== Copyright 2000 Copley News Service Copley News Service, April 14, 2000 "TO BE EQUAL: There's no denying history," by Hugh B. Price "Leaving things out because they do not fit is writing fiction, not history." So wrote the eminent historian, Barbara W. Tuchman, in an essay for her 1991 book, "Practicing History: Selected Essays." She might have added that distorting fact and circumstance to make them "fit" a particular, ideologically driven interpretation of history is writing fiction, not history, too and also the rankest dishonesty. Tuchman's insight remains as compelling today as when freshly written. Indeed, its truth was dramatically illustrated recently when a British court judge ruled that British historian, David Irving, who has focused in numerous books on World War II and Nazi Germany, was an "active Holocaust denier," whose distortions of fact and manipulation of evidence about the Holocaust were often "perverse and egregious." Irving has claimed, among other things, that Hitler never ordered the Nazis to try to wipe out European Jewry and that he didn't even know of the mass killings at the concentration camps of the Third Reich until late in the war. Judge Charles Gray declared in a scathing decision that this was nonsense. "Irving has for his own ideological reasons persistently misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence," the judge wrote. "For the same reasons, he has portrayed Hitler in an unwarrantedly favorable light, particularly in relation to his attitude toward and responsibility for the treatment of the Jews." The judge's ruling ended a libel suit Irving himself had brought against Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Atlanta's Emory University. Lipstadt had written in a book that Irving, once a respected historian, had become "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial," and that "he is at his most facile at taking accurate information and shaping it to conform to his conclusions." Irving filed a libel suit against her in Britain because British law, unlike American law, places the burden on the defendants here, Lipstadt to prove that their claims are correct. Her attorneys did just that with an array of Holocaust historians whose testimony shredded Irving's claims. At first thought, it is difficult to believe that any sane person could claim or give any credit to the assertion that the Holocaust never occurred, or that Hitler was blameless, or any of the rest of the ideology of Holocaust denial and neo-Nazism. And, yet, various private groups, as well as government agencies in the United States and Europe, have tracked a clear growth of groups and individuals making such assertions. Ironically, Lipstadt's book, which provoked Irving to file suit, was titled "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." As resounding and welcome as Gray's ruling and withering language is regarding the perverse attempts to deny that the Holocaust happened, I can't help but think that it has an even larger significance. One facet of that lies in the ironic and tragic coincidence that the attempt to deny the reality of the Jewish Holocaust of 50 years ago comes amid our current, years-long plague of genocidal wars and guerrilla conflicts in black Africa, parts of the Asian subcontinent and in the Balkans; figuratively, in the very heart of Europe where the Nazis unleashed their barbaric "final solution" a half century ago. Surely, this is a devastating comment on how thin the veneer of civilization remains among developed as well as underdeveloped countries. Second, in reading some of the fantastical claims of Irving and other Holocaust-deniers that Hitler and the Nazis have been misunderstood and that the things we know happened did not happen, I couldn't help but think of other efforts to deny other great wrongs. I've thought of how some in Japan denied the fact of the Japanese army's savage overrunning of Nanking in 1937, and its forced prostitution of Korean women during World War II. I've thought of the efforts of the right wing in Chile and Argentina to deny the murderous repression that occurred in those countries in the 1970s and 1980s. And I've thought of the attempt in the United States of some to deny that the Confederacy was not what it was: an attempt to ground a nation in a monstrous evil racial slavery. In this controversy, as in the efforts to whitewash the reality of the Third Reich and the other great wrongs, there is the same unwillingness to face indisputable facts here, of the damning language about slavery in the Confederate Constitution of 1861, for example. There is the same taking refuge in asserting the "honor" of the individual Confederate soldiers and sailors, as if individual valor can cover up and purify the stench of a perverse cause. And, when all else fails, there is the same clenched-jaw assertion that the great wrong really wasn't so bad anyway. So, for me, as resounding and welcome as Gray's ruling against Nazi sympathizer David Irving is, it also underscores the point that the struggle against those who would distort history in order to justify the great wrongs of the past is, for the foreseeable future, never-ending. Hugh B. Price is president of the National Urban League. Visit Copley News Service at www.copleynews.com ==
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