The Holocaust(s) Did Happen

Paul Cummins
Mirror contributing writer

   A few years ago, my daughter, an undergraduate at Northwestern University, was in a laundromat in Evanston. She had become friendly with the manager of the laundromat, an eastern European prison camp survivor. One day, the woman began yelling at a customer and told him to get out of her store. He was a Northwestern professor who was part of a lunatic fringe across the country, which argues that the Holocaust did not happen. One of their arguments is that it is all fabricated by Jews to gain American sympathy and foreign aid.
   The Holocaust did happen. That anyone would deny this provides educators with a great opportunity to educate. Why, we should ask our youth — from those in elementary school to those attending graduate seminars—would anyone want to deny historical reality? And, of course, we are immediately led into issues of prejudice, anti-Semitism, and fascist ideology. These are areas which offer teachers wonderful opportunities to discuss mass psychology, the history of bigotry and persecution, victimization — its causes and effects, and the like.
   The impulse of men and women to re-write history is another topic, which “Holocaust Revisionism” (to accord a contemporary euphemism to such idiocy) presents. Of course, George Orwell has brilliantly discussed this phenomenon in his anti-totalitarian novel 1984, but we can find other examples closer to home. For example, I attended Stanford University from 1955-1959, and one of my American history teachers was an eminent historian, whose text we read for a survey course in U.S. History. Thomas A. Bailey was not considered a revisionist historian, yet he simply did not discuss the 15th to 19th centuries’ “holocaust” which occurred in the Americas. Was he denying history, or simply a white man who was oblivious to the racial genocide of the Native Americans? Ironically, historians such as Howard Zinn who choose to discuss the reality of the virtual extermination of the Native Americans are referred to as “revisionist.” So recent history provides two examples of “holocausts,” one that extremist ideologies deny having happened, and the other, which well-intentioned humanist-historians ipso facto deny having happened by simple neglect.
   The dangers of denial, of course, are many. First of all, there is the oft-quoted danger of repeating history by being ignorant of it. Second, there is a clear and present danger in America of the continuing denial of the civil rights of Native Americans by each succeeding generation of law-makers, many of whom ignore the fundamental and primarily racial injustice perpetrated by white European settlers who stole the Indians’ land, violated almost every treaty designed and approved, and who killed multitudes of the Native American people. When, for example, will we fully confront the illegal and immoral acts committed by our forefathers? Our nation will not and cannot restore a sense of moral well being and community until we face up to our own historical acts of genocide. Americans are easily outraged by examples of Germans and Austrians denying their history (for example, read Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, or see the film The Nasty Girl). Yet, we continue to deny our collective guilt, perpetuating by inaction the obscenely poor and squalid conditions of Native Americans on our own soil.
   Thus “denying the Holocaust” provides us not only with examples of other peoples’ failures to confront their histories; it also can be a springboard for us to look into the mirrors of our own history and to seek redemption. If our collective consciousness were raised to such a level to make such an effort, the cleansing effects would be felt way beyond this issue. We would, out of necessity, begin looking at a host of similar social injustices. Conscience having been awakened by the on-going legacies of Wounded Knee and Sand Creek might then focus itself upon the plight of other neglected peoples — migrant workers, the homeless, war refugees, victims of wartime internment, the age-isolated and lonely, abused and ghettoized children, and the list goes on. For when we examine it more closely, we see that denial is a form of cancer, which threatens to consume the social body. Denial allows for not only racism, anti-Semitism, and ultimately genocide outside of one’s own borders; it also allows for the same within one’s own society. It happened in Nazi Germany; it has happened in America. Its residue, its victims both remain in our midst. It is critical for schools, legislators, and the citizenry at large to acknowledge our own history, to hold ourselves accountable for our past, and to protect our future. “Never again,” the legacy of the Holocaust, means never again in America as well as in the rest of the world.
   Paul Cummins is the President of Crossroads School, a founder of New Roads School, and the Executive Director of the New Visions Foundation.