the context: pope benedict xvi has lifted the excommunications on four bishops belonging to an ultra conservative catholic organisation, the Society of St. Pius X, who had broken canon law in the past. one of these bishops is a holocaust-denier:
i've never studied the holocaust, but this video absolutely pisses me off. several things to note:
1. he starts off on the wrong note almost immediately - fallacies of strawman + excluded middle. people don't claim that ALL the 6 million were gassed - a good number died from starvation, disease, forced labour, or shooting. and the choice is not between '6 million gassed', and 'none gassed'. even if there were no gas chambers, or the gas chambers didn't work as efficiently as claimed, there could still have been a lot of people who died in nazi hands or because of nazi actions - enough to justify the term 'holocaust'.
2. 'the most serious of [the revisionists] conclude that between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews perished'.
personally i believe that historical 'fact' is a misnomer - all 'facts' (or, as williamson prefers to put it, 'historical truth') are simply probabilistic models to account for patterns we find in historical sources. there are naturally other possible models for any pattern in our sources, but often we (try to) pick the most probable one. for instance, if we find all the london newspapers from 1901 announcing the death of queen victoria, one model which would account for this would be that she did, in fact, die in 1901. of course, another model which would fit would be one which suggested that victoria had died in 1900 and that all the newspapers had covered up the fact for a whole year; and yet another would be that all extant newspaper clippings are in fact fabrications from the 1950's made as a practical joke. but even these are, prima facie, (much) less plausible.
add onto the scales other lines of evidence and one realises that the alternative models become increasingly much less probable - so much so that it becomes perverse to accept them. in fact, the lines of evidence in this case converge very neatly. memoirists, diarists, letter-writers - some of whom are close to the queen - also record the death of victoria in 1901. there are medical records which corroborate this. there are black and white photographs taken of her funeral procession, a sermon was given and recorded at the service. more indirectly, coins and stamps from 1902 onwards stop featuring the bust of victoria; Hansard records that the 1902 session of parliament is opened by king edward viii. it becomes ludicrous - still plausible, of course, but very highly improbable - to assert that together with newspaper editors (or document forgers), letter-writers, coin minters, stamp issuers, and the editors of hansard are in together on a gigantic conspiracy, a claim for which there is no evidence whatsoever (a few conspiratorial letters would be useful to establish the case!)
back to the holocaust. the 200,000 figure is claimed by David Irving ('revisionist historian' or 'holocaust denier' depending on your political sensibilities), which is much smaller than estimates made by other historians, is based on evidence such as the Auschwitz Death Books, the records of the SS which ran the camps (and recently released from Soviet archives.) The Auschwitz Death Books record only 69,000 deaths. a figure of 200,000 is thus, of course, an entirely plausible model, extrapolated to account for the numbers as recorded in such sources.
The problem is that this particular line of evidence does not converge with others. the estimate of 6 million is made from, among other things, a comparison of pre- and post-war population census figures, which suggest that at some point between 1939 and 1945, a great number of jews disappeared from the administrative documentation. where did all these jews go? natural deaths, deaths from the war, emigration, conversion en masse to christianity cannot account entirely for the disappearance of 3/4 of europe's jewish population without leaving traces in other records (for instance, customs and immigration records, census records in other countries, parish records of baptisms and easter communicants). so unless it simply assumes that governmental statistics of different sorts across a range of countries are just dead wrong in this period, any model proposing that 200,000 jews died because of the nazis in those years would have to square with these unfortunate facts. if only 200,000 died, where did the rest go? if the nazis only killed 200,000, then who - or what - caused the others to disappear? this does not even take into account other nazi records, especially on deportations, documents written by the jews themselves, or documents (such as speeches, memos, etc.) which expound on the intent of the nazi leadership to exterminate the jews in a Final Solution, all of which suggest very strongly (almost to the point of certainty) that the nazis were responsible for their disappearance. other models remain possible explanations for the data (e.g. a great plague; the missing people running into hiding underground and founding a subterranean civilisation dedicated to the destruction of the world above) but there is simply no evidence for them. hence they should be dismissed.
such contradictions behooves one to ask questions on the reliability of specific sources. the Death Books, when examined, seem to be documents which, while valuable in their own right, cannot be used to establish the total numbers of murdered jews in auschwitz. a survivor has stated that only persons destined to do any forced labour were included in the SS registers; the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess's memoirs suggest that majority of people are also not recorded by the SS, and that the 'cause of death' was often inaccurate. on the other hand, we know that government census figures, while imperfect (census takers may miss out some people, they may be forced to rely on estimates in some areas, not all census records survive to present day), are important to the governments which take them - for tax purposes, to formulate social policy, etc. all this would imply that governments actually took care to make them as accurate as they could. did the Death Books serve a comparable purpose which would necessitate the same need for accuracy? furthermore, these documents are themselves quite incomplete: the SS destroyed many records in the final days of the war.
3. 'There were no gas chambers.'
first, dealing with the claim that leuchter (of the 'leuchter report') was an 'expert on gas chambers':NYT article
today the camps are all in ruins. the substance of this claim depends on the lack of absolutely foolproof physical evidence that the gas chambers once existed. but then again, the study of history is never foolproof; it depends upon the chance survival of fragments and relics of the past. some of the ruins which do, in fact, contain poison gas residue, are dismissed by 'revisionists' as delousing chambers, used for pest extermination purposes. i'm no expert on the technical claims made by williamson (that the ceilings were not high enough to expel the poisonous gases), but personally, i don't really think it's an important point.
mainly this is because such a claim ignores or dismisses evidence to the contrary such as eyewitness testimony from jewish survivors, the people who ran the camps, and allied soldiers. now eyewitness testimony is problematic. memory is fallible and selective, testimony is necessarily hugely subjective. people lie, distort, and exaggerate. however, the stories are rather consistent and corroborate each other, even when the informants have no reason to do so - i.e. jews and nazis say pretty similar things. (additionally, why would nazis lie at the nuremberg trials in order to be found guilty and punished?) consistency, naturally, suggests either reliability, or conspiracy - once again there are two plausible models to account for a pattern in the evidence. of course it is possible that survivors, interrogators of war criminals, and allied soldiers were in cahoots to make their accounts resemble each other. but once again, not only is this improbable, it would mean making an additional claim for which there is no evidence. (still no conspiratorial letters!)
there are also other kinds of evidence: photos and videos taken in the immediate aftermath of the war, building plans, remains of poison gas canisters. each line of evidence can be, on its own, dismissed. taken cumulatively, they make it perverse to claim that the gas chambers did not exist.
another big objection is that williamson's claims invert the process of historical explanation. one does not (or, at any rate, should not) claim that because some supposed engineer cannot think of a way to explain how the gas chambers work, they cannot possibly exist, therefore the nazis cannot have killed so many jews, and therefore the holocaust should be placed in scare quotes every time it is mentioned. such reasoning would assume that all other lines of evidence should be dismissed, even when they are broadly regarded as reliable and consistent, and converge on a single explanatory model. this is almost akin to saying that because current scientific models of powered flight show that the bumblebee is not aerodynamic enough to fly, it cannot possibly fly. but bumblebees are observed to fly all the time: it does not mean these observers are frauds, or lunatics, or that bees perform miracles routinely. it means that the scientists are wrong. similarly, just because leuchter cannot figure out how the gas chambers work does not prove that the gas chambers the nazis built were technically unworkable, nor does it imply that all the eyewitnesses were lying and all the building plans were forged. it simply means that leuchter is mistaken. his ignorance of how the gas chambers actually worked cannot be used to justify the opinion that there were no mass gassings and that the holocaust did not occur. (a similar tactic is used by creationists who point to gaps in biological knowledge in an attempt to attack evolutionary theory - maybe the subject of a post for another day :p)
4. religion and anti-semitism
there is something hugely ironic - or massively hypocritical - about a bishop from a recidivist organisation within the catholic church invoking historical evidence as some sort of holy grail in the quest for 'historical truth'. this can only be pseudo-scepticism - the same man who insists on the highest (and the most impracticeable and absurd) standards of proof for the logistical details of gas chamber operation will, on sundays, ask his flock to accept as 'historical truth' dogmas such as the perpetual virginity of mary without a shred of supporting historical evidence.
williamson is obviously an articulate and intelligent man. he's done his research. (hands up - who's ever even heard of the leuchter report before?) he cannot possibly be saying all this because he is ignorant, stupid, or lazy. it's hard, therefore, to avoid the niggling suspicion that he is simply wilfully blind to the historical evidence piled up against his opinions and the historical consensus which has formed behind that evidence. in this case, 'revisionist history' seems to become a pseudo-intellectual front for simple anti-semitism - an accusation that he will be hard-pressed to refute.
5. some final points
the figure of 6 million is necessarily ballpark - no one knows (or can know) the precise number of dead. the absolute lower limit is 4 million (victims whose names are known to the yad vashem museum in israel) and absolute upper limit is 8 million (the population of jews in europe.) most estimates made by historians put the death toll between 5+ million and 6+ million.
this leads to a larger point: there are necessarily limits to historical knowledge. we do not have absolute certainty that any past event occurred; nor will we ever know, in full, the details of how they happened or how people experienced them. the degree of certainty decreases over time: people die off, memories fade, documents get lost. epistemologically, therefore, much historical explanation is conjecture. but there are good conjectural models - which explain the patterns in as broad a range of sources as possible - and bad ones, which do not. pretending that a bad conjecture is a good one - and that it more accurately 'captures the past' - is dishonest.
also, when i say that historical explanations are conjectural, it does not mean that i expect the current orthodoxy on the holocaust to be overturned any time soon. of course it is possible that the holocaust did not happen. it is also possible that the world was created last wednesday, with all our memories before that date implanted in us; it is also possible that we are all brains in a vat. even then, holocaust denial is more improbable than both the omphalos hypothesis and the matrix, because, by definition, there can be no evidence for or against those two scenarios; whereas the claims of holocaust denial seem to have been falsified - if we accept as efficacious the efforts of the vast majority of historians to ensure the veracity, reliability and consistency of their source material - by the current state of research.
holocaust revisionism is the practice of pointing out to small gaps in our knowledge - e.g. the apparent insufficiency of the carrying capacity of lifts in concentration camp crematoria to handle the supposed numbers of people killed - in an attempt to discredit useful and largely consistent explanatory models. these represent not flaws in the existing explanatory framework, but the natural limits of existing historical knowledge. once again: just because we do not know precisely how something worked, does not mean it could not have happened.
revisionist history in other fields is often creative, exciting and fruitful, and occasionally overturn existing consensus on historical issues. a good example would be alfred cobban's work on the french revolution, which showed that, contrary to marxist models of the revolution as a bourgeois-capitalist takeover, the french revolutionaries were largely lawyers, professionals, priests and bureaucrats. in general, revisionism becomes successful when it points out explanatory deficiencies in existing models over a wide range of sources, and/or proposes new models which explain the patterns in sources better. good revisionist history does not depend on ignorance or misrepresentation to make its point.
i do not think that holocaust denial should be a crime, mainly because it allows deniers to claim victimhood (and/or martyrdom) and insinuate that the orthodox interpretation is afraid of refutation. it is not. instead, deniers should be allowed to express their views in order that they be effectively refuted.
lastly, people who make the whole thing into an issue of political correctness are really also missing the point.
i've never studied the holocaust, but this video absolutely pisses me off. several things to note:
1. he starts off on the wrong note almost immediately - fallacies of strawman + excluded middle. people don't claim that ALL the 6 million were gassed - a good number died from starvation, disease, forced labour, or shooting. and the choice is not between '6 million gassed', and 'none gassed'. even if there were no gas chambers, or the gas chambers didn't work as efficiently as claimed, there could still have been a lot of people who died in nazi hands or because of nazi actions - enough to justify the term 'holocaust'.
2. 'the most serious of [the revisionists] conclude that between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews perished'.
personally i believe that historical 'fact' is a misnomer - all 'facts' (or, as williamson prefers to put it, 'historical truth') are simply probabilistic models to account for patterns we find in historical sources. there are naturally other possible models for any pattern in our sources, but often we (try to) pick the most probable one. for instance, if we find all the london newspapers from 1901 announcing the death of queen victoria, one model which would account for this would be that she did, in fact, die in 1901. of course, another model which would fit would be one which suggested that victoria had died in 1900 and that all the newspapers had covered up the fact for a whole year; and yet another would be that all extant newspaper clippings are in fact fabrications from the 1950's made as a practical joke. but even these are, prima facie, (much) less plausible.
add onto the scales other lines of evidence and one realises that the alternative models become increasingly much less probable - so much so that it becomes perverse to accept them. in fact, the lines of evidence in this case converge very neatly. memoirists, diarists, letter-writers - some of whom are close to the queen - also record the death of victoria in 1901. there are medical records which corroborate this. there are black and white photographs taken of her funeral procession, a sermon was given and recorded at the service. more indirectly, coins and stamps from 1902 onwards stop featuring the bust of victoria; Hansard records that the 1902 session of parliament is opened by king edward viii. it becomes ludicrous - still plausible, of course, but very highly improbable - to assert that together with newspaper editors (or document forgers), letter-writers, coin minters, stamp issuers, and the editors of hansard are in together on a gigantic conspiracy, a claim for which there is no evidence whatsoever (a few conspiratorial letters would be useful to establish the case!)
back to the holocaust. the 200,000 figure is claimed by David Irving ('revisionist historian' or 'holocaust denier' depending on your political sensibilities), which is much smaller than estimates made by other historians, is based on evidence such as the Auschwitz Death Books, the records of the SS which ran the camps (and recently released from Soviet archives.) The Auschwitz Death Books record only 69,000 deaths. a figure of 200,000 is thus, of course, an entirely plausible model, extrapolated to account for the numbers as recorded in such sources.
The problem is that this particular line of evidence does not converge with others. the estimate of 6 million is made from, among other things, a comparison of pre- and post-war population census figures, which suggest that at some point between 1939 and 1945, a great number of jews disappeared from the administrative documentation. where did all these jews go? natural deaths, deaths from the war, emigration, conversion en masse to christianity cannot account entirely for the disappearance of 3/4 of europe's jewish population without leaving traces in other records (for instance, customs and immigration records, census records in other countries, parish records of baptisms and easter communicants). so unless it simply assumes that governmental statistics of different sorts across a range of countries are just dead wrong in this period, any model proposing that 200,000 jews died because of the nazis in those years would have to square with these unfortunate facts. if only 200,000 died, where did the rest go? if the nazis only killed 200,000, then who - or what - caused the others to disappear? this does not even take into account other nazi records, especially on deportations, documents written by the jews themselves, or documents (such as speeches, memos, etc.) which expound on the intent of the nazi leadership to exterminate the jews in a Final Solution, all of which suggest very strongly (almost to the point of certainty) that the nazis were responsible for their disappearance. other models remain possible explanations for the data (e.g. a great plague; the missing people running into hiding underground and founding a subterranean civilisation dedicated to the destruction of the world above) but there is simply no evidence for them. hence they should be dismissed.
such contradictions behooves one to ask questions on the reliability of specific sources. the Death Books, when examined, seem to be documents which, while valuable in their own right, cannot be used to establish the total numbers of murdered jews in auschwitz. a survivor has stated that only persons destined to do any forced labour were included in the SS registers; the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess's memoirs suggest that majority of people are also not recorded by the SS, and that the 'cause of death' was often inaccurate. on the other hand, we know that government census figures, while imperfect (census takers may miss out some people, they may be forced to rely on estimates in some areas, not all census records survive to present day), are important to the governments which take them - for tax purposes, to formulate social policy, etc. all this would imply that governments actually took care to make them as accurate as they could. did the Death Books serve a comparable purpose which would necessitate the same need for accuracy? furthermore, these documents are themselves quite incomplete: the SS destroyed many records in the final days of the war.
3. 'There were no gas chambers.'
first, dealing with the claim that leuchter (of the 'leuchter report') was an 'expert on gas chambers':NYT article
today the camps are all in ruins. the substance of this claim depends on the lack of absolutely foolproof physical evidence that the gas chambers once existed. but then again, the study of history is never foolproof; it depends upon the chance survival of fragments and relics of the past. some of the ruins which do, in fact, contain poison gas residue, are dismissed by 'revisionists' as delousing chambers, used for pest extermination purposes. i'm no expert on the technical claims made by williamson (that the ceilings were not high enough to expel the poisonous gases), but personally, i don't really think it's an important point.
mainly this is because such a claim ignores or dismisses evidence to the contrary such as eyewitness testimony from jewish survivors, the people who ran the camps, and allied soldiers. now eyewitness testimony is problematic. memory is fallible and selective, testimony is necessarily hugely subjective. people lie, distort, and exaggerate. however, the stories are rather consistent and corroborate each other, even when the informants have no reason to do so - i.e. jews and nazis say pretty similar things. (additionally, why would nazis lie at the nuremberg trials in order to be found guilty and punished?) consistency, naturally, suggests either reliability, or conspiracy - once again there are two plausible models to account for a pattern in the evidence. of course it is possible that survivors, interrogators of war criminals, and allied soldiers were in cahoots to make their accounts resemble each other. but once again, not only is this improbable, it would mean making an additional claim for which there is no evidence. (still no conspiratorial letters!)
there are also other kinds of evidence: photos and videos taken in the immediate aftermath of the war, building plans, remains of poison gas canisters. each line of evidence can be, on its own, dismissed. taken cumulatively, they make it perverse to claim that the gas chambers did not exist.
another big objection is that williamson's claims invert the process of historical explanation. one does not (or, at any rate, should not) claim that because some supposed engineer cannot think of a way to explain how the gas chambers work, they cannot possibly exist, therefore the nazis cannot have killed so many jews, and therefore the holocaust should be placed in scare quotes every time it is mentioned. such reasoning would assume that all other lines of evidence should be dismissed, even when they are broadly regarded as reliable and consistent, and converge on a single explanatory model. this is almost akin to saying that because current scientific models of powered flight show that the bumblebee is not aerodynamic enough to fly, it cannot possibly fly. but bumblebees are observed to fly all the time: it does not mean these observers are frauds, or lunatics, or that bees perform miracles routinely. it means that the scientists are wrong. similarly, just because leuchter cannot figure out how the gas chambers work does not prove that the gas chambers the nazis built were technically unworkable, nor does it imply that all the eyewitnesses were lying and all the building plans were forged. it simply means that leuchter is mistaken. his ignorance of how the gas chambers actually worked cannot be used to justify the opinion that there were no mass gassings and that the holocaust did not occur. (a similar tactic is used by creationists who point to gaps in biological knowledge in an attempt to attack evolutionary theory - maybe the subject of a post for another day :p)
4. religion and anti-semitism
there is something hugely ironic - or massively hypocritical - about a bishop from a recidivist organisation within the catholic church invoking historical evidence as some sort of holy grail in the quest for 'historical truth'. this can only be pseudo-scepticism - the same man who insists on the highest (and the most impracticeable and absurd) standards of proof for the logistical details of gas chamber operation will, on sundays, ask his flock to accept as 'historical truth' dogmas such as the perpetual virginity of mary without a shred of supporting historical evidence.
williamson is obviously an articulate and intelligent man. he's done his research. (hands up - who's ever even heard of the leuchter report before?) he cannot possibly be saying all this because he is ignorant, stupid, or lazy. it's hard, therefore, to avoid the niggling suspicion that he is simply wilfully blind to the historical evidence piled up against his opinions and the historical consensus which has formed behind that evidence. in this case, 'revisionist history' seems to become a pseudo-intellectual front for simple anti-semitism - an accusation that he will be hard-pressed to refute.
5. some final points
the figure of 6 million is necessarily ballpark - no one knows (or can know) the precise number of dead. the absolute lower limit is 4 million (victims whose names are known to the yad vashem museum in israel) and absolute upper limit is 8 million (the population of jews in europe.) most estimates made by historians put the death toll between 5+ million and 6+ million.
this leads to a larger point: there are necessarily limits to historical knowledge. we do not have absolute certainty that any past event occurred; nor will we ever know, in full, the details of how they happened or how people experienced them. the degree of certainty decreases over time: people die off, memories fade, documents get lost. epistemologically, therefore, much historical explanation is conjecture. but there are good conjectural models - which explain the patterns in as broad a range of sources as possible - and bad ones, which do not. pretending that a bad conjecture is a good one - and that it more accurately 'captures the past' - is dishonest.
also, when i say that historical explanations are conjectural, it does not mean that i expect the current orthodoxy on the holocaust to be overturned any time soon. of course it is possible that the holocaust did not happen. it is also possible that the world was created last wednesday, with all our memories before that date implanted in us; it is also possible that we are all brains in a vat. even then, holocaust denial is more improbable than both the omphalos hypothesis and the matrix, because, by definition, there can be no evidence for or against those two scenarios; whereas the claims of holocaust denial seem to have been falsified - if we accept as efficacious the efforts of the vast majority of historians to ensure the veracity, reliability and consistency of their source material - by the current state of research.
holocaust revisionism is the practice of pointing out to small gaps in our knowledge - e.g. the apparent insufficiency of the carrying capacity of lifts in concentration camp crematoria to handle the supposed numbers of people killed - in an attempt to discredit useful and largely consistent explanatory models. these represent not flaws in the existing explanatory framework, but the natural limits of existing historical knowledge. once again: just because we do not know precisely how something worked, does not mean it could not have happened.
revisionist history in other fields is often creative, exciting and fruitful, and occasionally overturn existing consensus on historical issues. a good example would be alfred cobban's work on the french revolution, which showed that, contrary to marxist models of the revolution as a bourgeois-capitalist takeover, the french revolutionaries were largely lawyers, professionals, priests and bureaucrats. in general, revisionism becomes successful when it points out explanatory deficiencies in existing models over a wide range of sources, and/or proposes new models which explain the patterns in sources better. good revisionist history does not depend on ignorance or misrepresentation to make its point.
i do not think that holocaust denial should be a crime, mainly because it allows deniers to claim victimhood (and/or martyrdom) and insinuate that the orthodox interpretation is afraid of refutation. it is not. instead, deniers should be allowed to express their views in order that they be effectively refuted.
lastly, people who make the whole thing into an issue of political correctness are really also missing the point.
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