Here is a short essay written by the Academy and Italian semiotics Valentina Pisanty , dedicated to the devious methods used by Holocaust deniers to support their theories. There is no better way to fight the enemies of truth if not knowing the weapons used by them. The text is quite long, but worth reading because it is very interesting and complete, even going back several years ago.
CONTEMPORARY ITALY No. 212, September 1998
The denial
Valentina Pisanty
The SS soldiers cynically amused to warn the prisoners: "In whatever way this war ends, the war against you we won, and no you will bear witness to, but if someone escaped, the world will believe him [...] And when some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the facts are too monstrous to tell you be believed. "
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
What is Holocaust denial?
There is a link of continuity between the Nazi policy of concealment of evidence of genocide and the alleged activities of some historians that for some time trying to convince the world that the Holocaust is the "great deception of the twentieth century. " According to these authors, Auschwitz and the Nazi gas chambers as nothing more than a figment of Allied propaganda of the Zionist matrix, to extract reparations from Germany defeat, the purpose of financing the state of Israel.
Usually we refer to them with the revisionist label (a name by which they themselves like to call themselves), but the official historiography prefers to call them deniers. The reason is simple: while every historian worthy of respect is revisionist in the sense that it is willing to consistently put their knowledge into play if the documentary evidence causes him to reconsider his position, the denial is colui che nega l’evidenza storica stessa. Se il progresso scientifico consiste nell’avvicendarsi di paradigmi, allora ogni sostenitore di un nuovo paradigma è revisionista: Copernico era revisionista rispetto al sistema tolemaico, i sostenitori dell’innocenza di Dreyfus erano revisionisti rispetto a coloro che emisero il verdetto di colpevolezza nel 1894, e così via.
Sebbene il revisionismo sia un atteggiamento scientifico comune, nell’ambito degli studi sulla seconda guerra mondiale è possibile individuare una forma più specifica di revisionismo, che taluni propongono di chiamare “riduzionismo” perché vuole ottenere lo scopo di ridimensionare la portata della Shoah e dei Nazi crimes. According to Ernst Nolte, for example, the liability of the Second World War is not to pass on to Germans and the Nazi concentration camps are comparable to a Soviet gulag .
The phenomenon of denial is not new: immediately after the war there were blocks of the authors who tried to rehabilitate Nazism, erasing what - in the eyes of the common consciousness is the most serious crimes committed by the Hitler regime, namely the extermination Planned million Jews to death camps 2.
To quote some precursor of denial, the first Holocaust deniers in France are former vichyista Maurice Bardeche (autore di Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise 3 ) e l’ex socialista Paul Rassinier. Rassinier, che viene oggi considerato come il padre fondatore del negazionismo, è una figura alquanto singolare. Anziano deportato politico a Dora e a Buchenwald, per qualche motivo difficile da spiegare Rassinier passerà il resto dei suoi giorni, dal dopoguerra in poi, a tentare di giustificare la politica concentrazionaria nazista e a sostenere che i veri responsabili della seconda guerra mondiale furono i comunisti e gli ebrei.
Nella prefazione di Le Mensonge d’Ulysse 4 , Paul Rassinier si riferisce a quella che egli definisce l’“irritante questione” delle camere gas. In 1954, when he wrote this preface, Rassinier has not yet explicitly formulated the theory of non-existence of Nazi gas chambers, and therefore for him to slaughter plants are a source of annoyance. Why is the issue of the gas chambers is described as an irritant? For the simple reason that it constitutes the greatest obstacle encountered by those who, like him, wants to rehabilitate the Nazi regime. You can groped to justify Hitler's expansionist policies, the racial laws, deportation and even the concentration camps, but however you see the gas chambers are a chapter of human history too absurd because it can be normalized. The only solution, therefore, is to root out the source of irritation. After
Rassinier, various authors around the world have tried to deny the Holocaust . But for thirty years while their case is passed relatively unnoticed, from the late seventies the denial began to get a large listening room and carve out a growing space in the historical debate and massmediology. What is the reason for this change?
In part, the relative success enjoyed by the media deniers in recent years is due to external factors such as increased temporal distance that separates us from the war, the emergence of the new right in Europe and a cultural climate of widespread skepticism of conspiracy and petty that, with the complicity of (often unintentional) of the sensationalism of the media, has paved the way for anyone who wants to overturn some accepted truths historiography, including Shoah.
But besides these external factors, I think this change is due preparation by the deniers of new communication strategies are more effective than those previously adopted. In 1978 he was based in Torrance, California, the Institute of Historical Review, an institution that brings together pseudoaccademico deniers from around the world and organizes conferences, distributes publications of Holocaust deniers and edited a magazine, “The Journal of Historical Review”, sulla quale scrivono tutti gli autori negazionisti. Laddove in precedenza i negazionisti avevano operato in isolamento, con il risultato che i diversi scritti su questo argomento erano spesso in contraddizione reciproca, ora i diversi contributi vengono coordinati dall’alto per conferire ad essi una coerenza che prima non possedevano. Ad esempio, L’Institute of Historical Review ha formulato otto assiomi del negazionismo che tutti i negatori della Shoah sono tenuti a rispettare:
- La soluzione finale consisteva nell’emigrazione e non nello sterminio.
- Non ci furono gassazioni.
- La maggior parte degli missing Jews emigrated to America and the Soviet Union by losing track of them.
- 4. The few Jews executed by the Nazis were criminals subversive.
- The Jewish community worldwide pursued anyone who wants to play an honest historical research work around the Second World War for fear that the truth of the facts emerges.
- There is no evidence of genocide.
- The burden of proof is on the side of "Exterminationists.
- The contradictions in the official history of the demographic calculations clearly indicate the nature of their argument false.
from eight axioms derive a series of standard questions and answers with the deniers argue that the most obvious objection:
- If genocide never happened, what happened to the missing Jews? Answer: they have taken advantage of the chaos of war to rebuild their lives with some handsome young local.
- How to explain the meaning of the code "special action" that we find so often in the Nazi documents? Answer: The special actions were nothing but selections to separate infected from healthy ones held in concentration camps, to prevent the spreading of epidemics of typhus.
- And what about the testimonies of the war? Answer: The evidence is not evidence because they were coerced or falsified by the Allies.
- And the material? Answer: it's all rigged, the result of a clever installation by agents of the Zionist propaganda, even the deniers claim that the photographs depicting the mountains of corpses of the camp were taken to Dresden after the Allied bombings.
Another factor that has contributed to raising the profile of the deniers was their apparent distance from anti-traditional far-right - this is a phenomenon that affects mainly the European Holocaust deniers. While the writings of the first Holocaust deniers explicitly revealed their anti-Semitic ideological influences and thus easily fell into the category of political pamphlets (relatively harmless to the extent that does not hide its ideological bias), the new Holocaust deniers (with Robert Faurisson in head ; in Italy's Carlo Mattogno, Germany Wilhelm Stäglich 5) do their best to give the appearance of ideological neutrality of its publications and scientific rigor. The stated purpose of the new Holocaust deniers, or those who might be called the "researchers" (who refuse the label of anti-Semites), is to restore the "historical truth", regardless of any further political motive.
addition to the precursors and the "researchers", there is a third group of Holocaust deniers who operate mainly in the U.S. and Canada, and I propose to call the "advisers". What characterizes the work of the latter is the extreme crudeness of their arguments, which are expressed in the style of the crude anti-Semitic propaganda longer cheap - it must be remembered that the United States Holocaust deniers are protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, and therefore have no avoid the problem of censorship, as it must do the deniers in Europe.
Each publication of this kind is made to arouse a great outcry in the university concerned, the noise echoes of which will eventually exceed the narrow confines of the campus to reach the pages of major newspapers and the screens of broadcasters. Thus, with a negligible initial cost (the amount necessary to pay for advertising space on the university magazine), if at all (hence the scandal, editors often refrain from cashing checks), Bradley Smith and his followers provide spaces amounting to thousands of dollars on print and on national television, allowing them to become the subject of discussion of many American citizens.
Another area in which the "advisers" were very active is the Internet, where there is a proliferation of sites deniers 6. The information channel is a very good solution to escape censure that in some European countries, affects the writings of Holocaust deniers. As you know, in fact, cyberspace is open to all, even if it is decided to refuse access to the network at a site considered ideologically pernicious, there are countless ways to circumvent the ban.
The ease with which the deniers highway access information has important implications for strategies by which the supporters of the official historiography trying to combat the phenomenon of denial of the Holocaust . If the old communication technologies (print and video) was still possible to think of suppressing the movement through the complaint, with the advent and spread of the Internet this objective has become impossible. Beyond the complex debate about whether to censor the lyrics of the authors in question, it is undeniable that such a connection may prove anachronistic now, and the prohibition on publication strategies have to take over other more complex and up to date. It is from this premise that drives the Nizkor Project (in Hebrew, "We Remember"), which since 1992 has taken on the task of unmasking the objectives of Zundel and similar groups through a meticulous monitoring of the sites deniers by the motto "the way to combat the pernicious ideas is through other ideas. "
Strategies interpretative
But we now see as the deniers read historical documents, to try to understand how they argue their case common. In general, the deniers show a high propensity for reading 'paranoid' texts: they give an interpretation of the documents programmatically suspicious, because behind every word spoken by the witnesses, lurks in their view, a secret. Their stated aim is to demystify the history of World War II, and they self-assigned role to expose the lie.
In this regard it is interesting to recall how, before converting to denial, Robert Faurisson has worked for a fifteen years as a professor of French literature at the University of Lyon. Reading his writings critical lettararia discover that the same method of interpretation - paranoid - that Faurisson then apply the reading of historical documents can be found in the way he reads the poems and novels. Every time that Faurisson is going to interpret a text (poems by Rimbaud's works of Céline, of Nerval or Lautreamont 7), the self-assigned task is to break the prejudices of traditional criticism and expose forgers. The method of interpretation employed by Faurisson in the reading of literary texts is divided into two phases (the same as those later found in his reading of historical documents), a first reading of suspicious , in which Faurisson rejects all previous tradition of interpretation and strongly suggests that someone (you know who) has any interest in concealing the only true meaning of the text, a second in which, assuming the role of exposing, proposes to categorically that he is the only key to good reading of the text, closing in total "fundamentalism" (because, once enunciated his thesis, he is not there any more room for discussion.)
Thus, to deny the will of Faurisson usually precedes the denial.
Prima di passare alla fase più propriamente negazionista della sua carriera, Faurisson attraversa una breve stagione critica intermedia (intorno al 1975) durante la quale, nel tentativo di dimostrare l’inautenticità dei diari di Anna Frank 8 , ha modo di applicare le sue capacità di demistificatore a un argomento che si avvicina a quelli che saranno i suoi interessi successivi.
Nel momento in cui decide di occuparsi dei diari di Anna Frank, Faurisson si immette nel filone del negazionismo, che da tempo cerca di dimostrare che i diari sono falsi, anche se non è ben chiara l’utilità di questa operazione, visto che nessuno ha mai pensato di considerarli come un documento evidence for the existence of extermination camps - as you know, Anne Frank wrote up his diary when he was still locked up in his secret apartment in Amsterdam. It is therefore strange that the deniers have been relentless with such fervor against this daily account of a young girl who had to know the reality of mass murder only after you have finished writing her diary.
The reason why the deniers devote much space to the diaries of Anne Frank is clearly the impact of emotion triggered by search all over the world from this text, which in some ways has assumed the role of the document symbol of the Shoah . Through the insinuation of doubt about its authenticity, deniers hope to extend the same wary attitude in every other aspect of the Holocaust .
Since 1957, the deniers have claimed that the Diary of Anne Frank is a common false and that its true author is not Anne Frank but some secret agent of the Zionist propaganda. For years, they have argued that these would be Meyer Levin, a writer to whom Anna's father, Otto Frank, in 1952 he had entrusted the drafting of a script taken from the diaries of his daughter. The hypothesis that the diary is a frame of Levin is so easy to disprove that Faurisson has even caused, by a certain point on, drop out.
Curiously, while claiming to want to prove the authenticity of the diaries, the deniers' arguments always end up taking absolutely inconsistent with that view, devoting all their efforts to attempt to prove that Anna was a disreputable person (because of her romance with Peter almost brotherly, his young companion in prison), unreliable and low intelligence, and even drug addicts (in this case the reference is to pasticchette valerian that Anna took every night before going to sleep). It is not clear what benefit there may be nell'infangare the image of what, for the deniers, it's just a harmless figurehead. Besides, if Anne Frank was not really the author of his diaries, it is not clear where to draw the Faurisson and company information needed to assess (negatively) the personality of the child.
In other cases it appears that the deniers do not support so that the diaries are not authentic, because they are not truthful. To demonstrate this, they listed the points of the diaries that, in their view are too improbable to be accepted as true. For example, the deniers are surprised that the eight illegal immigrants were able to Prinsengracht burn their waste, use the alarm, arguing loudly, hang the curtains on the windows, etc.. Without being discovered. Would it be possible to respond promptly to each of these objections (the noise occurred during the hours when there was nobody in the outbuildings, for example), but the transaction is useless. What the deniers do not seem to consider is that, obviously, the precautions taken by illegal immigrants not to be discovered were not enough, since they were reported and deported, and one of them managed to return home after the war.
The analysis of the denial of reading the diaries of Anne Frank illuminate the type of claim made by Holocaust deniers against intend to delegitimize documents. In the next section we will try to understand how this same method of reading functions when applied to documents and eyewitness accounts of mass murder.
reading of historical documents
On closer inspection, the operation of historical denial is a staggering rudeness. The first move is to make a denial of any evidence indicating the existence of gas chambers (the memoirs of Rudolf Hoess, the testimonies of survivors, etc..) And the Isle of context. Honest historian knows that every witness must be corroborated by other evidence, as no single witness is infallible. The testimony is the single piece of a larger mosaic that, overall, informs us of how you are likely carried out the events to which each witness refers in a necessarily parziale. Invece di far dialogare le varie voci tra loro, il negazionista estrae la singola testimonianza dalla rete probatoria nella quale essa è inserita. Una volta isolata la testimonianza per renderla più facilmente attaccabile, il negazionista va alla ricerca spasmodica di tutte le increspature esegetiche, le minime inesattezze fattuali e le piccole contraddizioni di cui essa è portatrice.
Essendo un prodotto della memoria umana, qualunque testimonianza può contenere alcune inesattezze o contraddizioni. Il testimone può sbagliarsi sul numero di persone stipate nelle camere a gas, sull’altezza o sull’esatto colore di un edificio, sul giorno della settimana in cui Himmler visitò il lager di Auschwitz, ecc. Ora, it is evident that similar mistakes do not undermine, detract from the value of the testimony with regard to its main contents. Instead, the deniers clings to every little mistake and hastily jump to the conclusion that, if the witness (he is a survivor or a former SS) was wrong about one detail, there is no guarantee that he is not wrong is also on the rest.
As you can see, there is a huge disproportion between the amount found and the incorrectness of the conclusions drawn from them 10. Even when they come to question the authenticity of the testimony of Gerstein, the deniers can see you anomalies that it contains. For example, the German version of his report (of which there are multiple drafts), Gerstein says that, gassing is complete, the special teams had to rummage in the mouth, anus and genitals in the bodies to search for gold and diamonds (sometimes happened that victims stripped of their clothes, hid some valuable asset in their orifices). In German they say Brillanten brilliant, but in the text of Gerstein's a typo: at one point the author writes Brillen (glasses) instead of Brillanten . What does a Holocaust denier as Charles Mattogno? Instead of taking note of the typographical error (especially since two lines after the word Brillanten is repeated correctly), says: "Men dell'Arbeitskommando looking glasses in the genitals of victims."
The reader, which is usually not sufficient information to respond promptly to each of these objections - and the deniers are careful to supply the bibliographic information needed to fill the gaps - is thrown into a state of disorientation and paralysis of interpretation. The first phase of denial, then, is the breaking of the consensus, the crumbling of the social upon which our collective reception of the Holocaust . In the minds of the unwary reader is thrown into the seed of dubbio circa la realtà dello sterminio. A questo punto, la situazione è matura per sferrare l’attacco finale: attraverso la tecnica dell’insinuazione, si fa intendere al lettore che le sbavature appena riscontrate nei documenti non sono casuali, ma fanno capo a una precisa volontà di manipolazione a opera di “certi ambienti del sionismo internazionale”. Di lì alla logora trama della cospirazione giudaica per la conquista del mondo il passo è breve.
Le strategie discorsive
Finora mi sono occupata di come i negazionisti leggano i documenti storici per piegarli alle proprie esigenze ideologiche. Ma c’è un altro aspetto da considerare, se si vuole capire come funzionino the texts of Holocaust deniers in terms of communication: the way in which they set out their arguments, trying to make it as convincing as possible.
Before you start to analyze the discursive strategies employed by Holocaust deniers, it should be noted that any historical discourse is full of rhetorical devices aimed at influencing the attitude of interpretation of a player often unaware of being manipulated. The contemporary history is marked by an awareness that if the starting material documentary provides the historical framework of the discourse, the gaps and contradictions in the documents swarm require his active intervention to "animate the fragments that are scattered before him " 11. Thus, the historical discourse is not clear why the vehicle of truth self-evident, but it is always the result of a set of discursive strategies used by the historian to convince its readers that the things of which he writes is likely to be carried out as he tells her.
universe of communications, perfect objectivity is an ideal difficult to achieve. Anyone who proposes a historical reconstruction, it does so from its system of beliefs and values \u200b\u200bwhich, inevitably, the text will bear a trace. Within a certain limit, so any information is partial. However, after getting aware of the natural subjectivity of one's horizon of departure, the historian can ever prevail to meet the conditions for honest communication, for example, it is expected that he always just says what he believes to be true (so that no conscious mind), not make unprovable assertions, not deliberately hidden a significant part of knowledge which is aware, that encourages the reader to verify for itself the credibility of his claims (hence the importance of bibliography), whereas, if his argument proceeds from probable premises only, then it is made explicit bias, and so on.
Instead, it comes to handling misappropriation of history when the means employed by the historian to influence the opinions of its readers do not meet commonly accepted criteria of honesty argument. In this sense, the manipulator is the one who proposes a partial interpretation of history and that, at the service of a particular ideological position, deliberately 'to drug' any information that may contradict his thesis.
That said, we must understand the extent to which the texts of the deniers to respect the ethics of historical discourse. Taking up the tripartite division of the authors deniers (precursors, researchers and "advisers") given above, it is quite evident that neither precursors, or the "advisers" are particularly interested in adapting the common principles governing scientific discourse honest: the selective use of wild sources, the use of a highly ideological jargon, often resulting in pure invective (to the detriment of the main exponents science of history), the exploitation polemical purposes of all the stereotypes typical of the slanderous anti-Semitic propaganda are more cheesy some of the traits recurring in the writings of these authors. Since these authors do not ensure any way to conceal the partiality of their views, their texts fall into the category of propaganda pamphlet, which the scientific discourse has not nothing to do. In some ways, the writings of 'fans' of Maurice Bardeche, Paul Rassinier, Bradley Smith, etc.., Are relatively harmless, in that they have a very limited range: the reader is not sympathetic enough to identify the ideological motive prompting the authors to question the existence of genocide for refusing to cooperate with them and brand their claims as mere lies.
In general, the authors in question represent themselves in their written as a group of researchers heretics persecuted unfairly by the official historiography: as soon as they can, he lingers to tell who believe they have suffered persecution on the part of academia and the 'official culture'. Sometimes, the denialist discourse seems to lose sight of its original intentions (to provide an alternative interpretation of the history of World War II) and folds up completely on itself, alternating with the record of the author's personal woes with the enunciation of abstract principles generally accepted (as that of freedom of expression). To power the "martyrology revisionist" 12, Faurisson and partners leverage the topos of the solitary hero and rebel against the institutions. Framing the conflict of opinion in the traditional narrative structure, depicted as an unequal struggle between David and Goliath, it is clear the intention to win the sympathy of the reader, as is known, can be identified more easily by the opponent of the least advantaged contention.
same extreme individualization of themselves as authors, the deniers, "researchers" put in place a systematic depersonalization of the supporters of scientific historiography, evoked by anonymous formulas as "a clearly identified political current," "Some American Zionist circles," "Thirty-four French historians, the" mainstream media ", etc.. Deprived of a clearly defined, the opponents are wrapped in an aura of impersonality left.
The goal is obviously to instil in the reader suspect that a conspiracy is in place by the occult and elusive (the Jewish lobby) but rarely-deniers "researchers" will push up the explicit enunciation of this thesis.
Together with the depersonalization of professional historians, Holocaust deniers seek to detach the speeches of opposition from the real world: the incorporeal figures paradigm of the official history of talk because things do not exist. One way to get this taken further cancellation is a very particular use dell'interpunzione. Take, for example, the first paragraphs of an article by Faurisson titled "The Problem of gas chambers" or " the rumor of Auschwitz" 13 :
No one disputes the use of crematoria in some German camps. The frequency of same epidemics throughout Europe at war, called for cremation, for example, the dead bodies for typhoid.
It is the existence of "gas chambers", true human slaughterhouses, that is in dispute. This challenge is growing. The major media did not ignore anymore.
In 1945, the official history stated that the "gas chambers" were brought into both the former Reich and Austria, both in Alsace and Poland. Fifteen years later, in 1960, corrected his opinion: "gas chambers" did not have, "first" (?), Who worked in Poland.
All words that relate to any aspect of the Holocaust are quotes: for example, involved in the expression "gas chambers" appears nine times in two pages, and is always placed in quotation marks. Such an artifice silistico stimulates an automatic reaction is suspected. The player is sown doubt about the status of the extermination facilities, which are treated in the text at all chimerical creations of the human mind.
The same effect is achieved by other punctuation such as exclamation points or question marks in brackets, ellipsis, italics and bold:
Thus, as one might have, such as Auschwitz, to enter two thousand (and even three thousand) people in an area of \u200b\u200b210 square meters (!), then add (!) on their granules banal and violent insecticide called Zyklon-B, then immediately after the death of the victims, without sending gas masks, in such a space saturated with hydrogen cyanide, a team to remove the bodies impregnated with cyanide?
Similar devices are used to emphasize, at every level (explicit and implicit) denial of the discourse, the thesis of non-existence of the extermination of the Jews
.
From everything we understand that the deniers, even when aspiring to obtain a driver's scientific legitimacy (as in the case of Faurisson), do not disdain the use of the techniques and the assumption dell'insinuazione to increase the persuasive impact of their writings. The effectiveness of argumentative
assumption is that you can pass relatively unnoticed by a statement that - if done openly - could lead to an immediate objection by the recipient. If someone says "come back to Bologna, is in effect providing two things: the first (explicit) is his intention to go in Bologna, while the second (implicit) is that, previously, has already been to Bologna. The implicit information is that which is taken for granted, and it is more difficult to contest: so much so that if one reverses the meaning of the utterance (" not return to Bologna"), this information remains unchanged.
The mechanism becomes interesting for the purpose of manipulating the rhetoric of the speech, for example if you decide to put their information on the background of the statement less obvious (and therefore more subject to criticism), thus trying to put them at protected from challenge. To deny the fact enunciation content requirement, the recipient must deny that the speaker has the right to use that particular expression, thus making metalinguistic rather complex operation. Take for example the final paragraph of the above cited article by Faurisson:
Nazism is dead and buried, with his Führer. Today remains the truth. We dare to proclaim it. The absence of the "gas chambers" is good news for poor humanity . Good news that you would still hurt to keep hidden. 14
the highlighted phrase, Faurisson put in the background of the utterance precisely the thesis that seeks to demonstrate, namely "the absence of the 'gas chambers'." To challenge the assumption, the reader must question the very structure of the sentence, refusing to assume what is indisputable place as enunciation. Not enough to overturn the sentence for denying the sense (the absence of the gas chambers is not good news for poor humanity "), you must argue with the way in which Faurisson has built his speech:" And who said that the gas chambers are non-existent? ". Only the uninformed reader, poorly motivated to assume a hostile attitude in the reading part of Faurisson distracted, it can fall into the trap warp text by the author - but it is precisely at such a player who turns Faurisson.
When reporting the views of official historians, Holocaust deniers often make use of assumptions designed to insinuate that the opinions in question bring water to their mill. The following example is taken by Arthur Butz (one of the leading deniers U.S.):
How admitted Dr. Kubovy the Jewish Documentation Center in Tel Aviv in 1960 "there is no document signed by Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich speaking of the extermination of the Jews and [...] the word 'murder' does not appear in the letter of Goering to Heydrich concerning the final solution of the Jewish question " 15.
The term suggests a reluctance to admit, by Kubovy, to support his thesis, which in turn suggests that the content of admission is inconsistent with the accepted assumptions of historiography. The technique
dell’insinuazione, tipica della scrittura libellistica, è del tutto fuori luogo all’interno di un discorso che si voglia scientifico. Se uno studioso serio vuole sostenere una tesi, lo fa a chiare lettere, perché l’allusione indiretta non si concilia con il principio fondamentale di ogni indagine scientifica, e cioè la falsificabilità delle ipotesi. In altre parole, lo studioso onesto si premura di offrire al resto della comunità scientifica tutti gli elementi necessari per mettere alla prova la validità delle conclusioni a cui è giunto. Ma se tali conclusioni vengono presentate in forma allusiva e indiretta, in modo che il ricercatore possa sempre sottrarsi alla responsabilità delle sue affermazioni (“non I meant to say this), then exit the domain of science because it fails the common ground on which positions may also opposite face.
Even at the level of exhibition strategies used in their writings, therefore, the deniers refuse to comply with the principles of scientifically honest communication. The accession of the deniers, "researchers" to the style of historiographic discourse is only apparent, not just enter any text in the table or a photograph for this to become a scientific essay.
Conclusion The denial does not stand up unless it is supported by some version of conspiracy theory, namely the conviction (widespread in the collective mentality) that somewhere there is a director who handles the occult throughout history. In fact, to question the existence of the genocide, we need to imagine that for decades has in place a concerted and coherent plan of falsification of history, of which most of the protagonists of the Second World War would be directly complicit: the survivors of the camps, the same interrogated Nazis after the war, various international organizations (like the Red Cross, the War Refugee Board, etc..), as well as all the major politicians of the time, including Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. The deniers, which often airs this hypothesis (through the technique dell'insinuazione we have discussed above), never get to explain how can such a conspiracy and who was the supreme craftsman. The deniers will never be able to write a counter-history of Nazism. All you can do is groped to dismantle the credibility of the accepted version of the history of World War II, but fail to construct an interpretation of the positive (and not even try it), through an alternative explanatory scheme of the facts than that generally accepted. The deniers can suggest or mention the existence of a Zionist plot to rewrite history, relying on the old prejudice of privileged access of Jewish media, but the conspiracy theory can not be demonstrated or even articulated: it can only enunciate.
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Notes
Paper presented at the conference "Fascism and anti-fascism: removals, revisions, negations. The history of Italy from Fascism to the Republic in the European context "(Rome, 21-23 April 1998), organized by the Volunteer Corps of freedom with the scientific collaboration of the National Institute for the history of the liberation movement in Italy and the Foundation Luigi Micheletti.
- Ernst Nolte, Bolshevism and National Socialism. The European Civil War 1917-1945, Firenze, Sansoni, 1989.
- It is well known in the Nazi death camps were killed not only Jews but also homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, gypsies, and various other ethnic minorities. However, the deniers are concerned only to deny the Jewish genocide, while not taking into account the other victims of "racial cleansing" Hitler. It is for this reason that in this article speak only of the denial of the Holocaust .
- Maurice Bardeche, Nuremberg ou la Terre Promise , Paris, Les Sept Couleurs, 1948.
- The Italian translation of the work is: The Lie of Ulysses , Milan, Le Rune, 1966.
- A collection of writings of Faurisson is in Serge Thion, Vérité historique Vérité ou politique? Paris, La Vieille Taupe, 1980, Faurisson is also the author of Mémoire en défense (1980) and Réponse à Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1982), both published by La Vieille Taupe. The main contribution to the cause of Wilhelm Stäglich denial is found in his Der Auschwitz-Mythos , Tübingen, Grabert, 1979. Finally, Carlo Mattogno, the main Italian Holocaust denier, is a prolific author: his writings, remember Auschwitz as "confessions" of Höss , Parma, The Sphinx (sd.) The Gerstein Report: Anatomy of a false , Monfalcone, Italy in Sentinel, 1985, Auschwitz: a case of plagiarism , Parma, The Sphinx, 1986, and Holocaust: amateurs , Padova, Ar Editions, 1996.
- Among the main attractions deniers cite the Zundelsite (directed by Canadian Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel), the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (Bradley Smith), the sites of Fred Leuchter, Radio Islam di, di Greg Raven dell'Association Veterans amateur war stories (Aaargh) e dell'Adelaide Institute.
- Cfr. Robert Faurisson, Was read Rimbaud? "Bizarre", 1962, n. 21-22, 1962; Id Was read Lautreamont ?, Parigi, Gallimard, 1972; Id The Key of Dreams and Other Chimera de Nerval, Parigi, Pauvert, 1977.
- R. Faurisson, The Diary of Anne Frank is it authentic?, In S. Thion, historical truth or political truth? cit.
- Kurt Gerstein entered the medical service technician SS-Führungshauptamt Health Service (SS) in 1941, and in 1942 he was appointed head of technical services for disinfection of lager.
- imagine someone watching a car accident and then, in his testimony, saying he had seen the accident victim submerged in a pool of blood. It is clear that this is a way of saying, and no one would dream of investigating balanced argue that, since it is physically impossible for the gallons of blood contained in a human body are equivalent to the volume of a lake, then the witness has lied.
- Georges Duby, Write history, in Alberto Asor (ed.), writing and history. Problems of literary historiography , Florence, La Nuova Italy, 1995.
- The expression is Nadine Fresco, Parcours du ressentiment , "Lignes", 1988, n. 2.
- Published for the first time in "Le Monde 28 December 1978.
- Emphasis added.
- Arthur Butz, The Hoax of the XXth Century , Torrance, Institute for Historical Review, 1976, p. 19. Emphasis added.
From: INSMLI.it (PDF file)
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