A forceful analysis of attempts to deny the Nazi Holocaust.
Lipstadt (Religion/Emory University; Beyond Belief, 1985 - not
reviewed) traces the history of Holocaust revisionism and contends
that it can no longer be ignored, showing how Holocaust-deniers,
once dismissed as a lunatic fringe, have been growing in numbers
and influence during the past 20 years. Citing groups like the
Institute for Historical Review, publications like The Spotlight,
politicians like David Duke, and academicians like Leonard
Jeffries, Lipstadt presents numerous examples of attempts to prove
that the extermination of six million Jews is a hoax; that only a
few thousand Jews died in the camps from disease; that the Allied
bombings of German cities were worse than any Nazi offense; and
that the "true victims" of WW II were the German people. These
distortions of recorded history, argues the author, threaten to
undermine our Western rationalist tradition and to legitimize the
politicization of history. To Lipstadt, the common thread among
Holocaust deniers is a "purely anti-Semitic diatribe" portraying
Jews as victimizers. Self-declared scholars like Arthur R. Butz
(whose credentials are in electronics) claim that Jews used the
world's sympathy after the war to "displace" another people,
establish the nation of Israel, and "steal" billions in reparations
from their German and Western "cash cows." Lipstadt argues
vehemently against giving revisionists a forum in the name of free
speech or freedom of the press, and she details the efforts of
California revisionist Bradley Smith, who pushed a "Holocaust was a
hoax" campaign in college newspapers throughout the US. Lipstadt
contends that "the responses to Holocaust denial by both students
and faculty graphically demonstrate the susceptibility of an
educated and privileged segment to the kind of reasoning that
creates a hospitable climate for the rewriting of history." An
important, well-documented study that deserves attention. (Kirkus
Reviews)
The denial of the Holocaust has no more credibility than the assertion that the earth is flat. Yet there are those who insist that the death of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps is nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a powerful Zionist conspiracy. For years those who made such claims were dismissed as harmless cranks operating on the lunatic fringe. But over the past decade they have begun to gain a hearing in respectable arenas, and now, in the first full-scale history of Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt shows how - despite tens of thousands of living witnesses and vast amounts of documentary evidence - this irrational idea has not only continued to gain adherents but has become an international movement, with organized chapters, "independent" research centres, and official publications that promote a "revisionist" view of recent history. Lipstadt argues that this chilling attack on the factual record not only threatens Jews but has an unsuspected power to dramatically alter the way that truth and meaning are transmitted from one generation to another.
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