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Ethics, Historical Relativismand Holocaust DenialPatrick Finney aa Department of History , University of Wales ,LampeterPublished online: 31 Mar 2009.

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Ethics, Historical Relativism and Holocaust Denial

Patrick Finney Department of History, University of Wales, Lampeter

This paper explores the ethical and theoretical issues a t stake in a question recently posed with escalating insistency: does historical relativism dissolve our grounds for opposing those who mendaciously assert that the Shoah never happened? * The contemporary prominence of this question derives from the coincidence of moments of transitional ferment in the discipline of history and the interdisciplinary enterprise of Holocaust studies. In the former, the critique of traditional practices based on an ideal of objective truth has led to qualms about the perceived political, ethical and practical impli- cations of relativist understandings. There is a growing demand for pro- ponents to move beyond theoretical debates to explain what postmodern historical discourse should amount to in practice. Holocaust studies simul- taneously finds itself at a transitional but also paradoxical point. The current high profile of the Holocaust in academia and popular culture is combined with a profound anxiety that, as the remaining survivors gradually pass away, it is vital to set in place - to memorialize - essential lessons, meanings and truths for future generations.

These separate concerns have converged as the Holocaust has become an issue around which fundamental general questions of history and theory are debated, its enormity making it an acid test for the ethical and practical valid- ity of a relativist approach. Thus in the words of Saul Friedlander, the extermination of the Jews of Europe ‘must challenge theoreticians of his- torical relativism to face up to the corollaries of positions otherwise too easily dealt with on an abstract level’ (Friedlander 1992: 2). Less open-minded defenders of traditional understandings, whether from Marxist left (Callini- cos 1995: 65-94) or conservative right (Himmelfarb 1994: 142-6), are cer- tainly prone to deploy the Holocaust as a kind of trump card, arguing that relativism must be rejected since it leaves us no grounds for opposing politi- cally-motivated denial, and this view is echoed in the most recent attempt to articulate a theoretical basis for mainstream historical practice (Evans 1997: 124-8, 238-43). These arguments are reiterated in Deborah Lipstadt’s important history of the whole phenomenon of Holocaust denial which more- over proceeds to raise the stakes by explicitly blaming historians who have questioned the existence of objective truth - ‘the notion that there was one version of the world that was necessarily right while another was wrong’ - for the flowering of denial (Lipstadt 1994: 19-20). This placing of relativism and denial under the same sign is obviously disconcerting, and demands a

Rethinking History 2:3 (1998), pp. 359-369 0 Routledge 1998 1 364-2529

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response from relativists wrestling with the problems entailed in representing the Holocaust. Yet the charge that relativists have somehow failed to consider the ethical implications of their theoretical positions - and that ethics necess- arily points in one direction - strikes me as curious, since I have always felt that ethical and political commitments lay at the very heart of the particular brand of relativism with which I identify.

This relativism contends that, for a variety of epistemological and methodological reasons, any engagement with the past is necessarily subjec- tive, and the truths of historical narratives necessarily local and contingent. If this be the case, and the past cannot logically entail only one ‘correct’ reading of itself, then the only ethical position is one which acknowledges - indeed, celebrates - the relativity inherent in historical explanation. Empiri- cist interpretive absolutism represents a ‘general ideological instrument of anti-utopian closure’, which seeks to privilege particular interested positions by lending them the authority of objective truth, and to close down the infi- nite possibilities of the past - and thereby the future (Jenkins 1995: 143). Relativist positions, conversely, accept the manifest confusion of past reality and leave the way open for pluralist readings - ‘none claiming any special privilege, but each providing some illumination from its own perspective’ - which alone are conducive to democratic emancipation and helping us ‘to determine the future that we want’ (Southgate 1996: 8, 137). I would like in the remainder of this paper to explore one practical issue, provoked by Lip- stadt, by connecting this general theoretical position to the problem of com- bating Holocaust denial. Thereby, I hope to demonstrate that relativism and ethics are by no means necessarily incompatible.

Holocaust denial requires opposition in two overlapping though distinct contexts, in the realm of the academy - within the discipline of history - and in the wider social world. First, the works of deniers need to be assessed as history, as academic historical interpretations, not because they should be accepted as such but because this is what, increasingly, they claim to be. Lip- stadt demonstrates how denial has recently become infinitely more pro- fessional and keen to wrap itself in the garb of academic scholarship. Through these tactics, deniers have tried to present themselves as representing ‘the other side of the argument’ about the Holocaust. This claim, though absurd, has brought the deniers some success, amid heightened sensitivities about free speech and censorship, in attempting to insinuate denial into the realm of legitimate scholarly debate.

Do relativists therefore have to accept denial on its own terms as just another valid historical explanation? Critics such as Lipstadt believe that we do, since they collapse the sophistication and multiplicity of relativist views (Harri and Krausz 1996) down to the simple and extreme proposition that all interpretations are equally good and equally valid. It follows from this that

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Ethics, Historical Relativism and Holocaust Denial 361

whereas they are free to dispute the validity of denial on empirical grounds, because of the cavalier ways in which it ignores or construes evidence, rela- tivists are precluded from adopting this strategy to rule denial out of court. But the characterization of relativism as entailing the uncritical acceptance of all interpretations is little more than a caricature. Epistemic relativism, the notion that all beliefs are socially-grounded and all knowledge thus histori- cally contingent, should not be confused with judgemental relativism, the notion that all statements are equally valid. In fact, relativism offers us sophisticated understandings of the reasons why all interpretations are not equal and leaves us with a wide variety of criteria for discriminating between (and accepting or rejecting) interpretations, including not merely the ideo- logical, moral and aesthetic, but also the empirical (LAW 1997: 171-5).

The role of facts and evidence has always been critical in theoretical debates within history. The relativist assertion, drawn from Hayden White, that historical narratives can never be absolutely true, since their contents are as much invented as found, is apt to draw forth the response that ‘the supremacy of the evidence’ acts as a check upon historians’ exercise of imag- ination, guaranteeing correspondence with the past: ‘if history is an imagi- native art, it is one which does not invent but arranges objets trouvis’ (Hobsbawm 1994: 57). This riposte is, however, inadequate on nvo grounds. First, it obscures the point that facts are not found but made: they do not sit around waiting to be discovered and deployed by historians, but are them- selves discursive constructs, interpretively constituted, always susceptible to redescription and freighted with ideological baggage. Second, it fails to address precisely what is involved in the process of ‘arrangement’, ignoring the fact that interpretations are always underdetermined by the evidence, and that narrative emplotment is never dictated by the facts themselves. More- over, the construction of narratives eventuates in something very different from the objective reality of the past. These nvo points, concerning the medi- ated, textualized and subjective nature of facts and the interpretive nature of narrative and explanation, lie a t the heart of the relativist challenge to the empiricist-realist model of historical knowledge. Yet White’s oft-quoted dictum does not imply that the content of historical narratives is entirely invented, and in practice most relativists have accepted - or indeed taken for granted - that there is some kind of bedrock on which (any number of com- peting) interpretations are constructed: thus facts may be ‘theory-laden con- structions’, but they are nevertheless ‘constrained by resistances in the data’ (Shanks and Tilley 1992: 111).

Historical relativists such as Keith Jenkins and Hayden White accept that the past does in some way limit, though it can never determine, historical interpretation (Jenkins 1995: 178; White 1992: 37-8). Robert Berkhofer, moreover, has engaged directly with this issue in relation to the Holocaust.

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Those events, he argued, have been explained in starkly contrasting ways by historians - as a product of ‘the natural evolution of German history’, or ‘the development . . . of capitalism’, or ‘the failure of the Enlightenment’ - which demonstrates that ‘the acknowledged facts are not enough to guarantee a single best interpretation’. Yet, he continued:

To admit such interpretive diversity. . . is not to endorse the so-called revisionist denial of the acknowledged horrible facts. Rather, it shows that these facts can be admitted and still not provide a definitive (con)textualization of the set of events colligated by the term [the Holocaust].

(Berkhofer 1995: 49)

Although Berkhofer went on to unpack some of the problems underlying these propositions, he nevertheless seems to share the belief that while empiri- cal facts can never suffice to ‘prove’ the truth of interpretations in historical discourse, they can - despite being interpretive - be deployed to ‘disprove’ certain accounts of the past, and even, though this is much more difficult in practice, to ‘disprove’ interpretations. Thus while there can be innumerable explanations of the Holocaust, some of which we may prefer to others (without, however, ever being able to designate one as definitively correct), some accounts - such as those which deny that Jews were murdered in gas chambers - can be wrong, and it is as open to relativists as anyone else to bring to bear empirical evidence to point this out (Berkhofer 1995: 45-75, especially 49-58).

It is perhaps natural that relativist critics of a realist discourse should have been chiefly preoccupied with the ways in which history is not of the past and with problematics of interpretation rather than of fact (notwithstanding the relativist tendency to collapse the distinction between the two). Yet it must be admitted that difficulties remain with the positions adumbrated above, which involve asserting in a very general sense the constructed nature of facts - and that histories therefore ‘are fabricated without any “real” foundations beyond the textual’ - but taking for granted the existence of certain facts in particular cases as the starting point for the construction of meaningful his- tories (Jenkins 1995: 179). This is particularly brought into focus here, since what is precisely at stake in the confrontation with denial is, untypically for historiography, as much the ‘factual’ matter of ‘what actually happened’ as the meaning to be derived from or imposed upon those events. Thus rela- tivists perhaps need to devote more attention to explaining the role of evi- dence within their envisioned historiographical praxis (if only because this aspect of their thinking is the most grossly misunderstood by critics), and, in particular, to theorizing in more detail the ontological status of the ‘resis- tances in the data’ referred to above.

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Ethics, Historical Relativism and Holocaust Denial 363

This issue forces us to confront the fundamental question of whether his- torical discourse is in fact referential at any level. Pushed to extremes, (some) textualist arguments tend towards the total dissolution of referentiality, but few, if any, historians have been prepared to partake of these extremes of semiotic idealism which are certainly not a necessary corollary of relativism (Zammito 1993). The ‘common-sense’ belief in the existence of a real past is a founding assumption of history as a discipline and discourse, and it is not called into question by relativism. The point of relativism is to problematize understandings of the transformation of the past into traces which are in turn translated into historiography, rather than to cast doubt on the fact that those processes occur. This is precisely Hayden White’s position, according to James Young’s recent persuasive and subtle reading of his work. For White, it is axiomatic that historians deal with real events that are distinct from fictional ones, and that there is therefore a radical difference between interpretations of those events and mendacious accounts which deny their reality, but the key point is that ‘no matter how real historical events were, once narrated, they enter a discourse that necessarily overlaps with the fictional’ (Young 1997: 25; cf. Kansteiner 1993). Interpretations and narratives cannot be objective reconstructions of the past - not least because that past did not consist of written stories - and facts are necessarily subjective constructs, but neverthe- less these ‘resistances in the data’ in some sense connect our histories with the reality of the past.

Thus while history - as a present-centred ideological construction - is ‘about’ much more than its ostensible object, it must nevertheless on some level be ‘about’ the past, if history is to retain any justification as a distinc- tive practice (distinct, that is, from fiction). Moreover, quite apart from these powerful general considerations, the Holocaust seems to me to demand imperatively that we retain the notion thar our discourse is in some ways influenced by a real past. It may be true that we cannot now engage with the Holocaust except imaginatively, but nevertheless it would be unacceptable to treat it as simply the product of our historical imagination.

The difficulty, of course, is that when confronting Holocaust deniers, there is no way we can absolutely prove this referentiaIity, or indeed the truth of any particular factual statement about the past. However much we may believe in the reality of the past as the basis for our practice, that founding assumption of the discipline cannot be proven from within the discourse, and even a fact is no more than ‘a claim to truth based on available evidence that is agreed upon by a community of scholars’ (Wishart 1997: 114). We may believe that through the traces before us the past throws up resistances to the telling of just any story about itself, but whether or not some particular thing constitutes a fact is an interpretive matter, its truth essentially local and conventional, dependent upon agreement within a community sharing an

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epistemic framework. In order to do straightforward historical work, we resile from metahistorical criticism - the notions that all facts are constructs, that no trace can absolutely prove anything other than its own existence - and take the communal acceptance of the existence of particular facts as a starting point. Similarly, when we encounter deniers, the relativist recognition that the discourse of history rests upon conventions - which dictate, for example, how much evidence is necessary to establish a fact - and a ‘common- sense’ act of faith that it refers to an actual past, does not remove the possi- bility within that discourse of advancing empirical arguments to support or rebut particular interpretations. When we confront people who do not share our epistemic frameworks then these empirical arguments will prove unavail- ing, and different strategies will be necessary. But within the discourse it is possible to put epistemological problems as to the grounding of historical method to one side, and for relativists to use empirical arguments just as freely as empiricists (who despite their realist assumptions of course face precisely the same problems as to the ultimate referential character of the data, despite their efforts to wish them away through reliance on rigorous method).

Even if these ontological problems were deemed intractable, and even if - though this is not the case - we did not believe in the reality of the past, it would still be open to relativists to combat denial through focusing on the mechanics of the discipline. Relativists and empiricists can agree that the rules and conventions of the interpretive community of historians are one of the factors governing the acceptability of histories. Of course, the nvo groups conceptualize these rules differently. Empiricists view them as natural and necessary, incarnating the tried and tested methodologies which guarantee historians access to objective truths about the past. Relativists, conversely, see them much more as arbitrary constructs, setting up regulatory procedures - some overtly prescribed, others implicitly ingrained, powerful yet fluid - to facilitate production of particular types of historical knowledge according to the requirements of particular ideological forces and social formations. Yet it is equally open to both groups to utilize these rules - more or less ironically - in order to exclude denial from the parameters of accepted scholarly interpretations. Thus leaving aside the broader philosophical questions we can point out that the way in which deniers interpret evidence and deploy facts currently falls outside acceptable boundaries, which entitles us to bar them from mainstream historiographical discussions; in the longer term, it is open to us, as members of the community who create, sustain and renegoti- ate its conventions, to see that denial remains thus isolated. We may all be free to impose our own interpretation on the past but what really matters is how that interpretation is intersubjectively judged by other scholars (Jay 1992: 107).

Within the discipline of history, therefore, there are various grounds upon

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Ethics, Historical Relativism and Holocaust Denial 365

which relativists can rebut denial. But this can scarcely be the end of the matter, for it would avail us little to have proscribed denial in the discipline if it nevertheless became accepted as ‘true’ beyond the academy. Hence we cannot simply patrol academic boundaries banishing interpretations that repel us, but must also mount opposition in the wider political world. In part, this is because Holocaust denial is not merely an academic phenomenon, but rather one aspect of the inexorable relativization of historical knowledge which is visible all around us, on the Internet - where denial flourishes - in the heritage industry and in the undermining of academic authority as disci- plined history gives ground to popular memory (Samuel 1994). Yet it is also because denial is an ideological enterprise with identifiable (if not always explicit) political goals, which thus offers excellent evidence of the truth of the post-structuralist contention that representations of the past - whether legitimate interpretations or inadmissible lies (Young 1997: 27-9) - are always interested knowledge.

Understanding the ideological positioning of Holocaust deniers is crucial if they are to be effectively combated. Denial is’such a ‘big lie’ - involves buying into such a monstrous conspiracy theory - that it cannot be sustained (in the case of those deniers who sincerely believe what they profess) without a supporting ideological apparatus of antisemitism and fascism. In other words, in deniers we are confronting people working with completely differ- ent epistemic frameworks - totally different ‘rules governing what counts as knowledge’ - to ourselves. This is the main reason why challenging denial within the discipline on empirical grounds or through disciplinary conven- tions is likely to prove of only limited effect in silencing (much less convert- ing) the deniers. In order to have ‘a genuine dialogue’ between positions within history, ‘there must be shared objects of discourse (agreed descrip- tions)’, and agreement on basic factual matters, in this case that the Holo- caust occurred. Since this basic agreement is lacking, then dialogue is impossible: we are dealing with incommensurable discourses, and neither side will be able to convince the other of the error of their ways through the deployment of empirical evidence (LAW 1997: 171-3). Hence although those deniers (the merely misguided or misinformed?) who seek only to relativize, excuse or justify the Holocaust and who respect the rules of the discipline can be combated in this way, deniers proper will simply explain away empirical evidence as part and parcel of the conspiracy which they claim to have detected. It is thus fruitless to engage with these individuals on detailed evi- dentiary grounds, since there can be no definitive resolution of disputes on ‘the weight of the evidence’ when individuals are working from different ideo- logical positions. (Moreover, engaging in this kind of debate will only lend deniers credibility and publicity.) In this limited sense, therefore, all the argu- ments developed above about empirical factors are beside the point, because

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the phenomenon which we are confronting is one where however much we believe in the reality of the Holocaust, and however much evidence we adduce in support of that belief, our opponents will remain resolutely unconvinced by our arguments. Hence, the battle has to be joined in a different context, and these individuals confronted on a political and moral level.

Deniers are chiefly important for what they intend in the present rather than for what they imply about the past and denial is inseparable from con- temporary fascist and antisemitic political projects: the Holocaust, after all, still constitutes the major obstacle to the rehabilitation of Nazism. Once this point is appreciated, it becomes apparent that worrying about the validity or otherwise of their interpretations risks missing the wood for the trees, engag- ing with the symptoms of the malaise rather than the cause. Although we will obviously not wish to abandon the field of history, we must engage with the deniers primarily on this overtly political terrain where that which is at stake ideologically is much more apparent. Granted, this begs the question of how to ground a pragmatic anti-fascist political project in the absence of totaliz- ing meta-narratives, and postmodernism is indeed often criticized for its alleged inability to provide such political resources, but debates about the ethical and political dimensions of relativism are well under way, and the view that relativism is inherently politically disabling is simplistic and misplaced. Political engagement with denial is of prime importance, and it is facilitated by relativism just as much as by any other philosophical position.

Moreover, it is arguable that this position offers the clearest conceptualiz- ation of the problem posed by denial and as good a prospect as any other for success in marginalizing it and preserving the Holocaust as a meaningful event in our collective past. Broadly speaking, Deborah Lipstadt’s practical prescriptions for counteracting denial do not differ greatly from those which I have argued are available to relativists: she deprecates the idea of debating with the deniers, and argues that we should simply rule their views out of court on the grounds of the evidence, continuously publicize our own interpretations and draw attention to the ‘historical and ideological roots’ of denial (Lipstadt 1994: 219-22). But in staking out her position on the grounds of neutral, disinterested scholarship - as opposed to the so-called ‘purely ideological enterprise’ of denial (p. 26) - Lipstadt adopts a strategy that undermines itself by effacing the fact that she too is writing from a posi- tion which is (though in a different sense) ideological, and that this conditions the way in which she defines truth. Her conception of what constitutes ‘proper history’ is one that is losing all cogency in a world where more and more groups and actors just are writing their own, often incompatible, his- tories, demanding their own legitimating readings of the past; in a world where the pluralization and relativization of historical knowledge is the exist- ing state of affairs rather than something theorists are trying to will into

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Ethics, Historical Relativism and Holocaust Denial 367

being. Ironically, while objectivity once functioned as an immensely power- ful strategy for privileging particular positions, it ‘is not as effective as it used to be’ (Orr 1995: 90).

Lipstadt’s position misunderstands the inherently dynamic nature of his- toriography, and the manner in which the forms and content of historical knowledge are constantly mutating over time, in response to changes in the wider social world. Her strategy for preserving the importance of the Holo- caust basically involves striking an absolutist stance, asserting that particular narratives and interpretations of the Holocaust just are important for all times and in all places, and attempting to set historical interpretation in stone on the basis of a claim to privileged authority over the past and thus access to universal truth. This strategy looks increasingly precarious, given the pro- found changes in the social world that have led in the first place to the under- mining of modernist certainties and the relativization of historical knowledge, and the fact that fascists are quite capable of appropriating objectivity for themselves (Jenkins 1995: 125-7). It would be far better to change tack, and shift our focus away from the particular interpretations to which we are attached and towards the values and ideology which have generated that attachment. Shifting the focus onto ideology not only unmasks the agenda of the deniers, but also permits us to make a virtue of the specific convictions which inform our own agendas. After all, who wants to be objective about the Holocaust? We think the Holocaust is important not as a result of some detached, scholarly inquiry but because of an emotional and intellectual abhorrence of racism, violence and genocide and because we passionately believe in the ethical imperative ‘never again’.

Ultimately, the problem that we face in dealing with denial is that however fervently we believe in the truth of the Holocaust, diametrically opposed views are held with just as much conviction by the deniers. Hans Kellner has written that:

However strong our belief in the transcendent truth of the evil, uniqueness and centrality of the Holocaust in history, we must confront the fact that this is our belief; any efforts to maintain this for the future will be an essentially con- servative task to preserve a certain sort of moral . . . or interpretive community.

(Kellner 1994: 143-4)

Kellner thus underlines that preserving the importance of the Holocaust under the impact of denial involves working to sustain particular types of communities sharing particular understandings. Within the academic world, this means understandings as to the inferences that can be drawn from data and the conventions governing what counts as truth and a belief that fascist readings of the past are illegitimate, on empirical and political grounds. Within the wider world, this means confronting deniers on the crucial terrain

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of politics and working to ensure that fascist values cannot prevail there. Ulti- mately, we are forced to the perhaps banal (and uncomfortable?) conclusion that what we need to do is to work to ensure that our truth remains stronger than theirs (cf. Jenkins 1997: 385).

I hope that this paper has succeeded in demonstrating that historical rela- tivism is by no means incompatible with ethical concerns, nor does it condemn us politically to neurasthenic passivity. Promoting pluralism in his- toriography does not imply that we have to accept as legitimate or condone all versions of the past which are thereby generated. Rather, we can evaluate them according to a wide range of criteria (aesthetic, ideological and empiri- cal) and choose to accept or reject them: ‘neither ontological nor epistemic relativism necessitates moral nor judgmental relativism’ (LAW 1997: 173). True, many issues remain to be addressed, but I hope that demonstrating the ethical concerns of relativism may permit future profitable dialogue. To return to the central question of ethics, it may very well be the case that relativism leaves the door open for fascist readings of the past, but this is, demon- strably, equally true of empiricism: both can enable ‘reactionary’ as well as ‘progressive’ readings of the past and the attendant versions of politics. What- ever the temptation to retreat from relativism under the impact of denial, I am convinced that the ethical way lies in seeking to preserve the openness of the past and pluralistic interpretation. If a fascist reading of the past is to become established, it is surely infinitely preferable that it should do so in cir- cumstances in which the inexpungable contingency and relativity of history is acknowledged, rather than in circumstances in which a claim .to absolute and universal truth can be plausibly sustained.

Note

1 The author welcomes feedback at finneypb@lamp.ac.uk

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