Holocaust revisionism and “revisionism”

Steve Lubet points out that the New York Times still hasn’t corrected its description of Tucker’s Carlson’s BFF Darryl Cooper to the correct “Holocaust denier,” from its sanitized “Holocaust revisionist.”

Lubet assumed that the offending headline had been written in haste by an uninformed editor, but far from it:

I wrote to the two reporters and received this reply: “It’s an interesting question and one we wrestled with. Classic Holocaust deniers say either the Holocaust didn’t happen or was greatly exaggerated. Cooper conceded that millions of Jews died. He is questioning the motives and methods.”

This is a new one to me, as the two flavors of Holocaust denialism with which I was familiar were “it didn’t happen at all,” and “yes hundreds of thousands of Jews died in the camps, but it was all because of unfortunately harsh conditions, not any homicidal intent.” Cooper’s version is to take the latter claim and make it even more absurd, by upping the number of dead into the millions, while still claiming it was all some sort of logistical mistake, like when you order Hugo Boss black shirts from Amazon, and they send you brown ones instead:

 Cooper told Carlson that it was all a big mistake. “In 1941,” he said, the Germans “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war.” Consequently, “they just threw these people into camps. And millions of people ended up dead there.”

Lubet notes that mass starvation was in fact an intentional Nazi strategy, not any sort of mistake. In any event, the vast majority of Jewish murder victims of the Nazis were not starved to death: they were gassed at six extermination factories: Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. or were shot to death by mobile killing units on the Eastern Front.

There is zero controversy about any of this among legitimate historians. Revisionism in the legitimate meaning of the term among historians has nothing to do with these sorts of conscious lies about the historical record:

Among legitimate historians, “revisionism” can refer to a good-faith attempt to develop a new or updated perspective on historical evidence. In a sense, all history is revisionist, as serious scholars constantly attempt to expand, elucidate, or correct our knowledge of past events.

But Cooper isn’t trying to refine our understanding of the Holocaust—as, for example, [Timothy] Snyder did by situating it within a broader pattern of mass killing the zone between the Rhine and the Urals in the first half of the twentieth century. Instead, he is arguing against all evidence that the most infamous genocide in human history was not a purposeful and thorough plan to murder millions, but an accident.

Holocaust deniers typically attempt to sanitize their antisemitism with neutral-sounding terms and phrases such as “revisionism” and “just asking questions.” Their pseudo-academic center is blandly called the Institute for Historical Review. The so-called Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust publishes a journal, An Inconvenient History: A Quarterly Journal for Free Historical Inquiry.

Regrettably, the New York Times, and several other mainstream outlets, have indulged a similar euphemism, white-washing Cooper as a revisionist, rather than a denier, which elides his noxious ideology, and underplays the dangerousness of his fawning interview on Carlson’s increasingly popular podcast.

Treating Cooper as anything other than a neo-Nazi who lies about the Holocaust because he would like to see another one is all part of the same social pathologies that produced the first Holocaust, which the New York Times went to great lengths not to report on at the time:

By its own admission, in a 2001 retrospective, the Times’s “staggering, staining failure” to report accurately on the Holocaust in the years 1939-45 was the most shameful episode in the newspaper’s long history. Stories of the annihilation of Europe’s Jews “were mostly buried inside its gray and stolid pages, never featured, analyzed or rendered truly comprehensible.” (They also infamously missed the Terror Famine several years earlier.)

Don’t get fooled again.