Alphabetical
site index (text)
[Images added by this
website] 
New Zealand, August 8, 2003Media watch:
Open minds, empty minds and the Holocaust
by David Cohen
DON 'T believe the guy who once
said the problem with history is that there's no
future in it. The dust has been disturbed yet again
in the
long-buried
case of Joel Hayward and the University of
Canterbury.
 Another
scholar is seeking to still or confirm the question
of whether Dr Hayward was the victim of an academic
witch-hunt on account of the revisionist views he
once took but has since repudiated on the subject
of the Holocaust. Do we need this?
Apparently so. Already the opening of this old
casket has got a number of local media outlets
loudly sneezing, such is their passion for
unfettered historical investigation, as they claim
to understand it.
Their general position
has found support this past fortnight, with a
raft of press interviews given by Dr Hayward to
mark his colleague's relitigation of the
original scandal.
The work,
you'll recall, argued that far fewer than six
million Jews, perhaps fewer than one million,
perished in concentration camps during the time of
Nazi rule across most of Europe.
It speculated that the idea of gas chambers being
used against the innocent during World War II might
have been a propaganda invented by the UK, the US
and Jewish lobbyists in the thrall of Zionist
forces. It postulated that Hitler could not
be held personally responsible for the situation.
And so on.
As somebody who was involved in reporting on the
situation at the time, I have no personal judgment
to make on Dr Hayward, who has said he now wishes
only to concentrate on his new career as a
freelance scholar. But the latest surge of coverage
isn't only about the acknowledged "mistakes" a
29-year-old student made a decade ago. It's about
the way in which a confused local media irrigates
the past.
This has not been our finest hour. With only three
lonely, impressive and, it has to be said,
left-leaning exceptions &endash; stand up,
Anthony Hubbard of the Sunday
Star-Times, New Zealand Herald
columnist Diana Wichtel and the
Listener's Philip Matthews &endash;
the tendency on the journalistic front has been far
more toward what the American columnist George F
Will once tactfully characterised as historical
amnesia, fumigated by gassy notions of "tolerance"
that cannot distinguish between an open mind and an
empty mind when it comes to the critical world
events of the past century. Peculiarly uninformed
when it comes to the collective fate that befell
European Jewry during World War II, the
emptyheads have clucked on about little else
other than the need to maintain the air of
scepticism Dr Hayward attempted to cast over the
topic in his ill-starred master's thesis. As an editorial in the New Zealand Herald
put it, "All of history has to be open to constant
reappraisal of events, their causes and
consequences and the light they throw on the past
and present."
Much the same point was made, implicitly and
somewhat less elegantly, in an impromptu apologia
written by Diana McCurdy in the
Dominion-Post, which included the fatuous
warning of "a possible backlash against the Jewish
community" if they or others were to ever again
make known their displeasure at their history being
so reappraised.
On first blush the stance may appear high-minded,
even impressively sophisticated; it could also be
described as pernicious and kind of creepy.
To be sure, history is about open-ended questions.
So is journalism. As Mr Will asks, speaking on
behalf of those who practise the other craft, what
kind of student of history makes a career out of
denying the reality of
an almost contemporary event that has been recorded
graphically, documented bureaucratically and
described in vast detail by victims, bystanders and
perpetrators?
More than three years have passed since Canterbury
was forced to ask itself the same question after
first apologising to the country's tiny Jewish
community for the unwarranted distress caused by
its conferral of a master's degree for the 360-page
dissertation The
Fate of Jews in German Hands: An Historical Inquiry
into the Development and Significance of Holocaust
Revisionism.
An independent inquiry convened by the university
later found the work to
be seriously flawed and its central conclusions
unjustified. They acknowledged that the affair had
been deeply embarrassing to one of the country's
most respected institutions of higher learning, a
university that has long had a special claim to
know better than most on questions of bogus
history.
Canterbury, after all, is the same institution that
provided the setting for two of last century's most
seminal philosophical works, The Open Society
and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism,
both of them exegesis on the pseudoscientific ideas
about "history" put forward by Plato,
Hegel and Marx, which were completed
there in the 1940s by the Jewish-Austrian
émigré Sir Karl Popper.
Like many others here from a similar background,
the culturally assimilated Sir Karl arrived looking
for shelter from the cataclysmic events opening up
at the time in Europe, whose reality has been
academically contested at the master's level of
study in just one country during the past 60
years.
In awarding the Hayward degree with honours, Sir
Karl's old institution achieved the dubious
distinction of becoming the only accredited
institution of higher learning in the world ever
known to have conferred an MA on the basis of a
historical "inquiry" of this type.
The good news is that the work's author has since
apologised and indicated his willingness to move
on. So has the university. Isn't it about time the
epistemologically challenged in the forthright
estate followed suit?  
Our dossier on the Joel
Hayward case-
July 2003, NZ Herald: "Holocaust
thesis ruined my life says historian"
-
Report of the Working
Party established by University of Canterbury to
Inquire into Hayward Case | summary
-
Holocaust scholar
at heart of 'book burning' row | 'Book-burners'
feared libel suit
-
Joel Hayward thesis: 'The
Fate of Jews in German Hands' (zip
file)
-
The
Fate of Joel Hayward in New Zealand Hands: From
Holocaust Historian to Holocaust? Part I |
Part
II
-
Death
threats and breakdowns - the Holocaust thesis
destroyed my life
|
write
to David Irving