Post-Truth by Matthew D'Ancona

Author:Matthew D'Ancona
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2017-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

The following day, Lipstadt learned that Irving had been categorically defeated. In his 355-page ruling, Judge Gray said that he had ‘significantly misrepresented what the evidence, objectively examined, reveals’. His ‘falsification of the historical record was deliberate and … motivated by a desire to present events in a manner consistent with his own ideological beliefs even if that involved distortion and manipulation of historical evidence’. Irving ‘was misrepresenting the historical evidence when he told audiences in Australia, Canada, and the US … that the shooting of the Jews in the east was arbitrary, unauthorized, and undertaken by individual groups or commanders’. The judge declared it ‘incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier’. He had often denied the existence of the gas chambers at Auschwitz and ‘in the most offensive terms’.22

The Lipstadt trial was rightly perceived as a landmark victory in the struggle against denial, the forensic debunking of a monstrous insult to six million dead. But it did not mark the end of the struggle so much as the beginning of a new phase of battle. Holocaust denial had been definitively driven from the realm of academic history: no serious scholar, whatever their ideological beliefs, would want to court the global humiliation visited upon Irving in the High Court.

But falsehood is cunning, adapting to suit new circumstances and metastasising however it can. A poll in 2014 of more than 53,000 people in over 100 countries showed that only a third of the world’s population believed that the Holocaust had been accurately recorded in historical accounts. Thirty per cent said it was probably true that ‘Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust’. In a worrying portent for the future, those under sixty-five were much more likely to say that they thought the facts about the genocide had been distorted – including, among respondents under that age, 22 per cent of Christians, 51 per cent of Muslims and 28 per cent of those with no declared religion.23

This generational difference has been compounded by the resurgence of anti-Semitism and the buzz of digital doubt. A study by Scott Darnell, of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, published in 2010, concluded that ‘knowledge of the Holocaust is relatively low in the U.S., and that, over the past decade, the number and concentration of organized antisemitic hate groups has risen (especially in the South and Mountain West)’. Though Darnell detected a decline in the overall number of anti-Semitic incidents – a pattern that was reversed in subsequent years – he also found that states

with a larger and more concentrated Jewish population tend to experience more antisemitic incidents, while organized hate group activity is most heavily concentrated in states with the smallest and least concentrated Jewish population; foreign-born Hispanics, African Americans, and those with low levels of education are particularly prone to harboring antisemitic beliefs. There is strong evidence to suggest that Holocaust denial has garnered an increasing amount of U.S. media coverage over the past decade and continues to grow in prevalence on the Internet.

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