Genocide denial is an ugly subject. I wrote a post about a recent variant a few months ago, relating to Ed Herman, one-time collaborator of Noam Chomsky. Herman has devoted himself in recent years to rubbishing the notion that 8,000 Bosniaks were massacred at Srebrenica. In an article last October entitled "Genocide Inflation is the Real Human Rights Threat: Yugoslavia and Rwanda", published in the far-left Z Magazine, he went one better, and insisted: "To an amazing degree, the Western media and NGOs swallowed the propaganda line and lies on Rwanda that turned things upside down."

I was reminded of this monstrous article and of Herman's fellow-travellers when reading this post on the Counterknowledge blog of Telegraph journalist Damian Thompson. It refers to one Robin Philpot, a Canadian journalist and a denier of the Rwandan genocide, whom I had mentioned as one of Herman's sources.

What Bosnian genocide?: Far left Chomsky collaborator Edward HermanThis is the first of two or three posts I shall write about recent instances of genocide denial. I do so to illustrate two points. First, the methods of genocide denial are consistent across time and place. The denial of the Srebrenica massacre really does employ the same methods as Holocaust denial. My second point is that genocide denial is politically heterogeneous. You find it on the Left as well as the far Right, though these tendencies have much in common with each other.

I first came across the phenomenon, in its most notorious and extreme form of Holocaust denial, in my teens. My languages teacher, who had been a child refugee from Nazism and whose parents had died in the camps, told me of an incident that happened when she had been introducing a travelling exhibition about Anne Frank. A prominent local member of the National Front (this was in Leicester, where the organisation received a substantial vote at that time) came up to her afterwards, introduced himself, and handed her a pamphlet. I can't remember it, but I'm certain this pamphlet would have been one called "Did Six Million Really Die?", under the pseudonymous authorship of a "Richard Harwood".

Harwood's real name was Richard Verrall. Verrall was editor of the National Front journal Spearhead. His was the first popular exposition published in English of the notion that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by international Jewry. Over the years I've acquired Verrall's pamphlet and a small library of the main pseudo-scholarly works advocating this view (though if you visit my house, you will not find them on open shelves). These are all either in French or in English; for obvious reasons, this sort of material doesn't get disseminated in Germany.

I give no link, but Verrall's pamphlet is now also widely distributed on the Web on far-right and Islamist sites. Its concluding section begins:

"Without doubt the most important contribution to a truthful study of the extermination question has been the work of the French historian, Professor Paul Rassinier. The pre-eminent value of this work lies firstly in the fact that Rassinier actually experienced life in the German concentration camps, and also that, as a Socialist intellectual and anti-Nazi, nobody could be less inclined to defend Hitler and National Socialism. Yet, for the sake of justice and historical truth, Rassinier spent the remainder of his post-war years until his death in 1966 pursuing research which utterly refuted the Myth of the Six Million and the legend of Nazi diabolism."

Extraordinarily, in a polemic that sets a methodological standard for lying about history, this paragraph includes an important truth. It's not often realised that (as Paul Berman rightly notes in his Terror and Liberalism) Holocaust denial began on the French Left. The first person systematically to advance the proposition that the Holocaust was a hoax perpetrated by international Jewry was Paul Rassinier, a French Socialist and Resistance fighter who had indeed been imprisoned at Buchenwald. There is a fine biography of him by Nadine Fresco, Fabrication d'un antisémite, 1999. As the title implies, Rassinier became an embittered antisemitic crank. He died in 1967 (not 1966 as Verrall/Harwood claims), having acquired a handful of followers. Rassinier's principal disciple, Robert Faurisson, is very much with us.

Noam Chomsky famously provoked controversy by coming to Faurisson's defence in 1981 - ostensibly on grounds of free speech, but in fact with other remarks attached. During the controversy, Chomsky insisted to one critic (for sources, see here): "I see no hint of antisemitic implications in Faurisson's work." Chomsky is not a Holocaust denier, and no serious critic accuses him of being an antisemite. But Chomsky's defence of Faurisson is not the libertarian one, which I agree with, of the right to free speech for Holocaust deniers. He clearly defends the legitimacy of Faurisson's views though not their factual accuracy. If you doubt this, consider Chomsky's remark on the masthead of this site and similar sentiments about far greater men than I, such as Vaclav Havel and the late Abba Eban. In Chomsky's universe, "tacit acquiescence to horrendous crimes" is done by liberals and moderate left-wingers. Faurisson genuinely is a racist who does acquiesce in the greatest crime of our age, by denying it even took place. Yet you won't find Chomsky describing Faurisson in the terms he uses to describe, well, me.

The proponents of genocide denial are not a weighty force, and some of them are very trivial indeed. But there are reasons for refuting them.

First, while I don't wish to sound melodramatic, once you let go by default the arguments of Herman and others, you have in effect granted the legitimacy in debate of the equivalent methods of reasoning of Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial, pace Chomsky's frivolous and absurd remarks, necessarily has malevolent implications.

Secondly, it's surprising how some of the propositions of genocide deniers can insinuate themselves into respectable forums without their being recognised as such. I noted an example last year when the novelist Kurt Vonnegut died. In his best known work, Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut directly relies on the discredited claims of my reader David Irving concerning the death toll at Dresden. Portraying the Allies as war criminals while downplaying the crimes of the Nazis is one the techniques of Holocaust deniers such as Irving.

Thirdly, there is matter of honour. It is plainly not logically impossible that fewer than 8,000 men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica; but the means by which Herman and his followers advance that conclusion are a violation of the methods of critical inquiry. That's what is wrong with genocide denial - not that it's an offence to our feelings, but that it's an offence against historical truth.

Fourthly, while the proponents of genocide denial are on the fringes of Western intellectual life, this is not necessarily true elsewhere. Holocaust denial has gained ground in the Muslim world. In particular, it's espoused by the puppet-president of a state that seeks a nuclear capability and anticipates the extinction of the Jewish state.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports,

Two Jewish congressmen are working to keep the Armenian genocide bill from reaching the U.S. House of Representatives floor....U.S. Reps. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) and Stephen Cohen (D-Tenn.), as well as three other opponents of the controversial bill memorializing the killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, spoke harshly of its implications for U.S. relations with Turkey at a news conference Wednesday in Washington.

"The Middle East is a tinderbox," Wexler said. "Our responsibility is to bring as much stability as is humanly possible."

Cohen added that passage of the bill would cause "real-time harm to real people."

Congressman Cohen claims that House Resolution 106 -- the Armenian Genocide Resolution -- would threaten our troops in Iraq.

This resolution is an affirmation of the American role in its humanitarian effort during the Armenian Genocide. It does not threaten our troops --Turkey does.

When I met with Congressman Cohen in August, I explained to him that Turkey has a tendency to use theatrics and bluff as foreign policy tools, just as it did with other countries that passed similar resolutions. And this is precisely what happened.

Turkey is now spending millions of dollars with PR firms and lobbying powerhouses to sway American public opinion with theatrics and fear-mongering tactics.

Turkey's tantrum reaction is unbefitting of a US ally -- especially an ally with such a record of unreliability.

In 2003 The Turkish Government rejected a US request to use its territory for the invasion of Iraq. Our military used contingency plans and shifted the war effort to other parts of the region. It was determined then that Turkey cannot be counted on as a reliable ally.

In 2005 Defense Secretary Rumsfeld blamed the inability to gain permission to invade Iraq through Turkey for the surge of the insurgency that our military faces.

Analysts from both the US and Turkey agree that the US can now do without Turkey, but Turkey cannot do without the United States. The economic and political costs to Turkey of cutting off American access are too great to even consider.

What we are witnessing now is outrageous. Turkey wants to impose a gag order when it comes to discussion of the Armenian Genocide. In essence, by acquiescing, we would be outsourcing our morality and foreign policy to Turkey. This is unacceptable.

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The Forward just published a piece by Leonard Fein on the ADL and the Armenian Genocide. Fein, like too many others throughout this whole affair, fumbles the very basic distinction between (1) being uninformed on a topic, and (2) Telling everyone else that they ought not have an opinion on that topic. Why are so many people having trouble grasping the difference between these two? Stop it!

Fein says

"[C]yberspace is filled with criticism of Abe Foxman, the ADL’s chief, who recently said, “This [the genocide] is not an issue where we take a position one way or the other. This is an issue that needs to be resolved by the parties, not by us. We are neither historians nor arbiters.”

It is true that Foxman is neither a historian nor an arbiter. But it is not possible to believe that he is unaware of the relevant history.

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