Rushdoony once again -- for the last time

The reaction to my statement that RJR was a Holocaust Denier (and thus either historically incompetent, racist or mentally unhinged) has elicited quite a bit of response, from very polite statements that I have misread him to veritable tirades accusing me of serious historical incompetence and demanding full apologies to his followers. The accusation of incompetence against me hinges on the fact that I have cited no evidence. Well, that was simply due to the fact that (a) while I have read RJR on this, I do not own his works and thus was not able to get immediate access to them and (b) I had not anticipated that so many would question what I had assumed was a well-known fact. So, here goes – those who asked for the reference can now have it.

First, some background: my original blog was prompted by an article in Harper’s about the rewriting of American history by the religious right. The writer mentioned RJR but, as I pointed out, missed the nastiest aspect of his work: Holocaust Denial.

Second, clarification of terms. Holocaust Denial does not require the denial that any Jews were killed by the Nazis. It requires the dramatic scaling down of the number from six million and, as a necessary corrolary, a massive scaling down of the intentional, technological dimension of the Final Solution.

Now to RJR. In The Institutes of Biblical Law, pp. 586 ff, RJR deals with the Ninth Commandment relative to the mass murders of the Second World War. The relevant section opens with a statement that false witness with regard to these is `especially notable and revealing.’ What false witness is that? Well, we are then told that the figure of six million Jews is now entrenched in the history books. But according to RJR these can be questioned: RJR cites anti-Semite Poncins (RJR does acknowledge P’s anti-semitism on p. 589), quoting Paul Rassinier to the effect that 1.2 million Jews died, and Paul Hilberg claiming it was 896, 292. RJR then states that many died of epidemics, many were executed. He then goes on to cite the legal case, which defendant Leon Uris turned into the novel QBVII, about Uris’s novel (RJR never names Uris or the novel) which claimed 17 000 medical experiments by this doctor during the war The judge reduced the number of established cases of forced sterlization to 130. On p. 588, RJR then makes the point that the figures for the Holocaust had to be exaggerated to make the whole thing more devastating. And he throws in references to Communist massacres and some of the weirder writings of Ernest Hemingway regarding sterlising all Nazis after the war.

So what do we make of this? First, at no point in does RJR withdraw the statement that 6 million is an exaggeration or ameliorate this by pointing out the fact that the alternative figures quoted are understatements. Legally, that's Holocaust Denial. Second, he is clearly unaware of the fact that Rassinier was a notorious ideologically-driven Holocaust Denier. But then, he only cites him at second-hand with no evaluation whatsoever of the claims. Historical incompetence. Third, he uses the Uris trial but never points out the obvious: that the establishment of the novelistic libel of this one man is (a) based upon legal criteria of proof which differ from those a historian might use (the burden or proof being peculiarly high from a historian’s point of view) and (b) has no real relevance to the larger question of the six million. Historical incompetence.

What of my other allegations? Is he a racist? Well, check out p. 257: interreligious, interracial, and intercultural marriages all banned by the burden of the law. Interracial? Can one even use the concept of `race’ in a meaningful sense prior to the eighteenth century? And does one really want to read the Old Testament law as supporting segregagtion? Historical incompetence combined with what seems like racism.

The man was historically incompetent, probably racist and, if he thought this kind of writing was intelligent scholarship, probably unhinged.