The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide (review)

Book Reviews 153 explain their motives. Indeed, if such men who were 'not fanatical Nazis and were not born to be killers could readily be turned into monsters, then the danger exists for all of us. In our time that danger has become manifest for Serbs and Croats, Hutus and Tutsis. Browning's study is one ofthe best (perhaps the best) contemporary examples of rmding both the unique and the universal aspects of the Holocaust. This is far from "universalizing the Holocaust" in order to relativize its crimes. That Langer misinterprets the conclusion to Ordinary Men demonstrates the limits of his understanding and empathy. His reading ofand listening to death camp survivors' testimonies may have produced an identification with themthatboth deepens and limits his insights. Death camp survivors are the world's leading experts on their own travails, but they are not necessarily the best sources for understanding the historical process, including the motivations of the perpetrators, that nearly crushed them. Robert Melson Department of Political Science Purdue University The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide, by Alain Finkielkraut, translated by Mary Byrd Kelly. Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1998. 146 pp. $29.95. This is a translation ofFinkielkraut's analysis ofHolocaust denial in France, published in 1982. Events have by no means outpaced Finkielkraut's brilliant diagnosis. The "negation" in the title is the English rendition of le negationnisme, the French equivalent for Holocaust denial. Bo~ terms-le negationnisme and denial-are meant to divest the self-styled claims ofits advocates, wolves in sheep's clothing, to be merely historical "revisionists," or courageous, non-conformist truth seekers. The French incarnation ofHolocaust denial, Finkielkraut argues, is anchored in the politicalLeft, thus differing from the NorthAmericanversion, whose chiefpractitioners are on the extreme Right. In both cases, however, denial crosses the political spectrum, with advocates among Afro-American radicals in the United States, and among neoFascists in France. Finkielkraut has little to say about neo-Fascist denial in France; his bete noire is the negationist Left. Nevertheless, Finkielkraut casts his net wide, running the gamut from outright deniers to those set on trivializing or diminishing the Holocaust: Trotskyites on the extreme Left who published and supported the work ofRobert Faurisson; the American radical Noam Chomsky who favored Faurisson with a preface to his book Memoire en defense and was himself no mean practitioner of genocide denial in the case of Cambodia; the disappointed leftists ofthe generation of1968; representatives ofgroups, often anti-Israel, wanting to outbid Jews as the world's victims. The villain of the piece, for Finkielkraut, is ideology: theory embraced as unshakeable belief, theory that dismisses facts that threaten to undermine it. Thus, 154 SHOFAR Winter 2001 Vol. 19, No.2 Finkielkraut argues that supporters of Faurisson on the extreme Left sought to "rehabilitate" not Hitler, but Marx (p. 29). In their view, Marx taught that political systems were mere epiphenomena, tools ofthe ruling class. From this, they concluded that there was no substantial difference between liberal democracies, the party dictatorship in the U.S.S.R., and Nazi Germany. Moreover, the proletariat was considered the only victim licensed by history, for as the only truly universal class, the proletariat will bring liberation to all humanity. The Holocaust had to be disposed ofby the extreme Left because there was no place for it in the dialectic of history. For similarreasons, Finkielkraut argues, Noam Chomsky supported Faurisson and denied the Cambodian genocide as well. He simply believed he held the key to the reality behind appearances, which was that informationwas controlledandmanipulated by those in power. For Chomsky, history was about ruling and oppressed classes playing their destined parts. Neither the Holocaust nor a genocide by Marxists in Cambodia fit into his predetermined historical script. Sometimes Finkielkraut seems wide of the mark. He makes much of the phenomenon ofnormalizing ortrivializing the Holocaust among the "repentant children of 1968," ex-student revolutionaries become non-believers on principle (p. 62). Distrusting accepted beliefs, they became the breakers oftaboos, including the taboos ofdenying the Holocaust or seeing it as exaggerated. However, Finkielkraut offers only one example of this attitude in France, not enough to make it a significant trend. Far more significant...