In his book published in 1968, Aspects of Antiquity, which in 1989 was translated into French under the less dry title of On a perdu la guerre de Troie,[1] M. I. Finley concluded his study of the Jews and the death of Jesus in the following words: "The dead past never buries its dead. The world will have to be changed, not the past." And yet one is tempted to add to this statement George Orwell's parallel and complementary comment that he who controls the past also controls the present; and, I would add, the future. No system of government, whether liberal or totalitarian, has ever been indifferent to the past, although of course control of the past is much stricter in a totalitarian society than it is in a liberal one. No regime, no society, is indifferent to how its own history, or what it considers to be its own history, is taught. This is true in Italy, this is true in France, this is true in Israel, just as it is true in Russia.
And yet I have called my presentation "who are the assassins of memory?" and not "who are the assassins of history?" This expression, "the assassins of memory," is not my own. I have borrowed it from Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, who used it at a Royaumont symposium on the functions of forgetting. It is true that I have made it into the title of a book. What were the reasons for choosing this title? There has been considerable discussion recently about whether there is such a thing as a collective memory. I belong to those who believe that there is, unlike, for example, my friend Pierre Sorlin.[2] But it is obvious that collective memory must always go through the individual memory.
Those who see fit to deny the very existence of the Shoah, and who call themselves "revisionists" --they now tend to be called Holocaust deniers (négateurs)-- are trying to affect each of us, whether we have experienced the Shoah directly or indirectly, and even, I would say, whether we are Jews or not, in our individual memories.
This memory is, of course, not history, and when we are no longer here, the only thing remaining will be history. But history --and this is the point to which I want to return-- is also made up of the intermeshing of our memories and the memories of witnesses. By laying the stress on memory, I am emphasizing the fact that the deniers' undertaking is clearly an attempt to strike at each of us in his or her self.
Can history itself be murdered? To the extent that we work on modern and contemporary history, we are used to the existence of enormous files, whose disappearance we can scarcely imagine. Those states which in terms of political practice are the greatest organisers of lies and tyranny are also those which best preserve those files that subsequently allow the historians to determine what really happened. We have just witnessed this for the files of the Spanish Inquisition,[3] and today in the former Soviet Union we are seeing the same thing happening in the Katyn affair.
And yet somebody dealing with classical history knows how fragile a thing history is. How could we recount the story of the Jewish War unless we had Josephus? We do have him, but the problem is simply shifted. How can we tell the story of the Jewish war using this single --or more or less single-- source, whose impartiality is not its outstanding virtue? One of the characteristics of "The Destruction of the European Jews," as Raul Hilberg put it, is that history was destroyed at the same time as history itself was being made.
What am I driving at? Essentially, three things:
Possibly the most extraordinary document in this connection is Himmler's speech in Poznan (Poser) on 6 October 1943, an address to the Reichsleiter and Gauleiter, in other words the Party aristocracy. Himmler says, very bluntly, that a radical decision had to be taken "dieses yolk von der Erde verschwinden zu lessen" --"to wipe this people off the face of the earth." But then he adds this simple sentence: "Die Juden müssen ausgerottet werden." "The Jews must be exterminated" is easier to say than to do, with everybody's consent. Does not every German have his decent Jew? So things had to be done in secret and, as far as possible, without leaving traces.
The gas chambers, which began operations in Auschwitz, for the Jews, in the spring of 1942, were both the weapon with which the crime was carried out, and the instrument for denial of the crime. This is not at all paradoxical, since the gas chambers are an anonymous instrument of murder. No one is responsible. No one is a murderer. This is the situation that Ulysses generates when he takes the name of Noman and the unfortunate Polyphemus cries out that Noman has blinded him.
Who is the murderer? The doctor who carries out the selections, the Häftling who directs the crowd of those condemned to die, the SS who take the Zyklon B to the gas chamber?
No one is the executioner, because everyone takes part in the murder, something which makes all the denials easier.
But when people use coded language, they also speak of something else, of a language which bears witness to a reversal of values. This is something that Thucydides, the Athenian historian, perceived during the Peloponnesian War, and I will allow myself to cite his comments on the subject: "To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence . . . and indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second."[5]
I first quoted this text of Thucydides in 1962 when discussing the reversal of values which had taken place in the French army during the Algerian war, but, possibly more remarkably, recently as I was reading something written by Simon Laks, the conductor of the Auschwitz orchestra, I found that, without being familiar with Thucydides, he had come up with practically the same words.[6]
Nobody, or practically nobody, could seriously deny a crime whose precise extent, paradoxically, nobody could as yet determine. The accused at Nuremberg did not make a serious attempt to deny the evidence, each of them --with the exception of Speer-- trying to deny his own responsibility. The Nazis had foreseen everything, except the crushing nature of their defeat. At that time nobody imagined that, in their defeat they had planted a time bomb which today is known as revisionism or denialism.
Let us try to plot the geography of this strange phenomenon. When you go to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and look at that section of the documentation which corresponds to the underworld (the pornographic books) of our National Library in Paris, you can easily have the feeling --for example, when examining the various editions of Richard Harwood's brochure, Did six million really die? or Butz's The Hoax of the XXth Century, or the various works by Faurisson, Stäglich, Christophersen or Carlo Mattogno-- of an international venture. In point of fact, the revisionist venture has several faces, and we have to know how to analyse each of these. First, of course, there are the individual perverts, such as "Jehovah's Witness" Dietlieb Felderer, who lives in Sweden, and who distributed a Jewish Information Letter, which contained, among other things, the following: "please, accept this hair of a gassed victim," or "this sample of Jewish fat." Let us ignore these paranoiac individuals. Besides, this particular one appears to have fallen silent. At any rate, I have not heard of him for some time.
So where today does revisionism flourish primarily? First and foremost,
and for obvious reasons, in Germany. This is the country where these books
are most widely distributed. Their target audience is a specialised one:
the heirs or survivors of the Nazis or extreme right-wing nationalists who,
in the thirties, were the Nazis' allies. In Germany, "revisionism,"
depending on the particular audience and author, can adopt the form of a
radical denial: the Nazis never killed a single Jew as such --it is
striking that there is no "revisionism" for the mentally ill or the
Gypsies-- or, alternatively, more moderate forms: the death of the Jews is
an act of war. Since the Jews declared war on Hitler, it is perfectly
natural that Hitler waged war on the Jews. The destruction of the Warsaw
Ghetto, for example, is the consequence of the uprising, not its cause.
This was Himmler's own thesis.
These large numbers of publications, which a ban does not appear to have
bothered very much, rarely emerge into the light of day in the general
press and parliamentary debates, even if a slip of the tongue by the
Bundestag President sometimes sparks off a public outcry. So we can say
that the status of these publications is comparable to that of X-rated
films or the pornographic press. It is extremely rare in Germany for
groups other than the Far Right to pick up these issues. Occasionally this
has happened with the Greens.
The second major location is the United States, because that is where the
money is. That is also where, on the Californian coast, we find the
Liberty Lobby of William Carto financing the Los Angeles revisionist
congresses and the Journal of Historical Review. In an utterly
classical formation, in this group there is a harmonious synthesis of
anti-Communism, anti-Semitism, hatred of the Blacks, such as the Ku Klux
Klan manifesto, hatred of the Democrats, etc. Do they extend beyond this
extreme Right position? They have tried to get themselves taken seriously
by buying the American Historical Association catalogues, by
advertising in student newspapers (recently, for example, at Cornell), and
by using as a front figures such as Noam Chomsky, who some ten years ago
agreed to write a preface to a book by Robert Faurisson, albeit making it
clear that he had not read his writings. In America this gained the group
far more censure than kudos, including among the most radical adherents of
political correctness. I do not believe in the revisionist threat in
America, any more than in Australia, despite the efforts of somebody like
John Bennett.
Third location: France, and to a smaller extent, Belgium and Italy, where
those active include figures like Carlo Mattogno or Cesare Saletta,
covering the open field between Fascism and the Far Left. There a strange
alliance has been struck between the Far Left and the extreme Right. There
one can talk of a real danger, insofar as, in France at least, there exists
a political party which brings together all the varieties of the extreme
Right: combining Maurras, Hitler and the traditional Catholicism of the
late Monsignor Lefebvre, a political party which receives the support of
something like 15% of the electorate and which does not conceal --in its
newspapers, in the statements by its leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, in its
propaganda-- that it is on the side of the assassins of memory. Moreover,
it also has Jews who support it. Openly, it is more anti-Arab than
anti-Semitic, but it supported Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. In one
sense, this is the legacy of Vichy, but a Vichy which received the support
of a fraction of the Far Left. How can this be explained? In point of
fact, everything revolves round a strange individual called Paul Rassinier,
who died in 1967, and was interned in Buchenwald and Dora. In his youth,
Rassinier was first a Communist, then a Socialist; in the thirties, he
belonged to the pacifist trend of the SFIO (the French section of the
Labour and Socialist International), which explains his hatred of Leon
Blum, the leader of the opposing trend who, because he was a Jew, was
suspected of being anti-Nazi. Unlike Paul Faure and other former
pacifists, Rassinier was a member of the Resistance and the Liberation-Nord
movement and a deportee. After the war, he rejoined the Socialists and
became the deputy for Belfort in the First Constituent Assembly. It is
quite possible that in his "revisionist" activities he was expressing his
feelings of guilt at having been constantly protected as a deportee, since
most of his deportation was spent in the "Revier" or infirmary.[7] His
spiritual heirs are a "Marxist" sect, the Vieille Taupe (Old Mole), which
in turn is derived, at several removes, from a dissident Trotskyite group,
Socialisme ou Barbarie. What kind of analysis lies behind these paranoiac
frenzies? In the centre we find a theme which is already visible in
Rassinier's approach: there is no basic difference between the First World
War, which each country presented as a just war, and the Second, which saw
the alliance between the liberal democracies and Stalinist Bolshevism.
Here Rassinier takes up the ideas of the American historian Barnes, who
after 1918 tried to show that the Americans had been wrong to become
involved in the war against Wilhelm II's Germany side by side with France
and England.
As far as the Second World War is concerned, the utterly distinct character
of Nazi Germany is denied, and this goes hand in hand with the denial, by
Rassinier in France and by Barnes and his American disciples, of the crime
of all crimes, the Nazi gas chambers.
It is this intuition of Rassinier's which was developed by the Vieille
Taupe, which gave it a twist that it has maintained ever since: that of
World Revolution. In order to achieve this revolution, the memory of
Nazism must be stripped of its specific aspects, and it must be shown that
Nazi Germany, the liberal and bourgeois West, and the USSR, whether under
Stalin or Brezhnev, are all, when it comes to crimes, on the same level.
The West has its colonial wars, Germany has its Gestapo and the USSR has
its KGB, apart from the camps which can be found everywhere. Once the
illusions have been dealt with, the decks will be cleared for the real
revolution, the one which will put an end to man's exploitation by man.
In order to prove this thesis, the Vieille Taupe people based
themselves on the minutely detailed writings of a fanatical scandalmonger
and anti-Semite: Robert Faurisson.
Just one point about the former Communist countries. What was
characteristic of these countries during the Communist phase of their
history is not "revisionism." This was always banned. On the contrary, of
the most documented publications about the mass slaughter, some are from
Hungary, with most coming from Poland. In the USSR itself, the massacre of
the Jews is but one minor aspect of the Nazi massacres, whose victims,
according to Soviet terminology, were "the Russians, the Ukrainians, and
other peaceful nationalities of the USSR." Soviet historiography does not
deny Auschwitz or Treblinka--it may even tend to blow up the figures, but
it does play down the Jewish dimension. Similarly, in Poland Auschwitz is
first of all presented as a camp for Poles. It can readily be foreseen
that with the development of rival nationalisms, there will be a resurgence
of a thesis which has already been adopted by a group such as Pamyat: the
real criminals of the Second World War are the Jews. This is a message
which has already been broadcast by various books or brochures from the
Hungarian emigration, such as those who put out a pamphlet called
Kissinger Soviet Agent, or a book such as Marschalko's The World
Conquerors.[8]
Now a few words about a last geographical location, the Middle East, where
Israel was battling against the Arab world. It did not require much
perspicacity to foresee that this conflict would give rise to the most
varied forms of anti-Semitism, even if this anti-Semitism may be presented
--as Maxime Rodinson puts it-- as a racisme de guerre, a form of
racism brought about by belligerency.[9] In this context, those who are the
most vehement, those who have systematically translated and republished the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, are not the most bellicose, because
these are largely the ideologues of Saudi Arabia, an American ally. The
interesting aspect is the attitude of the Palestinians. It appears to me
that they are attracted by two extremes: one is the pure and simple denial
of the Shoah, something of which there are many examples in Palestinian
literature; the other is to identify their own destiny with that of the
Jewish people. Everybody will have noticed, for example, that the
Palestinians' November 1988 Declaration of Independence was modelled on
Israel's 1948 Declaration of Independence. It is in this spirit that
Palestinian leaders sometimes say that they know what the Shoah is, because
they suffer it on a daily basis. I heard Yasser Arafat make this point in
1989 to a group of intellectuals, of whom I was one. I protested in an
article published by Le Monde. I must, to be fair, say that the
Revue d'Etudes Palestiniennes reproduced my protest uncut, and this
same revue sympathetically reviewed my book, Les assassins de la
mémoire.[10]
Now that I have concluded this tour of the world of denial, I can proceed
to the somewhat more introspective part of my paper.
On the strictly scientific level, it goes without saying that
pseudo-revisionism's contribution to the knowledge of these appalling
events is zero. Consequently, there never can or will be any question of a
scientific debate with these individuals. When Chomsky signed a petition
stating in respect of Robert Faurisson that this respected professor of
French twentieth-century literature and documentary criticism has carried
out an in-depth and independent historical study of the question of the
Holocaust, at that point he committed a kind of sin against truth and
knowledge. None of the "revisionists" has ever conducted a historical
study. It is also striking to see that practically none of these gentlemen
is a professional historian, the only exception being David Irving:
Stäglich is a judge, Butz a computer-science professor, Faurisson a
professor of literature. I must admit that I do not know the profession of
Carlo Mattogno, who represents Italy in this miserable little gang. As far
as I am aware, none of them, except Irving, has the slightest training as a
historian. For the honour of our profession, it is only right to make this
point. In less delicate areas, perhaps we can point out that the deniers
have their precursors. The most amusing example is, perhaps, that of a
very famous scholar who flourished at the end of the 17th and the beginning
of the 18th century -- Reverend Father Hardouin (1646-1742), who explained
that, with very few exceptions, all of Greek, Latin and patristic
literature consisted of forgeries put together in the 14th century by
heretic monks. Thus the reason why Calvin and Luther, for example, and
subsequently the Jansenist movement, were able to make use of St.
Augustine was because St. Augustine's works were just so many forgeries.
Hardouin divided the rest of classical literature into two groups: genuine,
good texts, such as Virgil's Georgics, and those which were genuine
and perverse, such as the works of Josephus. But is it sufficient to split
up the true and the false into two opposing blocks in order for
"revisionism" to be viewed as having been settled? Historical facts are
not inanimate objects; they are alive and change with the very movement of
history.
Let us begin with a first question: why did "revisionism," the new shape
adopted by ancient anti-Semitism, suddenly make a front-page appearance, in
France at least, at the end of the seventies? It is indeed true that there
was certainly far from an immediate awareness by historians themselves of
the specific nature of Judeocide in the Second World War. At the outset
--by which I mean during the Nuremberg Tribunal-- one cannot speak of a
general awareness of what the Shoah had been. It was engulfed in the abyss
of Nazi crimes. When Chaim Weizmann wanted to raise a Jewish voice to
testify in this trial, he was told that there was no point and that the
judges had quite enough material on the subject. The war against the Jews
shifted from the periphery to the centre of thoughts about the Second World
War[11] after a long incubation period.
The following observation provides a striking example of this state of
affairs: in the years that followed the Second World War, in a country like
mine, the symbol of deportation was Buchenwald or Dachau for men, and
Ravensbrück for women. The reason for this is quite obvious. In
1945, most survivors returned from Buchenwald, Dachau or Ravensbrück.
But apart from Ravensbrück, these camps did not have gas chambers, and
even the Ravensbrück gas chamber played only a relatively marginal
role in the camp's history. In addition, it must be noted that there was
something like a "narrative migration" between Auschwitz and Buchenwald,
just as in January-February 1945 there was a human migration between these
two camps. Thus there was some testimony to the effect that there was a
gas chamber at Buchenwald, a purely imaginary gas chamber, however, and
this tale was, of course, seized upon by Rassinier, and then by Faurisson.
If Auschwitz then occupied the central position in Europeans'
consciousness, it was, of course, because it was in Auschwitz that the
extermination installations operated over the longest period, but also
because far more survivors returned from Auschwitz than from the death
camps: Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka. Auschwitz was a mixed camp:
extermination camp, concentration camp, factory camp. With the exception
of the very few Sonderkommando survivors, the Auschwitz survivors
who have testified for history tell us less about death in Auschwitz than
about life there. This, for example, is true of the person whom I hold to
be the most remarkable painter of human relationships in Auschwitz, Primo
Levi. It is not without significance, perhaps, that he had some difficulty
publishing his first book, Se questo è un Uomo. Primo Levi
was an Italian chemist who was employed as a slave chemist in Auschwitz
III-Monowitz. His testimony about the extermination of his travel
companions occupies a few lines only. Perhaps one day we will see a new
migration of the Auschwitz story to Belzec or Treblinka?
If I now take my own experience, as the son of two French Jews who died in
Auschwitz, I would say that for several years I did not make a real
distinction between concentration camps and extermination camps. The first
book which really taught me what the Auschwitz camp was like was Elie
Wiesel's Night, published in France in 1958 by Editions de Minuit.
At the time, I was already 28. It so happens that I hate Elie Wiesel's
writing, except for this one book --an additional reason for referring to
it. Eight years later, with much hype and just as much controversy, Fayard
brought out Jean-Francois Steiner's dreadful book, Treblinka, and
yet it is this specific book which made me understand what an out-and-out
extermination camp was. A historian's training is not limited to
documented studies alone. Even in a historian's work, and of course in his
life too, the irrational also plays a role.
When I speak of the movement of historical awareness, I cannot argue as if
the history of the destruction of the Jews in Europe had progressed
steadily from the straightforward collecting of testimony and documents to
the kind of scientific development that we find in the most recent edition
of Hilberg's book. This would be a tremendously over-simplified view of
the development of historiography. The notion of progress must be
questioned when studying historiography just as it must be questioned when
studying history. A book like Martin Gilbert's The Holocaust,[12] which
is chronicle rather than history, may be useful but, as has often been
emphasized, it represents a major step backwards compared with much earlier
works, including books or collections of documents written on the spot. As
Arno Mayer wrote: "No retrospective memoir, literary work, or historical
analysis can match the precision and penetration of Emanuel Ringelblum's
Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto, of Adam Czerniakow's Warsaw Diary,
and of the collectively kept Chronicles of the Lodz Ghetto,
1941-1944. These three firsthand chronicles, written inside the cities
of the dying and the dead, were framed with distinctly modern ideas of
facticity, chronology, and context, and also of the dynamics of
collaboration and resistance under conditions of extreme powerlessness.
More remarkable still, they registered the impact of the course of world
history, particularly the war, on the daily life and fate of the
ghettos."[13]
The extermination of the Jews --something that many historians tend to
forget-- really took place not in the sidelines, but at the heart of the
Second World War. In contrast, however, the historiography of this
extermination developed over the subsequent decades: in other words,
roughly speaking, during the Cold War and, of course, without being spared
the movement of history itself. This can be said of any historical
enterprise, even when it applies to a very distant past, such as ancient
Greece, my own scientific area; and it is even more true of events as close
to us as the Shoah.
Raul Hilberg, who is the complete antithesis of a "revisionist," said one
day that these scoundrels could be useful to the extent that they force
professional historians to carry out an in-depth check of their methods and
results. Is this true? Can we say that there are flaws in the
historiography of the Shoah, flaws which can explain the very relative
success of the deniers among people who are not all gangsters?
The reply must be in the affirmative. Let me try to explain why.
a) Sometimes, history can be hypercritical. This is true, for example, of
some pages in Arno Mayer's book, Why Did the Heavens not Darken?
But most frequently, the history of the Shoah has been hypocritical.
In particular, many historians have been insufficiently critical in
evaluating their sources. In saying this, I am not suggesting that we
should eliminate from the archives of the Shoah everything given orally to
us by witnesses. Indeed, in my opinion we have not yet made sufficient use
of this type of document, and the historian must become a disciple of
Marcel Proust, insofar as memory is also inscribed in history. But memory
is not necessary a memory of the truth, and we must give storytelling its
place and its importance. Memory as such must be examined. We have much
to learn from it: many "facts," of course, but not just facts. I would
tend to say that the historiography of the Shoah comprises two
masterpieces. One is La destruction des Juifs en Europe (The
Destruction of the European Jews), a book based almost entirely on
written documents and administrative archives, and the other is Claude
Lanzmann's Shoah, a film which is a work of art, and is based exclusively
on the living memory of witnesses. The facts are accurate, I believe, but
they are seen through the screen of memory, and it is in this direction
that today's historian should be turning.
b) The Shoah is part of the history of the Jews. Those who deny this, such
as somebody whom I admired unreservedly, Professor Y. Leibowitz of the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who argued that this history concerns only
the goyim, are making a mistake because they are forgetting the
real-life aspect of history. Today there exists a Jewish state which
undoubtedly was not born of Auschwitz, but whose very existence has some
link with this Second World War tragedy. This Jewish state was at war, not
with the Nazis, but with the Palestinian Arabs, whom many Israelis call the
"Arabs of Eretz Israel." Many responsible Israeli politicians and, with
them, many educators consider that the current war is the continuation of
the genocide, and Arafat is the new pseudonym of Adolf Hitler, who also
called himself Nasser in the fifties and sixties. At least they used to
say that until the Oslo and Washington agreements.
If a stone thrown by a boy or girl from the Occupied Territories, if a
bullet fired by a Palestinian guerilla, if even a bomb thrown at a bus by a
Palestinian terrorist is the continuation of the genocide, the ineluctable
result of this type of assertion is that some of those who think that the
Palestinians have good reason to rebel will perfectly naturally think that
the Shoah itself was not the terrifying tragedy that we know it to have
been. Those who, in Israel or elsewhere, make political use of the Shoah,
are running the risk of making this into not a historical truth, but a
"political truth," as the deniers' sect puts it, in other words something
which can be crushed by more incisive reasoning.
I am not suggesting that the Shoah belongs to the historians, and to the
historians alone. A French politician said one day that war is something
too difficult to be left up to the military. The Shoah is part of Jews'
living memory, and this will continue to be true for several more decades.
But nothing lasts for ever, and politicians should be aware of this and
think before running the risk of making political mileage out of the Nazi
genocide. How many Israelis have made this point to me in private? How
many others have made it in public, such as journalist Boaz Evron or
Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz? The latter gave his views, for example, in
the film made by Israeli film-maker Eyal Sivan, Yizkor, The Slaves of
Memory. What does this film show? Basically nothing more than what
Yosef Yerushalmi showed in his book Zakhor[14]: we must not be the
slaves of memory. In Israel, everything happens as if a close link has
been made between the festival of Passover (Pesach), Holocaust Day
(Yom Hashoah) and Independence Day (Yom Ha'atsmaut). This
link appears to be very firmly anchored in the educational system. If this
is the case, and I have every reason to fear that it is, not only do I
think that it is politically dangerous: I also consider it to be
historically dangerous. History is not a religion. The truth of Auschwitz
is not a religious truth, whether the Almighty God was present or not.
Auschwitz and Treblinka belong to a series of historical facts, not a
religious truth. They must be studied as one studies historical facts,
something that implies critical methods comparable to those which are
routinely used by the historians of the French Revolution. For example, it
is absurd to talk about four million victims at Auschwitz, as the Poles did
until recently, or even, as Claude Lanzmann has done,[15] of three million.
If, like Raul Hilberg, one believes that the number of victims of the
genocide is slightly over five million individuals, and not six million, we
must accept this conclusion as we would for any episode in history. And we
must also agree to compare Auschwitz and Treblinka with other major
massacres of history, ancient or recent: for example, with the 1915
massacre of the Armenians, or the massacre of the American Indians
following the event which we commemorated in 1992. We must even accept the
fact that Auschwitz and Treblinka do not have the same historical meaning
for the Jews, the Europeans, the Americans, on the one hand, and for the
peoples of Asia, Latin America or Black Africa on the other. I said, not
the same meaning; I did not say, no meaning whatsoever. I am not arguing
that the Shoah should be ignored or denied in the name of political
correctness.
But there is something worse than the political or religious use of the
Shoah, and that is what might be called Shoah Business. Of course this is
something no one can prevent. On one of my trips to Israel, I came across
tourist leaflets about the "Holocaust Cave" on Mount Zion. This is worse
than anything, and I do not know how to describe this dreadful blend of
history, commerce, religion and politics. Of course, it might be objected
that there is a Napoleon Business, and this does not lead anybody to turn
Napoleon into a solar myth, as several irreverent disciples of Max
Müller proposed in the 19th century. But let us assume that Corsica
becomes a major western Mediterranean power. Let us assume that, in the
name of Napoleon, it establishes a mini-empire in the south of France, the
northwest of Italy and the north of Spain. Inevitably, there will be a
small group of madmen who will explain that Napoleon never existed and that
the supposedly Napoleonic Corsican empire is devoid of any serious
historical foundations. This is precisely the reasoning of an eminent
Beirut professor, Kemal Salibi, who tried to prove that the country of the
Bible is today in Saudi Arabia.[16]
I come now to the end of my paper. One last question: what should we do
with these people? How can we rid ourselves of them? Can we put the
deniers to good use, as Raul Hilberg suggested? Have I myself not written
an essay on Josephus called "Du bon usage de la trahison" ("Making good use
of treason")? The "revisionists" are a sect, in the religious sense of the
word, i.e. that sense which led Max Weber to contrast sect and church.
When I refer to a sect, I am not thinking of comparing them with one of
those sects which share the Mea Shearim part of Jerusalem. And yet they do
in fact possess some of the characteristics of a religious sect.
Undoubtedly some of them are out-and-out cynical scoundrels, but some of
them really believe in what they have to say. Most of them are
anti-Semites, in the various accepted meanings of the term, but not all of
them.
Of course, as I have already said, there can be no question of any
discussion with them. Does an astronomer discuss things with an
astrologist, or with a person who claims that the moon is made of green
cheese? But must we persecute them in the name of truth? I do not believe
so, despite the legislation against them that has been adopted in Germany
and France. Persecution, and even anything redolent of persecution,
produces martyrs, and we have not the slightest interest in making these
people into martyrs. I am in no way opposed to proceedings for defamation
in the case of lies aimed at individuals or institutions, but I am
resolutely opposed to the idea of imposing a historical truth through the
legal system. When the French parliament voted for such a law in 1990,
every single historian was opposed to it. If there is a lesson we should
learn from the history of communism and the State or Party Truth, it is
that no historical truth can depend on the state apparatus --however
liberal this state-- in order to be considered the Truth. But if
the truth has no need of police or courts, it certainly does not need
historians. Here and there -- in England, America, Germany, France, Italy
and, of course, in Israel, there are teams of historians who have carried
out outstanding work.
But I musthighlight two points which I consider to be vital:
Will the day come when people like Butz or Faurisson will be considered
innocent pranksters, like the people today who are still trying to locate
Atlantis? Neither my readers nor my listeners today will live long enough
to see that day. But one day perhaps....
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© Michel Fingerhut 1996-2001 - document mis à jour le 09/11/1998 à 10h08m32s.
Translated from the French by Ruth Morris
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