10
know). Also, 23 percent of those who identified themselves as "conservatives" assented to the
possibility that the extermination of the Jews may not have occurred. (To be sure, some
legitimate questions have been raised as to the accuracy of this poll. Novick, Holocaust in
American Life, pp. 271-72.) A survey of high school seniors in Alabama (1990) found that only
45% of them knew that the Holocaust was the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews. Many of
those who gave the wrong answer to the question thought that U.S. had committed the Holocaust
against the Japanese with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
This level of public ignorance makes it easy for the more "respectable" to engage in their
deceptions. Beneath the surface the deniers are bigots who hate Jews, racial minorities, and
democracy in general. But they have adopted the outward appearance of the rationalist and
avoided that of the extremist. They project the appearance of being committed to the very values
that they in truth despise--reason, accuracy, critical rules of evidence, the honest search for
historical truth. In an appeal clearly aimed at Christian intellectuals, George Brewer wrote in the
first issue of The Revisionist: A Journal of Independent Thought (November 1999): "Whether we
will be able to successfully skeet the other clay feet of the hegemonic ideology of liberal Secular
Humanism depends on how well we defend the right to think differently about the Jewish
catastrophe, as much as anything else."
2) Holocaust denial is at the core a threat to all who believe that knowledge and memory
are keystones of our civilization. The Holocaust is not merely a tragedy of the Jews but a
tragedy of civilization in which the victims were Jews. It was carried out by a highly advanced
technological society, by people who were products of one of the best educational systems in the
world. Thus to deny its reality is not a threat just to Jewish history but a threat to all who believe
in the power of reason. Holocaust denial repudiates reasoned discussion in much the same way
that the Holocaust itself repudiated civilized values. It is the ultimate glorification of
irrationalism.
3)
Holocaust denial reflects the direction that the intellectual climate in the scholarly
world has taken in the last quarter century. The deniers are plying their trade at time when
much of history seems to be up for grabs and attacks on the Western rationalist tradition have
become commonplace. There are no objective truths; there is no one version of the world that is
necessarily right while another is wrong. Every conceptual system is as good as another. One
cannot dismiss out of hand even the most far-fetched notions simply because they are absurd.