Posted by Eric Muller (visiting from <a
href="http://www.isthatlegal.org/";>isthatlegal.org</a>):
BROADCASTING REVISIONISM:
Rather than just complaining (as I've noted, justifiably) about its
rhetoric, [1]Timothy Burke is thinking carefully about the substantive
point of the [2]historians' letter to the media about Michelle
Malkin's "In Defense of Internment."
He attributes Malkin's success in drawing uncritical attention from
the major media to two things: (a) her saying something contrarian
about a matter of current interest, and (b) her being mediagenic.
He then says this:
Taking all this into account, the Historians' Committee for
Fairness still has a valid fundamental point. How do you decide
what's worth covering and not covering? Because not everything that
is contrarian and potentially mediagenic gets the coverage--the
coverage without, for the most part, attention to the dissenting
views of others--that Malkin has. To put it bluntly, why does
Michelle Malkin get on television and David Irving, the infamous
Holocaust revisionist, not get on television? Irving's argument
that the Nazis did not actually set out to exterminate the Jews is
factually detailed and it's certainly contrarian, and he's actually
somewhat creepily mediagenic.
. . .
The Historians' Committee for Fairness may have gone about their
task the wrong way, but they're entitled to an answer to this
question from the media that have given Malkin a hearing. What
makes her work worthy of coverage when work of equivalent
shoddiness and offensiveness is regarded as absolutely off-limits?
Timothy Burke's point about David Irving and Holocaust revisionism
deserves a moment's reflection. Let's consider a hypothetical. Suppose
an author were to publish a book revisiting the pogroms across Germany
in November of 1938 that we know as "[3]Kristallnacht." Suppose that
author's thesis went something like this: "Yes, German and Austrian
Jews certainly and regrettably suffered in the attacks of November 9
and 10, 1938, and in the incarceration of some 26,000 in concentration
camps for a period of many weeks that followed. We have seen, time and
again, the images of the broken storefront windows and the burning
synagogues that the Jewish grievance community and politically correct
academics want us to see. We have been led to believe that this was an
unprovoked outburst of baseless hatred on the part of the German
people. But what Jews and academics do not tell you, and do not want
you to know, is that the so-called Kristallnacht had a real cause: A
Jew did, in fact, murder the German official Ernst vom Rath in Paris
on November 7, 1938, at the German Embassy, and documents from the
time show that Josef Goebbels knew this and saw the murder as proof of
a larger Jewish threat to the Reich."
This, in the context of the Holocaust, is the precise analogue of
Malkin's thesis about the Japanese American internment. Please note
that I'm not suggesting that Malkin herself believes or has ever said
any such thing about Kristallnacht specifically, or the Holocaust
generally. I am sure she does not. believe such a thing. I am also not
comparing Kristallnacht to the eviction of Japanese Americans. I am
instead making a point about the nature--the architecture, if you
will--of her argument. It is this: you have been led to believe that
what seems to be a groundless, racist government action lacked any
foundation and can therefore be explained only as an expression of
hatred, but that is not so; in fact, there was a real threat to the
government that supplied a foundation for what they did.
So, to return to Timothy Burke's observation: suppose that a
mediagenic author were to publish such a work. Would MSNBC, CNBC, Fox,
C-SPAN, HBO, and countless radio programs present that work at all? If
they did so, would they present it uncritically, and without rebuttal?
Of course they wouldn't. And so the question is: why the difference?
A couple of possible answers suggest themselves to me, and neither is
very attractive.
One is that it's easier for us to recognize malevolence in others'
ancestors (the Nazis) than in our own. Thus, what seems incontestably
unjustifiable in the history of others remains debatable in our own.
The other is that Holocaust survivors and their children and
grandchildren (full disclosure: I am one), and the Jewish community
more generally, would not countenance an unrebutted presentation of
such a work in the major media, whereas the Japanese American
community is to some extent still (as it was 60 years ago) a safe
target for such an assault.
In the end, [4]Timothy Burke is right:
"If the people who make decisions about programming and content at
the talk shows want to tell me and other historians that they
wouldn't put Irving on the air because what he says in his work is
factually specious and untrue (which it is), then they're telling
me that they make these decisions based either on their own
personal and professional assessments of the factual truthfulness
of works of non-fiction, or they make these decisions based on
consultation with experts about what is reasonable, plausible,
debatably true work and what is poor, scurrilous, offensive lies.
If this is true, the question becomes potent: why is Michelle
Malkin on the air now? Because if talk show producers consult
experts on internment, they'd certainly find that almost everyone
thinks Malkin's work is shoddy and inaccurate, quite aside from its
ethical character. If talk show hosts read and assess work
independently to decide whether it is worth covering, then I'm
hard-pressed to understand why they think Malkin's is legitimate.
And if they just put people on the air because they're mediagenic
and interestingly contrarian, I again ask: why not Holocaust
revisionists? What sets the boundaries of the fringes, and doesn't
the expert assessment of intellectuals and scholars matter in that
boundary-setting?"
References
1. http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/7143.html
2.
http://www.isthatlegal.org/archives/2004_08_29_isthatlegal_archive.html#109404285228914607
3. http://www.mtsu.edu/~baustin/knacht.html
4. http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/7143.html
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