Word: holocaust
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WHEN THE CRIMSON received an advertisement this fall from a group claiming that the Holocaust never happened, we wondered whether it made a difference that most of us making a decision about whether it should run are Jewish. We wondered, additionally, whether our personal distaste for the ad could be grounds for refusing...
...examined the text and the layout of the advertisement closely: it was a full page designed to look like a news article, proposing to "reopen" debate about a topic that had been, its author argued, unfairly closed. Much like this fall's 56-page Peninsula issue, the the Holocaust ad cloaked its aggressive position by carefully appealing to "free speech" sensibilities--an appeal that often finds its greatest supporters among the journalism community. Such a tactic offers, as Professor of English and Comparative Literature Barbara E. Johnson noted in yesterday's Boston Globe, "a grammar of reason with a rhetoric...
...well say something precisely about the personal politics of The Crimson itself that while we acknowledged, in a staff editorial, the rhetorical strategies of the Holocaust ad, and the extent to which those strategies cloaked an aggressive purpose, we refused at another time to view Peninsula's tactics in the same light. In an unsigned editorial, we, as editor Ira E. Stoll `94 wrote in a dissenting opinion, accepted Peninsula "on Peninsula's terms," allowing that their arguments were fair arguments indeed, that they were "weak" but not hateful...
That iconoclastic temperament has also driven Buchanan to give sympathetic attention to crackpot Holocaust revisionists. In addition, he made intemperate comments during his crusade to prove the innocence of John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland autoworker convicted by an Israeli court of having helped murder hundreds of thousands of Jews as a Nazi death-camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible. There is considerable evidence that Buchanan may be right that Demjanjuk could not have been the mass murderer of Treblinka. But Buchanan has also claimed that diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody, much less...
...because the assassination of John Kennedy was so traumatic, the baby boomers' End of Childhood? Or that Americans have enshrined it as official tragedy, a title that confers immunity from profane revisionists who would reopen the grave? Are artists and moviemakers by such logic enjoined from stories about the Holocaust? The Holocaust, of course, is known from the outset to be a satanic plot. For some reason -- a native individualism, maybe -- many Americans resist dark theories about J.F.K.'s death, and think those retailing them are peddling foreign, anarchist goods. Real Americans hate conspiracies as something unclean...