Who’s Afraid of Holocaust Denial?
by Norman Finkelstein
This excerpt appears in Issue 3 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.
The following is an excerpt of the chapter "Who's Afraid of Holocaust Denial?" from Norman Finkelstein's book I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom (Sublation Press, 2023).
Inspired as I still am by the radical convictions of my youth, I am resolutely conventional in my opinion of what should and shouldn’t happen in the classroom. The 1915 inaugural statement of principles by the staid American Association of University Professors (A.A.U.P.) strikes the right chords:1
The university teacher, in giving instruction upon controversial matters, while he is under no obligation to hide his own opinion under a mountain of equivocal verbiage, should, if he is fit for his position, be a person of a fair and judicial mind; he should, in dealing with such subjects, set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators; he should cause his students to become familiar with the best published expressions of the great historic types of doctrine upon the questions at issue; and he should, above all, remember that his business is not to provide his students with ready-made conclusions, but to train them to think for themselves, and to provide them access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.. . .The teacher ought also to be especially on his guard against taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions before the student has had an opportunity fairly to examine other opinions upon the matters in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own. It is not the least service which a college or university may render to those under its instruction, to habituate them to looking not only patiently but methodically on both sides, before adopting any conclusion upon controverted issues.
A lectern is not a soapbox, a classroom is not a political rally, a professor should not serve as a conveyer belt for a party line. His responsibility is to stimulate, not to dictate. Plato said, “The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful.” It is not the worst maxim, although I prefer a slightly amended, less authoritarian version:The object of education is to teach us to love to think2—while minds fully realized will probably agree on which objects of contemplation possess beauty.
It is fashionable nowadays on the political left to ridicule the notion of “balance” in the classroom. Philosopher Akeel Bilgrami asserts that, although in the privacy of his study a professor must scrutinize all the evidence on all sides of a question, in the classroom he is only obliged to present the results of his prior deliberation. Otherwise, in the name of balance, one is placed in the “nonsensical” position of allowing “equal presentation in the classroom of two contradictory views.”
No educator with any minimal rationality would do that on the elementary grounds that if there are two contradictory views, only one can be right. Of course if she cannot make up her mind on the evidence as to which one is right, she might present the case for both views evenhandedly. But presumably such undecidedness is an occasional phenomenon. If so, balance cannot be put down as a requirement for pedagogy in the classroom.. . .In our own pursuits toward the truth, we may be as confident in the truth of the deliverances of our investigations as is merited by the evidence in our possession, and we need feel no unnecessary urge to display balance in the classroom if we have shown balance and scruple in our survey of the evidence on which our convictions are based, the only place where balance is relevant in the first place. (emphases in original)3
I will restrict my comments here to the liberal arts4 and broad generalizations.5 The first point to note is the sniff of disapproval by the political left of balance—that is, to “set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators”—in the classroom. Just a few decades ago, the left was itself demanding balance in academic life. It was adduced as proof positive of political bias that Stanford University was the only elite university in the U.S. to tenure a Marxist economist (Paul Baran). Once the political weight on American campuses shifted leftwards, the plea for classroom balance came to be disparaged by its former leftwing proponents and seized upon by its former rightwing opponents.6 The politics of balance aside, what are the pedagogical merits of this demand? “There are,” Bertrand Russell observed, “always good arguments on both sides of any real issue.”7 If, on most contentious topics, arguments can be made on both sides, then deciding which side made the better case is nearly always a matter of weighing and balancing, of preponderances, not absolutes. A consensus might currently exist on the evil of violent genocide and the inhumanity of chattel slavery, but no such consensus exists on the evil of capitalism, which arguably causes millions to perish each year from hunger and preventable diseases. Although the issue of torture once appeared closed, it has in recent times been reopened. So long as a hard consensus doesn’t obtain on a great issue of the day, and so long as the received wisdom is subject to a compelling, vital counter-argument, a professor should feel obliged to make the best case for all sides, however he personally has, in the privacy of his study, resolved those “contradictory views,” so as to enable students to do the mental heavy lifting—the weighing and balancing—for themselves. “No man can pass as educated who had heard only one side on questions as to which the public is divided,” Russell wisely commented. “One of the most important things to teach in the educational establishment of a democracy is the power of weighing arguments, and the open mind which is prepared in advance to accept whichever side appears the more reasonable.”8 Discovery of the better argument on a disputed point, Russell’s godfather, John Stuart Mill, memorably said, “has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners” (On Liberty). A professor must play both combatants in the classroom—the advocate and the devil’s advocate—while the student spectators actively engage, wrestle with the contending affirmations.9 Consider the Israel-Palestine conflict. A broad academic consensus has crystallized (at any rate, in Middle East Studies pro- grams) that the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was morally indefensible. It’s one thing to hold this opinion (it happens that I join in it). It’s another thing to pretend that no arguments can be made on the Zionist side. In fact, rightwing Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky did make a credible moral case,10 and one of my favorite classes when I taught the conflict was to challenge students to answer Jabotinsky after I emotively presented his brief. In general, the perfect teaching moment was one in which my presentation of contending opinions on a given topic was so finely balanced that students left class in a quandary as to where I stood. It often happened that students would drop by my office curious to find out. My stock reply was: “It’s not so important what I think. What’s important is what you think.” It would even happen that I persuaded a student that Israel was in the right and the Palestinians in the wrong. (I confess to alloyed feelings on those occasions.) Insofar as few are capable of playing a full-fledged devil’s advocate, i.e., making the very best case against their own beliefs, it is surely preferable that a student be exposed to those who are willingfrom convictionto argue, as it were, the devil’s case. When the leftist tilt in the academy is decried, “campus radicals” smugly rejoin that “the political affiliation or religious belief of faculty simply ought not to matter.”11 But they do matter. Even when a professor recognizes and meets his formal obligation to effect (or affect) balance in the classroom, still he will rarely be as persuasive as a colleague whose heart is in sync with his mind—who professes the counter-argument not just from professional obligation but with the full force of his being. A disciple of Milton Friedman will almost always make a better argument for the free market than a disciple of Marx, while a devout Catholic will almost always make a better argument against abortion than a radical feminist. It might also be contended that a distinction should be made out between moral controversies, where balance is warranted, and the presentation of factual evidence, where it’s not. But if a fact is clearly not in dispute—Abraham Lincoln was born on 12 February 1809—it’s not properly the subject matter, but rather the raw material, of teaching in higher education.12 If a fact is widely contested, even if not in scholarly venues but only in popular publications—for example, The Palestinians weren’t expelled in 1948; they left of their own volition—it’s instructive to make a balanced presentation in the classroom so as to demonstrate the feeble evidentiary basis of the popular belief. If one aspires to dislodging falsehood and replacing it with truth, it requires openly confronting and persuasively responding to the falsehood. If the specifics of the falsehood are not engaged—What about the Arab radio broadcasts exhorting Palestinians to flee?—it will retain its hold. Not everyone will be convinced by a fair-minded presentation; but not everyone will be close-minded either.13 Going a distance beyond Bilgrami, social historian Joan Scott asserts that imbalance in the classroom is not only inevitable but also a positive good: “taking positions . . . is part of the scholar’s job, part of what makes her a compelling and inspiring teacher”; “those positions are not neutrally arrived at by, say, balancing all sides until an objective view emerges; rather they are the result of some kind of deeply held political or ethical commitment on the part of the professor.”14 Even if, for argument’s sake, it is granted that “taking positions” is a prerequisite to being a “compelling and inspiring teacher,” still, it cannot be right that in the classroom a teacher should be inculcating her ideology-based “positions,” supplemented by a selective culling of facts that support them. Shouldn’t she, instead, be “balancing all sides,” and allowing students on their own to do the weighing, from which an “objective view emerges” unique to each of them? Otherwise, it’s hard to make out the difference between a “compelling and inspiring teacher” and a party hack, between pedagogy and indoctrination.15
***
The limiting case in the “balance” debate is Holocaust denial. It would make mockery of truth and academic freedom (it is said) if a university granted deniers a platform. But, to begin with, it’s not obvious what exactly is being denied. Does the Nazi holocaust denote the extermination of European Jewry or all categories of people systematically put to and slated for death? If only Jews, then why? If the distinction is quantitative—fully 5-6 million Jews perished—why then does the Nazi holocaust enjoy a privileged status? As many as 25 million Russians and 20 million Chinese were killed during World War II, yet no red flags preempt free-wheeling debate on these lethal destructions. Further, if the singularity of the Nazi holocaust and the point at issue resides in the number killed, it’s hard to figure why a taboo would be placed on Holocaust denial. Isn’t the sensible thing simply to adduce the technical evidence supporting the widely accepted 5-6 million figure? But maybe it’s the qualitative criterion of how that distinguishes the Nazi extermination: that is, the industrial-style/factory-like/assembly-line process culminating in the gas chambers and crematoria. However, only half of those Jews who died were killed in death camps.16 Whereas Raul Hilberg focused on the bureaucratic, complex, “destruction process” in his monumental study, he nonetheless brackets the Nazi holocaust with the Rwandan genocide (“History had repeated itself”), even as the latter was carried out utilizing the most primitive of weaponry and organization.17 Still, if the point of contention is the tech- nique—say, the gas chambers—why not, then, just lay out the evidence and let it speak for itself? If the intended effect of the taboo on Holocaust denial is to suppress it, the actual effect is to arouse suspicion: Why are deniers being muzzled if the evidence incontrovertibly belies their claims? Indeed, the taboo can boomerang. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance defines Holocaust denial as, inter alia, “attempts to blur the responsibility for the establishment of concentration and death camps devised and operated by Nazi Germany by putting blame on other nations or ethnic groups.”18 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pinned ultimate culpability for the Nazi holocaust on the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem.19 Should he then be barred from speaking in a college classroom on the Nazi holocaust?
When teaching On Liberty, I test Mill’s strictures against a triptych of hypothetical scenarios, one of which is:
A professor in our history department wants to devote one class of his introductory course on Modern Europe to the proposition that the Nazi holocaust never happened. It is a required lecture course, in which the professor doesn’t field student questions. Should he be permitted to teach this class?20
The initial objections raised by my students are always the same. Doesn’t the professor’s silencing of the class contradict Mill? But, I reply, don’t you listen to radio programs, watch television shows, and read books with which you vehemently disagree, even as you cannot physically dialogue with them? More often than not, the author of an offending text is no longer among the living. Does a rational person then stop his ears, switch stations, and shred the book, or does he attend to the unwelcome words, regardless of whether he gets in the last or even a first word? Still, the professor’s one-sided presentation (it is said) contradicts Mill. But, I rejoin, aren’t we bombarded with texts and images—not least in college course offerings—that validate the actuality of the Nazi holocaust? It can hardly be deemed a breach of balance if a single professor devotes a single class of a single course to disputing the incessantly articulated consensus wisdom. Once having disposed of these predictable demurrals, the real work begins.
What’s the point of such a class if I know for certain that the Nazi holocaust happened? But you can’t be certain of your belief until and unless you’ve heard out and answered any and all objections to it. Even a child, if his belief is challenged, knows enough of epistemology to retort: Prove me wrong! If you want to rationally hug your certainty, you must first meet the challenge of every naysayer.
Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth. . .; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.21
Even if you can marshal a mountain of supporting evidence, still, you can’t prefer your belief to that of Holocaust deniers if you refuse even to give them a hearing. The maximum you can rationally claim is agnosticism; otherwise, your belief is based on personal prejudice, not truth.
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination.22
What’s more, even if you don’t harbor doubts, that can’t entitle you to decide for others except if you’re omniscient.23 Once having acknowledged your human fallibility, you must also concede the possibility that you’re mistaken, in which case your act of suppression could deny others the possibility of exchanging error for truth.
Those who desire to suppress [an opinion], of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind, and exclude every other person from the means of judging. . . . All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.24
Even granting the facticity of the Nazi holocaust, it still repays to give deniers a platform. Just as the weight and depth of the credo all men are created equal(the other example I invoke to bring home Mill’s point) “is not always clear,”25 neither is the profundity of the Nazi holocaust. If layers of meaning lie buried in it (which I believe), then they can only be plumbed if the Nazi holocaust is “fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed.” It is remarkable how quick the reflex to suppress Holocaust denial is, even as conjuring taboos will inevitably reduce this colossal human tragedy to a sterile mantra, an object of blind worship. While red lines cordoning off “The Holocaust” from the corrective of unfettered inquiry proliferate, one of the core postulates of “Holocaust education”—its “uniqueness”—appears to be in need of correction as it can’t withstand rational scrutiny. Indeed, the current status of The Holocaust is replete with paradoxes:on the one hand, a unique sanction is imposed on Holocaust denial—not even denial of climate change, which threatens the planet’s very survival, is so sanctioned—while, on the other hand, demonstrating the “uniqueness” tenet of Holocaust education has proven elusive and, what’s more, denying its uniqueness, or even juxtaposing it with other historical crimes—except to show that it can’t be compared—is construed as a form of Holocaust denial!26 The more the taboos multiply, the more the Nazi holocaust is unmoored from time and space and is reduced to an object of idolatry.
However true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth.Not only the grounds of the opinion are forgotten in the absence of discussion, but too often the meaning of the opinion itself. The words which convey it, cease to suggest ideas, or suggest only a small portion of those they were originally employed to communicate. Instead of a vivid conception and a living belief, there remain only a few phrases retained by rote; or, if any part, the shell and husk only of the meaning is retained, the finer essence being lost.27
The taboos enveloping the Nazi holocaust haven’t only caused it to calcify into a lifeless ritual. What’s worse, they’ve spawned a raft of spurious testimonial literature and preposterous pseudo-scholarship, the paradoxical outcome of which is to provide fodder for the deniers’ mills.28 If a self-proclaimed “Holocaust survivor” enjoys immunity from cross-examination—as does every Tom, Dick and Moishe pawning himself off as a survivor—the human propensity is toward exaggeration, which, if left unchecked, will harden into a lie.29
There is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.30
It’s also possible to get the big picture right yet some of the constituting facts wrong. If one is committed to the purity of truth, not just in its wholeness but also in its parts, then a Holocaust denier performs the useful function of ferreting out “local” errors, precisely because he is a devil’s advocate—that is, fanatically committed to “unmasking” the “hoax of the 20th century.” He consequently invests the whole of his being in scrutinizing every piece of evidence, not taking the minutest point for granted, passing a fine tooth comb through each detail, until, in his monomaniacal zeal to expose an error, he inevitably stumbles upon one.
Even if the world is in the right, it is always probable that dissentients have something worth hearing to say for themselves, and that truth would lose something by their silence.31
“If these people want to speak, let them,” Hilberg counseled. “It only leads those of us who do research to re-examine what we might have considered as obvious. And that’s useful.”32 If he was laid back when it came to Holocaust deniers, that’s because Hilberg was confident in his conclusions based on his mastery of the source material. The impulse to suppress springs not only from disgust at what Holocaust deniers outrageously proclaim, but also, and more often, from dread of one’s inability to credibly answer them.33 “Yes, there was a Holocaust,” Hilberg once observed, “which is, by the way, more easily said than demonstrated.”34 If you’ve done your homework, then fielding obnoxious skeptics is at worst a form of intellectual amusement, the mental equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.
The upshot is, by placing under a microscope and inspecting from every angle each scrap of evidence, the Holocaust denier is doing for you what you (if you are genuinely committed to truth) would have to do for yourself; the difference being, the denier’s is the more probing examination, as it’s much harder to argue against yourself once you’ve settled into or developed a vested interest in your belief. Thus, far from suppressing Holocaust deniers, one should be grateful to them for—however unwittingly—facilitating the quest for truth.
The above text is an excerpt from Norman Finkelstein's new book, I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! Heretical Thoughts on Identity Politics, Cancel Culture, and Academic Freedom, out now from Sublation Press.
The A.A.U.P.’s stated mission is
to advance academic freedom and shared governance; to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education; to promote the economic security of faculty, academic professionals, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and all those engaged in teaching and research in higher education; to help the higher education community organize to make our goals a reality; and to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.
Compare John Stuart Mill: “the end of education is not to teach, but to fit the mind for learning from its own consciousness and observation.” (“On Genius” (1832); emphasis in original)
Akeel Bilgrami, “Truth, Balance, and Freedom,” in Akeel Bilgrami and Jonathan Cole (eds.), Who’s Afraid of Academic Freedom? (New York: 2015), pp. 16, 23. He locates this argument in a larger claim. According to him, Mill is being “outright incoherent” in urging the pursuit of truth while at the same time stipulating that one can never be certain of having attained it: “You cannot strive to achieve what you know to be impossible” (p. 15). This argument puzzles on several levels. First, if human reason is fallible, and if truth is a fundamental value, then mustn’t some allocation always be made to the possibility of error in the necessary search for truth? If, conversely, a coherent belief in truth requires absolute certitude, then, wouldn’t the price of pursuing it be irrationality and fanaticism? Furthermore, it’s hard to make out the incoherence in aspiring to a goal even if its full realization might be beyond reach. One would think that’s a commonplace in personal life (“I want to play the violin like Jascha Heifetz”) and political movements (“we aspire to abolish all forms of violence”). Even if a moral imperative couldn’t be fully realized, Immanuel Kant contended in his Metaphysics of Morals, one still had a duty to act as if it could be:
So the question is no longer whether perpetual peace is something real or fiction, and whether we are not deceiving ourselves in our theoretical judgment when we assume that it is real. Instead, we must act as if it is something real, though perhaps it is not; we must work toward establishing perpetual peace and the kind of constitution that seems to us most conducive to it… And even if the complete realization of this objective always remains a pious wish, still, we are certainly not deceiving ourselves in adopting the maxim of working incessantly towards it. For this is our duty, and to admit that the moral law within us is itself defective would call forth in us the wish, which arouses our abhorrence, rather to be rid of all reason and to regard ourselves as thrown by one’s own principles into the same mechanism of nature as all the other species of animals.
Mills argument, which isn’t nearly as “careless” and “bizarre” as Bilgrami purports (pp. 13, 23), anticipated Bilgrami’s objection, and his reply also seems convincing, albeit in a different register than Kant’s. An opinion, he wrote, merits deference and is ripe to be acted on not because it necessarily is the truth but, rather, because the person espousing it has made a good-faith effort to reach truth by mentally wrestling with all contenders:
In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct, because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and to expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt that the only way in which a human can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.
I am not qualified to comment on mathematical truths, which apparently differ in nature. Mill, for example, asserts that
on a subject like mathematics… there is nothing at all to be said on the wrong side of the question. The particularity of the evidence of mathematical truth is, that all the argument is on one side. There are no objectives, and no answers to objections.
A concrete analysis would have to differentiate between introductory and upper-level courses; between departments that do and don’t offer multiple courses on a given topic taught from ideologically opposed perspectives; and so on.
Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford: 2008), pp. 116-24.
Bertrand Russell, “Free Thought and Official Propaganda” (1922).
Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, edited, with an appendix on the “Bertrand Russell Case,” by Paul Edwards (New York: 1957), p. 184.
One obvious objection, to which there is no obvious answer, is that, on many, perhaps most, topics of academic inquiry, there are more than two combatants (points of view). The question then becomes: How many roles must the professor play in the name of impartiality?
Yosef Gorny, Zionism and the Palestinians, 1882-1948 (Oxford: 1987), pp. 166-69, 268.
Matthew W. Finkin and Robert C. Post, For the Common Good: Principles of American academic freedom (New Haven: 2009), p. 100.
The dual functions of teaching in higher education are said to be:
“first, to give definite knowledge—reading and writing, language and mathematics, and so on; secondly, to create those mental habits which will enable people to acquire knowledge and form sound judgments for themselves. The first of these we may call information, the second intelligence.” (Bertrand Russell, “Free Thought and Propaganda,” 1922)
If invited to deliver a public lecture on a college campus, contrariwise, I see my principal task as to persuade by offering the results of my own process of weighing and balancing. That, after all, is why I was invited: to present my viewpoint; others are invited to present theirs. This distinction between my duties in a classroom versus as a guest lecturer might be analogized to the news pages versus the editorial pages of a newspaper.
Scott, “Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom,” in Bilgrami and Cole, p. 78. Other respected contributors to the Bilgrami and Cole volume are equally dismissive of the notion of balance; see the essays by Cole, p. 53 (“we should remember that the proper goal of higher education is enlightenment—not some abstract ideal of ‘balance’”), and Moody-Adams, p. 111 (“it is impossible to teach . . . unless one advocates something”—emphasis in original). Isn’t encouraging students to use their own mind to think through a controverted question on their own advocating something?
Neither of Scott’s argumentative premises withstands scrutiny. What makes for a “compelling and inspiring” teacher is not her having “taken positions,” but her love of the subject matter she’s teaching and her desire to convey the thrill of these ideas to her students. Further, is it correct that, as one’s deepest “political or ethical” convictions maturate, “balancing all sides” plays no part? Coming as it does from a respected left academic, this is a most odd assertion. It’s certain that V. I. Lenin was deeply committed to Marxism. But, according to Isaac Deutscher, he “weighed the pros and cons before he committed himself” to Marxism, or, as Leon Trotsky put it, if Lenin embraced the Marxist creed, it was only “after weighing and thinking through each term from every angle.” One of the hallmarks of the left tradition used to be that it prized rational conviction. (Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed (New York: 1965), p. 26; Leon Trotsky, The Young Lenin (New York: 1972), p. 211)
Fully a quarter were just lined up and shot dead in killing fields.
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, third edition (New Haven: 2003), vol. 3, pp. 1294-96.
“Netanyahu: Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews,” Haaretz (21 October 2015).
The other two scenarios are: A professor in our biology department wants to devote one class of her course in Genetics to the proposition that people of color are intellectually inferior to white people; A professor in our anthropology department wants to devote one class of his course in Comparative Culture to the proposition that in some cultures women enjoy being beaten and raped. While teaching in Turkey, I replaced the Holocaust denier scenario with: A teacher in the religion department wants to devote one class of his course on Comparative Religion to the proposition that Islam is a terrorist religion.
On Liberty
Ibid. I would make the simple analogy with a customer telling a Baskin-Robbins employee that vanilla is his favorite flavor:
But have you tasted the other 30 flavors?
I don’t need to. I love vanilla. It’s soft, it’s sweet, it’s creamy, it’s got that tingly feeling.
Your reasons may be excellent, sir, but if you haven’t so much as tasted the other flavors, how can you prefer vanilla?
I would playfully query the student proclaiming certainty: “Are you God?”
On Liberty
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stevens, Bowers v. Hardwick (1986).
Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering, second edition (New York: 2003), pp. 41-55.
On Liberty
Finkelstein, Holocaust Industry, pp. 55-78. A fuller explanation would take account of the ideological utility that gives this nonsense currency (see footnote 26.).
Ibid., pp. 158-61, 236-39.
On Liberty
Ibid. I would liken Mill’s point in class to the aesthetic incompleteness of a mosaic when one tile is missing, a jigsaw puzzle when one piece is missing, or a crossword puzzle when one letter is missing. Just as mathematicians speak of an “elegant” proof, so truth has its own aesthetic that is its flawlessness.
Christopher Hitchens, “Hitler’s Ghost,” Vanity Fair (June 1996). It was Holocaust deniers, according to Hilberg, who demonstrated that Zyklon-B in its pure form was not sufficiently lethal to have been used in the gas chambers. Of the suppression of speech opposing U.S. entry in World War I, eminent jurist Zechariah Chafee observed:
Legal proceedings prove that an opponent makes the best cross-examiner… Men bitterly hostile to [U.S. participation] may point out evils in its management like the secret treaties, which its supporters have been to busy to unearth. (Zechariah Chafee Jr., Free Speech in the United States (Cambridge: 1941), p. 33)
“The silencing of an opponent,” a modern-day disciple of Mill noted, “sounds alarmingly like an admission that we cannot answer him.” (Conrad Russell, Academic Freedom (New York: 1993), p. 44)
“Is There a New Anti-Semitism? A conversation with Raul Hilberg,” Logos (Winter-Spring 2007; www.logosjournal.com/issue_6.1-2/hilberg.htm). I vividly recall my own frustration upon reading Holocaust-denier Arthur Butz’ The Hoax of the 20th Century. He correctly observed, for example, that it was originally alleged that three million Jews were killed at Auschwitz and that six million Jews altogether were killed. But the figure for the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz was subsequently scaled down to one million, yet the total figure was still put at six million. How can this be?, Butz rhetorically asked. I had no answer.