I first became acquainted with this topic a couple of years ago when I came across an old Donahue episode on YouTube. One of the guests was a young Jewish guy named David Cole (not featured in this book). He made some interesting points that no one really responded to. Donahue for example simply dismissed him sarcastically, "You're a real Columbo, David." The opponent they got to appear didn't really seem very informed on the topic, and I found it odd that they couldn't get a specialist to come on and provide a proper response.
My next encounter with the topic was seeing the Denial movie about the Lipstadt-Irving trial. After seeing that I came to understand that Lipstadt has a firm policy (apparently shared by most other Holocaust specialists) of not debating the Holocaust. The idea is that if you debate the position, you give the other side respect and credibility they don't deserve. But apparently she felt like the revisionists/deniers were getting enough attention that she couldn't ignore them any more. Hence we have this volume, a sort of indirect response.
We're told early on the book will not be a "point-by-point" rebuttal and this is a understatement. The book is an annotated bibliography of sorts. She goes through pretty much in chronological order, beginning with WWI revisionism and pro-German apologetics as well as isolationist movements. These she says are the seeds Holocaust denial. She then moves on to Rassinier, App, Arthur Butz, Institute for Historical Review, Zundel, Irving, and others. (As I read through, I usually searched for more info on the names mentioned). Again, for the most part she does not focus on rebuttals. Rather, her primary technique is to describe her targets with disgust and question their motives and overall credibility. Throughout she uses very loaded language which I thought detracted from her book. "Neo-Nazi," "discredited," "fallacious," several of these kinds of words on every page. She only rarely ventures beyond this sort of ad hominem. For example, there's the guy Leuchter who took samples from the walls at Auschwitz and had them chemically tested for cyanide. Lipstadt goes on for pages and pages about his credentials but only spends maybe a paragraph on the key question: is there or isn't there cyanide residue in the walls of the gas chambers and how much?
This would have been a more interesting book if she had been a least shown a little nuance in considering people's motivations rather than just calling everyone a Nazi. For example, Rassinier was a French leftist who himself was a political prisoner in several of the German camps. Whatever his motivations, he does not sound like a textbook Nazi to me.
She also neglects epistemology entirely. She just says "it" is self-evident and is not up for debate. That obviously isn't true of history in general, and she doesn't explain why the Holocaust is uniquely beyond historical critique; that is to say, she doesn't say how we determine the precise boundaries of "it" and whether "it" can be redefined on the margins and by what process. Her implicit argument seems to be a practical one: that the people that do it are politically motivated and do not act in good faith. She may well be substantially correct, yet I still find her take lacking and philosophically unsatisfying.
Lipstadt at several points claims to support free speech but she is frankly unconvincing in this. People have been jailed for this stuff in many countries. The US does not yet have these kinds laws, but there is considerable private censorship, including on this very website which has banned many dozens of Holocaust books.
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