The problem of Holocaust denial literature in libraries - The Library Bill of Rights

Library Trends, Summer, 1996 by Kathleen Nietzke Wolkoff

"Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation" (American Library Association, Office for Intellectual Freedom, 1992, p. 3).

This is the second tenet for libraries enumerated in the Library Bill of Rights, the statement of guidelines on intellectual freedom endorsed by the American Library Association (ALA). It calls upon information professionals subscribing to these policies to include in their collections a wide variety of materials on a wide variety of issues and implies that librarians would be wrong to buy materials that presented only one side of the debate on a current social issue such as euthanasia. Likewise, librarians who only purchased materials that presented Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal in a positive light would be guilty of ignoring other historical interpretations of this period in American history.

Now suppose that a new book was published by a historian who claimed not that the New Deal was merely misguided or ineffective, but that it never really happened. Suppose a new book claimed there was never a Social Security system or a Civilian Conservation Corps, and all of Roosevelt's alleged social programs were just fabrications of a bunch of liberals that were invented to justify the existence of a welfare state. Would librarians be free to dismiss such a perspective as inaccurate and absurd, or would they be obligated to include the book in their collections as an alternative point of view on a historical issue?

Preposterous as such a scenario may look on the surface, it represents a reality. For the past fifteen years, the library profession has actually faced a similar situation in the form of a growing body of literature that challenges the notion that European Jews were systematically exterminated in German death camps during World War II. Those who hold and promote these views call themselves "historical revisionists" (Shapiro, 1990, p. 1) and claim that historical accounts of the Holocaust are a myth, invented by a conspiracy of Zionists to further the cause of the state of Israel (Lipstadt, 1994, p. 9). This has raised complex and troubling questions for many librarians about the nature of truth and whether professional codes and ethics oblige librarians to provide access to information that a mountain of eyewitness and documentary evidence shows is utterly false. It has caused some to suggest that limitations on the Library Bill of Rights and the concept of intellectual freedom might be necessary to combat the spread of these hateful and inaccurate views.

Essentially, librarians have taken three philosophical positions on this thorny issue. The first reaffirms the sanctity of intellectual freedom and relies on a strict interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights. According to this argument, librarians can make no distinctions about what they will and will not accept as truthful, for to do so is to cross over the line of censorship. The first book they deem untrue, and therefore unworthy of inclusion in library collections, sets a precedent for excluding other materials and places librarians in the dangerous position of gatekeepers for what society can and cannot read or think. The concepts of intellectual freedom and free speech, this argument continues, have no value if they do not apply equally to all ideas, however bizarre, misguided, or unpopular they might be. To include such views in library collections does not mean librarians endorse them, but they must not make any value judgments about providing access to the ideas themselves.

Swan (1986) argues passionately for this position in defending the role of librarians as providers of access to ideas rather than as arbiters of truth:

It is our job to provide access not to the truth, but to the fruit of

human thought and communication; not to reality, but to multiple

representations thereof. Truth and reality must fend for themselves

within each of the complicated creatures who uses the materials we

have to offer. We can and do learn a great deal from bad ideas and

untruths. (p. 51)

The second philosophical position argues that librarians have a professional duty not to mislead the people they serve. Proponents of this view say librarians should not feel compelled, for example, to include materials that advised parents to pour boiling water on their children as a remedy for illness or that claimed the Earth was the center of the solar system. Books like this would not be selected at all because they are inaccurate or even harmful, the argument goes, and no one would think of calling such exclusions censorship. Why, then, should the exclusion of Holocaust denial literature, which can easily be called both inaccurate and harmful, cause librarians to feel any remorse whatsoever?

Peattie (1986) goes so far as to argue that a qualitative difference exists between two false statements like "the Earth is flat" and "the Holocaust is a myth." Although both are untrue, the first is "morally weightless, while the second is loaded with moral, social, and political implications," he says. "To put them in the same category, as the utterances of kooks whom we may tolerate because in the `free marketplace of ideas'--both concepts will (probably) be discarded--is to not think clearly" (p. 13). Peattie calls the flat-Earth assertion an untruth but the Holocaust denial a lie, which he defines as "a deliberate falsehood uttered to deceive and hurt people" (p. 14). As far as he is concerned, most libraries should have no room in their collections for lies.