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– DENIAL – claims felt like a duty; it also felt like a disappointment. Although I was never taken in, I almost envied those who were. My Jewish upbringing meant that I had been conscious of the Holocaust from an early age. As a teen who liked to read radical anti-fascist publications such as Searchlight, I also heard about Holocaust denial, although I never encountered it first-hand. This was pre-Internet, and it took commitment to track down such works – commitment that, as a soft suburban Jew, I didn’t have. But I did yearn to explore this demi-monde. What could be sillier than arguing the ­Holocaust never happened? It was all a big joke to me. A Jewish university friend and I used to fantasise about forming a Jewish metal band that espoused Holocaust denial and boasted that we really do kill Christian kids and use their blood in our Passover rituals. On holiday in Egypt, another Jewish friend and I visited bookstores to ask if they stocked Did Six Million Really Die? and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. What larks! Today, it’s harder for me to see the fun in all this. The breezy insouciance with which I consumed ‘altern­ative’ scholarship was based on the assumption that none of it really mattered. In my cynical, self-absorbed late teens and twenties during the smug 1990s there was no reason to think that neo-Nazis were anything other than marginal idiots; alternate histories and ­conspiracy theories similarly appeared to pose no threat to anyone. viii
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– Preface – I should have looked harder. It wasn’t just neo-Nazis and fringe cranks who were constructing alternative scholarship; big business and conservative politics were doing it too. Of course, I knew that there were those who denied nicotine was addictive, who tried to prove that environmental pollution wasn’t happening or wasn’t harmful. I was appalled at this, but it wasn’t my major worry. What I didn’t spot was either their longterm determination to prevail or the threads that tied them to the shady world that I refused to take seriously. Mea culpa. We are a long way from the smug certainties of 1990s liberalism, and my attitude to those who challenge real scholarship is no longer one of indulgence. As I will show in this book, for decades, centuries even, something deeply poisonous has been growing. This poisonous process has produced diseased fruit in our ‘post-truth’ age. My focus is on denial and denialism, which deploy a cluster of techniques that enable those with unspeakable desires to pursue them covertly. What I thought were simply ridiculous (if sometimes nasty) examples of human loopiness, are much more than that. ­Holocaust denial is not just eccentricity; it is an attempt to legitimate genocide through covert means. Denials of the harmfulness of tobacco, of the existence of global warming, and other denialisms, are, similarly, projects to legitimate the unspeakable. Yet I have retained just enough of my youthful indulgence that my approach to denial and ­denialism ix

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– Preface –

I should have looked harder. It wasn’t just neo-Nazis and fringe cranks who were constructing alternative scholarship; big business and conservative politics were doing it too. Of course, I knew that there were those who denied nicotine was addictive, who tried to prove that environmental pollution wasn’t happening or wasn’t harmful. I was appalled at this, but it wasn’t my major worry. What I didn’t spot was either their longterm determination to prevail or the threads that tied them to the shady world that I refused to take seriously.

Mea culpa. We are a long way from the smug certainties of 1990s liberalism, and my attitude to those who challenge real scholarship is no longer one of indulgence. As I will show in this book, for decades, centuries even, something deeply poisonous has been growing. This poisonous process has produced diseased fruit in our ‘post-truth’ age.

My focus is on denial and denialism, which deploy a cluster of techniques that enable those with unspeakable desires to pursue them covertly. What I thought were simply ridiculous (if sometimes nasty) examples of human loopiness, are much more than that. ­Holocaust denial is not just eccentricity; it is an attempt to legitimate genocide through covert means. Denials of the harmfulness of tobacco, of the existence of global warming, and other denialisms, are, similarly, projects to legitimate the unspeakable.

Yet I have retained just enough of my youthful indulgence that my approach to denial and ­denialism ix

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