Holocaust trivialization

Michael Shafir writes that the double genocide theory's worst version is Holocaust obfuscation.[5] In The Holocaust/Genocide Template in Eastern Europe, Ljiljana Radonić writes that the double genocide theory proposes the existence of an equivalency between communism and Nazism. Radonić argues that this theory and charges of Communist genocide both come from "a stable of anti-communist émigré lexicon since the 1950s and more recently revisionist politicians and scholars" as well as the "comparative trivialization" of the Holocaust that "results from tossing postwar killings of suspected Axis collaborators and opponents of Tito's regime into the same conceptual framework as the Nazi murder of six million of Jews", describing this as "an effort to demonize communism more broadly as an ideology akin to Nazism."[6]

During the Historikerstreit, many scholars believed the position taken in the Holocaust uniqueness debate by conservative intellectuals led by Ernst Nolte, namely that the Holocaust was not unique, Germans should not bear any special burden of guilt for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", there was no moral difference between the crimes of the Soviet Union and those of Nazi Germany as the Nazis acted as they did out of fear of what the Soviet Union might do to Germany, or that the Holocaust itself was a reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union, trivialized the Holocaust and ecohed Nazi propaganda.[7]

Historian Thomas Kühne writes that "[t]he more provocative historians were in doing so and the more they thereby questioned the uniqueness, or the peculiarity, of the Holocaust, the more their work was met with resistance or even disgust, most prominently and controversially the German Ernst Nolte in the 1980s."[8]

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) accused Gilad Atzmon of trivializing and distorting the Holocaust specifically in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The ADL stated that, among other abuses, Atzmon invoked the word Shoah to describe Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.[9]

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) condemned the United Church of Canada for trivializing the Holocaust. According to the CIJA, the United Church of Canada published a document[10][11] in which they placed a statement decrying the "loss of dignity" on the part of the Palestinians, attributed to Israel, promptly after a similar statement acknowledging "the denial of human dignity to Jews" in the Holocaust.[12]

The term communist holocaust has been used by some state officials and non-governmental organizations to refer to mass killings under Communist states.[13][14][15] The term red Holocaust was coined by the Institute of Contemporary History (Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte) at Munich.[16][17] Soviet and Communist studies scholar Steven Rosefielde also referred to a "Red Holocaust" for all "peacetime state killings" under Communist states.[18]

According to German historian Jörg Hackmann, this term is not popular among scholars in Germany or internationally.[17] Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine writes that usage of this term "allows the reality it describes to immediately attain, in the Western mind, a status equal to that of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazi regime."[19] Michael Shafir writes that the use of the term supports the "competitive martyrdom component" of the double genocide theory.[5] George Voicu states that Leon Volovici has "rightfully condemned the abusive use of this concept as an attempt to 'usurp' and undermine a symbol specific to the history of European Jews."[20]

In "Secondary Anti-Semitism: From Hard-Core to Soft-Core Denial of the Shoah", German political scientist Clemens Heni writes:

Contrary to the hard-core version, soft-core denial is often not easily identifiable. Often it is tolerated, or even encouraged and reproduced in the mainstream, not only in Germany. Scholars have only recently begun to unravel this disturbing phenomenon. Manfred Gerstenfeld discusses Holocaust trivialization in an article published in 2008. In Germany in 2007 two scholars, Thorsten Eitz and Georg Stötzel, published a voluminous dictionary of German language and discourse regarding National Socialism and the Holocaust. It includes chapters on Holocaust trivialization and contrived comparisons, such as the infamous "atomic Holocaust", "Babycaust," "Holocaust of abortion", "red Holocaust" or "biological Holocaust."[21]

In an 1988 article for The Village Voice titled "In Search of a Soviet Holocaust", American investigative journalist Jeff Coplon analyzes the scholarship surrounding the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s and argues that allegations by "mainstream academics", including Robert Conquest, of genocide against the Soviet Union were historically dubious and politically motivated as part of a campaign by the Ukrainian nationalist community.[22] In a letter to the editors, Conquest dismissed the article as "error and absurdity."[23] Critics allege Conquest was in the pocket of the Ukrainians for accepting sponsorship and describe his work as being exaggerately anti-Soviet, charges which Conquest denied.[24]

In the article, Coplon accused Conquest of misusing the sources in his work The Harvest of Sorrow in which Conquest posits that the famine was genocide. Coplon writes that Conquest "weaves his terror-famine from unverifiable (and notoriously biased) èmigrè accounts. [...] Black Deeds of the Kremlin, a period piece published by Ukrainian èmigrès in 1953, is footnoted no less than 145 times. Conquest can be deftly selective when it suits his purpose. He borrows heavily from Lev Kopelev's The Education of a True Believer, but ignores Kopelev when the latter recalls Ukrainian villages that were relatively untouched by famine, or relief efforts by a Communist village council."[22] Coplon argues that Conquest fixes on seven million famine deaths, including six million Ukrainians, with no appendix to show how his numbers are derived. Sergei Maksudov, a Soviet émigré scholar much cited by Conquest, concluded that the famine caused 3.5 million premature deaths in the Ukraine—700,000 from starvation and the rest from diseases "stimulated" by malnutrition.[22]

Coplon reports opinions of expert Sovietologists rejecting "Conquest's hunt for a new holocaust." While these Sovietologist agree the famine was a terrible thing, they argue it was not genocide and point out that the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 was hardly confined to the Ukraine, that it reached deep into the Black Earth region of central Russia, that Joseph Stalin had far less control over collectivization than is widely assumed and that radical district leaders made their own rules as they went along.[22] According to Alexander Dallin of Stanford University, the father of modern Sovietology, "[t]here is no evidence it was intentionally directed against Ukrainians. That would be totally out of keeping with what we know – it makes no sense." According to Moshe Lewin of the University of Pennsylvania, whose Russian Peasants and the Soviet Power was groundbreaking in social history, was quoted as saying: "This is crap, rubbish. I am an anti-Stalinist, but I don't see how this [genocide] campaign adds to our knowledge. It's adding horrors, adding horrors, until it becomes a pathology." Lynne Viola of SUNY-Binghamton, the first historian from the United States to examine Moscow's Central State Archive on Soviet collectivization, stated to "absolutely reject it. Why in god's name would this paranoid government consciously produce a famine when they were terrified of war [with Germany]?" Roberta Manning of Boston College, a veteran Sovietologist, argued that Conquest is "terrible at doing research. He misuses sources, he twists everything."[22]

Coplon argues there is a fascist or far-right link in positing the famine as Soviet genocide and holocaust. According to Coplon, "[i]n the latest catalogue for the Noontide Press, a Liberty Lobby affiliate run by flamboyant fascist Willis Carto, The Harvest of Sorrow is listed cheek-by-jowl with such revisionist tomes as The Auschwitz Myth and Hitler At My Side. To hype the Conquest book and its terror-famine, the catalogue notes: 'The act of genocide against the Ukrainian people has been suppressed [sic] until recently, perhaps because a real 'Holocaust' might compete with a Holohoax.' With the term 'Holohoax' referring to the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews." Eli Rosenbaum, who was general counsel for the World Jewish Congress, observed that "they're always looking to come up with a number bigger than six million. It makes the reader think: 'My god it's worse than the Holocaust.'"[22]

According to Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole and Kai Struve, there is a competition among victims in constructing an "Ukrainian Holocaust." They note that since the 1990s the term Holodomor has been adopted by anti-communists due to its similarity to the Holocaust in an attempt to promote the narrative that the Communists killed 10 million Ukrainians while the Nazis only killed 6 million Jews. They further note that the term Holodomor was "introduced and popularized by the Ukrainian diaspora in North America before Ukraine became independent" and that "the term 'Holocaust' is not explained at all." This has been used to create a "victimized national narrative" and "compete with the Jewish narrative in order to obscure the 'dark sides' of Ukraine's national history and to counter accusations that their fathers collaborated with the Germans."[25]