FW: Concerning Holocaust-denial

[jbor]

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From: kmcvay at veritas.nizkor.org (Ken McVay)
To: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
Subject: Re: Concerning Holocaust-denial
Date: Wed, Oct 4, 2000, 5:56 PM


You wrote:

>"when one uses the term "Holocaust," the understood meaning is that of the
>systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazi state"
>
>http://www.nizkor.org/features/revision-or-denial/rebuttals-02.html

That definition is not Nizkor's definition, but Greg Raven's - a
Holocaust denier.

>However, this is not the crux of the dispute.

Good :-)

>My argument has been that in Thomas Pynchon's novel, *Gravity's Rainbow*,
>which was published in 1973, the Holocaust as such is largely absent even
>though the setting of the novel is the final year or so of WW II, and just
>thereafter, primarily in Germany, with a sequence at Nordhausen and,
>briefly, Dora. In the sequence at Nordhausen seen through the eyes of one of
>the rocket technicians at the Mittelwerke, the camp inmates used as slave
>labour in the V-2 program are referred to as "foreign prisoners". A scene
>immediately after the liberation of Dora depicts the piled bodies of dead
>and dying inmates of the camp. But what is not referred to anywhere in the
>novel is the systematic annihilation of Jewish people in the death camps, or
>the transportation of enfeebled Jewish (or other) camp inmates from Dora to
>Auschwitz or Mauthausen to be murdered. At no point in the novel is the
>narrative represented from the point of view of the Jewish victims.

Why do you think that the Holocaust should be limited (in this
example) to "the systematic annihilation of Jewish people..."? After
all, all of the victims were NOT Jewish.

>I have remarked that the absence of any reference to these events,
>situations and perspectives is striking in the context of the novel's
>setting, but that the literary and historical explanations for it could be
>that the narration is filtered through the points of view of various of the
>characters, and that while there might have been some suspicion, or perhaps
>even widespread knowledge -- on both sides of the war divide -- of the fate
>of the Jewish prisoners at death camps such as Auschwitz and Buchenwald,
>this knowledge or intimation was witheld, suppressed or otherwise ignored.

OK - the same could be said of the fate of all of the victims.

>In other words, the war was not being fought over the Holocaust, was not

I certainly agree with that. Even when Allied leaders _knew_ what was
going on, they shied away from public statements/actions because they
were afraid of being accused of fighting only for the Jews.

This is not a mystery, it is mainstream historical reality.

>generally regarded as being fought over the Holocaust by the soldiers or
>civilians of any nation, and, further, neither the issue nor the term itself
>came into currency until later, from the time of the Nuremberg Trials at the
>earliest. As a literary text the novel in this way enacts a type of dramatic
>irony: the shadows of the Holocaust encroach at the edges of characters'
>consciousnesses and in allusive details, but there is constantly a
>suppression or denial of awareness of or their possible complicity in the
>fate of the Jews and other victims of persecution; and that this is in
>keeping with what was happening *at the time*. I find this to be a very
>powerful evocation of one aspect of the Holocaust, which was the way that
>citizens and officials in Germany, occupied Europe and the Allied nations
>alike remained silent despite awareness, to varying degress, of the
>systematic persecution and murder of Jewish and other peoples by the Nazis
>during the 1930s and until the end of the war.

Ok - I understand what you are saying. I haven't read this novel, but
I would tend to agree with your thoughts.

>For this argument I have been accused of characterising the author as a
>Holocaust-denier, and libelled as a Holocaust-denier myself. This public
>defamation has been ongoing over a long period of time, to the point of
>harassment, and has been very offensive to me. I would very much appreciate
>your opinion on whether or not the arguments I have offered above can be
>considered as Holocaust-denial, and whether there are any flaws in my
>historical understanding of the era.

I don't think that anything you have said in this missive would cause
me to charactorize you as a denier. That's just plain silly, and
grossly unfair to the position you've expressed here.

I have had a few discussions with Rudolf Vrba, who lives nearby...
Vrba was one of the first to carry the message of Auschwitz to the
West. His reports were not believed, to put it mildly. The world did
not WANT to know.