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PARTISAN REVIEW
may be created by omission: in an interview in
Change,
Chomsky
pointed out, for instance, that no one in France raised the question
of the Indonesian genocide going on in Timor because France had
extensive vested interests in this part of the world. Thus we have
access to political truth rather than to historical truth . For Thion ,
trying to build a general case about historical mystifications, the
Holocaust example is didactically useful and handy.
If
one can
demonstrate that such an emotionally charged , widely accepted ,
large-scale genocide has been subject to similar distortions for a vari–
ety of reasons - distortions in testimony by the survivors due to emo–
tional factors , distortions by the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials
because of the propaganda purposes of the Allies - it then becomes
easier to make a more general claim that history in the West, and not
just in the Soviet Union, is ideologically biased .
Within this perspective, the number of converts increases. Thus
by the third trial, Faurisson's lawyer produced the ethnologist
Karnoouh from the CNRS as a witness. He was one of two token
Jewish witnesses to be asked by the lawyer at the beginning of ques–
tioning: "Do you belong to the group commonly known as theJews?"
Following this loaded introduction , Karnoouh suggested that "all the
evil should not be borne only by one group ; let us distribute it
equally between the Germans and the Soviets." When asked who the
beneficiaries might be , besides Israel, of the so-called fraud
attributed to the Jews, he replied: "the two imperialisms which rule
us - the Russian and the American ." Perhaps then, the main issue
for this group of converts seems to be to rid themselves of the alba–
tross of the Holocaust as the quintessential evil , to leave room for the
two major imperialist evils .
Another factor conducive to the spread of revisionism is a
simple-minded anticommunism. There are those who question the
gas chambers on the ground that they had been "discovered" exclu–
sively in the areas liberated by Soviet armies . They were therefore
likely to be just a fabrication of the Soviets to draw attention away
from their own deeds.
But how can one explain the case of the children of nonsur–
vivors who have joined the revisionist camp? Perhaps there is at
work some psychological mechanism for a strong denial of reality.·
• Various forms of denial were common among the Hiroshima survivors. Cf. R.J .
Lifton,
Death in Life
(New York: Touchstone Books, 1967).
