When former war crimes prosecutor Stephen Rapp said, “we’ve got better evidence” against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad committing war crimes “than we had against the Nazis at Nuremberg,” he caused a small controversy.
How could anyone compare the evidence against the Nazis without diminishing it and playing into Holocaust denial? On the other hand, this criticism appears to delegitimize the evidence against Assad, feeding into his defenders and their denial of his atrocities.
The truth is that researching Holocaust denial and the way it attempts to situate and/or discredit evidence and narratives offers important parallels to other forms of denial. Yet it remains true: one will diminish the horror of the Holocaust by making facile comparisons. Comparing denials proves somewhat easier, but can run the same risk.
In their astute writing at ScienceBlogs, the Hoofnagle brothers have developed a good amount of research examining denialism as “the employment of rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none.” The Hoofnagles include Holocaust denial along with 9/11 truth, Creationism, and anti-vaxxer theories. I largely agree with those inclusions, but denial is not just about expanding the context of reasonable debate. There is something deeper.
The Hoofnagles also contribute “conspiracy, selectivity (cherry-picking), fake experts, impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts), and general fallacies of logic” to the list of characteristics of denial. Again, all of these seem perfectly reasonable as traits of denialism. And they certainly match studies of Holocaust deniers.
The study of Holocaust denial involves a careful understanding of the analytical frameworks deployed by scholars of the Holocaust in addressing denial. One thing that jumps out to me in particular is the way that scholars view tendencies among deniers as generalizable not just to Holocaust studies but other forms of what Deborah Lipstadt calls the “growing assault on truth and memory.” While it would be disingenuous to compare this or that denier to Holocaust denial out of spite, reckoning with Holocaust denial can help contextualize other forms of denial—for instance, denial of the Bosnian genocide and denial of the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons in Syria. Helpfully, scholars of Holocaust denial explicitly make the connection between Holocaust denial and other conspiracy theory groups.
Perhaps the most renowned scholar of Holocaust denial, Lipstadt defeated a libel case brought in 2000 by denier David Irving in a British court, which ruled that Irving “has for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence” and “is an active Holocaust denier” and “anti-Semitic and racist[.]” Lipstadt’s defense hired scholar Richard Evans to investigate Irving’s work, resulting in an entire book dedicated to unpacking Irving’s errors called Lying About Hitler.
On the subject of denial, Lipstadt writes in her book, Denying the Holocaust, “If Holocaust denial has demonstrated anything, it is the fragility of memory, truth, reason, and history” This applies to other attempts to deny history, particularly as survivors begin to die of old age and other causes. Lipstadt argues that Holocaust denial is worth rebuking not for the sake of the memory of the Holocaust alone—a noble task to uphold—but to defend history, itself, from its assailants. “Holocaust denial must be regarded as not just an attack on a portion of history that is of particular importance to Jews but as a threat to all of history and to reasoned discourse.” She further calls her readers to action, writing, “When we witness assaults on truth, our response must be strong, though neither polemical nor emotional.”
The implications of Lipstadt’s big claim about the defense of “all of history” suggest that other attacks on “all of history” ought to be repudiated with the same vigor, since they similarly rely on the “fragility of memory” among other things. In other words, the study of denial can be generalized into a comparative field. Yet it remains important not to treat the genocides and atrocities with the same comparative approach. The facts of such crimes against humanity are abhorrent aberrations, and to compare them without due consideration for the unique experiences of their victims fails to do justice to their effect. My friend Adnan Delalić put it better than I can in a tweet, describing denialism as a “meta discourse with its own logic and patterns, as well as a flattening of the real events. This makes it arguably easier to compare different cases of denial than to compare the actual genocides being denied.”
It is difficult to tell whether most deniers are in earnest about their claims. Many of them likely are, some may be cynical in the extreme. Yet what I keep returning to is the incredible energy that deniers invest into undermining what they simplify into a set, “official narrative,” typically of victims and often of scientists and historians. By undermining the “official narrative” of a phenomenon, deniers become trauma artists; they find the worst aspects of reality and, in denying them, perpetuate them. Unable to die or to mourn properly, survivors are condemned to guilt and shame. What happens to their memory?
In assessing Lipstadt’s work, I observed common tropes also present in the denial of more-recent, well-evidenced atrocities and genocides, such as the Bosnian genocide, the government of Bashar al-Assad’s gassing of Syrian civilians, and the Xinjiang camps. In particular, generalizable traits include the dehumanizing humiliation and insult of the victims of crimes against humanity, the misconstrual of official documents and efforts to take a dictator’s rational faculties for granted (e.g. the notion that Hitler had no reason to exterminate the Jews when he needed them for forced labor represents an easily debunked claim premised on some kind of rational motivation behind the anti-Semitic despot’s actions).
Although they may not take those positions with regards to the Holocaust, other deniers might apply them to other atrocities—for instance, the grotesque ridicule of Syrian victims, efforts to take selectively-chosen OPCW documents out of context, and claims that Assad would never gas his own people when he is winning the war already. The first of these is immediately chilling, because in refusing survivors their dignity, deniers deprive them of the significance of their memories and, indeed, their place in the world. The second has been dealt with extensively by Bellingcat. The third again relies on attributing a “rational actor” fallacy to a dictator whose brutality has been clearly exposed.
This comparative study is useful for ascertaining the relationship between conspiracy theory and not only the far right but a broader milieu. While “conspiracy theory” will be further discussed in terms of its empirical qualities in post three of this series, here it will be taken to connote the rejection of an “official narrative” grounded in scientifically proven and reasonable fact patterns for the development of various theories as to the suppression or “cover up” of the “true story” about what might have happened instead. Since conspiracy theories hinge on the exposure of some supposed “cover up,” they play into populist discourse, which identifies the “people” in opposition to an “elite” and its defenders.
By nature of its generalizing approach to the “people,” populist politics tend to erase divisions between left and right; thus, conspiracy theorists who tend to be populists also tend to be found on the margins of left and right. Perforce, conspiracy theories can unite left and right-wing politicos in search of the “truth.” While fascism tends to unite left and right under a right-wing movement for ultranationalist rebirth, and Holocaust deniers tend to be fascists and far-right activists, different kinds of conspiracy theorists and deniers can come from different sides. Hence, conspiracy theorists may mix with fascists and far-right activists in their various milieux while remaining, themselves, left-wing or libertarian or some other persuasion. In short, conspiracy theories offer easy “elite” nemeses and the glue to bind different political positions in contradistinction.
This blog series will develop further the frameworks used by historians of the Holocaust and analysts of Holocaust denial to assess more deeply commonalities between deniers and conspiracy theorists from all sides of the political spectrum. It will utilize a 10-point framework for “denial detection” provided by Michael Shermer and Alex Grosman in Denying History, along with traits of conspiracy theorists developed by scholar David Neiwert among others. Thus, the series investigates if and how denial functions in similar cases like the Bosnian genocide and Assad’s gas attacks, revealing common threads and unique “logic and patterns” that fabricate a persistent metadiscourse against survivors and history.
Alexander Reid Ross is a Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right and a PhD candidate in Portland State University’s Earth, Environment, Society program. See full profile here.
© Alexander Reid Ross. Views expressed on this website are individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect that of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). We are pleased to share previously unpublished materials with the community under creative commons license 4.0 (Attribution-NoDerivatives).
Alexander Reid Ross is a Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right and a PhD candidate in Portland State University’s Earth, Environment, Society program. See full profile here.
© Alexander Reid Ross. Views expressed on this website are individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect that of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). We are pleased to share previously unpublished materials with the community under creative commons license 4.0 (Attribution-NoDerivatives).
