Yet the conviction is itself irrational, argues Finkelstein. No historical event is unique. And, dangerously, it leads to myth-making and distortion. It is riddled with factual errors and misquotes. Not even court transcripts are produced correctly.
Events are outright invented.
This political correctness has become so extreme on some campuses that to compare the Nazi death camps with an atrocity such as the slaughter of 10 million Africans in the Congo as a result of the Belgian ivory and rubber trade, is met with accusations of Holocaust denial. A higher proportion of Europe's gypsies than Jews were slaughtered, claims Finkelstein, and there's no memorial to them. Washington DC has a big Holocaust museum, but nothing for victims of the slave trade or of the genocide against American Indians. Wilkomirski claimed to have been a child survivor of Auschwitz, when in fact he isn't Jewish and spent the war growing up quietly in Switzerland. However, the lies about the Holocaust started long before Wilkomirski.