Focus On Allied War Crimes in Holocaust Denial Literature
The focus on supposed Allied atrocities during the war has also been a theme in Holocaust denial literature, particularly in countries where outright denial of the Holocaust is illegal. According to historian Deborah Lipstadt, the concept of "comparable Allied wrongs" such as the post-war expulsions and alleged Allied war crimes like the bombing of Dresden, is at the center of, and a continuously repeated theme of, contemporary Holocaust denial; phenomenon she calls "immoral equivalencies". Pierre Vidal-Naquet pointed out the same phenomenon in the earlier version of Les Assassins de la mémoire under the title Auschwitz et le tiers monde (Les Assassins de la mémoire, Paris, 2005, pp. 170–180), and accurately about the declarations of Klaus Barbie's lawyer Jacques Vergès. In 1977, Martin Broszat in a review of David Irving's book Hitler's War maintained that the picture of World War II drawn by Irving was done in a such way to imply moral equivalence between the actions of the Axis and Allied states with both sides equally guilty of terrible crimes, leading to Hitler's "fanatical, destructive will to annihilate" being downgraded to being "no longer an exceptional phenomenon".
Read more about this topic: Holocaust Denial
Famous quotes containing the words focus on, focus, allied, war, crimes and/or denial:
“I don’t have any doubts that there will be a place for progressive white people in this country in the future. I think the paranoia common among white people is very unfounded. I have always organized my life so that I could focus on political work. That’s all I want to do, and that’s all that makes me happy.”
—Hettie V., South African white anti-apartheid activist and feminist. As quoted in Lives of Courage, ch. 21, by Diana E. H. Russell (1989)
“Carlyle is not a seer, but a brave looker-on and reviewer; not the most free and catholic observer of men and events, for they are likely to find him preoccupied, but unexpectedly free and catholic when they fall within the focus of his lens.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory.... From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
“In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Heaven absolves all crimes committed to gain a throne once Heaven gives it to us.”
—Pierre Corneille (1606–1684)
“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”
—Audre Lorde (1934–1992)