To the Editor:

The most intriguing detail of Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s “Lies About the Holocaust” [December 1980] is the report that Noam Chomsky is among the most vigorous defenders of Robert Faurisson’s inalienable right to propagate, from a university chair, the neo-Nazi lie that the Holocaust is a Zionist invention. This is, I think, the same Chomsky who in countless speeches over a decade ago explicitly denied to proponents of our involvement in Vietnam the right to free speech anywhere, and in a book called American Power and the New Mandarins (1968) wrote that “by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one’s humanity.” Apparently, since he takes an “agnostic” view on the question of whether or not the Jews of Europe really were murdered, Chomsky does not fear that his “humanity” is endangered by neo-Nazism. Or has he recently become a convert to Millite liberalism, one whose zeal for free speech swells in proportion to the anti-Zionism of the speaker?

Edward Alexander
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington

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To the Editor:

I wish to take exception to the distorted picture of Harry Elmer Barnes presented by Lucy S. Dawidowicz in “Lies About the Holocaust.” I cannot reconcile the Barnes whose many books I used over the years, both as an undergraduate and graduate student, with Mrs. Dawidowicz’s characterization of him as “a fanatical Roosevelt hater,” “shrill, irresponsible, and irrational,” “guru to . . . neo-Nazi cranks and crackpots,” a writer with the “shamelessness of a habitual liar.”

Barnes (1889-1968) was a most respected sociologist and a prolific writer and editor of some twenty-five books. His books were solid, substantial, scholarly—models of clear, concise presentations of sociological thinkers and their doctrines. One does not disparage scholarly excellence because a writer “produced no original scholarly work but synthesized information,” or because one does not like his views on the origins of World War I, Pearl Harbor, and American participation in World War II.

Post-World War I revisionism was in some measure a product of widespread disillusionment. The gap between the idealism of Wilson (the Fourteen Points) and the Treaty of Versailles (a product of the intractability of Georges Clemenceau and Lloyd George) was great, leading to a rejection of both the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations by the United States Senate, and a revaluation of the role of the Allied powers by some American scholars.

Barnes’s The Genesis of the World War, a book of some 750 pages, appeared in 1926—an original piece of historical writing, not “synthesized information.” Barnes did not exonerate Germany from a share of the war guilt, but gave what he considered “overwhelming proof” that Serbia, Russia, and France were also guilty. Carl Becker, a prominant historian of the period, characterized the book as “a marvellously straight, swift, cogent presentation of facts and conclusions.”

After the rise of Hitler to power, however, a revision of the revisionists became evident. Observing how the Germans were behaving during World War II, critics found it relatively easy to denounce Barnes for doubting that the Germans were likewise culpable and responsible for World War I.

Mrs. Dawidowicz gives no indication that there were opponents of American participation in World War II other than Nazis, cranks, and crackpots. Among those expressing their opposition were: Charles A. Beard, John Dewey, Norman Thomas, Chester Bowles, Oswald Garrison Villard, Harry Emerson Fosdick, William Benton, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and others. . . .

The full and definitive story of Pearl Harbor has yet to be written, [but] there is considerable evidence to cast doubt upon the official version: a sudden, unanticipated, treacherous attack which precipitated the United States into the war. . . .

According to Barnes and others, President Roosevelt had already committed the United States to war by the massive supply of guns, arms, munitions, and destroyers to Britain. Tension had been steadily building up between the United States and Japan as a result of the embargo on shipments of oil arid scrap iron to Japan. The United States had broken the Japanese code and was familiar with the operations of the Japanese fleet in the Far Pacific. Roosevelt expected that hostile action of the Japanese fleet would bring the United States directly into the war. . . .

A careful reading of Barnes’s pamphlets—Was Roosevelt Pushed Into the War by Popular Demand in 1941? (1950) and The Struggle Against Historical Blackout (undated but published about the same year)—reveals a rational presentation of his position, with no more, perhaps even less, shrill animosity and hostility toward his opponents than Mrs. Dawidowicz exhibits in her own article. . . .

The only real case Mrs. Dawidowicz can make against Barnes stems from the writings of his last few years. Here he seems to have become obsessed with his cause and have lost his sense of rationality in arguing, among other things, as Mrs. Dawidowicz reports, that the atrocities of the Allies were greater than those of the Nazis. This is deeply to be regretted.

Mrs. Dawidowicz makes much of the neo-Nazi ideology of the Revisionist Convention, sponsored by the Institute of Historical Review in 1979, and dedicated to the memory of Barnes. . . . [But] Barnes cannot be held accountable or responsible for those acting in his name after his death.

It would be a grave injustice to belittle Barnes’s vast sociological writings and to denigrate his serious efforts to bring greater insight into the causes of World War I and of the American involvement in World War II and to remember him only as “shrill, irresponsible, and irrational” and a “habitual liar.”. . .

William Isaacs
Bronx, New York

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To the Editor:

In an article that was, for the most part, properly indignant about Nazi apologists, Lucy S. Dawidowicz makes the disastrous mistake of likening revisionist interpretations of World War II to the revisionist historiography of the 1920’s. Although there were some historians who became revisionists of both wars, out of a continuing commitment to American isolationism, critical differences should be noted between the two revisionist schools. World War I revisionists, unlike those writers Mrs. Dawidowicz condemns, were at their best discriminating and balanced scholars. Sidney Fay was not an apologist for imperial Germany, but someone who recognized the bias of wartime polemics and postwar memoirs. He studied the war’s outbreak by focusing on the diplomatic blunders and political indiscretions that both sides had committed. Contrary to Mrs. Dawidowicz’s comments, Fay was in fact more critical of Germany’s role in the war than of England’s, but he did stress the shared responsibility of all the major belligerents, and of two minor ones, Austria and Serbia, in igniting the fatal fuse.

As I tried to show in a review article for the American Spectator in 1973, Fritz Fischer has not “put to rest” the argument about responsibility for World War I, as Mrs. Dawidowicz states. . . . In point of fact, Fischer has revived a controversy which Raymond Aron and Gerhard Ritter had tried to settle in the 1950’s by documenting the series of blunders among the original belligerents leading to the war. Fischer, in contrast, presents the eruption of struggle as the premeditated working-out of Germany’s pre-1914 dream of world empire. Unhappily for his thesis, this interpretation rests on little more than conjecture and attempts at impugning his opponents as German nationalists. Fischer does cite annexationist German war plans constructed, among others, by Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, but fails to remind his readers of two obvious facts. These plans were produced during the war itself, and their aims were hardly more arrogant than the plans then being devised in other wartime chancelleries. Far from establishing a historiographical consensus, Fischer has evoked critical comments from a variety of scholars—e.g., Egmont Zechlin, Golo Mann, and Joachim Remak—few of whom can be accused of harboring affection for Kaiser Wilhelm.

I have raised these points because of a persistent tendency among American scholars, including Mrs. Dawidowicz, to extrapolate hastily from Nazi behavior to the general outlines of German history. Often this tendency has expressed itself as indiscriminate Teutonophobia, which has actually blurred, not dramatized, the distinctness of Nazi brutality within the context of German history. A.J.P. Taylor, a reinterpreter of Hitler whom I find as offensive as does Mrs. Dawidowicz, can trivialize the Nazi experience partly because of his long-publicized anti-German feelings. Hitler, Taylor assures us, was tout simplement a German leader: no more and, in some ways, even less destructive of international order than the German regime in 1914. To me, however, it seems the two wars did develop out of substantially different causes and involved German governments with differing degrees of responsibility. And even at the risk of being called a political extremist, a charge that Mrs. Dawidowicz levels at Fay and his disciples, I shall continue to believe that the German imperial government in 1914, unlike the Nazi state in 1939, was colossally inept, but not brutally bellicose.

Paul Gottfried
Rockford College
Rockford, Illinois

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To the Editor:

I read Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s article with interest. Unfortunately, her statement that “the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, working together with Melbourne’s Jewish community, mounted an exhibit on the Holocaust” is incorrect. The Australian Holocaust Exhibition was conceived and initiated by the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Committee in Melbourne. It was organized in conjunction with the Jewish cultural center “Kadimah,” the Jewish Heritage Committee of the Victorian Jewish Board of Deputies, the Australian Jewish Museum, and others. . . . The Victorian Council of Churches also agreed to cooperate. The exhibition received wide press coverage and was very well attended: hundreds of students from both Jewish and non-Jewish schools visited it. Literature about Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Nazi era and about Nazi atrocities and extermination camps was disseminated. In addition to the photographs, a special film was shown, in which survivors of ghettos and death camps described their experiences.

The exhibition was a good occasion to remind and inform the Australian community about the Nazi plan to destroy the European Jews.

At no time did the German Embassy take part in organizing or subsidizing the exhibition, nor were they asked to do so. The Holocaust Exhibition will be shown in other cities and towns in Australia, and the film is to be shown in other countries as well.

Jacob Kronhill
Melbourne, Australia

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Lucy S. Dawidowicz writes:

First of all, a correction. It turns out that there are two Revisionist presses. One, using a New Jersey post-box, is supported by the German-American National Congress and has promoted Butz’s book. A second, using a Brooklyn post-box, has published Barnes’s “revisionist” essay and the Morris book which accorded the neo-Nazi deniers of the Holocaust legitimacy as historians.

William Isaacs is too zealous in defense of the early Barnes. I did not address myself to the general politics of World War II isolationism, but only to Barnes’s malevolent hysteria. Mr. Isaacs might well ponder why the galaxy of notable isolationists headed by Charles Beard himself never admitted Barnes to their company. Even as early as 1940, Barnes had already discredited himself.

Paul Gottfried attributes to me statements about Sidney Fay that I never made and never would make. Presumably a historian, Mr. Gottfried ought to recognize a particular obligation to be accurate and honest. As for the Fischer controversy, Fischer’s chief opponents were Gerhart Ritter and Egmont Zechlin. Ritter, one of Germany’s historians of the old school, especially objected because he feared that widespread acceptance of Fischer’s view would lower the Germans’ sense of their national self-esteem. Zechlin’s politics, rather than his historical professionalism, probably account for his anti-Fischer position. For the present, it appears that Fischer’s views have prevailed.