 Live for the two o'clock block here on ThinkDeck on a given Friday, it feels like Monday, doesn't it? And we have Julian Gorbach, he's an assistant professor of journalism at the journalism program in the School of Communication at UH Manoa, and we like so much to have him here because he helps us get a philosophical lift on things. And among other things, he is among being a journalist and a reporter par excellence and a philosopher, a media philosopher, you know, serious. He's also a scholar in the Holocaust, which is very important. So today we're going to talk about, you know, the public discussion around the Holocaust. And before the show began, Julian, I was asking you or suggesting that me, myself, I have always been concerned about the denial of the Holocaust, but it hasn't been that long. When did the denial, when did you hear voices of the denial? Was it 1960, 1970, as late as 1980? But those voices seem to have taken root these days, and there are a lot of people and groups in the world who deny it, or if they don't affirmatively deny it, they forget about it. It's inconsequential to them. This is very troubling. Do you think those thoughts too? Yeah, I don't know when Holocaust denial really took off. I've never really read about the subject, but I do know, you know, just from what I've learned about like Deborah Lipstadt, the woman who's, you know, written as a major Holocaust scholar, that certainly by the 80s, Holocaust denial was going on, was a real thing. And there were, you know, Holocaust revisionism, I guess, efforts to kind of write the Holocaust out of history or deny it because David Irving was publishing, you know, the one who tried to sue Lipstadt for libel when she accused him of Holocaust denial. His books were being published in the 80s, and so she was pointing to those. So he denied the Holocaust, and she sued him, but he sued her for speaking out for the proposition that he was denying the Holocaust. Yeah, I think that as far as I know, and again, I'm not even really well-versed altogether in that case, except that I do know that when she originally was criticizing him, it had already evolved to the point where Irving had set himself up as a serious scholar, even though he doesn't have a doctrine or anything. You know, I don't think he has very much formal education, but he had taught himself German, and he was one of the first people to really dig deep into the Nazi archives, the German archives. In German, of course, what came out during the trial was that he had been digging into the archives, but he had also been screwing with what the German actually said, what the documents actually said. He had been misrepresenting what the texts were. But I believe he had set up sort of a pseudo-academic journal. I mean, it had all the appearances of a serious academic journal, but it was basically a home for Holocaust denialism, and that was already up and running by the 90s by the time she started pointing him out because her point wasn't just that he was a run-of-the-mill denialist or revisionist. It was that he had developed this whole kind of veneer about him of being a serious scholar and had brought all these other revisionists, Holocaust revisionists along with it. She's, of course, an American Jewish scholar, but he sued her in England because the Holocaust, I mean, the libel laws are much stricter than they are in the United States. And so, oddly enough, in England, and in her case, the burden of proof is on the person accused, which is oddly enough because you would think that the burden of proof would be on the accuser for libel, but she actually had to prove that she was not guilty of libel, which set a pretty high bar, but they met it. This is so similar to the QB7 novel where, I guess, a writer pointed out that a particular person was associated with the Nazis, and he sued the writer, the Nazi sued the writer, and then the writer had to prove that he was a Nazi, that the Nazi was a Nazi. It was the same burden of proof issue. And QB7 is Queen's Bench 7, a British court in London. It's the same story, except that was fiction, I think. So, here's a hard question for you, though. Is there a connection between denial and anti-Semitism? I mean, I think that the issues, like in the David Irving case, were really on top of each other, because a lot of what it came down to in, I think, the final stretches of the case were whether David Irving really believed what he was arguing, because he was an anti-Semite, or not. But I don't know, but this gets into intentionality and all that kind of thing, but it'd be hard for me to understand why you would want to argue against what had happened to the Jews in Germany. I mean, I don't know. There's an interesting case of Schultzberger, the guys, the family that had owned the New York Times, and Arthur Hayes Schultzberger. And the fact that because he was part of the reformist Jewish movement of the early 20th century, in that time, you could argue that this was a kind of self-hatred, Jewish self-hatred, but there was an effort, you know, there was that conflict between the German Jews that had been there since the mid-19th century, and the boatloads of East European Jews that had started to appear by the late 19th century and early 20th century. And there was, you could argue coming out of that, or it's been argued that the reformist movement tried to stipulate that, well, Judaism wasn't a peoplehood. It was a belief, like it was religion, not a peoplehood. And so therefore, you weren't actually Jewish unless you practiced Judaism, believed in Judaism. In other words, you weren't born Jewish just because your parents were Jewish. And that kind of seeped into the editorial policy of the New York Times during the coverage of the Holocaust because that meant that the editorial policy of the New York Times during that whole catastrophe was to refer to Jewish victims as people or refugees, but not as Jews, even though they were being forced to wear the Jewish stars. Characterized as Jews by the Nazis. And yeah, even though they were traced as Jews through their blood and were forced to wear the Jewish star, it didn't matter whether you believed in Judaism or not. And they were slaughtered for that. But the way that it was being reported in the leading American newspaper was not that they were being targeted or murdered for being Jews, but that they were people who were targeted by the Nazis. So it clouded things. So you could argue to the extent that that would be denialism. But still, you have that kind of overlap even in that kind of horrific story because you could argue that there was kind of a, in a way, a self-hatred that's sold burger. Laurel Leff, by the way, who's a professor at Northeastern and a friend of mine wrote Buried by the Times, which has really lays out this whole argument. Interesting. So back to my question, I'm just giving you my own logic. Yeah. We know, we who have cracked a book at any point in our lives, we know that the Holocaust took place. And it's not even cracking a book. It's watching all the movies and all the media that have, you know, been covering our society globally for the past 75 years. We know the Holocaust took place. There is no basis for denial, none. And yet there are people who deny. Could they be anything other than anti-Semitic? I don't know. I mean, I guess that, you know, some people can be manipulated. And there's always that worry. But I think that, I mean, we're into deep speculation. I mean, to me, it's, you know, for all intents and purposes, the important thing is the way it plays into people's animosities, that they're, you know, that the reason why it's either for the people who are preaching it or for the people where that belief that it didn't happen takes root in them, it has to do with playing on the idea that Jews are seeking some kind of special pleading, gaining some advantage from claiming victimhood, that they claim to be special victims or unique victims, and that then you get into what you're playing on in order to get people to believe that it never happened is some underlying sentiments of, these people over here are Jews and they're not me and I don't like these people. They seem to be doing A, B or C. That kind of xenophobia, the kind of typical stuff that people feel that I guess is embedded in us being people to see other people and say, well, we don't like them because there are other people playing one group of people off another, that kind of thing. And that seems to be, to me, but we're psychologizing about it. I mean, you know, and so you're necessarily speculating when you do that. If we had somebody here at this table who was a denier, I would really love to ask that person some questions and see what the psychology was. But let's move on. Let's move on to what brought us together on this occasion, and that is analogizing concentration camps and Nazi's current events, which happened in the news. And this is a controversy, if you want to call it that, over Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's recent remarks about concentration camps, which some people feel is a special term reserved to real concentration camps, as they existed in the 30s and 40s, and Nazi's as they existed in the 30s and 40s. Can you describe this controversy so we can get a handle on it? Yeah. Well, one of the things I try and do, it's interesting, because you said before that you sort of see me as a philosopher, that I philosophize. I do. And I'm a historian, or a media historian, but there's a reason why I think that you sort of see the philosophical side of that, because philosophy is a really important part of it, but we can get into that in a minute. The point is that one of the things I like to do, whether we're talking about the original history or like this controversy, is to look very carefully to trace the lines of thought, what's said and the actual words and that, and to the extent that what we say also represents what we think. And so, Kazia Cortes had put this out on Instagram and then had also tweeted it, but it was basically she had referred to the current detention facilities that we have for the, yeah, for the, well, for all the migrants, I think, but we've been particularly concerned about the treatment of the children, although the treatment of the adults has been pretty egregious too. But she, compared to that, the concentration case, but she also evoked, and I think, like, it was a two-sentence kind of a statement, a very brief one, but the second one was she evoked the never-again, sort of... Oh, never-again, right, which is a phrase about the Holocaust. I don't know if you had this experience, but I grew up with that term, never-again. Right, with the Holocaust, like let's never let this happen again. We can't let that happen again. So then the, I think, one of the initial responses was from Yad Vashem, the Israeli official Holocaust Museum in Israel. And there's some interesting reporting that's gone on about the connection between the statements of Yad Vashem now and its management and the connection between that and the Netanyahu government and their politics. But they immediately responded by saying basically that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should educate herself about concentration camps and the Jews and talking about the fact that the statement went on about how like the concentration camps had been these labor camps to kind of work Jews to death and then the gassing that went on in them and arguing that by comparing what was going on in the current American facilities to the concentration camps, she was belittling the cruelty that the Jews had suffered. And then the United States Holocaust Museum came out with a statement referencing another statement from months earlier and the headline of that was I think why Holocaust analogies are dangerous and it was written by a historian who works for the Holocaust Museum that the original statement that the new Memorial Museum had referred to was a longer piece that was written months ago by Edna Friedberg who's this historian and it was it's not really exactly a statement it was kind of an essay in a way arguing that analogies to the Holocaust have been used and abused and all these different kinds of things. What the message is, don't. Don't make the analogies. I mean I guess you know not to mischaracterize her I mean now we're getting you know it's become particularly important to be precise in language or whatever. Yes it is, it's a really sensitive subject. And so she's pushing back and seeing being very careful because the analogies can be dangerous and the Holocaust has been used and abused in all these different ways. We don't want you to abuse these words now. And she brought up some interesting examples some of which kind of bothered me that she tried to use them as examples of ways the Holocaust has been abused. Like what? Well I mean one of her examples of how it's been terribly abused was that animal rights groups have referred to like the Holocaust on your plate. That's a long way. Well I mean I you know Jay I mean it's interesting because you've heard me talk about denial and climate change and the mass extinction of species and I think that you know I'm someone who's in front of young people every day who are looking at really really serious environmental problems in this world and are looking at you know by the time they're 50 years old or older what's our world going to look at and I don't think that they consider treatment of other species or treatment of animals to be I mean I think that older generations you know had different views of animal rights and saw animals over here and humans over here and it was offensive to talk about the dignity of animal life in the same category of human life and it was considered to a large extent like a bizarre or irrational to talk about the cruelty of experimenting on animals for example for medical research you know I know I remember my father's generation my father's a physician and for a number of people in his generation they thought animal rights people were crazy for trying to push back on experimenting on animals but I don't know I mean I think that like I mean does anyone want to sit through I've never been able to sit through a documentary about how the slaughterhouse industry works or whatever I mean it's horrifying the fact that we ignore it every day doesn't mean that it isn't horrifying and I think that people who take that seriously aren't trying to belittle the Holocaust I think to the contrary I think that they just see some of this stuff differently and so for her to kind of to me it bothered me that she trotted that out as an example of ways we abuse the Holocaust because in a future time we may look at the way that we you know treat animals when we in our massive slaughterhouse industry with horror because of the way we do it Well this is it's usage it's English you're a professor of journalism it's usage usage is change the definitions of words change even words that are highly charged at one point in history they become in different use well I mean I think you know I think this whole controversy is the reason why I talked to you about it I think it's really interesting to talk about it is it's very deep controversy with very strong arguments on both sides both of which need to be respected I think there's a real case to be made that a real concern about belittling or not doing due respect to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and kind of being sloppy in the way we throw around the ideas but I also think that a lot of us would never have become historians or would never dig into history if we didn't feel like it was important and it's not important because it happened in the past it's important because of what's happening today it informs us of things that happen and I mean if you just think about you know this is not the first time we've been on your show and if you think about and it's not the first time we've talked about the Holocaust and if we were to now have to go back to every conversation we've had about relating the Holocaust and pick it apart and say well that's offensive for you to relate it to this or that's offensive for you to relate it to that I mean I think we've needed to talk about the Holocaust but at the same time I mean you and I could sit here and we could come up with examples I mean like I remember people compared Obamacare to the Holocaust people compared efforts to enforce gun control to the Nazis and to Nazism and now as liberals Seinfeld had the soup Nazi yeah okay so the Seinfeld had the soup Nazi and he was a soup Nazi because you had to have his soup and it just it was take off in that word maybe we forgot exactly what the details are but we remembered that the Nazis were very methodical and disciplined and they didn't make exceptions to the rules and all that sort of hard kind of way of dealing with people but see this gets at the heart of like what's good history and what's bad history right and when you said you sort of see me as a bit of a philosopher there's different schools of history okay one of them is political history what's been called like kings and battles we say okay Hitler rose to power there was the battle of the bulge etc etc you know the kind of hard facts and events of political history are very traditional history that goes way back but another very long-standing school of history is intellectual history which is the argument that that ideas not events are what make history so like when Caesar crosses the Rubicon as an event that literally might have been a guy walks across a river called the Rubicon but the Rubicon meant certain things to Caesar and to the Romans at the time and so Caesar crossing the Rubicon wasn't just this guy crossing a river because of what ideas mean and so so like a lot of language and like concentration camps or other terms we have to be as historians and doing good history you have to look at what the word meant at the time to the people using it absolutely like that somebody wrote a book called the collaboration which was basically accusing Jewish movie moguls of collaborating with the Nazis in suppressing the persecution of Jews from the Hollywood movie screens and that created this uproar part of his argument was well I went back and looked at the German archives and they're using this word and I think he even goes so far to talk about the different words in German for collaboration and how it's used etc but so these words can get really loaded like I've written a biography and I refer to the main subject of it been hacked as a romanticist I don't mean he's romantic in a way like when you give somebody a hallmark card for Valentine's Day that's very romantic I'm talking about the debate between the people who were the kind of supporters of the enlightenment and the next generation that came that pushed back on that that we call the romanticists which doesn't really have much to do with being romantic and being sentimental or the specific events of history is the ideas of history yeah and the words and the fact that words like a word that we use now like race meant something to people in 1865 that it doesn't necessarily mean to people in 2019 what's the piece now where people feel that the flag that Betsy Ross was faithful to the American 13 states 13 colony flag back in 1776 is negative and that people are adopting this flag as a statement of white supremacy it's very interesting they don't know that this was the original flag of the United States as it was formed they don't know that but they attached to it white supremacy it becomes the Confederate flag brought current I mean in the public mind it's very strange how it all changes and it's totally inaccurate so one of the issues with concentration camps is that the word existed before you had the Nazis moving into the 1943 final solution at that stage you know there were concentration camps before there was a Nazi Germany so to some degree are we saying that that Alexandria to her test I doubt she thought all this that kind of thing through like she didn't know that I don't think she was like saying it with the awareness of like well concentration camps were used at the time of the war she was using lingo and you know she's in a generation that uses lingo but we were almost out of time quickly the time passes Julian you joined in a letter on this very issue about analogizing the terms of concentration camps and never again and Nazis by her and others you signed a letter with your view of that can you talk about that letter for a moment well you know I had already had my own thinking about it but what I found really striking when I actually found out there was this letter that all other scholars I think there's something like 400 of us now signed it it's an extremely strong statement because it what it says is that the United States Holocaust Museum has put their credibility on the line and that they're really in danger right now of damaging their relationship with the academic community unless they it the letter kind of demands that they retract these recent statements and as far as I know there hasn't been a response yet from the United States Holocaust Museum but I'm eager for them to make them because I do think that at a certain point they need to add some nuance certainly that headline why Holocaust analogies are dangerous is pretty strong and there needs to be more nuance but you know one of my own views is that there's all these really important aspects of the Holocaust we're gonna get outraged at Alexandria Ocasio Cortez that's pretty distorted because we've allowed President Trump to campaign and use as a motto America first you cannot if you want to talk about offensive terminology or abusing phrases or terms in the Holocaust you cannot get more offensive than to resurrect as a motto for American foreign policy the phrase America first so before we have a controversy over what concentration camps mean or don't mean when some liberal in Congress uses it we should talk about the American president's use of America first which was an isolationist kind of Nazi sympathizing phrase highly nativist at a time when Jews were trying to escape Hitler and come to America it was the it was the slogan of the people that were for immigration restriction in the late 1930s and 40s and people should understand that the reason why we have the asylum laws that are now so much in contest right now that is really a lot of the focus of this whole detention center and all that is those laws were drafted the way they're drafted because of the Jewish refugee issue and the fact that we did not massive yearning to no I'm talking about I'm talking about American immigration during the 1930s and 40s yeah the asylum status of Jewish refugees trying to escape Hitler at the time and the way that our policies treated them and also the dishonesty there was an investigation by the treasury department of Breckenridge long and the state department that blew up in 1943 over this because they were they were actually not even meeting the quotas the immigration quotas at the time so there's all this ugly history it came out with the United Nations refugee policy after the war and also the whole issue of deportees you know during the post war thing of the Holocaust survivors and what happened to them and that led to the policies that then America took on and adopted an asylum policy out of that point is we can't forget what happened no and there's no clean break there's no clean break but I think people who use these terms without knowing it would be different if they knew it would be different if they had studied it would be different if they had some idea of the import of these terms and these references I don't think she knows I don't think he knows and it's loose use of language so it takes somebody like you or a writer in the newspaper you know to make this right to put it in perspective and you know what I gotta say this too our discussions Julian right at the end of the show you start going it's the best part but we gotta cut it now so I hope we can do this again and follow up this morning I'm sure Julian Corbett thank you for having me on great thanks for having me back I'd like to say the sign