41845358-Antisemitism

CHAPTER 5
DENYING THE HOLOCAUST
A NEO-NAZI MYTHOLOGY
FOR TWO MILLENNIA SCURRILOUS MYTHS about Jews abounded in
Christian lands. We have seen how the medieval Christian myth of the Jew as
Satan’s agent conspiring to destroy Christendom helped spawn the modern
nationalist myth of a Jewish cabal plotting to rule the planet. This myth and
others about Jews, including their racial inferiority, were widely believed by
many people and unashamedly propagated by members of the cultural elite—
all this in a scientific age that had experienced the critical spirit of the Enlightenment.
The Nazis employed these myths to justify their war against the Jews:
They were cleansing Europe of parasitical subhumans who threatened the fatherland.
The zeal and brutality displayed by both the SS and ordinary Germans
involved in the extermination process attest to the immense impact these
myths had on people’s thinking.
The systematic slaughter of two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe
shamed many people and awakened them to the evilness and danger of
anti-Jewish myths. It also spurred a growing Christian-Jewish dialogue that
has fostered greater understanding and tolerance. As a result, the propagation
of old myths about Jews has greatly abated in Western lands, at least in respectable
circles. Nevertheless, antisemitism still has the capacity to ignite
people’s meanest feelings and distort thinking, as in the disturbing phenomenon
of Holocaust denial.