Friday, January 05, 2018

"Black Book of Communism" and Holocaust Denial

Ben Norton tweeted over a month ago about a Holocaust-denier exercise, which first came to my attention this morning:

Norton's citation is to his article Why Are the Trump White House and Media Citing an Antisemitic Book's Claims to Demonize Communism? AlterNet 11/22/2017. The book in question is The Black Book of Communism, first published in French as Le Livre noir du communisme: Crimes, terreur, répression in 1997. Norton explains:
The Black Book of Communism is a collection of right-wing essays published in France in 1997, and subsequently translated into English and published by Harvard University Press in 1999. Some of its contributors have admitted that the book’s figures are fabricated or exaggerated. Contributors Jean-Louis Margolin and Nicolas Werth distanced themselves from the text, criticizing the editor Stéphane Courtois and his “obsession to arrive to the 100 million deaths.” When he could not round out the figure to 100 million, Courtois apparently just added numbers.

Perhaps more troubling than The Black Book of Communism’s many egregious errors is the fact that it counts Nazi-collaborating fascists, anti-Semitic White Army fighters and czarist officers who oversaw genocidal pogroms against Jews in its list of “victims of communism.”

The International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania — known popularly as the Wiesel Commission, after Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who led it — condemned the editor Courtois for “comparative trivialization” of the Nazi Holocaust. In order to portray communism as more evil and murderous than fascism and demonize scholars who refuse to do the same, Courtois fell back on anti-Semitism, “inserting an incriminating insinuation directed at the Jews,” the Wiesel Commission wrote. The commission noted that the editor’s tactics inspired “prestigious intellectuals” to rehash anti-Semitic stereotypes and talking points like “Red Holocaust,” “monopoly on suffering” and “Judeocentrism,” which it noted “are widely popular in radical-right circles.”
These "body-count" controversies are always grim. I find it helpful to keep in mind as an ethical guideline when looking at them that 100 wrongful deaths in one country or under a particular regime doesn't justify even one wrongful death in another country or another regime.

At the same time, invidious comparisons between countries is a standard feature of international relations, including these body-count disputes.

Anti-Communism was always a key part of Nazi ideology. And Holocaust-deniers to this day try to justify the Holocaust and even the German invasion of Russia by saying it was all the Commies' fault.

One of the best analyses and debunking of Holocaust denial I've come across is the 2000 decision written by Mr. Justice Gray in Irving v. Penguin Books Limited, Deborah E. Lipstat [sic[, the case depicted in the movie Denial (2016). The decisions deals with the historical issues at length, and in language accessible to non-attorneys. Because the notorious David Irving was suing Lipstadt in a British court for portraying him in a book as a Holocaust denier, the decision goes into some detail about the nature of the available documentation and what reality-based uses of it requires.

Section 11 is about the Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden in 1945. The section is a case study in how Holocaust deniers take a real historical event, exaggerate facts in the favor of the case they want to make, and make a tendentious historical interpretation that tends to minimize or justify the mass murder of Jews and others in the Holocaust. In this case, it is the Western Allies, not the Communist Soviet Union, whose actions are exaggerated and used to cast the Holocaust in a more favorable light.

There is a website, Holocaust Denial on Trial from Emory University's Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, with historical resources on the Holocaust and Holocaust denial, including transcripts of expert witnesses at the Irving v. Lipstadt trial.

The current (Jan/Feb) issue of Foreign Affairs journal has a set of stories on "The Undead Past: how Nations Confront the Evils of History," with articles focusing on the US, Germany, Russia China, South Africa and Rwanda. In his essay "China's Cover-Up: When Communists Rewrite History," he describes the perspective of Karl Jaspers on how Germans needed to come to grips with the crimes of the Nazi regime:
The man who devised the road map for the expiation of German guilt was the philosopher and psychoanalyst Karl Jaspers, who in 1945 gave a series of influential lectures at the University of Heidelberg that were later collected in a book titled The Question of German Guilt. Even though what happened under Adolf Hitler precipitated something "like a transmutation of our being," said Jaspers, Germans were still "collectively liable." All of those "who knew, or could know" - including those "conveniently closing their eyes to events or permitting themselves to be intoxicated, seduced, or bought with personal advantage, or obeying from fear" - shared responsibility. The "eagerness to obey" and the "unconditionality of blind nationalism," he declared, constituted "moral guilt." Human beings are, said Jaspers, responsible "for every delusion to which we succumb." He put his faith in healing through "the cultivation of truth" and "making amends," a process he believed had to be completely free from any state-sponsored propaganda or manipulation.

"There can be no questions that might not be raised," he declared, "nothing to be fondly taken for granted, no sentimental and no practical lie that would have to be guarded or that would be untouchable." In Jaspers' view, only through historical awareness could Germans ever come to terms with their past and restore themselves to a semblance of moral and societal health.

Jaspers' approach owed a great deal to psychoanalytic theory and the work of Sigmund Freud. For Freud, understanding a patient's past was like "excavating a buried city," as he wrote in 1895. Indeed, he was fond of quoting the Latin expression saxa loquuntur: "The stones speak." Such mental archaeology was important to Freud because he believed that a repressed past inevitably infected the present and the future with neuroses unless given a conscious voice to help fill in what he called "the gaps in memory." In this sense, history and memory were Freud's allies and forgetting was his enemy. [my emphasis in bold]

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