`Truthers' schuld de V.S. en Groot-Brittannië voor de Holocaust
Woensdag, 16 April, 2008In de spoedig-aan--gepubliceerde roman van Salman Rushdie, Enchantress van Florence, is één van de karakters Niccolò Machiavelli, de originele donkere prins van machtspolitiek. IL Machia, aangezien hij wordt geroepen, wordt afgebeeld als toegewijde tegenstander van duidelijk. `Hij geloofde in… verborgen waarheid de manier andere mensen die in God worden geloofd of de liefde, geloofde dat de waarheid altijd in feite verborgen was, die duidelijk, openlijk, was onveranderlijk een soort leugen.'
Zonder twijfel zijn wij allemaal over individuen gekomen met wat politely ultra-sceptische vooruitzichten zou kunnen worden genoemd. Het soort mensen die uitdrukkingen zoals `de bevoegdheden gebruiken die' zonder een snuifje van ironie zijn. De zekerheid, niet twijfel, is eigenlijk hun het bepalen trek, hun zekere kennis dat geheimzinnige, omniscient `zij' altijd verantwoordelijk zijn. Verlaten aan zijn eigen apparaten, kan dit soort mentaliteit charmingly bijna zonderling lijken. Maar twee ontwikkelingen hebben de laatste jaren draai een hoofdzakelijk onschadelijke gevoeligheid in iets geholpen die een sinistere ideologie nadert.
De eerste was de postmodern aanval op het begrip van objectieve waarheid die academische gunst in de jaren '80 en de jaren '90 vond. Een generatie van menswetenschappen en sociale wetenschappenstudenten ging door de theoriemolen en leerde dat de werkelijkheid eenvoudig een culturele bouw, een media gebak is. Aangezien zeer weinig academics, laat staan niet-gegradueerden, ooit `' deconstructionism werden, bereikte een beet-gerangschikte verscheidenheid populariteit: `die' problematising.
Deze vereenvoudiging moedigde de overtuiging dat aan, als George Walden zodra het zet, de uitzondering niet meer de regel bewijst, is het de regel. Als u `kon problematise' één enkel spanningspunt van geschil, dan zou het gehele verhaal van objectiviteit instorten.
De tweede ontwikkeling was Internet, dat, voor al zijn diverse voordelen, ook heeft helpen de hiërarchie van bewijskrachtige waarheid in één enorme massa van concurrerende waarnemingen afvlakken. Daar op de onbegrensde uitzicht van het Web, schijnen het empirische feit en het wilde gerucht vaak om het gelijke factureren te delen.
Breng deze twee tendensen samen, voeg een wijdverspreide verdenking van Westelijke overheden en een groeiende verveling met liberale democratie toe, en u krijgt de ideale voorwaarden voor welke bedragen aan intellectuele nihilism. Misschien is het ongehoordste voorbeeld van deze het als paddestoelen uit de grond schieten cultus 9/11 `Truthers', die barmy leger van advies dat van mening is dat de officiële versie van gebeurtenissen die aan die dag leiden een overheidssamenzwering is.
The Truthers pride themselves on merely asking rather than answering questions. To which end, they ignore everything that supports the accepted version and concentrate on what they claim are its weak points - for example, the rapid collapse of the towers - to cast doubt on the overall story. Thus the exception becomes the rule.
But in fact the Truthers play host to various counterfactual theories - some of the more restrained hypotheses propose that it was an inside job, the planes were not passenger jets, and the Pentagon was not hit by a plane.
At the impressionable end of the scale, where rank naivety and fashionable cynicism merge, Charlie Sheen has promoted such theories and the Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard has suggested that the destruction of the World Trade Centre was a ‘money-sucker’ designed to avoid the cost of rewiring the towers. At the (only slightly) more sophisticated end, writers like Gore Vidal, and the Labour MP Michael Meacher, have speculated that some within the US administration may have had cause to turn a blind eye to the hijackers.
But it’s one thing to blame America for the attack on America. That’s hardly radical. No, if you really want to lay waste to the notion of historical truth and the fundamental principles on which Western democratic society is based, then you need to go one step further. You need to blame America for the attack on Nazi Germany.
Even within the liberal arts world, where America has long been a byword for injustice, bellicosity and corruption, Nazi Germany has remained the ultimate example of evil. And that presents a philosophical problem for the most zealous Bush-haters within the arts. If America helped stop a more depraved regime once, is it not at least theoretically possible that it could do the same again?
The common answer is to point out that Iraq and Afghanistan were hardly superpowers bent on global domination. The drawback to that response is that it’s a limited, pragmatic position - a politician’s argument - that lacks the kind of moral righteousness that appeals to a certain artistic imagination.
The bold solution, then, is to reposition Nazi Germany as the victim, and America (and Britain) as the aggressors. This, in essence, is the job the novelist Nicholson Baker appears to have taken on in his new non-fiction book Human Smoke. Baker, who in his novel The Fermata explored the erotics of excreting, seems here to immerse himself in its politics. He is the outrider for paranoid revisionism.
According to Adam Kirsch, writing in the New York Sun, Baker sets out to ‘convince the reader that America should not have fought Germany or Japan; that Franklin Roosevelt connived to get us into the war at the behest of the arms manufacturers, and probably knew about the bombing of Pearl Harbor in advance; that Winston Churchill was a proto-fascist; that in Japan’s invasion of China, China was the aggressor; that after the fall of France, Churchill was culpable in vowing to fight on, and not acceding to Hitler’s “peace” terms; that the Holocaust was, at least in part, Hitler’s response to British aggression, and that the only people who demonstrated true wisdom in the run-up to the war were American and British pacifists.’
Again, Baker’s method, according to Kirsch, is to ignore the overwhelming wealth of material that contradicts the above claims and to focus on any seeming anomalies or exceptions that support his case, no matter what the source. So, for example, in seeking to offload at least some of the blame for the Holocaust on to the British, Baker cites the mayor of Hanover’s reason for deporting Jews to the East, namely that the British bombing campaign had created a housing shortage.
There is much to be said against the British bombing of German cities, and indeed much has been said and written of a critical nature. But it can never be argued that it precipitated the Holocaust, quite simply because it did not, as any self-respecting historian would confirm, supported by a mountain of empirical evidence.
It’s essential for healthy intellectual debate that conventional wisdom is challenged. However, that requires an engagement with reality, not its negation. The mentality that sees 9/11 and 7/7 as government conspiracies, and the Second World War as a singular tale of Allied guilt, refuses to see what’s staring it in the face, so has no choice but to search for buried clues. Sometimes, though, the apparent is true because the only thing hidden is lies.
See More:HistoryShare Your Thoughts on ‘Truthers’ blame US and Britain for the HolocaustPlease note, not all comments will be published. '
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008at 9:19 pmand is filed under 9/11 Truth, Political News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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