The new voice of antisemitism: recent Holocaust negationist literature in America

Abstract

This honors thesis argues that the literature of Holocaust negationism is a repackaging of classical antisemitism. The propositional content of negationist discourse is less significant, I argue, than its rhetoric. And its rhetoric unmasks the truth about negationism: its primary concern is not the Holocaust at all, but an "international Jewish conspiracy" that is behind the "Holocaust hoax." It is a bad mistake, then, for liberal academics and scholars to treat negationism as merely "the other side" of the "Holocaust story," and to protect its right to a hearing. The reality is that negationism is an effort to restore antisemitism to respectability as a form of political discourse, which is anti-liberal in its bones. This thesis traces the development of Holocaust negationism from the 19th-century forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford's International Jew, a locus classicus of pre-Holocaust antisemitism, through Arthur Butz's Hoax of the Twentienth Century down to the current dissemination of negationist ideas on such internet websites as that of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH). The purpose of this thesis is not to refute negationists' arguments against the Holocaust; its historicity is taken for granted here. Instead, this thesis subjects negationist rhetoric to unsparing scrutiny. I show that negationist rhetoric is not unique-it is the same antisemitic rhetoric that was introduced by the Protocols. The arguments that negationists advance, and the conclusions they reach, are the same arguments advanced and the same conclusions reached by traditional antisemites. This thesis closes a gap in current scholarship, demonstrating the straight-line descent from traditional antisemitism to Holocaust negationism and calling its "revisionist" motives into question.