Content provided in partnership with
Be careful whose history you deny, for to hate them you must steep
Independent, The (London), Dec 16, 2006 by HOWARD JACOBSON
I wonder if, as a seasonal kindness to those who attended the deny-fest of all the crazies in Tehran last week, I might be allowed to suggest a more effective form of Holocaust Denial. When you speak of That Which Never Really Happened, try concealing the fact that You Wish It Really Had. Or if that proves too difficult, think twice before accepting invitations from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who promises that That Which Never Really Happened Pretty Soon Will.
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
Also consider that as serious, unprejudiced historians, bringing light where there has hitherto been only darkness, you have awfully good news for Jews everywhere. Don't be shy about it; tell them. "My friends, the terrible tragedy which you, the Jewish people, believed had befallen you, hadn't. Your parents weren't, after all, gassed at Auschwitz. The three million vanished Jews of Poland weren't exterminated as you thought, though don't ask me to explain why they are no longer there. Those piles of bodies you saw, you didn't. That which was inflicted on your own flesh, wasn't. It has all been a ghastly misunderstanding. But at last the truth is out. Hallelujah! Thanks to our unremitting toil, the Jews of Europe have been saved!"
Why not? Those who labour in the rubble of an earthquake embrace its survivors. The doctor who saves your life is pleased to tell you you still live. Wouldn't the expression of joyful relief for the millions of victims it has rescued from the lies of history prove the disinterestedness of Holocaust Denial?
As it is, there is no historian of the Holocaust That Wasn't who isn't a Jew-hater first. Whether they argue that the Holocaust didn't happen at all, or happened just a bit, or happened to some degree but was deserved, or happened only to Jews who had made themselves enemies of the state, or was merely another word for natural (not to say desirable) wastage - the dying of Jews who were already disease-ridden, morally enfeebled, spiritually purulent - the one unchanging character in the story is the degenerate and conniving Jew.
It is the same when it comes to understanding how the "Myth" of the Holocaust came about. The Jews were not simply mistaken, or prone, in the confusion of war, to exaggerate. Rumour did not sweep their ranks. They were not the dupes of Allied propaganda. No: the Holocaust Lie was deliberately and systematically propagated to poison minds against the German people, to win unending sympathy and compensation, to clear a passage for the Jews' pursuit of World Domination, to effect a rape not just of the conscience of Europe but of Palestine, and to silence all criticism against anything done in the name of Zionism.
Everything the Nazis said about the Jews, in other words, has been borne out after the event and would have justified a Holocaust had there only been one. By which reasoning it was only by a sort of historical oversight - the inadequacy of the railway lines running into Auschwitz, the shortcomings of the gas chambers - that there wasn't. Which oversight, if he gets his bomb, Ahmadinejad all but promises to rectify. I know a Holocaust Denier. Female, good looking, socialite, friend of David Irving, last heard of heading for Tehran last week, and famous - in my house anyway - for telling reporters covering Irving's trial in Vienna earlier this year that "so-called Holocaust victims" should be exhumed to see whether "they'd died from typhoid or gas". Quite where they were going to find the bodies she didn't hang around outside the court long enough to explain. But as an example of fearless historical questioning I think it's up there with wondering, if there were millions of Jews murdered, why so few of them ever come forward to give evidence.
When I say I know her, I mean I've met her a few times. At debates and garden parties, places like that. I was brought up to be polite to people whatever their beliefs, so I smile when I encounter her and enquire after her researches. For all the time she has spent by Irving's side, the Holocaust isn't really her bag, as evidenced by her assumption that its victims were buried neatly and recoverably in cemeteries. What really interests her are Jews.
Jews in high places. Jews orchestrating world censorship. Jews looking down their noses at Gentiles.
I make a point of assuring her, by word and deed, that I do not look down my nose at her. But she is too smart to suppose that exonerates the entire Jewish people. She cites scripture. "For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God; the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth." "Deuteronomy 7:6," she says, flashing me the smile which must have lit up Tehran last week, when talk turned to wiping Israel off the map, and every heart was merry.
There are several ways to go with Deuteronomy 7:6. You can point out that any statement made so long ago is subject to reinterpretation, Jews being nothing if not rabid re-interpreters. You can explain that the specialness alluded to is understood more as a burden than a privilege, and that the phrase "above all people" refers to the ordering of God's choice, not a Jew's position vis-a- vis the rest of humanity. You can show, if you have the requisite quotations to hand, that every monotheistic religion defines itself primarily through its consciousness of specialness. Or you can just say fuck off.
