This is a kind of mantra from deniers (and their fellow travellers, useful idiots etc) but both of the charges are globally and historically untrue.
Very few countries in the western world have anti-denier laws, and those that do, have most often extended existing laws against incitement to racial hatred to cover the genre of propagandistic writings known as 'revisionism'. It is difficult to see how one can speak of the "belief" in the Holocaust being protected in Germany or France, but not in Britain, Russia, the US, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Italy, and most other countries affected by or close-up witnesses to the Second World War.
Even in countries where such laws exist, they are a recent development, emerging long after the 'revisionists' had made their opinions known. The Gayssot law was passed 12 years after the Faurisson affair; more than enough time to know that Faurisson was an antisemitic hack. Indeed, Faurisson and his cohorts made extremely bad use of the time they had in the public spotlight. Revisionism a la Faurisson was apparently something to be spewed out in endless articles, never a book, never anything substantial.
In Germany, too, the law did not change fundamentally until the mid-90s, when the lex Deckert revision altered the requirements to the 'simple Auschwitz lie'. Before then, you needed aggravating factors, such as the expression of overt antisemitism, to convict. But since the mid-90s, Rudolf and other German deniers, most especially Horst Mahler, have obliged prosecutors time and again by expressing their antisemitism. We have simply never been given a chance to see what a purified German 'scientific revisionism', minus its antisemitic fish-wrappings, would look like.
The judgements against Rudolf, which he has helpfully uploaded to his website (and got translated), make it perfectly clear that he was being prosecuted for his propaganda, not for his alleged science. The story of the emergence of the Rudolf report is actually quite gripping, because it involved so much skulduggery and deception, and offers so many insights into the mentality and modus operandi of the far right in the early 90s. But one thing it cannot be deemed, is scientific.
It's an irony of the chemical pseudo-debate that the multiple tests of the ruins of the crematoria all found cyanide traces. This fact is not in dispute, nor is the quantity of cyanide in much dispute, although justifiable criticisms can be made of both Leuchter and Rudolf for taking less than perfect samples. Leuchter evidently went out of his way to try and find no cyanide, but failed. Rudolf simply skewed his overall set of samples and really did not construct anything like a properly composed sample. That should leap out at anyone reading his tables. The real issue has always been the interpretation of the results, and there the argument has been lost by 'revisionists' in hundreds of discussions. It certainly doesn't help that dozens of cheerleaders have yapped away claiming that the chemical proof is definitive, while ignoring the manifold obvious objections.
Both Leuchter and Rudolf hark back to a time when the western world was more than prepared to air these issues and to listen to 'revisionists'. I have been repeatedly struck by the fact that ideas as obviously nonsensical as Holocaust denial have been considered in some seriousness by a large number of intellectuals, academics as well as, surely, hundreds of thousands of lay readers, and that the conclusion has always been that the ideas are bogus. 'Revisionists' could even get their ideas touted on national television in the US - not the most scientific or rigorous of venues, and a popular choice for many a crank - and could circulate them widely through drumming up a lot of publicity for their 'controversy'.
In the UK as well as worldwide, the Irving-Lipstadt trial was undoubtedly an opportunity for many to sit back and consider the evidence and arguments. As journalists observed, it became a kind of grotesque parlour-game of what-if. Indeed, that what-if game is played all the time whenever HD comes up for discussion. What if they are right? What would be entailed? What would we expect to find and see if these claims were true? That's why the dwindling band of true believer 'revisionists' are confronted continuously with questions they can never answer satisfactorily, like 'what happened to them then?' and 'how could all those SS men have been coerced?', to name but a few.
Most of the refrains that are offered up on this thread from the 'revisionists' are now extremely old. Leuchter was 23 years ago, the first Zundel trial took place more than a quarter of a century ago, the much-touted David Cole video was made 18 years ago, ditto Rudolf's report. Most of the memes are that old as well. Faurisson started blethering on about the Auschwitz swimming pool and the mysteries of how Churchill, Eisenhower and de Gaulle hadn't written anything on the Holocaust about 20 years ago. These things have been hashed out on countless occasions, for at least as long as there has been the modern internet, and it's really unsurprising when they induce such epic boredom today.
Most of the questions asked of deniers are also that old, too. Yet in 2 decades of fairly continuous discussion between deniers and non-deniers, no convincing answers have ever been forthcoming. That is another red flag.
This pseudo-debate has a history, one that for obvious reasons contemporary negationists (and their fellow travellers, useful idiots, etc) wish to ignore and to bury. It is really not difficult to find out about that history. A simple glance at the Wiki page for Holocaust denial does the trick. There are by now several dozen books on Holocaust denial, chronicling its emergence and discussing its claims. One can certainly quibble and dispute individual points and judgements in the books, but it is an undeniable fact that there was this guy named Rassinier, and then other guys like Hoggan, Harwood, Butz and Faurisson, and their writings said x, and their source base was y, and none of that is in rational dispute. So however much the deniers might hate Deborah Lipstadt, she did her primary job in Denying the Holocaust, which was to provide a history of denial.
It's very evident from this history that time and again, serious-minded people have considered the core claims behind 'revisionism'. The impact of the Faurisson affair on intellectuals in the 1980s was considerable. You can find numerous philosophers musing on it. And then, some time in the 90s, these musings trail off, until 'denial' becomes a cliche and a joke, to the point where a Google search for 'Holocaust denial' will associate fully 1/6th of the hits with 'global warming'. That's because after a while, it became more than obvious that the entire gambit was bullflop.
I don't see where there has been a 'taboo' on denial. Quite the opposite: the badly written rantings of a lunatic French professor, as well as other sundry cranks, were given more than their due consideration. The most prominent denier of all time was even allowed to drag a professor through a London libel court to sue her for calling him a Holocaust denier, and then used Holocaust denial arguments to prove his case. As an exercise in surrealism, Irving vs Lipstadt takes some beating.
If there is now a 'taboo' on denial, then that's because several decades of public antics and exposure have worn out what limited welcome it ever had. That's also why the laws changed in France and Germany. It's not difficult to examine Faurisson's writings from 1978 to 1990 before the Gayssot law was passed. Doing so is rather disappointing, because there isn't actually much there, even by 'revisionist' standards.
If denial is 'taboo', then so are many other ideas which have been aired in public and found wanting. The granddaddy of these pseudo-debates is undoubtedly the Velikovsky affair, back in the 1950s. The ideas were lunatic, but persuasive to some, and scientists hated them. They did not handle Velikovsky well, who thus was able to pose as a modern-day Galileo, as all cranks like to do. In the long run, though, the ideas have simply not stood up, and anyone who cites Velikovsky damns themselves entirely. You could not hope to get Velikovsky cited in classes on ancient history or astrophysics or any of the other disciplines he touched on.
Holocaust denial, after all, is one of many Bad Ideas which have swirled around the public sphere since 1945. That places the onus squarely on the shoulders of those who want to advocate it to explain why, after all the due consideration it has received, we are not entitled to conclude it is horsehockey, and treat it accordingly.
I'll quote a post made elsewhere on this very subject, which I think is extremely apposite. The person being addressed was, of course, a Holocaust denier pulling out the violin and whining that his beliefs were persecuted.
At the moment, there's a thread burbling on where a 9/11 Truther is trying to convince the world that a list of 400 names of academics - irrespective of their discipline, expertise, employment status - is somehow significant proof against the conventionally accepted explanation for 9/11. I observed that the Twoofer should consider himself lucky, because Holocaust deniers would be hard pressed to find 40 individuals who qualify as proper academics who have ever endorsed any aspect of 'revisionism'. And that's since the end of World War II, worldwide.
Many of those 40 academics didn't even contribute anything to the genre of 'revisionism', they just lent their names to the masthead of the Journal for Historical Review, back when they thought it added credibility to have a far-right Argentinian economics professor who evidently believed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were literally true as one of their editorial board members. Another guy to mention would be Austin App, professor of English and crank letter-writer, whose contributions to revisionism amount to a few 10s of 1000s of words of unsourced ranting. Or we could mention another professor of English, unlike most of the academics actually still alive, who is a Muslim, and whose contributions to 'revisionism' consist of remarks made on YouTube videos and on the internet. Or even the weighty revisionist contributions of the vaunted Harry Elmer Barnes, whose comments on the Holocaust were ignorant even in the 1960s, and totally lacking any scholarly substantiation.
The pattern across this tiny set of fewer than 40 academics is not difficult to work out: strong ideological motivations, a lot of axe-grinding, countless insults and ad hominems from them, and a whole truckload of crankery, with very little to show by way of solid research outputs.
I'm happy to debate the what-if of an academic, doesn't matter where, deciding whether or not to embrace 'revisionism', but only if the actual track record is factored in. It's not a happy tale for 'revisionists', of course.
But it might just explain why the number of academics taking the plunge doesn't increase very often. Not because they're persecuted, not because they might have career problems, or get jailed, because there are countless academics in perfectly secure positions with tenure and good track records who could, if they wanted to, endorse 'revisionism' and not suffer any of those things. They don't come out and endorse 'revisionism' because it's been weighed in the balance often enough, and found wanting. They don't endorse 'revisionism' because the names bandied around by the lone associate professor of English when touting the genre, like Butz and Staeglich, date back to the 1970s and are totally outmoded even by 'revisionist' standards.
Most of all, they don't endorse revisionism, because there is nothing much to endorse. Academics want to make names for themselves and know that in order to do so, they have to show results, not insinuations, suspicions or vague handwaves. The set of fewer than 40 academics never came up with anything that could be called a genuine result, and most didn't even bother to try. They thought that merely lending their tenured asses to the cause would convince someone or other.
The hypothetical academic of this what-if speculation would know that the subject on which they might choose to opine has been extensively researched. At a very basic level, ignoring past research is an obvious fail. But the mountain of research grows every year. Most of the fewer than 40 academics embraced denial in an era when there wasn't as much available on the Holocaust, although the volume was already considerable by the 60s. That is no longer the case.
And that's why 'incidents' of denial in academia have declined precipitously, although graphing a set of fewer than 40 individuals is not going to produce much in the way of a curve. I count only five guys with any kind of academic affiliations who have stuck their tongues out in the past decade and embraced denial. They would be, Claudio Moffa, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies who has simply hosted conferences and given a lecture in a course, not produced any articles or monographs on the subject; Nicholas Kollerstrom, who is a stretch to include as he was merely an unpaid honorary research fellow in the history of early modern astronomy, but what the hell; the guy is a known conspiracy nut anyhow; Daniel McGowan, an emeritus professor from a liberal arts college and primarily a pro-Palestinian activist; Kaukub Siddique, an associate professor of literature and communications whose YouTube rants have already been mentioned; and let's be generous, 'Thomas Dalton', supposedly some kind of professor at some point or other, who is the one person out of the five who cobbled together a book of sorts on the topic.
That's five guys, who together have produced one book, a few articles for websites, and been filmed speaking in public and had the films put on YouTube.
Gee, I wonder why there aren't more academics queuing up to commit intellectual suicide...
