Auschwitz And Holocaust Denial ("Revisionist History")

It was the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army this week. The most prominent Holocaust denier in this country is Pat Buchanan. It is bad enough that Tim Russert and Don Imus both give Doris K. Goodwin, the plagiarist, a pass and feature her prominently on both their shows. However, it is even worse that Imus and MSNBC give program time to Pat Buchanan. Whatever her faults, Doris K. Goodwin is not a Nazi apologist nor a Holocaust denier. That honor belongs to Pat Buchanan. I have long been uneasy with Buchanan's defense of Nazi war criminals. Recently, one of his chief advisers from his ill-fated presidential effort spoke at a major Holocaust denier/revisionist history conference. Birds of a feather. If this is (fair & balanced) guilt by association, so be it.

[x Wikipedia]
Holocaust Revisionism

Holocaust deniers prefer to be called Holocaust revisionists. Most people contend that the latter term is misleading. Historical revisionism is the reexamination of accepted history, with an eye towards updating it with newly discovered, more accurate, and/or less biased information. Broadly, it is the approach that history as it has been traditionally told may not be entirely accurate and should be revised accordingly. Historical revisionism in this sense is a well-accepted and mainstream part of history studies. It may be applied to the Holocaust as well, as new facts emerge and change our understanding of its events.

Holocaust deniers maintain that they apply proper revisionist principles to Holocaust history, and therefore the term Holocaust revisionism is appropriate for their point of view. However, their critics disagree and prefer the term Holocaust denial. Gordon McFee writes in his essay "Why Revisionism isn't" that:

"Revisionists" depart from the conclusion that the Holocaust did not occur and work backwards through the facts to adapt them to that preordained conclusion. Put another way, they reverse the proper methodology [...], thus turning the proper historical method of investigation and analysis on its head."

In general, the term Holocaust denial fits the description at the beginning of this article, while Holocaust revisionism ranges from holocaust denial through the belief that only minor corrections are required to Holocaust history. However, because the latter term has become associated with Holocaust deniers, mainstream historians today generally avoid using it to describe themselves. Thus Holocaust revisionism has come to be understood as revisionist history, rather than historical revisionism.

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[x Frontpage Magazine]
Pat Buchanan, His Fans, and Anti-Semitism
By Jamie Glazov

MY RECENT REVIEW of Pat Buchanan’s new book, The Death of the West, has triggered some angry letters from Buchanan supporters.

Offended at various remarks that I made, my critics are mostly upset at my implication that Buchanan is a racist. One reader writes to me,

"Your paranoid feelings are coming out. I read Buchanan’s book, The Death of the West, and I do not get out of it any racial feelings."

For a person to read The Death of the West and not "get out of it any racial feelings" is unquestionably quite a feat. This is like spending an entire day hanging around with members of the flat earth society and never getting the hint that something might be a little bit, well, not altogether right.

I have studied Pat Buchanan’s philosophy of life for quite a while. Aside from his anti-communism and Catholicism, both of which I deeply respect, his views on other issues do more than just raise my eyebrows. There is one particular realm of Buchanan’s world vision that troubles me the most. I would like to take this opportunity to offer all the Buchanan supporters a summary of this realm. It will probably serve as a great inspiration to them.

Let’s begin with an illuminating fact: if you read the criticisms of my review in the Go Postal section, you will find that several Buchanan supporters keep accusingly inquiring if I am a Jew. What does this say about them?

Let me give you a clue:

Buchanan wrote a real charming book before The Death of the West. In A Republic, Not An Empire, he denied that Adolf Hitler had any malicious intentions toward the West, let alone toward the Jews living there. He also argued that Hitler was forced into pursuing the Final Solution because of British and American intervention in the war. Buchanan’s implication, in other words, was that Hitler wasn’t really responsible for what he did.


Buchanan has described Hitler as a "genius" and "an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War."

What feelings or beliefs would motivate a person to make such a tribute to Hitler?

Buchanan’s words have always implied that, if Hitler had only entertained designs on Eastern European Jews for his Final Solution, and that as long as this did not affect American interests, then America had no obligation to intervene on purely humane grounds. That’s what Buchanan’s "America First" policy is all about.

I can’t help from wondering: what exactly is Buchanan saying about the Holocaust?

Buchanan has also shown an obsessive predilection for defending accused Nazi war criminals, every one of whom somehow appear to be innocent in his eyes.

What rests behind a man’s passion to distinguish himself in this light?

During his infamous defense of John Demjanjuk, Buchanan claimed that Demjanjuk was not the guard he was alleged to be at Treblinka. Buchanan turned out to be right: Demjanjuk was a guard in a different concentration camp.

The non-existence of a forthcoming Buchanan apology on Demjanjuk implied that Buchanan believed that he had actually won on this issue.

During his defense of Demjanjuk, Buchanan made the intriguing statement that the diesel gas fumes used at Treblinka could not have killed anyone. These diesel gas fumes were used not only at Treblinka, but also at a number of other death camps. Hundreds of thousands of Jews died in these camps. If these victims did not die from diesel gas fumes, then how and why did they die? Would Buchanan be willing to expose his family members, as well as himself, to the same fumes in order to demonstrate his point?

During Ronald Reagan’s presidential visit to the Bitburg cemetery in Germany, Buchanan wrote, for Reagan's controversial speech, that the Germans buried there, who included members of SS units and Nazis who participated in Hitler's extermination of the Jews, were "victims of the Nazis just as surely as the victims in concentration camps."

Fascinating.

Buchanan has also compared the Nazi camps with those set up by Gen. Eisenhower for German prisoners of war. This is a comparison between POWs being held because they are an enemy in war and a group of people who are liquidated because of their race.

Buchanan has drawn a parallel between Andrei Sakharov, the great Soviet dissident who was persecuted for, among other things, his courage in standing up for human rights in a totalitarian regime, and Arthur Rudolph, a German rocket scientist who admitted his involvement with slave labor and other atrocities of the Nazi regime.

Why would Buchanan do this?

During the Gulf War, Buchanan charged that the American intervention was caused by a Jewish conspiracy, which consisted of American Jews conspiring with the Israeli Defense Ministry. On other occasions, he has talked about the "Holocaust survivor syndrome" which, in his view, involves "group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics." During these particular interpretations, he put himself in the same league with Holocaust deniers and Holocaust perpetrators by using their favorite vocabulary.

Holocaust deniers consistently talk about the "Jewish conspiracy," that pathological fantasy that involves the Jewish control of the media and the banks, the Jewish assault on culture, the Jewish poisoning of the Aryan race, etc. We've heard this all before: in Mein Kampf and in the terminology of Nazi spokesmen who engineered Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and, yes, Treblinka.

What is it that possesses a man to use this vocabulary when he knows full well the ugly context in which it has already been used?

After being confronted about the anti-Semitic implications of his words, Buchanan has stated, several times: "I don't retract a single word."

Not a single word? Not even a single one?

Why?

Perhaps Buchanan’s fans can enlighten me.

Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s new book, Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist.

Copyright © 2002 Frontpage Magazine