Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  No neoconservative was elevated in office after September 11, as Churchill had been to prime minister after the collapse of the Munich agreement, but policies espoused by neoconservatives were embraced by the Bush administration. Was this because Bush learned them from the likes of Wolfowitz and Perle? Or did he and his top advisers—none of them known as a neocon—reach similar conclusions on their own? We may have to await the President’s memoirs to learn the answer to that narrow question, but every American has reason to be grateful for the result.

  If these policies should fail, for whatever reason—including a recurrence of national faint-heartedness—then neoconservative ideas will no doubt be discredited. But this matters hardly at all compared with what we will have lost. For, if they fail, either we will then be at the mercy of ever more murderous terrorism or we will have to seek alternative methods of coping with it—methods that are likely to involve a much more painful and frightening course of action than the admittedly daunting one that still lies before us.

  If, however, the policies succeed, then the world will have been delivered from an awful scourge, and there will be credit enough to go around—some of it, one trusts, even for the lately much demonized neoconservatives.

  ROBERT JAN VAN PELT

  Excerpt from The Case for Auschwitz

  The Influence of Literary Theory

  on the Origins of Holocaust Denial33

  [Professor van Pelt was a key historical witness for Deborah Lipstadt in the lawsuit David Irving launched against her, accusing her of falsely describingIrving as a Holocaust denier. The defense made the truth of the Holocaust the center of its presentation. Van Pelt’s testimony on “the case for Auschwitz”—the case that it was in fact a camp designed for systematicgas-chamber extermination—helped win Ms. Lipstadt a definitivevictory. Here he makes a conjecture about the culture of literary and intellectual relativism which, he believes, allowed Holocaust denial to flourish. ]

  [David] Irving did not explicitly embrace negationism at the 1983 conference, but the occasion was to have far-reaching consequences: it marked his first encounter with hard-core negationist Dr. Robert Faurisson. That meeting began a process that would lead to Irving’s 1988 endorsement of the Leuchter Report and, twelve years later, culminate in the libel trial in the Royal Courts of Justice.

  Faurisson was a one-time lecturer in French literature at the University of Lyons–2. He had emerged from a school of literary interpretation known as New Criticism. This school went back to the early 1940s, when two prominent American critics, Monroe C. Beardsley and William Kurtz Wimsatt, proposed that the contemporary approach of interpreting poems in their autobiographical, historical, political, or cultural contexts was bankrupt. Instead, a critic should read a poem as a verbal icon—an autonomous verbal structure—and foreclose any appeal to history, biography, or cultural context. Even the poet’s intention did not matter when judging a poem. French student of literature Robert Faurisson adopted Beardsley and Wimsatt’s ontologically grounded aesthetic isolationism but abandoned its pragmatic aim to encase it in a particularly dogmatic set of rules. His “Ajax method” (because “it scours as it cleans as it shines”) centered on the proposition that while words may have more than one meaning if taken in isolation, they acquire one specific meaning only within a text. And while texts may generate different responses, this does not mean that they have different meanings. In short: “Texts have only one meaning, or no meaning at all.” Refusing to consider any external evidence, the only access to truth was now to be through Faurisson’s own technique of textual exegesis.

  Faurisson’s work would have remained a footnote in the history of postmodern literary theory if not for his desire to apply the “Ajax method” to the study of history. It was, at first sight, a natural extension of his activities. “The historian works with documents,” declared a nineteenth-century French handbook on historical methodology in its opening sentence. And it concluded its opening paragraph with the succinct formula: “No documents, no history”—an adage which, incidentally, would inspire Faurisson to coin his own maxim: “No holes, no Holocaust.” Langlois and Seignobos’s classic Introduction to the Study of History (1897) stressed the importance of a critical approach to documents because “criticism is antagonistic to the normal bent of the mind.” Writing in a time which clearly remembered how historians cultivated an “empty and pompous species of literature which was then known as ‘history,’ ” Langlois and Seignobos pressed their case that historians should not make easy assumptions about documents written a long time ago by people who may have used language differently. But they also wrote that contemporary documents could be taken at face value. Ignoring Langlois and Seignobos’s observation that it was not necessary to apply the most rigorous internal criticism to contemporary documents because the author and the historian shared language and outlook, Faurisson condemned historians who habitually failed to “attack” the documents they were using and instead tried to fit those texts into their various contexts. In other words, historians sinned against the ground rule of Faurisson’s theory of criticism, seemingly justified by Langlois and Seignobos, that nothing should distract from the exegesis of the sacrosanct “word on the page.”

  Faurisson’s attempt to apply his rule of textual exegesis to history was ill founded. First of all, it was a clear example of the kind of hypercriticism against which Langlois and Seignobos had warned. “There are persons who scent enigmas everywhere, even where there are none. They take perfectly clear texts and subtilise on them till they make them doubtful, under the pretext of freeing them from imaginary corruptions. They discover traces of forgery in authentic documents.” Applied without restraint, hypercriticism destroyed the possibility of history.

  Furthermore, Faurisson’s approach very clearly departed from Beardsley and Wimsatt’s own method of exegesis, which applied only to poetry because in poems “all or most of what is said or implied is relevant.” For the interpretation of “practical messages,” the critic had to “correctly infer the intention.” However, Faurisson had no qualms about launching his theory of literary criticism into a colonizing drive beyond the boundary of the poetic to treat historical texts as merely rhetorical, purely discursive operations that have no link to external evidence.

  Faurisson was not the only one to dissolve the boundary between literature and history. In fact, a whole school arose which, under the banner of New Historicism, began to apply the lessons of adherents of New Criticism to the discourse of history. The new historicism claimed that the materials of historical investigation—chronicles, correspondence, bills, minutes, memoirs, court proceedings, eyewitness testimonies, and so on— were at an ontological level not different from, for example, poetry. Fair enough. Yet they also charged that the accounts historians wrought from those elements—their “histories”—were no different from poems or novels or epics. In effect, they erased the fundamental distinction between fact and fiction—a distinction that had in a rough-and-ready fashion defined the boundary between history and literature since the ancient Greeks.

  Faurisson could be seen as just another exponent of post-structuralist historiography if not for the fact that he attempted to apply this theory to a unique ideological agenda. To be sure, many in the New Historicist camp had a mission of their own: to challenge the dominant understanding of history as just another hegemonic discourse. The New Historicists aimed to create a place in history for the hitherto repressed—that is, everyone who was not white, straight, or male. In other words, by dissolving “History” into “histories,” they tried to reveal new riches hitherto suppressed under the totalitarian discourse that centered on a Whig interpretation of history as progress. Faurisson, however, had a different axe to grind: he did not desire to make our reading of the past more inclusive. To the contrary: he aimed to narrow history by scouring the Holocaust from the record. If the champions of New Historicism intended to increase the truth content of history by allowing different and contradictor
y “truths” to float simultaneously, Faurisson desired to use the same technique to debunk a central truth of contemporary history as a lie.

  In this mission, Faurisson was inspired by another French ideologue, Paul Rassinier. Born in 1906, Rassinier had been a communist in his youth, but he was expelled from the party in 1932. A pacifist in the 1930s, Rassinier applauded the Munich agreement. He served in the French army in 1940, joined the French Resistance in 1942, and edited the clandestine magazine La Quatrième République. Arrested on November 29, 1943, by the Gestapo, he was deported to the concentration camp of Buchenwald in January 1944. After a period of quarantine there, he was brought to the concentration camp at Dora-Mittelbau, where he was imprisoned for fourteen months.

  When Rassinier entered the camps he saw no basic difference between the democratic West, National Socialist Germany, and communist Russia, between the First World War and the Second. He was simply not prepared to acknowledge that the National Socialist regime was different or that its concentration camps were unique. “The problem of the concentration camps was a universal one, not just one that could be disposed of by placing it on the doorstep of the National Socialists.” Rassinier believed that the horror of camp life was the result not of German policies but of the common practice, found in every country, of letting trusted inmates, who were referred to in the French penitentiary system as Chaouchs, run the prison on behalf of the jailers. “From morning to night, our Chaouchs, throwing out their chests, plumed themselves on the power that they said that they had to send us to the Krématoriumfor the least indiscretion and with a single word.” According to Rassinier, the SS kept a distance and were even ignorant of what happened inside the camp. If they had involved themselves with the day-to-day lives of the inmates, the situation would have been better. After having formulated the thesis that the SS was really not in control and that all the horror of inmate life was due to the petty cruelty of the Kapos, Rassinier came to a logical conclusion: the atrocity stories about the use of the camps as factories of death could not be true, because these stories implied an organized system of terror that transcended the cruelty of the Kapos. To account for the fact that such stories circulated nevertheless, Rassinier postulated “the complex of Ulysses’ lie, which is everyone’s, and so it is with all of the internees.” Camp inmates had an inborn need to exaggerate their suffering “without realizing that the reality is quite enough in itself.”

  After he was liberated in April 1945, Rassinier returned to France. He had no patience for or empathy with his fellow deportees who “came back with hatred and resentment on their tongues and in their pens.” They were caught in “a treadmill of lies. . . . So it was with Ulysses who, during the course of his voyage, each day added a new adventure to his Odyssey, as much to please the public taste of the times as to justify his long absence in the eyes of his family.” To Rassinier, the proof of the fact that the ex-inmates were lying was their constant return to the (to him) obviously absurd proposition that camps had been equipped with homicidal gas chambers. As time progressed, he became more and more obsessed with the issue of the gas chambers, which had ceased to be the result of mere “lies of Ulysses” and had become a massive fabrication created with a political aim in mind.

  This shift in explanation from psychology to conspiracy was due to the notorious Kravchenko trial, which dominated the French media in the first half of 1949. In 1944, Victor Kravchenko, a top official of the Soviet delegation in Washington, D.C., defected to the West. In his best-selling book I Chose Freedom (1946), Kravchenko described the Soviet Union as a totalitarian nightmare in which the successes that had been trumpeted all around the world, especially the ruthless collectivization of agriculture, had been achieved through the application of terror backed by an extensive system of concentration camps. The Soviets and their communist allies in the West answered through a campaign of defamation against Kravchenko, which resulted, among other things, in an article published in the French magazine Les Lettres Francaises. It claimed that Kravchenko was too stupid to have written the book, and that his so-called revelations had been manufactured by American intelligence. In response, Kravchenko filed a libel suit against the magazine, and in early 1949 the trial began in Paris. It lasted for two months. In the end Kravchenko won, but many never surrendered the idea that the whole gulag had been an invention of the American intelligence service, designed to discredit the Soviet Union. Rassinier drew the conclusion that if the Russian concentration camps had been concocted in Washington, D.C., the stories about German extermination camps with large crematoria equipped with homicidal gas chambers must also have been the product of some propaganda apparatus.

  Rassinier spent the rest of his life trying to debunk the myth of the camps. As a known Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite, Faurisson was attracted to Rassinier’s thesis that the Holocaust was a hoax and the gas chambers the stuff of legend. Exposed to an alleged deception of such dimensions, Faurisson lost his interest in sonnets, odes, and novels and began to subject accounts about Auschwitz to his “Ajax method.” [. . .]

  INDEED, ON HIS return home to France Faurisson became, once again, the center of public debate. In April 1980 the so-called Faurisson Affair was given new life with the publication of Serge Thion’s 350-page-long book Vérité historique ou vérité politique? La dossier de l’affaire Faurisson. La question des chambresà gaz (Historical Truth or Political Truth? The File of the Faurisson Affair—The Question of the Gas Chambers). With the strong declaration of the thirty-five French historians published in Le Monde on February 21, 1979, Faurisson had become the underdog opposed by the defenders of the status quo. For the champions of the radical left, Faurisson became a hero of the search for a new cause that would unmask the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, and they began to fashion, in imitation of the Dreyfus Affair, a so-called Faurisson Affair. Those who rallied to Faurisson’s side were the same radicals who believed that the reporting on the Cambodian genocide had actually served the interests of the establishment. “The West’s best propaganda resource is Pol Pot’s regime,” Régis Debray observed in discussion with Noam Chomsky. “We needed that scarecrow.” And Chomsky provided, together with Edward Herman, a lengthy analysis of the way the liberal press averted its eyes from the “terrorizing elites” at home and used the news of atrocities abroad to help maintain the political, social, and economic status quo. Thus, the atrocities ascribed to Pol Pot (or Stalin) allowed the elites in the United States to discredit every form of socialism as a highway to the Gulag and to resist the creation of national health insurance, the improvement of welfare programs, and the growth of the labor movement.

  Contemporary atrocities were not the only ones to be exploited by the reactionary establishment. Hitler also proved a convenient “scarecrow.” For the French ultra-Left of the 1970s, National Socialism had been the ultimate political emanation of capitalist society, created to stop the historically necessary advance of the working classes. As such, it was a tool of the bourgeoisie, the same bourgeoisie that shaped and dominated postwar liberal-democractic society. Yet the bourgeoisie denied the fundamental identity between liberal democracy and Hitler’s regime, and their main argument was, as some ultra-Left ideologists had discovered, the Holocaust. The strategists of the proletariat formulated the thesis that the fundamental identity between the two political systems would become clear only if the Holocaust, the principal foil of capitalism, were to be removed from the historical record.

  Finally intellectual fashion played into Faurisson’s hands. The generation that began to dominate the intellectual world in the late 1970s had been the same that, ten years earlier, had seen its hopes of progress through radical change defeated. As the promise of change had not materialized, the students of 1968 felt that “history” had betrayed them and became skeptical of any “grand narrative” of historical development that led to some social, political, and economic resolution at the end. This, in turn, led to the conception of a different kind of understanding of the past
, or, for that matter, of the present. Instead of one privileged narrative that told of the progress of God’s people from fall to redemption or of the progress of (Western) civilization from cave to lunar colony or of the progress from slavery to freedom, the generation of 1968 formulated the idea that one should allow, paraphrasing Chairman Mao, a thousand parallel “histories” to bloom. And they carried on their banners Nietzsche’s observation that objective reality is not accessible, that what we call truth is a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms” in the service of political, social, and economic power. Armed with Nietzsche’s slogan that one’s obligation to truth was just one’s pledge to lie herd-like according to a fixed convention, these revolutionaries stormed the bastille of the “grand narrative” which, so they believed, disenfranchised all but the (generally) white male carriers of “the idea.” These radicals preached that one should stop searching for “the truth” and become engaged in recovering many alternative “truths,” such as the histories of the underprivileged class (the common folk, slaves), gender (women), race (“colonials”), and so on. In short, in an effort to defeat the cultural imperialism of the West and the cultural arrogance of its intellectual tradition, historians began to practice a principled relativism that demanded an absolute suspension of judgment when faced with “otherness” or concepts expressed in such neologisms as “alterity,” “illeity,” and “différance.” In seeking the stranger and the foreigner, they hoped to find themselves. As a result, many of the generation of 1968, who reveled in the rhetoric of “difference,” “textuality,” “incommensurable phrase-regimes,” and the like, were fascinated by Faurisson— the ultimate stranger, the champion of an alternative history that was incommensurable with the hegemonic narrative of the Holocaust.