PSYCHOLOGY: holocaust, mythology and the subconscious

..Professor Lipstadt established her credentials as a “renowned historian,” by writing “three books,” two of which bear variations on the title “Denying the Holocaust.” Not content with her own unearned laurels, Lipstadt is obsessed with denying the qualifications which others have earned honestly. In a letter on her blog which she sent to the New York Times, Lipstadt takes issue with the Times referring to David Irving, who has written more than three books, as a “historian.” [She insisted that] instead of referring to Irving as a “historian,” the Times should have called him as a “denier.”

Her three books notwithstanding, Lipstadt’s real claim to fame came from the fact that she was named as a defendant in a libel suit.

A book on that trial constitutes one-third of all of her book-length writing over the past 23 years.

As some indication of the depth of her overall scholarship, Lipstadt assigned the “Holocaust memoir” called Fragments in her classes. When the book was revealed as a threadbare hoax written by a non-Jew who had never been near a concentration camp, Lipstadt opined that, if the allegation turned out to be true (which it did), this “might complicate matters somewhat,” but insisted that it would still be “powerful as a novel”.

Professor Lipstadt was supposed to have been introduced by Rabbi Michael Signer. This is fitting in a way because Signer was also the recipient of an endowed chair, he at Notre Dame, for producing even less intellectual material than Professor Lipstadt. Rabbi Signer could not attend the lecture because he died in January but Professor Lipstadt assured her audience that he is now “up there watching us.”

Even more than being a defendant in a libel suit, Professor Lipstadt’s renown comes from her efforts to prevent the spread of the delict known as “holocaust denial.” The point of her talk at Notre Dame was explaining the full ramifications of this invention. As we have come to expect from speakers like this, Professor Lipstadt feels that another Kristalnacht is right around the corner. “I see things,” she confided to the yentas from the south side, “as bleaker than I used to see them.” Over the past year, there has been “an uptick in anti-Semitism,” something that should be “a source of tremendous concern.”

Of course, given her expansive notion of anti-Semitism -- “Holocaust denial is a form of anti-Semitism”; it is “the new anti-Semitism” -- “uptick” is hardly the proper term. The Holocaust itself begins to pale in comparison to the threats now on the horizon—not that I am accusing Professor Lipstadt of Holocaust denial. According to Professor Lipstadt’s definition of the term, anyone who says the word apartheid and Israel in the same sentence is guilty of the “new anti-Semitism.” The term “Israel Apartheid” was, of course, a veiled reference to former President Jimmy Carter, who is now routinely dismissed as an anti-Semite. Perhaps “New Anti-Semite” might be a better term, since it corresponds with the “New Anti-Semitism” and reflects, of course, the fact that no Jew dared to level the term when Carter was president.

At this point, Professor Lipstadt was just warming to her topic. Any claim, she continued, that Zionism is a form of racism or anything linking Israel and South Africa also constitutes anti-Semitism. The same goes for UN resolutions condemning Israeli behaviour toward Palestinians, something she terms “legalized anti-Semitism.” The same goes for people who refer to Jews as a group, as in what she terms “the so-called Jewish lobby,” which was a veiled reference to Walt and Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel Lobby. Anti-Semitism has even infected “some parts of Belgium”!

Which brings us to the heart of the “new anti-Semitism,” otherwise known as Holocaust denial. There are two forms of Holocaust denial: Hard core and soft-core. As examples of hard-core holocaust denial, Lipstadt mentioned David Irving and “so-called Bishop Williamson.” Lipstadt also objects to historians who claim that “otherwise David Irving is a good historian,” making it clear that they are guilty of what might be termed second-hand Holocaust denial, a pathogen that is contracted by intellectual proximity in analogous fashion to how lung cancer is supposedly contracted by second-hand smoke.

Then there is soft-core Holocaust denial. As examples thereof, Lipstadt listed things like “cancellation of Holocaust remembrance day celebrations,” something that happened in Barcelona recently, “because of Israeli behavior in Gaza.” As another example of soft-core holocaust denial, Lipstadt mentioned “Eastern European countries governments arguing that Nazis and Communists were equivalent, and that the communists perpetuated genocide.” The fact that a Jewish resistance fighter was indicted by the Lithuanian government for war crimes committed while he was a partisan is an instance of soft-core holocaust denial, according to Professor Lipstadt. Another example of soft-core denial was Mel Gibson’s interview at the time of the release of The Passion of the Christ—which the Jews, according to Professor Lipstadt, made into a blockbuster by their protests.

Mel Gibson became a holocaust denier, in Professor Lipstadt’s eyes, when he mentioned in an interview with Diane Sawyer that “in the Ukraine millions of people were starved to death.” As Norman Finkelstein has pointed out in his book The Holocaust Industry:
As conclusive and irrefutable proof that Mel Gibson is a Holocaust denier, Lipstadt mentioned that he said in the same interview that the Jews “died at Auschwitz,” not that they were “murdered,” which is what he should have said if he wanted to avoid the charge of anti-Semitism. Holocaust denial is also something that can be contracted genetically, like the goyische equivalent of Tay-Sachs disease. Professor Lipstadt makes it clear that Mel Gibson contracted it from his father, or better, because he refused to denounce his father, who was a holocaust denier. As further proof of Mel Gibson’s “soft-core holocaust denial,” Professor Lipstadt claimed that Gibson said, “My father never lied to me in his life.” (Does this mean that genetic transmission of holocaust denial causes an amelioration from the hard-core variety manifested by Hutton Gibson into the soft-core variety manifested by his son? If so, what are the prospects for the third generation? Holocaust doubt?) We are left to assume that Gibson should have behaved more like little Pavlik Moroslav, the Ukrainian boy who denounced his father to the Soviet secret police. Little Pavlik was murdered by his outraged relatives, but the Soviets erected statues and schools in his honor.

Having come up with the taxonomy of holocaust denial, Lipstadt then segued into a discussion of her main claim to fame, namely, the fact that David Irving named her as a defendant in a libel suit, a fact she characterized at another point as being taken out of line and shot. It seems that every cloud has a silver lining. So when Professor Lipstadt was sued for libel, it allowed her and a team of researchers to delve into the work of people like David Irving. Since she had already written a book mentioning Irving, this wasn’t especially reassuring, but oblivious to that fact, Lipstadt launched into an analysis of two footnotes. In one instance Irving claimed that Hitler was furious at one of his lieutenants for attacking a Jewish delicatessen at the time of the 1923 beer hall putsch. What Lipstadt uncovered was that Hitler was really furious because said lieutenant didn’t wear his uniform during the attack. According to Lipstadt, this discrepancy proves that David Irving made it all up. In recounting this anecdote, Lipstadt seems oblivious to the fact that she is testifying to Irving’s acumen as a historian and his ability to get to little known facts. Whether what he said is accurate in detail is precisely the role of historical research, an activity she prohibits in anyone who disagrees with her point of view.

In a second instance, Irving claimed in one of his books that Hitler was furious that Nazis were attacking Jewish businesses and ordered them to stop. What Lipstadt and her team of investigators uncovered is that Hitler was only upset by the arson, but even if that is the case, it is not clear why this should be a legal matter, or worse, reason to ruin a man’s livelihood. Don’t people write books to have them discussed? Isn’t this why we have universities and professors? Isn’t this how we learn about the past? Not according to Professor Lipstadt.

Before long it becomes clear that the academy exists, in Lipstadt’s view, not to pursue the truth but to punish malefactors who are guilty of thought crimes. What becomes equally apparent before long is just how blood-thirsty Professor Lipstadt can be when it comes to pursuing her enemies. We are talking about something more than personal animus here. We are talking about racial or ethnic animus of the sort that gets expressed in the later novels of Philip Roth or in the late Richard John Neuhaus’s magazine First Things, where Meir Soloveichik declared that hate is a Jewish virtue.

Lipstadt expressed this hatred by way of anecdote. During her libel trial, Lipstadt was shocked to hear her lawyer tell a BBC interviewer that David Irving wasn’t important. When she pressed him on this after the interview, her lawyer assured her that “David Irving was like the dirt--Lipstadt paused at this point and added parenthetically “he used another word”-- “you step into on the street. The dirt’s not important, what’s important is that you remove it from your shoe.” Lipstadt then referred to the claim that David Irving was a piece of dog [excrement] as “a wonderful analogy” because it “helped her to understand” how to deal with people like this.

Just to show that Lipstadt doesn’t apply epithets like that to the goyim alone, she also applied the same description verbatim to Norman Finkelstein. In responding to a call when Lipstadt was on a program on National Public Radio, Lipstadt said of Finkelstein: “Think of the dirt you step in on the street and you know what kind of dirt I’m talking about. It has no importance unless you fail to clean it off your shoe before you go into the house.” Lipstadt’s outburst prompted one listener to write in, “If Professor Lipstadt disagrees with Professor Finkelstein, I suggest that she debate him on the facts instead of being allowed to launch vulgar personal attacks on NPR with impunity.”

In an interview which was posted on the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs website (#11, August 1, 2003) Lipstadt claimed that “as an American,” she was “a staunch believer in free speech,” but went on to say that “the situation in Germany is different and that there might be room there for a law against Holocaust denial.” What comes across here is a strong belief in double standards, which comes down to both praising the academy and then using it as a podium for referring to other people as dog [excrement]. Once again, the academy is instrumentalized into a weapon against holocaust deniers, which is to say, people whom organized Jewry portrays as enemies of the Jewish race, and a place to settle ancestral scores.

Her goal is clear: to get everyone else to view her opponents as dog [excrement]; her quandary, however, is strategic, namely, how to “defeat them and not build them up.” As she put it in her talk, “How do you fight these people without building them up or giving them some merit.” The answer to that question is “dynamic silence,” a theory developed by the AJC in dealing with Gerald L. K. Smith in the ’50s, and recounted in Benjamin Ginzberg’s book The Fatal Embrace. Professor Lipstadt, however, got her answer from the lawyer in the Irving libel action. Lipstadt may or may not have read Fatal Embrace, but her talk and the hatred she spewed onto her enemies is some indication that disinterested pursuit of the truth is not Professor Lipstadt’s goal in life. It’s not enough to disagree, as serious historians can and do, with certain assertions in David Irving’s writings. Professor Lipstadt insists on total denunciation of everything David Irving ever wrote, followed by a concerted attempt to deprive him of his ability to earn a livelihood. On her blog, Lipstadt gloats that Irving has been reduced to selling Nazi memorabilia, as if concerted efforts to blacklist him in the publishing industry had nothing to do with that fact.

Anyone who does not go along with this campaign is suspect and guilty of fraternizing with the enemy, which also calls for reprisals. In this Lipstadt differs from Norman Finkelstein, who writes:

Not all revisionist literature-however scurrilous the politics or motivations of its practitioners-is totally useless. . . . [David] Irving, notorious as an admirer of Hitler and sympathizer with German national socialism, has nevertheless, as Gordon Craig points out, made an “indispensable” contribution to our knowledge of World War II. Both Arno Mayer, in his important study of the Nazi holocaust, and Raul Hilberg cite Holocaust denial publications. “If these people want to speak, let them,” Hilberg observes, “It only leads those of us who do the research to re-examine what we might have considered as obvious” (The Holocaust Industry, p. 71).

Deborah Lipstadt doesn’t want to disagree with David Irving. She wants to first humiliate and then destroy him. “We stripped Irving bare,” Lipstadt told her audience at Notre Dame. “We made him look silly.” Not content to leave it at that, Lipstadt continued that at one point she took out two movies, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Mel Brooks’ The Producers. What she learned from watching these movies is that it’s not enough to defeat your enemies (no one brought up the fact that Lipstadt’s enemies were people who had written books with which she disagreed), “The point was to dress him in a jester’s costume and make him a witness to his own powerlessness.”

In other words, academe is for Lipstadt simply the arena in which she humiliates her foes. This view was expressed repeatedly during the course of her talk. Persuasion is not her strong suit, and that, of course, means that it has no place in academic life. “Trying to convince holocaust deniers,” she said at another point, “is a hopeless task.” It is also a circular argument, to which Professor Lipstadt is as blind as the image of Synagoga on the façade of the cathedral portal in Strassbourg.

Professor Lipstadt credits her researchers with bringing about the victory over David Irving, but in doing so only reinforces the idea that the academy has been weaponized: “The trial was a great tribute to academia; they tracked down that information.”

Given all of the resources at her disposal, I began to wonder why Professor Lipstadt hasn’t written the definitive Holocaust narrative. In spite of the resources at her disposal, and the fact that she is now on leave of absence from Emory University spending a year immersing herself in “Advanced Holocaust Studies” at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the only thing she has produced during the last 16 years is an account of the Irving trial. In fact, in the 16 years which have elapsed since she invented the term “holocaust denial,” she has produced not one piece of historical scholarship on the period in question. Instead of laying these issues to rest the way scholars do, i.e., with a piece of competent scholarship, Lipstadt has decided to resolve the issue by force majeure.

Why is this? Well, maybe it’s because Professor Lipstadt’s day job as thought cop keeps her so busy she can’t do anything else. In her professional activity Professor Lipstadt resembles less the scholar and more the political commissars assigned to units of the Soviet Army or the interrogators at the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, positions that were more often than not staffed by Jews, as Jewish historians have noted. In The Russian Jew under Tsars and Soviets, Salo Baron writes:

Perhaps in subconscious retaliation for many years of suffering at the hands of the Russian police, a disproportionate number of Jews joined the new Bolshevik secret service. The impression these facts made upon the ordinary Russian is rightly stressed by Leonard Shapiro: “For the most prominent and colorful figure after Lenin was Trotsky, in Petrograd the dominant and hated figure was Zinoviev, while anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator (p. 203).

Professor Lipstadt is the spiritual descendant of these Jewish investigators. Professor Lipstadt’s job is to shoot anybody in academe or publishing (the current equivalent of the Soviet army) who is not following the party line. Since she can’t very well go out and shoot David Irving literally, she does the next best thing by assassinating his character by claiming that he is not really a historian (certainly not a “renowned historian” like Professor Lipstadt) and depriving him of a livelihood.

Professor David O’Connell, who teaches French at Georgia State University, found this out when he published an article on Elie Wiesel in Culture Wars. O’Connell’s article did what scholarship is supposed to do. It pointed out inconsistencies in the conventional narrative that academe had been cowed into ignoring. It pointed out patent absurdities like the famous picture of Wiesel in Buchenwald; it pointed up the discrepancies in the various accounts Wiesel has given of his liberation from Buchenwald. It brought up the fact that after the release of the PBS documentary The Liberators, which purported to describe how an all-black tank battalion liberated Buchenwald, Wiesel suddenly became aware of memories he never had before, memories of being liberated by black soldiers emerging from Sherman tanks. “I will always remember with love,” Wiesel wrote in 1989, “a big black soldier. He was crying like a child-tears of all the pain in the world and all the rage. Everyone who was there that day will forever feel a sentiment of gratitude to the American soldiers who liberated us.”

It was a truly touching moment. Unfortunately, it never happened. First of all, Liberators was made up “to increase Black and Jewish mutual understanding in Brooklyn,” and Elie Wiesel wittingly collaborated in that scam. O’Connell’s article not only damaged Elie Wiesel’s reputation, it also called significant segments of the Holocaust narrative, in particular those recounted by Wiesel, into question. Did Professor O’Connell’s Culture Wars article then constitute Holocaust denial? This is where the story gets interesting.

After O’Connell’s article on Wiesel appeared in the October 2004 issue of Culture Wars, Lipstadt wrote to the administration at GSU in an attempt to get him fired. She claimed in her letter that O’Connell had engaged in “fraud in research.” What followed was several pages of single spaced writing in which she questioned O’Connell’s spelling of Yiddish and labored mightily to convict Professor O’Connell of fraud. Unwilling to dismiss Lipstadt’s letter, the administration at GSU appointed a panel of three full professors to look into the matter. After deliberating for almost a year, from December 2005 to October 2006, the professors concluded that there was no fraud, or that if there were, it was the doing of Elie Wiesel and not Professor O’Connell. If Professor O’Connell didn’t get fired, it wasn’t for Professor Lipstadt’s lack of trying. The fault lay not in Professor Lipstadt’s will but in her intellect. In spite of her endowed chair and years immersed in “advanced holocaust studies,” she couldn’t mount a coherent argument. Every claim she raised was ultimately dismissed as baseless. It was as if she felt she could carry the day by sheer force of will, and was upset to learn that academic life still had a remnant of integrity.

There is probably another reason why the attempt to oust Professor O’Connell failed. The administration at GSU knew if they fired O’Connell on trumped up charges of fraud, that he would then sue them, and the lawsuit would lead to a discovery process that would have been disastrous for both the university and the system of thought control run by the powerful Jews who were orchestrating the campaign, demanding vengeance. In a way, it’s a shame this case didn’t go to trial. It would have been interesting to learn how Professor Lipstadt heard about Professor O’Connell’s article in the first place, and it would have provided a nice counterpoint to the Lipstadt-Irving libel trial in London. It would also have exposed the inner workings of Jewish thought police like Deborah Lipstadt and the role she plays as an enforcer of the Jewish hegemony over academe today.

The O’Connell case makes an interesting counterpoint to the Williamson case as well. Unlike Professor O’Connell, Bishop Williamson did no research, published no article or book, and so had no way to fight back when the counterattack came. This is why he was such a tempting target. This is also why the Jewish organizations have stayed away from David O’Connell. They tried to get him fired and failed because O’Connell had all the facts on his side, and there was nothing that organized Jewry could do about it. As a result, Lipstadt et al shifted to the tactic of “dynamic silence,” and there the situation at GSU has remained ever since. Professor O’Connell has challenged Professor Lipstadt to a debate, but, as we learned when we attended her talk, Professor Lipstadt doesn’t debate Holocaust deniers. But in this case, that logic isn’t compelling, because she herself had to certify that Professor O’Connell was not a holocaust denier. Unable to prove that O’Connell engaged in fraud, Lipstadt was unable to claim that he was a holocaust denier. Since she comments on every conceivable delict under the sun on her blog, it seems odd that Professor Lipstadt didn’t comment on the challenge to debate the Williamson affair from Professor O’Connell, a man who teaches not far away from where she holds her chair. The logistics of a debate would hardly be insurmountable, or are there other considerations at work here?

I tried to get some idea of the limits of the holocaust narrative in the question and answer period after her talk. What I got instead was more evidence for the circularity of the term. My question concerned the documentary about the 761st Tank Battalion, an all-Negro unit, which allegedly liberated Buchenwald. Was it Holocaust denial to say that it never happened?

Lipstadt was forced to admit that the Tank Battalion/Buchenwald story was, as she put it in another context, “pure invention,” but she refused to see any implications in this for the Holocaust narrative as a whole or for Wiesel’s credibility. Wiesel, she claimed, dealing with the latter instance first, was talking about other black soldiers, but since the army wasn’t integrated at that point, that would have to mean other Black units, and there were none in the area at the time. As Professor O’Connell pointed out in the article that Lipstadt and presumably her researchers meticulously vetted, “He [Wiesel] made this statement despite the fact that there were no blacks present at the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, and the black unit in question was over 50 miles away on that date.”

So the question is: is it holocaust denial to say that the 761st Tank Division didn’t liberate Buchenwald?

“No,” snapped Lipstadt, “because it never happened.” This, of course, brings up bigger issues about the status of the holocaust narrative itself. Is it riddled, like AIG’s portfolio, with “toxic assets.” If so, which parts of the holocaust narrative are not true? Would it have been holocaust denial to make this claim when everyone, Elie Wiesel included, was effusively praising the PBS documentary? What about other parts of the holocaust narrative, which have since gone down the memory hole? What about the lampshades made out of Jewish skin? What about the soap made from Jewish fat? What about the source of the term holocaust itself, i.e., the truckloads of Jewish babies who were thrown into burning pits? As soon as one detail becomes patently absurd, Lipstadt is on the scene to purge it from the collective memory, to ensure that no damage gets done to the holocaust narrative as a whole.

BIGGER ISSUE

This, of course, brings us to the bigger issue, which is, how do we know what really happened? The answer to that question is historical research, but that is precisely what the delict “holocaust denial” has been created to prevent. Holocaust denial is another word for Jewish control of discourse, in particular historical discourse, in particular historical discourse about World War II. If a historian publishes something that a powerful Jew, which is to say a Jew with powerful backers, dislikes, that person will be punished. If the person in question lives by writing books, as David Irving once did, the Lipstadt brigade will get him blacklisted in the publishing industry. If the person in question is a professor, the big Jews will try to get him fired, as Deborah Lipstadt herself did in the case of Professor David O’Connell. In this instance, Lipstadt failed, but David O’Connell’s case is not typical in this regard.

More typical is the case of Norman Finkelstein, who was fired from his job at DePaul University in Chicago. The fact that Finkelstein was a Jew himself doesn’t matter. It’s the big Jews, in this case Alan Dershowitz, who decide who is to live and who’s to die in academe and publishing. Finkelstein wrote a devastating critique of Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel, and, as a result, Dershowitz set out to destroy Finkelstein’s career. It was, in many ways, a typically Jewish response, the academic version of “You’ll never work in this town again.” What followed was equally Jewish. In fact Finkelstein characterized the dispute as a contest over “who was the toughest Jew from Borough Park.” The definitive answer to that question is in: the big Jew from Borough Park is Alan Dershowitz, who got Finkelstein fired with the collaboration of the supine Catholic priest who is president of DePaul University. Among other things, this also shows that a selection process is at work among Jews in academe. Any Jew who goes against the interests of organized Jewry will get destroyed by the ruthless academic enforcer Jews who represent their interests. Most Jews are immune to struggles like this because they fall into the broad, gray middle category of fellow travelers, Jews who go along with the agenda in order to collect big salaries for a cushy job.

But there are larger lessons to be learned here. First of all, when if comes to a choice between money and principle, Catholic universities go for the money. Secondly, the fact that academe has become the site of unseemly brawls like this is largely the result of Jewish influence in academe. As Professor Lipstadt made abundantly clear in her talk, the university not the place where the big Jews seek the truth. The university is a place where Jews settle scores. It’s where they punish people who threaten the Jewish hegemony over discourse.

This should not surprise us. The university is not a Jewish creation. It is a Catholic creation of the Catholic Middle Ages, and so it should not come as a surprise that Jews have all of the difficulties which come with functioning in an alien environment when they are admitted to universities. For over 600 years, from roughly the beginning of the13th to the middle of the 19th century, Catholics were involved in the creation and preservation of the university as a place where one engaged in the disinterested pursuit of the truth. T