Guest Post: Holocaust Denial – The Phantom & the Reality

'I first came across the phenomenon of Holocaust Denial when I read ‘Did 6 Million' Really Die’ written by one Richard Harwood aka Verall, Deputy-Chairman of Britain’s National Front.'

I won’t bore readers with a refutation of the lies and falsehoods that it contains.  What struck me is how it tried to pick up on trivial mistakes and discrepancies, things like population statistics.  Bearing in mind that in Eastern Europe we are talking about what were effectively feudal societies, where often the most basic demographic statistics, like a census were absent, this is hardly surprising.

Indeed one only need recall 9/11, when it took the US authorities over 3 years before they could finally settle on the numbers who were murdered.  If an advanced society like the United States had such difficulties about whether it was three or five thousand, as was initially the case, then how much more difficult was it in societies which had barely begun to emerge into the modern world?

Lest anyone doubt the fact of the holocaust, that over 5 million Jews were exterminated, in addition to 3 million Poles and at least 3 million Russians, then there is an abundance of German documentation such as the Situation Reports of the Einsatzgruppen, the SS Killing Squads which operated in the wake of the German army in the Ukraine and Russian from June 1941 onwards.  They both compiled and boasted of the numbers they had murdered and they were huge.  The only argument of the more sophisticated holocaust deniers like David Irving is that Hitler didn’t give a written order!  In fact it is not terribly surprising that he did not put his Order down on paper.  Nor was it necessary since the verbal Fuhrer Command was law in Nazi Germany (something which even the Nazi Governor-General of Poland, Hans Frank – former Head of the Nazi Legal Service – objected to.

For those interested in the subject, then I would recommend Raul Hilberg’s ‘Destruction of European Jews’, which is based almost entirely on German documents or Christopher Browning’s ‘The Origins of the Final Solution.’

But if one were to operate according to the standards of the Holocaust Deniers, then the Palestinian Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) from 1947-9 could equally be denied.  No one knows, or can know, with absolutely precise definition, how many were massacred and expelled.  Even the names of some villages may have disappeared for eternity.  And of course Zionism has denied the Nakba, claiming that the Arabs ran away or were instructed to leave.

I say this because there are in reality two types of holocaust denier.  The neo-Nazi western imperialist, who believes in a hierarchy of races and the gullible dupe, often a reactionary Arab regime, that acts as a distorted echo of European holocaust deniers, mouthing that which they do not and cannot understand.

To deal with the first briefly.  The barbarism of Nazi Germany would have encompassed the wiping out of the Slav peoples - the Poles, Russians, Hungarians and Romanians, as well as Black and Arabic people.  Indeed Hitler made his attitude to the colonial struggle in India and Africa explicitly clear:

To me, as a nationalist who appreciates the worth of the racial basis of humanity, I must recognise the racial inferiority of the so-called ‘Oppressed Nations’, and that is enough to prevent me from linking the destiny of my people with the destiny of those inferior races. [Mein Kampf, 363]

When the Arab Revolt took place in Palestine between 1936 and 1939, Nazi Germany offered no support whatsoever, since it supported British imperialism.

But there are many millions of people in Asia and the Arab countries who also believe that the holocaust is a myth.  The bloody and foolish ruler of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmedinajad is one of them. ‘Ahmadinejad says Holocaust a lie, Israel has no future’

 The stupidity of Ahmedinajad and those who echo him, are a gift to the Zionists.  He plays right into the hands of the Zionists who are able to then turn round and say ‘you see, they really do want to murder every last Jew.’  But this was always the way with the corrupt rulers of the Middle East.  The Saudi regime, which has financed holocaust denial publications, has also ‘supported’ the Palestinians verbally when it suited them.

Their behaviour is not only stupid but a product of an almost total ignorance.  In effect what Ahmedinajad is doing is reflecting the Zionist argument, just as once the Zionists reflected anti-Semitism.  Zionism uses the Holocaust to justify its expulsion of the Palestinians from their land.  The Nakba has always been a crime, Holocaust or no Holocaust.  In fact Political Zionism began 46 years before the onset of the Holocaust in 1941, if we take the writing of Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, or even earlier if we take account of Leon Pinsker’s Lovers of Zion formed in 1882. 

And when the extermination of European Jewry was at its height, Zionism played down what was happening and even opposed the rescue of Jews to anywhere but Palestine (which was impossible).  The record of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis and assorted fascist dictators is a matter of record. (see Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators)

The problem with the argument of the Ahmedinajad’s is quite simple.  Israel justifies its actions by reference to the Holocaust.  So if you deny the Holocaust then Israel has no legitimacy!  There is only one problem with this.  The Holocaust happened.  No serious historian pretends otherwise and David Irving, when he sued Penguin Books for libel, was comprehensively demolished and defeated.  So, by Ahmedinajad’s argument, Israel is therefore legitimate.

This isn’t holocaust denial but historical idiocy. For sure it allows people like Israel’s Netanyahu to portray Ahmedinajad as the new Hitler.  ‘Netanyahu: It's 1938 and Iran is Germany; Ahmadinejad is preparing another Holocaust’

But a moment’s thought would tell you that Iran is not one of the world’s leading industrial powers, unlike Germany under Hitler.  It doesn’t have an abundance of natural resource bar oil.  It has no designs on other countries, having been the victim of attack by Iraq.  And surprise surprise, it has a Jewish population, the largest in the Middle East after Israel, of 25,000.  Now Hitler’s Germany did everything in its power to expel its Jewish population until 1941.  Ahmedinajad’s Iran, not only gives a place in its parliament (Majid) to a Jewish representative but it is determined to hang on to its Jewish community.  Ahmedinajad may be a fool but a Hitler he is not.

The reality is that the so-called Holocaust deniers of third world countries are a product of outrage at the actions of Western imperialism and Israel – actions which in many cases are little different from those of the Nazis, with over one million estimated to have been killed in Iraq alone.  It is a distorted form of anti-imperialism which, instead of locating the forces responsible for the creation of Israel, South Africa or any other imperialist state, focuses upon the ethnicity of those who make up imperialism’s warrior states. By using the Holocaust to legitimise its actions, Zionism encourages Holocaust Denial.

If anti-Semitism was the socialism of fools then Holocaust Denial is their ultimate idiocy.

Tony Greenstein is a trade union activist, a member of UNISON, Brighton & Hove Trades Council and Secretary of Brighton & Hove Unemployed Workers Centre, where he works as an employment adviser. He runs a socialist, anti-Zionist blog, www.azvsas.blogspot.com.