Saturday, January 06, 2007
(9:40 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Denialists
Over at A Tiny Revolution, Jonathan Schwarz has a great post about how the penchant of right-wingers to indulge in pointless nitpicking while resolutely ignoring the broader point is very similar to the rhetoric of Holocaust denial. He takes this kind of thing to be characteristic of right-wing discourse.Sure enough, within the first five comments, we get the obligatory move toward equivalence -- in this case, someone named Nell praises the post, then adds "denialists aren't only in the right-wing camp." How insightful! How even-handed! How fucking stupid! [UPDATE: It has come to my attention that Nell is actually one of the good guys, etc. Let's pretend I used another example instead of Nell -- for instance, the person further down who cited "human nature" as an explanation for this phenomenon.]
Are there really "Gulag deniers" out there? People who claim that the so-called "Cultural Revolution" is a myth invented by the liberal media? I don't know, maybe there are -- but I feel like I would've heard of them by this point. It seems like the problems more characteristic of the left in this regard are a certain naivete, which most often results in people abandoning the cause when they find out what's really going on. The other option is to excuse the brutality as "necessary," and perhaps to supplement this with evidence that, say, the Gulags aren't absolutely evil. But just outright denying it? Or outright denying it because some petty details in the accounts of the brutality don't seem exactly right? Not so much.
So I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it's perfectly fair to say that the "Holocaust-denial" style of rhetoric is characteristic of the right and not characteristic of the left.
