In May 1995, 50 years after the end of the second World War, Ireland’s minister for equality and law reform, Mervyn Taylor, opened the “Garden of Europe” in Listowel, Co Kerry, which contained the only Holocaust memorial in Ireland. Speaking as an Irish Jew, he said: “I can only say how much this gesture by the people of Listowel is appreciated by my own community.”
More than 30 years on, Mervyn’s son, Gideon Taylor, president of the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (the Claims Conference), established in 1951 to seek reparation from Germany on behalf of Jewish victims, has been speaking about one of his Conference’s surveys. It suggests almost one in 10 Irish people aged between 18 and 29 believe the Holocaust is a “myth”, while 19 per cent in this age group believe it happened but believe its scale has been “greatly exaggerated”. These findings align with similar surveys in the US and other parts of Europe, albeit with parallel robust support for education about the Holocaust.
Taylor suggests these findings come at a particularly poignant moment: “Soon we are going to live in a world without Holocaust survivors, without a Holocaust survivor voice.” The findings follow the recent deaths of Ireland’s oldest man, Holocaust survivor Joe Veselsky, and Monika Sears, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto as a child and, later in life, spoke publicly in Ireland about the Holocaust.
The lack of Irish engagement with the reality of the Holocaust in the 1940s has been pondered by various historians. Clair Wills, author of That Neutral Island (2007) suggests “the crucial factor which lamed the humanitarian response was the inability to contemplate, let alone comprehend, the true meaning and scale of the Jewish persecution until it was far too late ... the reality was that a reporting of war denuded of all commentary, stripped of all specific reference to atrocity, produced its own kind of falsehood. Nowhere was this more evident than in the gap between what was known through diplomatic channels, and ordinary citizens’ lack of knowledge about the Jewish catastrophe”. There was an absence of public discourse, even with the liberation of Auschwitz, Belsen and Buchenwald in 1945.
READ MORE
We have new types of falsehood to contend with now, as an avalanche of digital content has replaced the denuding of old. Instead of censorship, we have an abundance of distortion, lies and denial, as history, or what purports to be history, is weaponised.
The expansion of social media has given even more force to the warning of historian Eric Hobsbawm in 1994: “the destruction of the past, or rather the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century. Most young men and women at the century’s end grow up in a permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times in which they live in with not enough of a shared idea of that public past”.
Social media and misinformation have made history even more important. As journalist Matthew d’Ancona put it in his 2017 book Post Truth, it is not just a case of conspiracy and denial, but “Truth out, emotion in”. He also elaborated on Holocaust denial in the digital age, which in some respects “is the template for what has become Post Truth”.
As a historian, David Irving became notorious for his Holocaust denial. In 2000 he sued American academic Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher over her assertion in her book, Denying the Holocaust, that “Irving is one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial. Familiar with historical evidence, he bends it until it conforms with his ideological leanings and political agenda”. Irving lost his High Court case in London, the judge asserting that Irving’s “falsification of the historical record was deliberate”, involving “distortion and manipulation of historical evidence”. He declared it was “incontrovertible that Irving qualifies as a Holocaust denier”
This, however, was far from the end of denial. Legal vindications are frail against the torrents of social media misinformation.
In 2017, d’Ancona also asked a question that now has even more urgency: “who is to say that the consolations of the conspiracist will be defeated by the cool rigours of truth?” The disregard for historical evidence may be consigned to the margins of news given the current havoc being wreaked by Donald Trump, but it is a central facet underpinning his new order. Watch closely how this year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States will be weaponised. The approach of the current US administration to this landmark may mirror their demand that the Smithsonian Institution museum group change the content of its exhibits found problematic by Trump’s fascist regime in “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals”.
