“I see no antisemitic implications in the denial of the existence of gas chambers or even in denial of the Holocaust.”
—Noam Chomsky
In 1980 Noam Chomsky discovered Robert Faurisson, a right-wing antisemite and onetime lecturer in literature at the University of Lyon 2, whose catalog of 1978 described him (with comic solemnity) as specializing in “investigation of meaning and counter-meaning, of the true and the false.” His guiding dogma is that “Hitler never ordered (nor permitted) that someone be killed because of race or religion.” If the Nazis built gas chambers, it was for gassing lice. After all, did not Himmler himself say that “it is the same with antisemitism as with delousing”? One of his central premises is that the only witnesses to the Holocaust are Jews, and that Jewish witnesses are liars—because they are Jews. This opinion did not prevent him from being adorned by a faction of the French ultraleft with the title of “the Jew,” that is, “a man alone,”1 a label that fits him almost as well as “a sort of apolitical liberal,” which is the sage Chomsky’s description of this antisemite.2 The lie and “swindle” about gas chambers and genocide, Faurisson alleged, originate with the “Zionists” and victimize primarily “the Germans and Palestinians.”
Faurisson has vaulted to fame not so much through his jejune publications as through his good fortune in finding a powerful friend to defend him from his persecutors, that other great ally of the “Palestinians,” Noam Chomsky, who came to the defense of Faurisson after his university classes had been suspended3 and he had been brought into court in June 1981 for defamations of Holocaust witnesses and scholars of the Holocaust. Chomsky promoted (and placed his name at the head of) a petition supporting Faurisson’s “just right of academic freedom” and worshipfully identifying him as someone who had been “conducting extensive historical research into the ‘Holocaust’ question” and was harassed as soon as “he began making his findings public”4 (emphasis added). As Pierre Vidal-Naquet has remarked, “what is scandalous about the petition is that it never raises the question of whether what Faurisson is saying is true or false, that it even presents his conclusions or ‘findings’ as the result of a historical investigation, one, that is, in quest of the truth. To be sure, it may be argued that every man has a right to lies and falsehood.… But the right that the forger demands should not be conceded to him in the name of truth.”5
Although Deborah Lipstadt in her book Denying the Holocaust6 assigns considerable blame to Chomsky’s “Voltairean” defense of the Nazis’ free speech for their ability to penetrate the campuses, she pays insufficient attention to its still darker implications. These were captured succinctly by Nadine Fresco when she commented on the pregnancy of the fact that Chomsky selects as his model the Enlightenment bigot who in 1745 said of the Jews, “You will not find in them anything but an ignorant and barbarous people who have for a long time combined the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition,” and then added the paradoxical coda: “One should not, however, burn them.”7 Neither has Lipstadt (perhaps because she lacks training in abnormal psychology) tried to track Chomsky down the winding path whereby he moved deeper and deeper into the revisionist morass, arguing, first, that denial of the Holocaust is no evidence of antisemitism; second, that anti-Zionism too implies no presumption of antisemitism; and third, in a truly spectacular example of tu quoque that he concocted in 1991, that anyone who says that the Jews alone were singled out by Hitler for total annihilation is involved in “pro-Nazi apologetics” (presumably because a genuine anti-Nazi would insist—erroneously—that Hitler wanted to annihilate all identifiable groups except ethnic Germans).8
At times Chomsky has given the impression that immaculate agnosticism moves him to defend the deniers. In Liberation (December 23, 1980) he wrote that “I don’t know enough about [Faurisson’s] work to determine if what he is claiming is accurate or not.” In Le Matin (January 19, 1981) the newly tolerant linguist wrote that “we don’t want people to have religious or dogmatic beliefs about the existence of the Holocaust.” But we may conjecture that even though he does not directly endorse the claims of Faurisson and the other cranks, he wishes them well in their endeavor; for he believes that to undermine belief in the Holocaust is to undermine belief in the legitimacy of the state of Israel, which many people suppose (albeit mistakenly) to have come into existence because of Western bad conscience over what was done to the Jews in World War II. Chomsky would feel no compunction about joining “right-wing” forces to achieve the great desideratum of delegitimizing the Jewish state.
Chomsky surely recognizes that the underlying motive of the Holocaust deniers, like that of much of his own political labor, is hatred of the state of Israel. Indeed, the crucial place of Israel in the demonology of the deniers is the most relentlessly pursued theme of Lipstadt’s book, and articles denying the Holocaust have long been a staple of PLO publications. Almost without exception the deniers claim that the Jews invented the “legend” of the Holocaust because they wanted license from the world to “displace” the poor Palestinians and establish the Jewish state, and they wanted the helpless, defeated Germans to finance the operation. Of course, the neo-Nazis ignore the fact that most reparations money was paid to individuals, and constantly accuse Israel of exaggerating the number of Jews killed so it could receive more German money. In fact, as Lipstadt remarks, since the money Israel did receive was based on the cost of resettling survivors, it would have been in Israel’s interest to claim that fewer than six million had been killed and that more had managed to reach Israel. Austen App, for example, accused the “Talmudists” of using “the six million swindle to blackmail West Germany into ‘atoning’ with the twenty billion dollars of indemnities to Israel” (Lipstadt, 95). (The sum Germany paid to the state of Israel was $110 million.)
Denying the Holocaust is a book that was undertaken with great reluctance, for its author was keenly aware that for the deniers there is no such thing as unfavorable publicity. She began as “an ardent advocate of ignoring them” but after examining their activities closely decided that they will not retreat unless aggressively beaten back. Without according them legitimacy by “debating” them, either in the TV talk shows that have incessantly invited her to do so or in the book itself, Lipstadt has, in her scholarly and dispassionate exposé of the deniers’ political program, fake scholarship, and fraudulent methods, exploded every one of their claims. Whether her tenacious effort will explode the movement itself remains to be seen. “The wicked,” says Isaiah (57:20), “are like the troubled sea; / For it cannot rest, / And its waters cast up mire and dirt.”
1.Nadine Fresco, “The Denial of the Dead: The Faurisson Affair—and Noam Chomsky,” Dissent 28 (Fall 1981): 469.
2.Chomsky, preface to Robert Faurisson, Mémoire en défense: contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’Histoire; La question des chambres à gaz (Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1980), xiv–xv.
3.His right to teach was not withdrawn, and his request to teach correspondence courses was approved.
4.The petition is quoted in full in Werner Cohn, The Hidden Alliances of Noam Chomsky (New York: Americans for a Safe Israel, 1988), 6.
5.Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 58.
6.Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: The Free Press, 1993). Subsequent references to this book appear in parentheses in the text.
7.See the entry “Juif” in Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique.
8.Electronic mail USENET network (soc.culture.Jewish newsgroup), August 19 and September 12, 1991.