Holocaust Deniers: a Cult Mentality

About four or five days ago, I re-posted an article on Facebook about the lady seen in the photo above: Dita Kraus. She has recently published a book titled "A Delayed Life", about her experiences as a Jewish girl in the Nazi concentration camp system. During the article in "The Journal", she comments poignantly about Holocaust denial: 

" I have still a number on my arm from Auschwitz – and people say it never happened? I just don’t know what to do because it is more than one can believe. I am lost when I am confronted with somebody’s denial of the Holocaust.”
My reposting drew two highly pertinent comments from Ian Hill and Neville Grundy (Rednev) that are well worth repeating here. Ian Hill told of his wife's stepfather who entered a concentration camp in WW2:

"...he was in the Signals Corp and he was one of the first people to enter Belsen having been sent in to restore electricity and sanitation. He and his colleagues were horrified by the state of the people who had been held there and did everything they could to help them."

Neville makes the irrefutably valid point that it would have been impossible to fake the concentration camp photos taken in 1945:

" If you look at science fiction films up until the 1960s, and TV science fiction even later, you'll realise how primitive special effects would have been in the 1940s: there is no way the convincing-looking footage that we have seen could have been produced, especially in a war zone".

Well said, all three! I thank Ian and Neville for giving me permission to quote their comments, as they provide us with three key elements to employ against Holocaust deniers: victim testimony, witness testimony and logical refutation. Now, all these elements exist in abundance, and have been employed against David Irving, Dermot Mulqueen, Richard Verrall and their dreary tribe for decades. And yet, despite victim and witness testimony and convincing refutation in print and in court, the Holocaust deniers continue to maintain their drivel, mostly online and, all too often, unchallenged.

So why do they do it, and what drives them? Neville Grundy points to a possible answer:

"Holocaust deniers either have a nasty political agenda or are stupid - there are no other possibilities".

Well, I agree about the political agenda. As said previously, only the neo-Nazis stand to gain politically from Holocaust denial, which is why their reading lists are filled with titles by David Irving and others. How far each neo-Nazi believes in Holocaust denial is difficult to assess - I am sure that some know it to be false, but find it a useful tool to mobilise less intelligent fascists. There might be people who believe the Holocaust never happened, but deny being Nazis (really?). What is of interest here is the obvious fact that, despite an abundance of proof that Holocaust denial is rubbish, these people carry on believing in it anyway. (6% of British people are said to believe in Holocaust denial). Stupidity, mental illness, might be factors, but there might be something else in play here.

In 1981, the late Professor Paul Wilkinson wrote "The New Fascists", in which he cast a baleful and perceptive eye over the new fascist groups emerging post-WW2 (some are still with us). I gave my copy to charity years ago, regrettably, but remember the valid point he made about these far right groups. Instead of regarding them as rational means-to-an-end  political organisations, we should think of them as  politico-religious cults. Instead of having achievable objectives, their "programmes", such as they are, are actually statements of faith, rather than fact. Apply this to Holocaust deniers, and this fits like a glove. Of course they cannot admit that their beliefs are irrational - those beliefs are somehow sacrosanct to them -  anything else would be a denial of their faith.

This can be borne out by a comparison with other cults, one example of which can be found in the failed prophecies of the Jehovah's Witnesses (JWs). I am not implying that the JWs have anything doctrinally in common with the neo-Nazis; the JWs suffered terribly in Germany under the Nazis. However, when you read the list of prophecies made, and unfulfilled, you can only attribute the fact that the JWs continue to flourish and recruit, to unquestioning, unreasoning, faith. Holocaust deniers are much the same, holding fast to their irrational beliefs in the face of overwhelmingly contrary evidence, aka "The Truth".

Were all cults as peaceful and quiescent as the JWs, we would have nothing to be overly concerned about. Unfortunately, many such cults are capable of terrible violence. If we regard the Nazis as a cult, this is undeniable, but violence is not not exclusive to them. There was, for instance, the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult which carried out the horrific sarin gas attack on the Tokyo underground railway system in 1995. which killed 13 people and injured many more. According to the BBC, the cult leader, Shoko Asahara, said the attack was:

 "a holy attempt to elevate the doomed souls of this world to a higher spiritual stage".

Fascist justifications for violence sound much like this, and are about as rational.

All other assessments of Holocaust denial are admirable, and I have no criticism of them, but, if we include the fanaticism of cultish belief, I think we can develop a more comprehensive strategy for dealing with this contemptible rubbish that exists only to advance the cause of neo-Nazism and incite anti-Semitism. The better we know our enemy, the better our chance of defeating him.