Anyone who wants to understand the current spate of fake news and fake history must go back some years to its most extreme modern manifestation: Holocaust denial. An entire industry has been built to legitimize Holocaust denial. The deniers have funded “research” “institutes”, “journals”, books, magazines, videos, websites, newsflashes – all designed to provide a patina of academic respectability to demonstrable falsehoods. Nearly every day, I receive dozens of emails from websites with such legitimate-sounding names as “The Institute for Historical Review”, and “Legalienate” and “Reporters Notebook” that purport to disprove “the Holocaust yarn”. These include newsflashes containing “new facts” that put the “final nail in the coffin of history’s Mother of all hoaxes” – that Jews were “allegedly gassed” and cremated at Treblinka and other “death camps”. [...]
Yet, thousands of people, many with academic degrees, and some with professorial positions, persist in denying the undeniable. These professional liars were given a degree of legitimacy by Noam Chomsky, who not only championed the right of these fake historians to perpetrate their malicious lies, but who actually lent his name to the quality of the “research” that produce the lies of denial. A widely circulated petition of 1979, signed by Chomsky as well as Holocaust deniers such as Serge Thion, Arthur Butz and Mark Weber, described the notorious denier Robert Faurisson as “a respected professor” and his false history as “findings” based on “extensive historical research”, thus giving it an academic imprimatur. Chomsky has since argued that he had intended only to support Faurisson’s right to free speech and not the validity of his claims, but whatever his intentions may have been, his name on the petition helped to bolster not only Faurisson’s standing, but also that of Holocaust denial. [...]
I have no problem with courses being taught about the phenomenon of Holocaust denial – it is after all a widespread concern – just as I would have no problem with courses being taught about the phenomenon of false history, false facts and conspiracy theories. But the classroom, with its captive audience of students being graded by professors, is never an appropriate place to espouse the view that the Holocaust did not take place. By publishing his book, the psychiatry professor mentioned above placed it in the public sphere, where readers could choose whether to read it, and believe its claims, or not. The classroom, however, is not a free and open marketplace of ideas. The monopolistic professor controls what can and cannot be said in his or her closed shop. Accordingly, the classroom must have more rigorous standards of truth than the book market, or the internet. [...]
Freedom of speech and the open marketplace of ideas are not a guarantee that truth, justice or morality will prevail. The most that can be said is that freedom of expression is less bad than its alternatives such as governmental censorship, official truth squads or shutting down the marketplace of ideas. Like democracy itself, untrammelled freedom to express hateful and dangerous lies may be the “worst” policy – except for all the others that have been tried over time.
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