's Claims to Demonize Communism? AlterNet 11/22/2017. The book in question is The Black Book of Communism, first published in French as Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression in 1997. Norton explains:

The Black Book of Communism is a collection of right-wing essays published in France in 1997, and subsequently translated into English and published by Harvard University Press in 1999. Some of its contributors have admitted that the book’s figures are fabricated or exaggerated. Contributors Jean-Louis Margolin and Nicolas Werth distanced themselves from the text, criticizing the editor Stéphane Courtois and his “obsession to arrive to the 100 million deaths.” When he could not round out the figure to 100 million, Courtois apparently just added numbers.

Perhaps more troubling than The Black Book of Communism’s many egregious errors is the fact that it counts Nazi-collaborating fascists, anti-Semitic White Army fighters and czarist officers who oversaw genocidal pogroms against Jews in its list of “victims of communism.”

The International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania — known popularly as the Wiesel Commission, after Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who led it — condemned the editor Courtois for “comparative trivialization” of the Nazi Holocaust. In order to portray communism as more evil and murderous than fascism and demonize scholars who refuse to do the same, Courtois fell back on anti-Semitism, “inserting an incriminating insinuation directed at the Jews,” the Wiesel Commission wrote. The commission noted that the editor’s tactics inspired “prestigious intellectuals” to rehash anti-Semitic stereotypes and talking points like “Red Holocaust,” “monopoly on suffering” and “Judeocentrism,” which it noted “are widely popular in radical-right circles.”

These "body-count" controversies are always grim. I find it helpful to keep in mind as an ethical guideline when looking at them that 100 wrongful deaths in one country or under a particular regime doesn't justify even one wrongful death in another country or another regime.

At the same time, invidious comparisons between countries is a standard feature of international relations, including these body-count disputes.

Anti-Communism was always a key part of Nazi ideology. And Holocaust-deniers to this day try to justify the Holocaust and even the German invasion of Russia by saying it was all the Commies' fault.

One of the best analyses and debunking of Holocaust denial I've come across is the 2000 decision written by Mr. Justice Gray in Irving v. Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstat [sic[, the case depicted in the movie Denial (2016). The decisions deals with the historical issues at length, and in language accessible to non-attorneys. Because the notorious David Irving was suing Lipstadt in a British court for portraying him in a book as a Holocaust denier, the decision goes into some detail about the nature of the available documentation and what reality-based uses of it requires.

Section 11 is about the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden in 1945. The section is a case study in how Holocaust deniers take a real historical event, exaggerate facts in the favor of the case they want to make, and make a tendentious historical interpretation that tends to minimize or justify the mass murder of Jews and others in the Holocaust. In this case, it is the Western Allies, not the Communist Soviet Union, whose actions are exaggerated and used to cast the Holocaust in a more favorable light.

There is a website, Holocaust Denial on Trial from Emory University's Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, with historical resources on the Holocaust and Holocaust denial, including transcripts of expert witnesses at the Irving v. Lipstadt trial.

The current (Jan/Feb) issue of Foreign Affairs journal has a set of stories on "The Undead Past: how Nations Confront the Evils of History," with articles focusing on the US, Germany, Russia China, South Africa and Rwanda. In his essay "China's Cover-Up: When Communists Rewrite History," he describes the perspective of Karl Jaspers on how Germans needed to come to grips with the crimes of the Nazi regime:

The man who devised the road map for the expiation of German guilt was the philosopher and psychoanalyst Karl Jaspers, who in 1945 gave a series of influential lectures at the University of Heidelberg that were later collected in a book titled The Question of German Guilt. Even though what happened under Adolf Hitler precipitated something "like a transmutation of our being," said Jaspers, Germans were still "collectively liable." All of those "who knew, or could know" - including those "conveniently closing their eyes to events or permitting themselves to be intoxicated, seduced, or bought with personal advantage, or obeying from fear" - shared responsibility. The "eagerness to obey" and the "unconditionality of blind nationalism," he declared, constituted "moral guilt." Human beings are, said Jaspers, responsible "for every delusion to which we succumb." He put his faith in healing through "the cultivation of truth" and "making amends," a process he believed had to be completely free from any state-sponsored propaganda or manipulation.

"There can be no questions that might not be raised," he declared, "nothing to be fondly taken for granted, no sentimental and no practical lie that would have to be guarded or that would be untouchable." In Jaspers' view, only through historical awareness could Germans ever come to terms with their past and restore themselves to a semblance of moral and societal health.

Jaspers' approach owed a great deal to psychoanalytic theory and the work of Sigmund Freud. For Freud, understanding a patient's past was like "excavating a buried city," as he wrote in 1895. Indeed, he was fond of quoting the Latin expression saxa loquuntur: "The stones speak." Such mental archaeology was important to Freud because he believed that a repressed past inevitably infected the present and the future with neuroses unless given a conscious voice to help fill in what he called "the gaps in memory." In this sense, history and memory were Freud's allies and forgetting was his enemy. [my emphasis in bold]

Argentina: desaparacidos denial?

Trump's Holocaust Memorial Day statement that didn't even mention Jews - on the same day he announced his ban-the-Muslims immigration rule - has highlighted one of the variations of Holocaust denial. Jonathan Freedland explains (Calling the Holocaust ‘sad’ is the first step towards denying it ever happened Guardian ):/

As anyone who has seen Denial, the new film about the 2000 libel trial brought by David Irving against the historian Deborah Lipstadt, will know, Holocaust denial can take many forms. In the face of all the evidence, there are those who say that six million Jews were not murdered by the Nazis; or that the gas chambers never existed; or that Adolf Hitler had nothing to do with it. There is another strand, too; one denying that Jews were specifically targeted for extermination. Even though the Nazis infamously referred to their mass killings of Jews as “the final solution to the Jewish problem”, this form of Holocaust denial seeks to negate that core fact – to suggest that the second world war saw lots of people get killed, and that Jews suffered just like everyone else; no more and no less.

Página/12 provides a current example of a similar approach to denying the murders and mass repression of the Argentine dictatorship of 1976-83 in Werner Pertot, Una nueva muestra del negacionismo PRO Página/12 31.01.2017.

The story concerns Juan José Gómez Centurión, a retired military officer who is currently head of the Argentina customs office (Aduana). He has somewhat of a checkered pass: "Gómez Centurión’s choice for public office has been questioned due to the fact that he took part in the 1987 and 1988 military uprisings against Raúl Alfonsín’s democratically-elected government." (Gómez Centurión reinstated to post Buenos Aires Herald 10/14/2016)

Pertot reports that he "negó que existiera un plan sistemático de desaparición de personas durante la última dictadura y calificó de '22 mil mentiras' la cifra de 30 mil desaparecidos" ("denied that a systematic plan existed to make people disapper during the last dictatorship and described the figure of 30,000 people disappeared as '22,000 lies'").

The number of people "disappeared" by the regime of El Proceso, the dicatorship's name for itself, is a well-researched, conservative and widely accepted figure. This is called a negacionista (denier) position in Argentina.

See also:

• Juan José Gómez Centurión negó que haya existido un plan sistemático de desaparición de personas El Diario de Buenos Aires 30.01.2017
• Alan Soria Guadalupe, Gómez Centurión relativizó la represión ilegal y desató un nuevo escándalo La Nación 31.01.2017
• Más repudio para Gómez Centurión Página/12 31.01.2017

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Argentina boots the Holocaust-denying bishop

Anti-"Modernist" Pope Pius X

Cristina Fernández' government is kicking him out and wishing him good riddance: El Gobierno expulsa de la Argentina al obispo que negó el Holocausto Clarín 19.02.2009.

Interior Minister Florencio Randazzo gave Bishop Richard Nelson Williamson 10 days to leave on his own or be expelled. One of the grounds is the "public notoriety" Williams has incurred "by his anti-Semitic declarations". The government's statement said that his Holocaust-denial statement that he spouted on Swedish television "profoundly attack Argentine society, the Jewish people and all of humanity."

According to the government, being a Jew-hater isn't his only departure from Christian ideals. They claim he's been lying about his reason for being in the country, claiming to be an administrative employee of a group called "La Tradición" but really has been acting as the head of the renegade seminary in Moreno of the Levebrist Society of St. Pius X.

The namesake of that reactionary Catholic Society, Pius X (1835-1914), Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto, was the first Pope to be canonized as a saint. But the distinguishing feature of his papacy (1903-1914) was his bitter campaign against "Modernism". Richard McBrien in Lives of the Popes: The Pontiffs from St. Peter to John Paul II (1997) writes:

Although Pius X was canonized a saint in 1954, his pontificate stands as one of the most controversial in the modern papacy. He assumed a relatively critical posture toward modern democratic governments and led a sometimes cruel and internecine campaign against Catholic theologians, biblical scholars, and historians (lumping them all under the umbrella of Modernism), from which the Church did not begin to recover until the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

And it's the ultra-traditionalist devoted admirers of that Pope that the current Pope Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) wants to restore to good standing within the Church. Disgusting.

Tags: anti-semitism, argentina, catholic fundamentalists, holocaust denial

A Holocaust memoir that turned out to be wrong

Bob Somerby's Daily Howler column of 01/06/09 alerted me to a story that hadn't registered on my consciousness before. But it's the kind of story that particularly interests me because it involves the effort to get the facts of a story right and the possible negative consequences of failing to do so.

I grumped in a number of posts back in 2007 about Ken Burns' PBS documentary The War, about Americans during the Second World War. The subjects of the interviews were elderly. Anyone old enough to vote in 1945 (at age 21) would have been at least 81 in 2005. And they were relating events from six decades before. The documentary provided little if any information on whether the stories had been individually verified in some way. One woman seemed downright dingie, even though she was presented in a very sympathetic light. Another guy told a story that had the feel of "too good to be true" about staving off his imminent execution in a POW camp by a bluff involving a claim about an evil spirit, a story that could have been checked at least to some degree.

I checked one account myself, of a guy talking about the motivations of kamikaze suicide pilots late in the war. From a view minutes researching in my home library and in the digital Encyclopedia Britannica, I concluded that what he said on that subject was very unlikely. And the motivation of the kamikazes was not a matter of which he had any direct wartime experience. He had seen a kamikaze plane crash into a ship, but he had not (so far as the film told us) been involved in interrogating would-be kamikaze pilots. It would have been helpful to know whether some of these stories had been vetted through normal historical research. (There was one story the film followed that did have contemporary documentation in the form of a diary kept by the girl they were describing.)

I've often said something to the effect that the only type of story I know of that's possibly less reliable than men bragging about their sexual accomplishments would be women bragging about theirs. People make up stuff. Even when we're not consciously confabulating something, we misremember things, mix up the details, embellish the story get the dates wrong, forget some of the participants, doctor the story to avoid relating something embarrassing that someone did or said at the time (usually ourselves), and so on. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously fallible. And as time goes on, it becomes more so.

The story that Somerby mentions is a case of an elderly Jewish man who was in the Buchenwald concentration camp outside Weimar, Germany, as a boy. His story was about a little girl that brought him an apple every day - during the winter - by tossing it over the fence of the camp. The girl was the daughter of (apparently) Polish slave laborers who had been brought there to work. They were Jewish but were passing for Christian.

Years later, after the war and after emigrating to America, he went on a blind date with another Jewish immigrant. After talking for a while, they discovered that they were the same boy and girl of the Buchenwald story! They married and lived happily ever after. Or at least stayed married for a long time.

The story got a lot of publicity, was featured on Oprah, and became an e-mail chain-letter favorite. The guy had a book of his story about to be published, a movie was set to be made.

But what I've related of the story already should have raised a few questions. Apples in the dead of winter? Did the concentration camp guards routinely let visitors stroll up the fence? Were prisoners allowed close enough to the fence to chat with outsiders and get food from them? Is it plausible that a Jewish family trying to pass for Christian in Nazi Germany during the middle of the war would let their nine-year-old daughter stroll down to the Buchenwald camp every day?

The story of what happened with the book is discussed in these two articles: The Greatest Love Story Ever Sold by Gabriel Sherman The New Republic 12/25/08; and, False Memoir of Holocaust Is Canceled by Motoko Rich and Joseph Berger 12/28/08,

Historian Deborah Lipstadt has posted about it several times on her blog, obscurely titled Deborah Lipstadt's Blog. This post of 12/31/08, for instance, reproduces an article of hers from The Forward that describes her issues with the story. The book has apparently found another publisher, even though the accuracy of the story has been effectively debunked. The title of the book, the first run of which the previous publisher had ready to release when it was cancelled, was Apples At The Fence by Herman Rosenblat.

Some basic research by an historian who knew what he was doing was what eventually killed the book's publication, though the publisher and prospective filmmaker were initially very defensive over any such criticism. As the Times reports:

The primary sleuth in unmasking his fabrication of the apple story was Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish studies at Michigan State University. He has been working on a book on how 904 boys — including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel — were saved from death by an underground rescue operation inside Buchenwald, and has interviewed hundreds of survivors, including boys from the ghetto at Piotrkow in Poland who were taken with the young Herman Rosenblat to the camp.

When Dr. Waltzer asked other survivors who were with Mr. Rosenblat about the tossed apple story, they said the story couldn’t possibly be true.

In his research of maps drawn by ex-prisoners, Dr. Waltzer learned that the section of Schlieben [a sub-camp of the main Buchenwald camp] where Mr. Rosenblat was housed had fences facing other sections of the camp and only one fence — on the south — facing the outside world. That fence was adjacent to the camp’s SS barracks and the SS men there would have been able to spot a boy regularly speaking to a girl on the other side of the fence, Dr. Waltzer said. Moreover, the fence was electrified and civilians outside the camp were forbidden to walk along the road that bordered the fence.

Dr. Waltzer also learned from online documentation that Ms. Radzicki, her parents and two sisters were hidden as Christians at a farm not outside Schlieben but 210 miles away near Breslau.

Lipstadt's criticism focuses on how fabricated account can affect the general understanding of the events of the Holocaust and on how Holocaust deniers exploit erroneous, careless or falsified accounts of events. In her Forward article, she explains:

There are various lessons to be learned from this: Facts about the Holocaust must be checked. Historians should never build their understanding of events based on one story from one person. But Rosenblat had enablers. His publisher, agent and movie producer pounced on his story. Reporters never bothered to check it out. They all seemingly wanted a story that made the Holocaust heartwarming, even though, as Waltzer aptly put it, the "Holocaust experience is not heartwarming, it is heart rending."

[Harris] Salomon [who is still planning to do a film of the story though designating it as fiction] believed that this kind of "candy-coated message” would reach “Middle America” and “do more to teach people about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in a way nothing before has done." Jewish sources also allowed themselves to be co-opted. Aish HaTorah featured the story on its Web site. A Chabad rabbi, whose relatives died in the Holocaust, was swept off his feet by this phony tale and arranged a belated bar mitzvah for Herman, garnering even more publicity for the Rosenblats and himself.

I have spent much of my academic career studying Holocaust denial. But the much greater danger to our collective memory of the event is posed by Holocaust trivialization and romanticization. What the Rosenblats and their enablers did was create yet another obstacle for the remaining survivors to convince others that their stories are true.

Rosenblat claims that all he wanted to do was make people love each other more. The Chabad rabbi probably thought the story would inspire faith. Salomon wanted to teach Middle America about the Holocaust.

These may be worthy goals. But the Holocaust should not be reduced to a means for trying to fulfill these or any other ends. The instrumentalization of the Holocaust, the use of it to fulfill something else, is the ultimate degradation of the event. If Holocaust deniers were smart, they would sit back and let the Rosenblats, Salomons, Berkley Books and the like peddle their wares. Within a short time, no one would know what was truth and what was fiction. [my emphasis in bold]

It's probably too much to expect that the Holocaust won't be instrumentalized. People have a huge need to draw meaning and lessons events. And when someone settles on what they take as "the lessons of the Holocaust" or "the lessons of Munich" or whatever, they are sorely tempted to use it to justify their own arguments.

But, as a specialist in the field, Lipstadt may be applying a more precise academic meaning of "instrumentalization" that I would. There are whole volume written on the nuances of the "representation" of the Holocaust and I can't pretend to be extensively acquainted with it.

In the New Republic article, Lipstadt explains how Holocaust deniers exploit false or mistaken claims:

Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University, who was appointed by President Clinton in 1994 to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, says she first heard Herman's story while on a research trip to Auschwitz about the same time Waltzer started examining the narrative. Someone had read her an email chain that they had printed out that recounted Herman's amazing love story. "I said, 'I don't believe it,'" she told me, recalling the episode.

Lipstadt, who wrote the 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, is troubled by the possibility that Herman's love story is fabricated, because she believes it could be co-opted by the Holocaust denial movement. "If you make up things about parts, you cast doubts on everything else," Lipstadt told me. "When you think of the survivors who meticulously tell their story and are so desperate for people to believe, then if they're making stories up about this, how do you know if Anne Frank is true? How do you know Elie Wiesel is true?"

In addition to the impossibility of being able to approach the fence, Lipstadt disputes other details of Herman's story. "Based on what I have seen thus far, I would say that this story is not exactly a shining example of verisimilitude [i.e, accuracy]," she wrote on her blog on December 15.

Tags: deborah lipstadt, holocaust, holocaust denial, shoah

The bombing of Dresden

Der Spiegel's English site recently carried a story that gives a good glimpse at one way the politics of remembering the Second World War plays out in Germany, in this case in connection with the bombing of Dresden on February 13, 1945: A War of Words 02/02/05.

The firebombing of Dresden presents some unusual twists. Many American readers know it from Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, which tends to present it as unnecessary excesss. After the war, the Soviets and their client regime in East Germany condemned the bombing of Dresden as an example of British and American savagery, even though the USSR was fully in support of the strategic bombing campaign during the wartime alliance against Nazi Germany.

Those who want to rehabilitate Germany's role in the Second World War, in the sense of minimizing Germany's blame for causing the war, also tend to focus on the bombing in general and the firebombing of Dresden in particular as a way of depreciating the Allies.

And Holocaust deniers use the bombing, especially of Dresden, as some kind of balance against Hitler's campaign of murder against Jews. Their argument suggests or outright claims that the killing of Jews was in retaliation for the bombing of Germany civilians. Also, in a contradiction of a kind not uncommon among extremists groups, they minimize the number of Jewish victims and exaggerate the numbers of deaths in Dresden.

"The Bombing of Dresden" section (click on "The Judgment" and then Part XI) of the judge's report in the failed lawsuit of Holocaust denier David Irving against author Deborah Lipstadt, and how Irving uses it, gives a lot of historical material about the bombing of Dresden, and also about what an ideological football it's become, particularly in the dark corner of thought known as Holocaust denial:

The Spiegel article gives this background:

The spectacular firestorm caused by the carpet bombing left Dresden, long known as "Florence on the Elbe" because of its splendid Baroque architecture, in ruins, officially killing at least 30,000 people. The exact number will always be the subject of great debate and some estimates count tens of thousands more deaths. There is no doubt that the horror was a tragedy of terrible dimensions, but wasit an act of vengeance on the part of the British and Americans for the Nazi bombings of Britain or was the decision to attack born out of the perception of military necessity?

One prominent argument is that it was a needless act on the part of the British at a point when the Germans were retreating on many fronts and the Russians had already crossed the Oder River into Germany. The other, most recently proffered by British historian Frederick Taylor is that the Allies saw in Dresden an important communications and transportation hub from which supplies and troops were being sent to the eastern front, where the Soviet Army was suffering heavy troop losses. The latter, one could argue, would make Dresden a legitimate military target. Residents of Dresden, indeed, across Germany, remain divided between these theses as the 60th anniversary of the Dresden firebombing approaches.

My own view is that within the context of the "strategic bombing" campaign, Dresden was a legitimate military target. It's also worth noting, especially since it has become a common criticism of the Allies that not enough was done to interfere with the Nazi killing of Jews, that Dresden at the time was a key transit point for Hungarian Jews being shipped to Auschwitz. But, as destructive as the bombing was, the shipment of Jews from Dresden to Auschwitz resumed very quickly.

I have larger concerns about the whole strategic bombing campaign in the Second World War. The Army's own survey after the war found that the bombing had actually achieved little in terms of its military aim to interfere with critical war production. John Kenneth Galbraith, who was part of that survey himself, explained in his famous book The Affluent Society, first published in 1958, that the bombing may have been actually counter-productive in that sense. The bombing destroyed so many businesses not directly related to military production that it freed up a huge number of people to work in the armaments industry.

Der Spiegel also provides this article from Salon on Dresden: "Dresden: Tuesday, Feb. 13, 1945" by Frederick Taylor by Laura Miller 02/02/05. The Salon original appeared there 03/01/04.

And speaking of Salon, they just published a review of Deborah Lipstadt's book on the David Irving lawsuit: Shilling for Hitler by Charles Taylor 02/07/05. In that article, Taylor notes:

Gray [the judge in the Irving lawsuit] handed down a decision that, to anyone sentient and breathing, ended the myth of David Irving as a historian. In his
judgment, Gray not only said that Irving was an "antisemite" and a "racist" but
that his "falsification of the record was deliberate and ... motivated by a
desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs
even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence."

Tags: david irving, deborah lipstadt, dresden, dresden bombing, holocaust, holocaust denial, second world war, shoah, slaughterhouse-five