The Collegian

Issue date: 3/5/09 Section: Opinion

In his opinions piece, Raymond Spiotta ostensibly defends the free speech of Holocaust deniers, but in so doing he indulges in their pseudo-historical gibberish. His assumption that the opponents of Holocaust denial "have never paused to examine the factual basis for that dogma of theirs" reveals his susceptibility to the propaganda of Judeophobes (a better term than the problematic "anti-Semite"). Historians do debate exactly how many millions of Jews, Catholics and other "undesirables" Hitler's Third Reich annihilated. But Bishop Williamson's crank opinion that there was no Holocaust and that the Third Reich used no gas chambers does not merit serious consideration. He is the ignorant voice of radical Judeophobia shouting against the overwhelming weight of historical and scientific evidence.

Spiotta's apparently harmless defense of free speech serves as an introduction; soon the article gives way to Judeophobia, Zionist conspiracy theories and even an implicit denial of the Holocaust. Yet the milder claims about free speech also reveal a lack of historical understanding - and truth through understanding is what history ultimately pursues. I absolutely agree that, in the abstract, free speech ought to extend to Judeophobia, but Spiotta's castigation of these silly Europeans for their emotional and legal reactions against Holocaust denial ignores the drastic difference between his American perspective and that of contemporary Germans. He argues that Germans should be able to speak of the Holocaust in the same way they speak of Russian gulags, atheism, and the color of the sky. But the German nation was not complicit in the gulags, and one cannot compare atheism or the color of the sky to the extinction of a people group from an entire continent based solely on their race. Germany is less than 70 years removed from that abomination, yet Spiotta has more sympathy for the wild untruths of Holocaust deniers than he does for Germans struggling under the weight of an unimaginable national shame.

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