Reflection

In my paper, I took the scholarly works of Luck Boltanski and Lillie Chouliaraki on witnessing and used them as a lens through which I could examine the denial accounts of Arthur Butz and Paul Rassinier. I first established three main categories of how a distant spectator responds to witnessing a tragedy: expression of indignation towards a persecutor, expression of tenderheartedness towards a benefactor, and humanization of the victims. I analyzed how Butz’s work The Hoax of the Twentieth Century and Rassinier’s work Debunking the Genocide Myth took these elements of witnessing and inverted them – “flipped them on their head” per say.

The process of reading these works and using genocide denial methods to find out what about these accounts is surprising or unexpected – other than the obvious surprise that such a field exists – pushed me in my analytical skills. As I mentioned in my paper, many people’s first response is to write these scholars off as crazy and move on to more “important” areas of study. Such was my first response as well. In an effort to try to find an argument and more specific topic for my paper, I was aimlessly searching genocides on google when I came across a reference to a pamphlet entitled “Did Six Million Really Die?” written by Richard Verrall – a well known Holocaust denial account. I started to research more of this topic, more because I found it to be interesting rather than to be a potential paper topic.

Examining their works and discovering that there was a logic behind their statements changed the way that I view the “crazy” works that exist in the world. The fact that there was an ordered logic and method behind the denial of the Holocaust surprised me. I always viewed logic and organized methodology as infallible – this project has shown me that they can become inverted and imperfect, as illustrated through the perversion of the witnessing process in the works of Butz and Rassinier.