The name Arthur Butz comes up from time to time at Northwestern. Most recently, he defended Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial."They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets," the Iranian president said.
On Butz's Northwestern-hosted Web page (one might wonder what will happen when Pubweb goes under), the MIT alum and electrical engineering professor gives his version of the Holocaust: "Nazi persecution of Jews, concentration camps, crematoria [and] dead bodies strewn about camps (especially Belsen)."
That's right, dead bodies. Here's where the "nuance" comes in – Butz contends that people died in the concentration camps from disease, not from execution. It is indeed true that typhus spread through the camps, killing many Jews.
Eichmann and Hitler's Final Solution was, to Butz, simply the deportation of Jews. Similar expulsions of "middleman minorities" are well documented in world history by scholars including Thomas Sowell (not to drag the world's most respectable social scientist into a debate he's never wasted his time entering).
For the record, of course, the idea that executions did not take place is ridiculous. Nazis kept records of it, perpetrators confessed in trials after the war and one can to this day visit Auschwitz and see the gas chambers.
But the more important point is that Butz's argument is a distinction without that much of a difference. Rounding millions of people up against their will, forcing them to work and placing them in living conditions where a fatal disease rips through them – all of which Butz concedes – is not a far cry, morally, from killing. The Nazis still ostracized, dehumanized and were responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews.
Butz has stirred up countless debates, from the freedom-of-speech issue to whether professors should use Northwestern Web space for issues unrelated to their specialties to whether his claims have any merit. University officials have run scared, most recently when University President Henry Beinen sent out a school-wide e-mail calling the professor's Iran statement "a contemptible insult to all decent and feeling people."
It would perhaps be more effective just to say: "Sure, Arthur. The Holocaust didn't happen. Your ancestors (and many of ours) simply rounded up an entire racial group, put them in concentration camps, overworked them, planned to deport them and then let typhus kill them first. Happy?"
The more wound up the public gets over an absurd view, the more that view will circulate.
