They are asking if it deserves a special protected place in the public consciousness. Some, he went on, are asking whether memorialization of the Holocaust, as well as Holocaust studies in schools and universities, are not being used wrongly, or simply getting out of hand. The case for Irving s being a Holocaust denier seems to rest on his claim that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and on his rejection of the six million story. To support his judgment, he relied on witnesses for the defence. Irving, after all, had said that between one million and four million Jews died.
Denial depends on who and what is being denied.
Historian Robert W. Thurston is one of several who have claimed that Stalin was not guilty of mass murder from 1934 to 1941. For them, too, the Gulag didn t exist, except for criminals who would have been in jail in any country the kind of bilge that Eleanor Roosevelt swallowed. No disgrace for them, though. They are hardly noticed. Even if they were, and faced a case against their critics, there would be no millions of dollars forthcoming for their defence from the Spielbergs, the Bronfmans or the American Jewish Committee, as they were for Lipstadt.