The Greatest Hoax in History: denying the Holocaust

Twitter is like a vast, sprawling city; a virtual metropolis of over 300 million citizens. We are all familiar with our patch, but beyond it there are streets we won’t walk down and worlds we don’t know exist.

A few days ago, in a part of the city I had never been to before, I heard a man say a very stupid thing. So I shouted across the street that he was a very stupid man. And all of a sudden, from dark alleyways on every side came other stupid people. I found myself in the land of the Holocaust deniers.

There is, of course, little point in arguing with the utterly delusional, and especially not in 140 character bullet points on Twitter, but the experience of 24 hours in this weird world has been enlightening. In some ways. It has been an insight into how these people think, and how they can keep their delusions alive in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Evidence, you see, is to be sneered at. Even more sneer-worthy is the entire historical profession, who are either paid ‘shills’ of the Zionists, or else idiots who simply regurgitate the work of others. One man suggested to me that no historian had done original research into the Holocaust — perhaps the most researched area of the past — since 1945, and that it would be impossible to study the Soviet archives even after the 1990s because they were all in Russian.

I struggled to get clarity on whether these people believe that the historical profession is in cahoots with international Jewry, or whether they are as sceptical of all areas of historical inquiry as they are of those involving Jews.

I was unable to impress upon them that if the Holocaust did not happen, then it cannot be said that anything in history ever happened; there is much less evidence that Caesar lived, that there was a battle at Waterloo, or that there was a queen called Victoria, than there is that the Holocaust took place. Hostility to the historical profession in this case must rely on conspiracy theories or complete historiographical nihilism.

My main antagonist invoked E.H. Carr to support his bizarre approach to history. (When it became apparent that he hadn’t read What is History?, the man quickly passed me on to someone nastier and more virulent than himself, and left the brawl.) But as Richard J. Evans points out with specific reference to the Holocaust in his introduction to Carr’s book, Carr should not be read as believing that there is no reality at all; his argument is about interpretation, not existence.

The whole experience has convinced me that Professor Evans’s own contribution to the canon of books on historical method, In Defence of History, is more important than I thought. To my generation of undergraduates, academic postmodernism seems to have lost its more militant edges, and has in many areas been enlightening and productive. To Evans it seems to be a terrifying threat. Certainly, in the hands of imbeciles, a little sloppy hyper-relativism is a dangerous thing.

All of this is bolstered with the rhetoric of free speech and the right to an opinion. Oddly, the right to have an incorrect opinion is confused with a complete lack of truth in general, as if because somebody can say something, that something must be true. The idea that another person is incorrect is dismissed as ‘elitist’. Most of them seem to be anti-books.

Holocaust denial is simultaneously anti-intellectual and pseudo-intellectual; in denying the validity of the historical profession, and instead relying on the constant re-circulation of debunked hoaxes, unfortunate errors, and pamphlets published from somebody’s garage, an excuse can be made for not reading, researching or thinking, and instead waving around a half-remembered “fact” when confronted. As a subculture, it provides an outlet for the under-educated and the ill-informed, who can easily become experts, not by studying, but by refusing to do so.

Holocaust denial is at root a conspiracy theory, and as with all conspiracy theories, one imagines that there is something rather satisfying, perhaps even comforting, in believing that you have access to secret, forbidden knowledge, that you have kicked in the doors of perception and — almost alone in the world — can see things for what they really are.

To minds infected with paranoid anti-semitism and illusions of conspiracy, it made perfect sense to accuse me of being an agent of the ‘Jewish lobby’, a paid practitioner of hasbara, and — most bizarrely — an Islamophobe. One man seemed convinced that peer-reviewed meant Zionist-controlled, which presumably explains why the so-called Journal of Historical Review rejects such scholarly norms.

‘Who needs scholarship when we have the internet?’ would, one supposes, be their response, and indeed the internet has provided a space for these ideas to fester. This district of the Twitter-opolis is a dismal place, populated by conspiracy-theorists, reactionary polemicists, and pseudo-intellectual anti-didacts who are smugly satisfied at having fallen for the greatest hoax in history.