History: Why It Matters

This is a continuation of my reflections on the section title Lying in chapter one of Lynn Hunt’s History: Why It Matters.

Rather than take the tract I took with the last post and fleshing out the history behind the case cited by Hunt, I want to deal more abstractly with Holocaust denial. The main reason for that is that I can hardly do a deconstruction of it justice when the likes of Richard Evans and Deborah Lipstadt have their names forever attached to the finest examples. Yes, Holocaust denial may still continue but I would simply refer readers to these two historians.

Lipstadt’s 1993 Denying the Holocaust and her more recent 2019 Antisemitism: Here and Now are both must reads to understand Holocaust denial and contemporary anti-Semitism. She is at the front of dealing with Holocaust denial – and she provides the example for how one should engage with such nasty falsehoods. Lipstadt does not and point-blank refuses to engage in public debates or discussions with Holocaust deniers, stating:

“To do so would give them a legitimacy and a stature they in no way deserve. It would elevate their antisemitic ideology – which is what Holocaust denial is – to the level of responsible historiography – which it is not.”

She frames Holocaust denial as prejudice (against the Jews) mixed with propaganda (of Nazism, racism and far-right politics), where history proper is the engagement with rational argument and scholarship (suggesting – rightly so – that Holocaust denial is irrational and devoid of actual scholarship).

Lipstadt (like Evans – which I will get to) very much attributes the emergence and continuation of Holocaust denial to (among other things) the emergence of postmodernism within the history discipline, which, in her opinion:

“Created an atmosphere of permissiveness toward questioning the meaning of historical events … [with no ability to] to assert that there was anything ‘off limits'”

And it is within this atmosphere that Holocaust denial has found ground and footing, unable to be dislodged from existence. The phenomenon of postmodernist approaches in history since the 1970s has produced pockets of academic historians where:

“No fact, no event, no aspect of history has fixed meaning. Any fact can be recast. There is no ultimate historical reality.

Holocaust denial is part of this phenomenon. It is not an assault on the history of one particular group. Though denial of the Holocaust may be an attack on the history of the annihilation of the Jews, at its core it poses a threat to all who believe that knowledge and memory are among the keystones of our civilisation … [and] to all who believe in the utmost power of reason.

Evans’ 2001 Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial does the same job in trying to understand what is at play within the broader Holocaust denial apartness by examine the court case between Lipstadt and David Irving (Irving sued Lipstadt for calling him out on his Holocaust denial claims). I expect that Evans’ recent work on conspiracies and democracies (to be published) will be another a defining moment for academic history in trying to understand the mess of the past 20 or 30 years.

However, I want to track back to Evans’ In Defense of History, published in 1999. As I mentioned above, like Lipstadt, Evans attributes to a great degree (probably more than Lipstadt) Holocaust denials’ longevity to the postmodernist turn the history discipline took. In In Defense of History he constructs a cogent argument that history has moved too far towards an “extreme relativism”. He points to E. H. Carr’s What is History? as a significant, important and ‘correct’ course-correction for historians. Carr put forward a more relativist understanding of the past (which is all I will say here, as it is an essay in and of itself), as opposed to the dominant trend of empirical and scientifically-based history which dominated from the Enlightenment to the 1950s and 60s. This turning point is best seen in the pseudo-debates that Carr and G. R. Elton has through their writing. Indeed, these two men are frequently still cast as the two poles of ‘doing’ history, with more extreme versions of each sitting further along the spectrum.

Yet while this ‘opening up’ of history away from politics, war and great men towards a broader canvas encapsulated by Carr was a good thing, the subsequent whole-hearted embrace of postmodernism by many (not all) in Evans’ discipline between the 1970s and 1990s leaves to door open – in Evans’ mind – to far-right historians creating:

“A massively falsified consensus, brought about by the misreading or manipulative use of evidence, the suppression of crucial facts and the creation of a certain selective amnesia in those whose memory might otherwise go far back.”

It is important here to remember that Evans does not at all deny the importance and significance of the relativist approach, just he decries going to the point where all history is subject to question – even the very premise of a past that is accessible to our understanding. Here, Evans clearly spells out how Holocaust denial situates itself comfortably in a discipline where the existence of any objectivity or truthful understanding exists:

“Total relativism provides objective criteria by which fascist or racist views of history can be falsified … Thus “holocaust denial” literature … has been given respectability above all in the United States – in Germany it is illegal – by a widespread belief that “both sides of the picture should be heard”, or in other words, that both sides have at least in principle equal validity.“

You will note here a moment where he puts the boot into the US. He goes on from the quote above to lay into the ‘freedom of speech’ tradition that is so vaunted in the US and how it permits the existence of a kind of ‘even-handedness’ where none need be. This, combined with the belief that there is no fixed meaning, that meaning is supplied by the reader and the attacks on rationalist traditions (the hallmarks of postmodernist thought according to Evans), is a formulae for disaster.

If you needed proof that the principle of ‘both sides’ still runs through US culture, two (three?) days ago, I came across this article. In it, a state politician in the US walks back comments that he believed (and was trying to legislate for) “teachers to be impartial in their teaching of all subjects, including during lessons about Nazism, Marxism and fascism.” Thankfully common sense and reason prevailed as the political realised that he had made a massive blunder here (on one hand he probably wanted teachers to keep their ‘radical Marxism and critical race theory’ out of the classroom; on the other hand if you expect impartiality on Marxism, you need as much of the good of Marxism and the bad of it … right?). But still, this is happening in the US today.

And this is precisely why Hunt’s book needs two extra words added to its title History: Why It Matters Right Now. So long as Holocaust denial continues, it needs to be confronted in a deft and efficient manner – Lipstadt and Evans providing two sound models. Hunt’s discussion of it too is helpful. However, in this day and age there may well need to be a new approach. Germany’s approach has stood the test of time and the country is all the better for it. Learning about the Holocaust (to varying degrees, depending on the school) is compulsory in Australia. So too other countries. Perhaps more robust engagement with the Holocaust is needed through the early years?

Hunt – off the back of a brief discussion of Trump – cites Holocaust denial as the “model for how to lie about history”. She goes on to do a wonderful job of summarising the how’s and what’s of Holocaust denial, before finishing up with some of the why’s behind it. Short version: Racism and politics. She pays some attention to the popularity of Holocaust denial in the Middle East where some (not all) political leaders have used it as a way in which to criticise Israel and attempt to erode claims of the nation’s legitimacy. For this, one only need revise the Ahmadinejad years in Iran. She also cites survey dats from 2013/14 showing that 20% of people surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa who had actually heard of the Holocaust believed the historical accounts. I would suggest that this is a symptom of the socio-political climate the the domineering debates of the region.

Again, Hunt doesn’t dwell for pages on Holocaust denial, but make the prescient point: That lying is alive and well in society about history. It is easy to find history’s defenders – in the face of Holocaust denial, Lipstadt and Evans jump out – but it is becoming increasingly difficult to her their voices.

Hunt’s cause of that: Social media.