Holocaust Denial - Focus On Allied War Crimes in Holocaust Denial Literature

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, allied, war, crimes, denial and/or literature:

    It’s sad but true that if you focus your attention on housework and meal preparation and diapers, raising children does start to look like drudgery pretty quickly. On the other hand, if you see yourself as nothing less than your child’s nurturer, role model, teacher, spiritual guide, and mentor, your days take on a very different cast.
    Joyce Maynard (20th century)

    Can love be in aught allied to dissipation? Let us love by refusing, not accepting one another. Love and lust are far asunder. The one is good, the other bad.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.
    Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)

    O liberty! O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!
    Madame Roland [Marie-Jeanne Philipo (1754–1793)

    The line that I am urging as today’s conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, a repudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body.
    Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)

    Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
    Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)