The Academic Left and Holocaust Denial

A story I’ve been trying to
follow very closely over the past few weeks is the ongoing libel trial
in Great Britain centering on the issue of Holocaust denial. David Irving,
a racist who denies the Holocaust happened, is suing Deborah Lipstadt,
a historian and author of the intriguing but spotty “Denying the Holocaust,” for libel.

In her book, Lipstadt argues
that Holocaust denial is not so much about any legitimate attempt at historical
revisionism, but rather just another rhetorical tool for racists and extreme
right wingers to push their anti-Semitic views. She devotes an entire
chapter to Irving’s antics, in which she writes that Irving intentionally
deceives readers about the historical facts surrounding the Holocaust.
Irving, in turn, sued her in a British court for libel, arguing that he
might be mistaken about the Holocaust but he was not intentionally deceptive.

Before getting to the role
of certain elements of the academic left in promulgating and justifying
pseudo-history, it is (unfortunately) necessary to say in the strongest
terms that Lipstadt is exactly right about the Holocaust deniers. Even
labeling what they do as pseudo-history is often too much of a concession.
Like some of the more extreme members of hard-core Maoist groups, the
goal of Holocaust deniers is to paint fascism with a friendlier face,
not to seriously delve into the various genuine historical controversies
that surround the Holocaust (which address why and how the Holocaust happened,
not whether it did).

The problem with Lipstadt’s
book, though, is that she seems to be largely clueless about the role
that epistemological relativism (postmodernism and deconstructionism)
are playing in making pseudo-histories such as Holocaust denial or some
of the more extreme claims of Afrocentric historians gain relatively large
audiences (considering just how devoid they are of any link to reality).
Lipstadt does give these theories passing mention, but concedes far too
much to postmodernists and underestimates the effect they are having on
notions of truth.

Postmodernism/deconstructionism
start off with observations that are accurate enough — since all knowledge
is acquired from observation, there is always the possibility that any
given observation is a product not of reality but of the observer’s bias
or viewpoint. In a trivial example, I happen to be color blind and have
difficulty seeing certain spectra of light which other people have no
problem seeing (or so they tell me). I frequently refer to something as
green only to have my wife, Lisa, correct me that in actuality the object
is red or blue.

From that observation, however,
postmodernism and deconstructionism tend to descend into genuine epistemological
relativism — since all facts depend on biased observers, all facts are
biased and nothing is objectively true.

This bizarre conclusion has
become widely accepted by a significant number of Leftish academics (though
it has also met with vehement opposition by other Leftist academics for
the reasons I’ll get to in a moment), because it is viewed as empowering
to women, minorities and other historically oppressed groups.

Postmodernism made a lot of
inroads in feminist circles, for example, because it provides an easy
way for feminist to debunk the notion that there are biological differences
between men and women. Whereas feminists in the 1960s or 1970s might have
presented arguments showing that most justifications of sexism based on
biology were factually incorrect, the postmodernist feminist academic
of the 1990s argued that nothing written about men or women can be objectively
true, so there can be no objective biological differences between men
and women.

My wife, Lisa, for example,
took a graduate seminar on women and history in which one of the textbooks
argued that there were no such things as “women.” The classification of
human beings into “men” and “women” is completely fallacious and rests
on nothing but political ideas aimed at oppressing women (ironically,
one of the implications of this view, which a surprising number of postmodernist
feminist have embraced, is that it puts them in a pseudo-creationist position
of denying Darwinian evolution, which is transformed into just another
politically oppressive theory disguised as science).

Postmodernism has also been
popular with some Left-oriented individuals, because it provides an easy,
quick method to tear down traditional institutions of liberal society.
The very first class I ever took in college opened with a Leftist English
professor discussing the book he was writing. His book was a deconstruction
of the Constitution of the United States of America. The professor explained
that he believed in a sort of vulgar postmodernism that held that every
book that claimed to argue for a certain point of view could also be proven
to argue for exactly the opposite point of view it claimed. So, for his
book on the U.S. Constitution, the professor was arguing that although
the Constitution appeared to be a forward-looking, if imperfect and flawed,
document advancing the cause of human freedom, in fact it was a reactionary
document whose only purpose was to prevent real freedom from ever taking
hold. And, mind you, this had nothing to do specifically with the US Constitution
but was true of any text.

Which brings us back to David
Irving and Deborah Lipstadt. If, in fact, the US Constitution has no fixed
meaning then neither does Mein Kampf. Irving and his fellow anti-Semites
have done for Mein Kampf what postmodernists have already done for documents
like the Constitution or categories like women — they argue it doesn’t
really mean what it says. Irving and others go on at length, much as my
deconstructionist-minded professor, parsing and analyzing sentences from
Mein Kampf as well as Nazi documents which clearly involve hatred for
Jews and the planning and implementation of the Holocaust, arguing they
really don’t mean what they appear to mean.

No, Irving doesn’t quite go
so far as the postmodernists and argue that Mein Kampf or Nazi documents
are without meaning entirely, but he is helped by the postmodernists claim
that no particular viewpoint is privileged. If they are correct, Irving’s
view of the Holocaust is just as correct as Deborah Lipstadt’s.

Although few people outside
of academia read postmodernist or deconstructionist works (even ordinary
people wanted to, much of it is incoherent), such views do filter down
to the larger society. One place this is seen is the spread of fringe
Afrocentric histories that often make downright bizarre claims (such as
attributing Egyptians with mastery of psychic powers). It is not difficult
to debunk many of the more bizarre Afrocentric claims, but like Holocaust
Denial, such pseudo-histories are usually immune to debunking because
it has a largely political purpose. Teachers and others who advocate teaching
Afrocentric history usually dismiss the historical problems as being secondary
to the more important purpose of raising the self-esteem of African American
children. (And certainly Holocaust Denial and Afrocentrism will not be
the last pseudo-history to try to gain respectability).

To its credit, one of the sources
of opposition to the postmodernist Left has been The Nation which
has published several pieces excoriating both the feminist postmodernist
critique of the biological sciences and the more extreme deconstructionists
such as Stanley Fish. After all, the postmodernist project threatens to
undermine both conservatives and liberal, right wingers and left wingers.
The only way to solve social or political problems is first to understand
what causes them; while folks of different political stripes might disagree
both on what the problem is and what the best way to solve it is, both
conservatives and liberals and libertarians and others work in the same
framework — marshaling evidence for or against some policy. Postmodernism
sweeps away that possibility, by sweeping away the ability to know anything
objectively about the world, and reduces everything to power. It no longer
matters if a voucher system will better educate children or be used as
a right wing assault on common values — neither can be decided objectively,
so all that really matters in the end is the brute political force that
each side can muster.

And that’s probably one of
the more reactionary ideologies in a century filled with reactionary ideologies.