Europes Canned Outrage

There is outrage in Europe. Jean-Marie Le Pen has done it again. In a debate in the European Parliament on Wednesday, Le Pen repeated his well-known remark about the Nazi gas chambers being “a detail of the Second World War.” Indeed, he could hardly have avoided repeating it, since Le Pen was in fact quoting his earlier remark in order to defend himself against charges made the previous day by the German Socialist MEP Martin Schulz. Schulz had described Le Pen as a “Holocaust denier.” Le Pen in turn called Schulz’s comments “defamatory”: a reaction that would ordinarily lead one to conclude that Le Pen must not in fact deny the Holocaust. “I simply said that the gas chambers are a detail of the World War,” Le Pen explained. “This is self-evident [évident],” he added. (He did not say it was a “statement of fact,” as the AP mistranslated the phrase.) And, indeed, from the point of view of logic, how could anyone disagree with him? Given, moreover, that denying the existence of the gas chambers has long been the single most characteristic gesture of Holocaust denial or negationism, to call them a “detail” – a description that would appear, after all, to presuppose their existence – ought rather to be described as an, albeit tepid, form of “affirmationism.”

Who knows what in fact Le Pen was driving at when he first uttered his famous phrase way back in 1987? The context was a radio interview and Le Pen had been asked what he thought about the theses of two notorious French revisionists, Robert Faurisson and Henri Roques. “I haven’t made any special study of the question,” Le Pen allowed, while expressing his “hostility to every form of prohibition and regulation of thought.” As Le Pen reminded his auditors in the European Parliament on Wednesday, he would himself be fined the French franc equivalent of nearly €200,000 for his remarks.

One thing, in any case, is certain: far from preserving the memory of Nazi crimes, the ritualized denunciation of Le Pen’s famous remark in Europe today serves in fact to diminish them. The Nazis did not only slaughter six million Jews. They slaughtered tens of millions of innocent civilians throughout Europe: Russians, Poles, Serbs, Czechs, Frenchmen, Greeks, Italians, and so on. Although Jews obviously occupied a special place in Nazi ideology, the savagery visited by German forces upon the subjugated populations of Europe was every bit as much an expression of Nazi racism. This is especially evident in the treatment that was reserved for Slavs: or Slavic “sub-humans” [Untermenschen], as the Nazis liked to call them. According to the most recent estimates, a staggering 27 million Soviet citizens are now believed to have been killed during the Second World War, over half of them civilians. The treatment reserved for Red Army soldiers was in fact no less criminal. Soviet POWs were notoriously permitted to starve to death. Hundreds of thousands of Serb civilians were killed following the German invasion of Yugoslavia: many of them in concentration camps alongside their Jewish compatriots.

Indeed, even as concerns the Holocaust itself, the gas chambers were in fact a “detail” and by no means the whole story. An estimated one-fourth to one-third of the six million Jewish victims were killed by the mobile SS Einsatzgruppen that spread terror behind the advancing German lines as the Wehrmacht pushed into the Soviet Union. The preferred method of the Einsatzgruppen was a bullet in the back of the head. Nor was gassing the only method of killing employed in the death camps. Tens of thousands of Jews who were judged fit for work upon their arrival at the camps were literally worked to death. As Joseph Borkin recalls in his classic study of Auschwitz, The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben, the Buna work camp at Auschwitz “reduced slave labor to a consumable raw material, a human ore from which the mineral of life was systematically extracted.”

Moreover, the source of the latest denunciation of Le Pen should be considered: Martin Schulz, the head of the Socialist group in the European Parliament. Schulz provoked the pseudo-scandal by putting forward a motion designed to prevent Le Pen from becoming the honorary President of the parliament. According to the current rules, this would occur if the presently 80-year-old Le Pen should turn out to be the oldest MEP following the upcoming European elections in June. The prospect of the “old Fascist” and “Holocaust denier” opening the new session as honorary President was, Schulz said, “unacceptable.”

But, to adopt a phrase of Henryk Broder, whereas Martin Schulz appears to be very concerned about threats to dead Jews, he is evidently far less so about threats to Jews who are still living. Schulz has been one of the most vociferous members of the European Parliament in condemning Israel for using “disproportionate” force against its enemies and in making outrageous suggestions of moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. Already in November 2006, he was the co-sponsor of an EU parliament resolution condemning Israel for using “disproportionate” force and he repeated the charge during the recent Gaza War. Moreover, in a March 10 statement on “the situation in Gaza” [German link], Schulz made a point of condemning the “radicals on both sides.” He then went on to endorse a statement once made by Yitzhak Rabin, while giving it a twist that Rabin could surely never have imagined:

I find that in 1995 he said one of the most intelligent phrases: “We must pursue the peace process as if there was no terrorism, and we must fight terrorism as if there was no peace process.” That is the message for both sides.

Both sides? Does that mean that Hamas is also “fighting terrorism”? Schulz is, incidentally, a proponent of holding talks with Hamas. The open call for killing Jews in the Hamas Charter apparently represents no obstacle for him in this connection. 

Schulz has also come out in favor of “dialogue” with the Mullah regime in Iran, writing last November in the Financial Times Deutschland that Barack Obama’s openness to “diplomacy and dialogue” with Iran was “particularly welcome.” As noted above, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s famous remark about the gas chambers came in response to a question about the theses of the revisionist historian Robert Faurisson. As so happens, when the Iranian government held its infamous “Holocaust deniers conference” in Tehran in December 2006, one of the guests of honor was none other than Robert Faurisson. Faurisson’s paper on “The Victories of Revisionism” was dedicated “to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” as well as to the German neo-Nazi Horst Mahler.

Perhaps Martin Schulz would care someday to explain the double standard. In the meanwhile, observers should take Schulz and Co.’s canned outrage over Le Pen for what it is: an alibi.