In a piece for the Independent last weekend (subscription only), Howard Jacobson wrote on David Irving. Arguing that Holocaust denial is 'Nazism in another guise' and 'hate ideology in action', he concluded that deniers of the Holocaust should 'rot in prison, and rot in hell thereafter'. I have already - though only briefly - expressed my own view about this, and I may return to it at greater length. But Howard Jacobson's article highlights why Holocaust denial is so repellent, whether or not one thinks it should be permitted as (free) speech. He says:
The paradox at the heart of Holocaust Denial... is that it sets out to refute what it wished had happened.This is a point that was also well made some years ago by Cynthia Ozick:
The Swiftian fancifulness of it - that those who delight in its having happened are the very ones who say it never happened!Jacobson then goes on to refer to a dream, and a fear, articulated by Primo Levi:
We forget, when we scratch our heads over Irving's sentence, that in those countries where it is called a crime, Holocaust Denial is understood not only to lie but to defame. The defamed, in this instance, being the dead. Primo Levi wrote of a terrible dream shared by all survivors of the death camps, of never being listened to, of returning home and even those they loved turning from them in suspicion and disbelief. Mankind's constant enemy, Levi wrote, are the 'negators of truth'. Those who should have been confuting those negators - the true witnesses - were precisely those who couldn't, for they had been annihilated. Survivors 'spoke in their stead, by proxy', but their words were at a remove, and subject to mistrust. Thus, through the callous logic of destruction, does terror wear away the memory of its crimes. Deniers of the Holocaust are defamers of its victims. They accelerate the cruel process of forgetting, murdering a second time those already murdered.Holocaust denial is mockery of the dead and of the horrific manner of their deaths, and it is wilfully that. Striking against an impulse towards respect for the dead that is all but universal culturally, it is worthy only of revulsion. That is why even if one thinks, as I do, that Holocaust denial should not be a crime, one is not bound to feel any sympathy for David Irving, much less any obligation to defend him.