Mick Hartley

A strong piece from David Aaronovitch in the Times (£) – Sean Spicer’s Hitler gaffe was stupid but it was not as invidious as the ideas supported by Ken Livingstone and Marine Le Pen:

Spicer has been wrongly condemned. His Nazi gas mega-gaffe was just that: a mistake. I even know what he was trying to say. Some googling West Wing underling had obviously told him during his prep for the press conference that, unlike President Assad, even Hitler hadn’t used chemical weapons militarily (which he hadn’t). Spicer simply didn’t know enough basic history to have a light-bulb go on his head to remind him that Hitler most certainly was no stranger to gassing people unmilitarily. Spicer’s error arose out of stupidity and ignorance, not a malign desire to rewrite history or even to offend. Of course he should resign and he probably will, but he wasn’t trying to excuse old Adolf or deny the Holocaust.

There has been quite a lot of Third Reich around lately. Apart from Spicer and Ken Livingstone’s Labour Party suspension, on Sunday Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader and presidential hopeful, caused outrage by absolving the country of responsibility for deporting thousands of Jews to death camps in the Second World War. This has led various people to opine that the lesson of Spicer’s Untergang and of Livingstone’s “Hitler-supported-Zionism” business is that no one in public life should invoke Hitler, ever. There is a new doctrine which dictates that nothing is comparable to the Nazis and the Holocaust and any attempt at comparison will always cause offence and be wrong so just don’t do it.

This injunction is quite wrong and I’ll try to explain why. Spicer, of course, is a blustering fool and it is bad that a blustering fool should be the press spokesman for the president of the United States. But what Livingstone and Le Pen were trying to do was the product not of ignorance, but of intention. They were in the business of revisionism, of revising the historical record to suit their own ideological needs.

Let’s start with Livingstone, who went back to the Labour Party last week insisting that his “Hitler supported Zionism” argument — in essence that Zionism and Nazism were two sides of the same exclusionist coin — was historically justified. To those who know the territory this is a familiar claim. In 1987 Perdition, a play by the Trotskyist writer Jim Allen, was pulled by the Royal Court Theatre 36 hours before its first performance. The play suggested that wartime Zionist leaders in occupied Europe collaborated with the Nazis in the death of Jews to further their aim of a separate Jewish state in Israel. It was largely based on a book by the American self-described historian and Trotskyist, Lenni Brenner.

In an interview with Time Out magazine Allen was candid about the play’s purpose: “I’m saying that this is the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written, because it touches the heart of the most abiding myth of modern history, the Holocaust. Because it says quite plainly that privileged Jewish leaders collaborated in the extermination of their own kind in order to help bring about a Zionist state, Israel, a state which is itself racist.” The play was to be directed by Ken Loach, who defends it to this day. But it is a tendentious polemic created by cherry-picking and false juxtaposition. Only its deceased author’s bovine certainty prevents accusations that he was a monstrous liar. A television debate between Allen and the historian Martin Gilbert (available online) ended in the playwright’s intellectual evisceration….

Ideological bookends, Livingstone and Le Pen are engaged in attempts to steal history from itself and they can’t be dealt with by swearing a self-denying ordinance not to mention Hitler or the war. In a way that’s exactly what revisionists want us to do. They are, rather, dealt with by always always knowing your stuff.

A good example of the kind of rhetorical overkill attending Spicer's gaffe was yesterday's Guardian piece from Timothy Snyder:

In a press conference on Tuesday, Sean Spicer claimed before an incredulous room of journalists that Adolf Hitler did not use chemical agents to kill people during the second world war. Beneath this stunning factual error lurks a horrifying moral one.

“We didn’t use chemical weapons in world war two. You know, you had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons,” the White House press secretary said. When asked to clarify his comments, he added: “I think when you come to sarin gas, he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing.” Spicer then went on to refer, in weird phrasing, to “Holocaust centers” – a seeming reference to Nazi concentration camps….

This incredible statement by Spicer – which erases the use of deadly chemical agents by Nazi Germany – fits very well into the general historical politics of the Trump administration. The name of Hitler is invoked to criticize the enemy of the moment: today Assad, but not long ago, American intelligence officers.

The general consequence is to minimize the scale of Hitler’s crimes…

But Spicer's claim wasn't that Hitler didn't use chemical agents: he claimed that Hitler didn't use chemical weapons, against his own people. There's a significant difference. As Aaronovitch argues, people like Livingstone and Le Pen are far more dangerous to the memory of the Holocaust than an idiot like Spicer.