A Retraction
by digby
I have been roundly chastized for suggesting that Christopher Hitchens is open to the idea that the Holocaust is a hoax. I admit that I was being hyperbolic and I regret writing it. I extrapolated that he was open to the idea it was a hoax from the fact that he is so intimate with a range of Holocaust deniers, whom he insists on calling “revisionists” and whose shoddy scholarship he defends for inexplicable reasons.
Max Blumenthal called him out on Huffington Post last year:
You [Hitchens] then wrote your Minority Report column for the Nation on October 3,1994 about a dialogue between you and Faurisson. “It is widely alleged that gas chambers– ‘chemical slaughterhouses’ — were used to destroy European Jewry,” you reported Faurisson telling you. “Very well, where is there a surviving authentic model, or photograph, or model of the operation of one such?”
You replied, parrotting Faurisson’s own words to Berenbaum:
“My own first answer must be that I have never seen such a relic of an operating gas chamber (though I have seen small-scale crematoria in camp museums in Germany).”
Faurisson then asked you whether you “understood that much anti-Nazi propaganda is just that? That there was no soap made from human fat? That the confession of Rudolph Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz was extorted by coercion and in any case mentioned a total death at Auschwitz that not even the Israel experts at Yad Vashem credit?”
Your unbelievable reply: “Here, my answers are yes and yes, because I know that the story in the first case, and Hoss in the second, have been debunked.”
And who “debunked” these stories other than Faurisson himself? Who?
Charles Taylor’s review of Deborah Lipstadt’s book about Irving’s trial (in which he was found to be a holocaust denier)points out, however, that Hitchens has been very clear that his dinner companion, David Irving, does not say the holocaust was a hoax:
Giving Hitchens the benefit of the doubt about the lies of [Irving’s] Goebbels book still does not excuse this claim from his 1996 Vanity Fair article: “And, incidentally, [Irving] has never and not once described the Holocaust as a ‘hoax’.”
Restricting ourselves just to what Hitchens could have known before writing that, we find that, testifying at the 1988 trial of a Canadian Holocaust denier, Irving said, “No documents whatever show that a Holocaust had ever happened.” What’s the defense of this? That Irving doesn’t use the word “hoax”? OK then. How about these?
In a 1991 speech, Irving said, “Until 1988, I believed that there had been something like a Holocaust … but [in] 1988 … I met people who knew differently and could prove to me that story was just a legend.”
In 1990: “The holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention.”
And, again, in 1991: “More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”
Hitchens does not defend these people only on the basis of free speech. If that were so I would not have written anything at all. As repugnant as what these people write is, I do not support (although I understand) the European laws against such things.
What I also do not support, any more than I support balderdash like creationism or Charles Murray’s “Bell Curve”, is an agenda masquerading as scholarship. And that obviously is what these holocaust “revisionists” are selling. Hitchens is not a stupid man and while his defense of them may have began as reflexive contrariness, he has subsequently sold his own credibility in defending them.
So it is true that I have no proof that Hitchens is open to the idea that the holocaust was a “hoax” and it was a mistake to say that unequivocally. The only proof I have is that he is a great defender of the shoddy scholarship of “revisionists” who believe that the Holocaust is a “legend.”
My intention in the post below was to show that Hitchens’ contrary iconoclasm was on a collision course with itself. I did it badly, in a hurry and I regret it.
mea culpa.
.