| Description |
This study was undertaken to counter the arguments of those who have suggested that the Holocaust experience and its tremendous suffering and inhumanity can and should only be met with silence. It grew out of my reading of an article in The Village Voice, "Gas Chamber Games: Crackpot History and the Right to Lie" (June 10--16,1981), which described the attempts of some contemporary French historians (Robert Faurisson among them) to deny the reality of the death camp and to call the perpetuation of such an idea a "Zionist lie". The article's author, Paul L. Berman, provides his own explanation of this phenomenon by identifying these attempts as responses to the failure of intellectual Marxism in the twentieth century. In a time when "Solzhenitsyn' s exposes and Pol Pot's exploits" have shown socialism to be a "totalitarian disaster," in a century where the inevitable march of progress was interrupted by the obvious barbarism of two world wars and the slaughter of millions, those who sustain the Marxist doctrine of historical progress cannot allow this reality to challenge their theoretical constructs. They have thu; denied the most appalling instances of barbarism (the Holocaust) in order to keep the construct intact. |
