Resistance

GERMAR RUDOLF, RESISTANCE IS OBLIGATORYsouthern states and which at times came close to a self-identificationwith the vanquished. After Germany’s defeat in World War I it was amatter of course for the allies that the war guilt had to be attributed tothe authoritarian and militaristic system of “Prussia,” that “civilization”therefore is the real {p. 14} winner. But already within a few yearsvoices could be heard especially in the U.S. which drew an entirely differentpicture of the situation in 1914 and which attributed at least aconsiderable share of the guilt to the Allied powers. It was not difficultto see that the protagonists of this revisionism mainly originated fromthe faction of American pacifism, which had fought the armament lobbyright from the beginning as the culprits of the war. A similar developmentoccurred in the U.S. after World War II, and even a partial identityof the persons involved could be determined, as for the case of HarryElmer Barnes. But as much as the accusation of “Germanophilia” mighthave been close at hand, this did not touch the arguments in the slightest,and it wasn’t just the revisionists who claimed that Roosevelt andhis surroundings had aimed at intervening on England’s side. Even inGermany the all too plain theses of the “anti-Fascists” had to provokeobjections: it was not an “assault of Nazi Germany on Poland” thatmarked the beginning of World War II, but the division treaty betweenStalin and Hitler at the expense of Poland. In the early 1950s, however,a different revisionism arose in the U.S. as well, namely the revisionismregarding the Cold War, which emphatically questioned that it had beencaused by the Soviet Union and which at the end came to conceptionscrudely hostile to the [U.S.] state and system, which in practice cameclose to an identification with the Soviet Union or Soviet-style Marxism.These revisionists had a hard time during the 1950s and during thetime of the Vietnam War, but their books have never been banned, sincethey {p. 15} enjoyed the freedom of speech kept in high regard in theU.S. One could posit the thesis that the existence of revisionisms whichare provocative and inimical to the system are a main characteristic ofliberal societies. But it is not at all a given fact that general statementslike this can also be applied to that revisionism which totally or at leastin part “denies Auschwitz.”In contrast to this it cannot be questioned whether established sciencehas revised its Auschwitz image – both regarding the actual campas well as the symbol for the “final solution” – and that a need for a revisionhas been recognized.270