I am neither a Catholic nor a Holocaust denier, so I find it hard to place myself in the position of once and future Bishop Richard Williamson, who thanks Pope Benedict XVI is now ex-excommunicated (although out of a job). I am, in fact, Jewish, but lucky in that my entire family had moved here before the rise of Nazism -- thanks for the push, Tsars and Cossacks! -- and so I'd have to go as far as unnamed third cousins before finding a relative who died in the Holocaust.
I am both a social scientist and attorney by training, however, which means that I've spent much of my adult life trying to figure out how one should determine the truth and, a far different thing, how people do determine the truth. And something, frankly, bugs me about the Vatican's demand for Williamson to recant his assertions.
I worry that the Pope is turning Bishop Williamson into a new Galileo, muttering the equivalent of "e pur si muove" to the future: not "but still it moves" but "but still there were no gas chambers."
Bishop Williamson is not merely a Holocaust denier, but a general conspiracist par excellence. Consider this quote:
There is serious reason to believe — that in 1898, it was not the Spaniards who sank the U.S.S. Maine; that in 1917, it was not the Germans who set up the Lusitania as a target; that in 1941, it was not the Japanese who set up Pearl Harbor for attack; that in 1963, it was not Lee Harvey Oswald who killed President Kennedy. ... In 1994 it was certainly not Timothy McVeigh’s van exploding outside the Alfred Murrah Building in Oklahoma City which brought the front of the building down.
A smart consipracist mixes fact and fiction, text and subtext. What is interesting in the above quote is the correlation between historical distance and plausibility. I am not well-versed in the topics, but I have no trouble believing that Spaniards didn't sink the Maine or that the Lusitania was transporting weapons and thus a legitimate target of war. I am somewhat more aware of the argument that FDR let Pearl Harbor happen on purpose, though I don't believe it (and I'm sure commenters will try to school me); I am totally at sea over the question of who killed JFK and who paid for the bullets. Then you get to 1994 (actually 1995), and I have no idea what conspiracy theory he's talking about regarding the bombing in Oklahoma City, but I'm pretty sure I won't buy it.
That's the text. The subtext is: the powers that be have lied before when it suits their purposes; if the story of the Holocaust suits their purposes, it too may be a lie.
Holocaust deniers may be many things, but they are not idiots. They know what we can scarcely imagine: that in the long term, their side may win out. That is the problem we who agitate for historical truth and human rights face. This notion seems incredible -- until, perhaps, one remembers that most of the world doesn't really have a dog in the fight.
What is it to the Chinese or the Indians or the Indonesians or whether or not it is precisely true that twelve million people, half of them Jews, were deliberately exterminated by Hitler's agents? It means about as much to them as the disputes between Turks and Armenians, Hutu and Tutsi, Vietnamese and Cambodians, Chileans and Argentines, means to most of us. There are historical bases to all manner of conflicts, and we don't really understand them clearly.
The well-disposed humanists among us simply want the historical truth to come out and be respected. If the Armenians or the Tutsi or the Cambodians or the Argentines strike oil or in other respects have something we want, then they are likely to receive a respectful hearing for their views. If we want something from their opponents, likewise. What is true of us is true for anyone else who doesn't have a dog in a fight, so long as there appears to be some basis for the potentially favored side of the conflict.
All the Holocaust deniers have to do, to earn a hearing from the well-disposed of the future, is to appear to have some sort of plausible case for their side; self-interest will do the rest. Historials, Jewish and otherwise, have done wonderous work in documenting the Holocaust; short of coming up with six million names of dead Jews and six million others. Do you know what, decades from now, it will take to refute it? The charge that the evidence is faked or tendentious and the inclination not to look into the matter further. That's about it.
That's what we're up against.
The approach of Pope Benedict, like so much that I dislike about the man, is to change belief by decree. Bishop Williamson is told that he must recant. No torture, this time, is behind it; he just can't serve in the church (which already has accepted back his soul) until he does. This remind me (painfully so) of Galileo, forced by the Inquisition to recant his belief that the Earth moves around the sun, but still muttering that in his heart (like a Marrano! like a Christian under Communism!) his belief remains pure. That is what Richard Williamson may become to future generations. (Is it any skin off Pope Benedict's nose if, a century from now, that happens?)
So maybe Williamson will publicly recant. Maybe he will get cute about it, as Jesus did when confronted with the logically critical question of the morality of paying taxes to the occupying Romans. Maybe he'll follow other Holocaust deniers in retreating to a partial position of denial: such as that many Jews were killed, maybe a half-million or a million, but not six million.
Think about the subtlety of this approach. You, Dear Reader, like me almost surely accept the historical record that six million Jews were killed and you reject the notion that the Holocaust was a complete fable, like the "moon landing" that was produced on a sound stage in Arizona. (Note: why yes, that was a joke, thank you.) But, without looking anything up -- because more false information can be planted on the Internet than true, because there are myriad false depictions to every true one -- how well do you think that you could defend the proposition that it was six million instead of one million?
I believe that there were six million Jews killed (or allowed die in camps, like Anne Frank) despite not believing many things that I am told by governmental and other authorities, because it seems implausible to me that, given the number of people and institutions that have studied the question, it could not be true. But if you ask me to prove six instead of one million I have to point to some authorities and tell you that they should be trusted. And why should you trust them, you ask? Didn't people lie about the Lusitania and weapons in Iraq? Well, yes they did. But I don't think that they did here.
Now, unlike (I expect) many of my readers here, I am not an expert. I don't know from personal or family experience. But I have read a fair number of books, seen a fair number of documentaries, met a fair number of tattooed victims, all of which I've found convincing that the six million figure and the generally accepted description of the Holocaust is trustworthy. I have visited both the Holocaust Museum and Yad v'Shem. But, truth be told, I remember both about as well as I remember the Rock 'n' Roll Museum in Cleveland and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: not that well. I know that, were this a trial, I would wilt under a strong cross-examination on a more subtle attack that gave some ground to the notion that something bad happened but it wasn't as huge a catastrophe as represented. I simply don't have all the evidence at my fingertips. And I am a hell of a lot closer to the Holocaust than people will be 100 years from now.
I know that the slipperiest Holocaust deniers say that there were gas chambers, but they were never used, or hardly used used a little, or used only by rogue operations, or built by Russians, whatever sells. No, not whatever sells -- just whatever keeps one from feeling that one must buy what one's competitor is selling. I think that that is what Bishop Williamson and his ilk up to.
I hate that Pope Benedict may be turning Bishop Williamson into tomorrow's Galilean-style hero. What's the alternative, you may ask? It is not seeking obedience and imposing orthodoxy and censorship. It is challenging, shaming, scorning, defeating in fair and open argument.
Wikipedia's quote from John Stuart Mill on this question is as good a place as any to start:
"I choose, by preference the cases which are least favourable to me - In which the argument against freedom of opinion, both on truth and that of utility, is considered the strongest. Let the opinions impugned be the belief of God and in a future state, or any of the commonly received doctrines of morality... But I must be permitted to observe that it is not the feeling sure of a doctrine (be it what it may) which I call an assumption of infallibility. It is the undertaking to decide that question for others, without allowing them to hear what can be said on the contrary side. And I denounce and reprobate this pretension not the less if I put forth on the side of my most solemn convictions. However positive anyone's persuasion may be, not only of the faculty but of the pernicious consequences, but (to adopt expressions which I altogether condemn) the immorality and impiety of opinion. - yet if, in pursuance of that private judgement, though backed by the public judgement of his country or contemporaries, he prevents the opinion from being heard in its defence, he assumes infallibility. And so far from the assumption being less objectionable or less dangerous because the opinion is called immoral or impious, this is the case of all others in which it is most fatal."
More generally, Mill and his followers present four arguments for free speech:
(1) The "harm princple," which you know as "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me."
(2) The "free market of ideas" notion that limiting speech limits the development of thoughts and ideas. By being open to all ideas, even the partial truths contained with in them may help to better hone an already pretty good idea.
(3) The belief that "sunshine is the best disinfectant" for unacceptable speech and beliefs, which thrive best when left to fester in the dark. After Freud, we also have a better sense of the key role that taboo and the lure of forbidden fruit and of being one of the elect cogniscenti have on behavior.
(4) The "innoculation" notion of challenge developing resistance. If all one does is repeat the truths that everyone accepts as true, without challenge, then one loses the meaning of the truths one professes, as with young children who say the Pledge of Allegiance phonetically without understanding it. Only when challenged does one have to look deeper into what one professes and come to appreciate the truth contained there. Only then does one truly develop resistance to lies.
I don't think that the first two rationales are persuasive in arguing for not consigning Holocaust revisionism to the basement, but I think that the last two are. I think that we need to let beliefs like Williamson's come out to where they will lose their allure of themselves being unchallenged. I also think that we need for each person to learn for themselves why these arguments are false. We need for people to develop their own mental muscles used for resisting Holocaust denial. If we simply decree that they believe as we say, it won't work; it will provide a thin and weak foundation.
I gravely doubt that we will, centuries from now, succeed in getting people to accept the reality of the Holocaust if the reality of it seems to come from Orwellian edicts about what one must believe, whether papal, progressive, or Presidential. Too many people will benefit from its not being accepted as true, particularly if Israel continues to survive as a Jewish state which derives much of its moral legitmacy from the Holocaust, but still fails to gain widespread street-level acceptance in the Middle East. So I wonder if the better approach -- the only viable long-term approach -- to the problem of how to get future generations to believe in the reality of the Holocaust is to take Holocaust deniers and let them, in every generation, hawk their wares and let them be subject to product testing. Maybe the anti-Holocaust-denial cure is not an antibody that people can receive through innoculation; maybe it is a muscle that has to be exercised against resistance.
I want to see Bishop Williamson put up what evidence he has. And I want to see him blown out of the water.