Archive/File: people/b/butz.arthur butz.003
Last-Modified: 2008/03/20

   "In contrast to [other deniers], Butz did not justify the German
   persecution of the Jews by claiming that Jews were disloyal,
   untrustworthy, or intent on causing Germany's downfall.  He gave
   the anti-semitism.<4> Closer examination revealed that he harbored
   precisely the same attitudes and used the same methodology that had
   charactorized all Holocaust denial literature up to this point.
   The packaging had changed but the contents remained the same.
   Anything that disagreed with Butz's foregone conclusion and the
   thesis of his book - that the story of Jewish extermination in
   World War II was ap propaganda hoax and that the Jews of Europe had
   not been exterminated <5> - was dismissed as 'obvious lies,'
   'ludicrous,' 'breathtakingly absurd,' 'absolutely insane,' 'fishy,'
   'obviously spurious,' and 'nonsense.'<6> 'Survivor' literature -
   the term is always placed in quotes - is dismissed as full of
   'endless raving about extermination.' Despite his attempt to
   project a scholarly aura, however, Butz allows his rhetoric to fall
   into a very different category: American diplomats engaged in
   'hysterical yapping about the six million,'<7> and stories of 'gas
   chambers' were 'wartime propaganda fantasies,' 'garbages,' and
   'tall tales.'<8>

   Evincing the same sypathies as previous generations of deniers,
   Butz declared that the greatest tragedy was that the Germans and
   Austrians had been the real victims.<9> He also showed the same
   antipathies as those who had preceded him.  Describing Jews as
   among 'the most powerful groups on eart,' he argued that they
   possessed formidable powers to manipulate governments, control war
   crims trials, govern the media, and determine other nations'
   foreign policy, all in the name of perpetrating the hoax of the
   twentieth century.<10> According to Butz, Jews invented this hoax
   in order to further 'Zionist ends.'<11> Thus one could extrapolate
   from Butz's argument that whatever anti-semitism the Nazis
   displayed was well justified.  This demonology, common to virtually
   every denier, is an affirmation of Nazi ideology.  The Nazis
   depicted Aryans as the 'master race' - strong and invincible.
   Jews, in contrast, were not human.  Despite their superiority
   Aryans were considered highly vulnerable to Jewish conspiracies.
   The Jews' ability to create the hoax had proven the Nazi thesis
   correct: They were a threat to the world.

   In the book and in subsequent articles published in the _Journal of
   Historical Review_, Butz acknowledged the validity of a number of
   the criticisms commonly directed at deniers, including that their
   ranks numbered no historians with any scholarly academic standing.
   Bemoaning this, Butz attributed it to the fact that respected
   scholars had been frightened away from questioning something as
   'established as the Great Pyramid.' It was because of the 'default'
   by professional historians that nonhistorians such as himself were
   left with the responsibility for exposing the 'idiotic nonsense' of
   the Holocaust.<12>

   In order to mainstream Holocaust denial and attain for it scholarly
   respectability, Butz also had to acknowldege that denial books,
   articles, and journals are published by neo-Nazi, extremist, and
   racist groups, side by side with intensely nationalist or
   white-supremacist racial diatribes.  Attempting to deflect this
   criticism, Butz agreed that in an optimal situation deniers' work
   would appear in scholarly journals, but the normal channels of
   scholarly research had been blocked to those who would reveal the
   'truth.' In the interest of exposing the hoax, those who worked in
   this field had no option but to turn to these ideological
   publications.  When he depicted the deniers as martyrs willing to
   risk their reputations by appearing in these publications because
   they had no other option, he ignored the intensive, symbiotic
   relationship between these groups.

   Since the publication of the book, Butz, who has assiduously tried
   to maintain his image as a disinterested scholar, has been
   associated with a variety of extremist and neo-Nazi grouips.  His
   books are promoted and distributed by the Ku Klux Klan and other
   neo-Nazi organizations." (Lipstadt, 124-126)

< 5> Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Torrence,
     California, 1976), p.12
< 6> Ibid., pp. 107, 131, 171, 195, 223
< 7> Ibid., p. 249
< 8> Ibid., pp. 240, 287
< 9> Ibid., p. 240
<10> Ibid., pp. 33, 89
<11> Ibid., p. 87
<12> Ibid., pp. 247-48
                            Work cited

Lipstadt, Deborah E.  Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on
   Truth and Memory.  New York: The Free Press (A division of
   Macmillan, Inc.), 1993.

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