The Holocaust conference in Iran was portrayed as a total flop in the German-language news. The images of American and British Orthodox rabbis (not Holocaust deniers, but anti-Zionists) meeting with the Iranian president made for some cognitive dissonance or shock, but little of substance was reported. President Ahmadinejad stayed away from the conference; none of the big names in Holocaust revision turned up among the 67 participants from 30 countries. The most significant guest appears to have been former KKK leader David Duke, infamous for having won more than half the white vote in the 1991 election for the Louisana governorship.

Meanwhile, I continue to fight a small-scale e-mail battle against an ardent Holocaust denier. We have been exchanging e-mails for several months now. I would summarize what I have learned so far about revisionism (as they call their approach) and revisionists (as they call themselves, trying to attach themselves to a serious historiographical concept) as follows:

• Much like creationists, deniers will not debate or seriously address epistemology. Abstract questions about what constitutes reliable evidence and why are of little or no interest to them. This is a major reason why I would strongly advise against a public debate with them. Epistemic clarity is impossible to achieve in a rancorous or time-limited environment where audience applause will be the measure of success. If you are debating a revisionist, don't get bogged down in details neither of you can check from your home office (whether ground-radar studies at Treblinka are accurate, for example). Insist instead that you talk about why one source (a webpage, book, etc.) is more believable than another. Dig to the ideological roots of the issue. I did this with webpages based on the so-called Leuchter Report and webpages like Nizkor which debunk it point for point. Talk about why each of you believes one page and not the other.
• Months ago, for example, faced with the claim that Nazi anti-Jewish measures were a reaction to a Jewish "declaration of war" against Germany in April of 1933, I checked his sources. I found that all the revisionist jabber about a Jewish declaration of war was based on a single headline from the London Daily Express in 1933. That newspaper referred to some American and British Jewish organizations' calls for a boycott against the Nazi regime as a "Jewish declaration of war." Revisionists will not talk about why they find that evidence of a "war" against Germany, but do not consider seriously the much more solid evidence of mass murder.
• Revisionists will ignore it, but you can assure yourself and any onlookers of your position with "internal criticism" of evisionist "evidence." Internal criticism is often enough to deconstruct revisionist claims. The various webpages they base their arguments on are self contradictory and poorly documented. Tracing the citations or simply closely examining what they are really saying is often enough to dispell the initially interesting impression some of their arguments might make. For example, there are many webpages which list lots of different alleged number of Jews who died at Auschwitz. They contrast astronomically high numbers published right after the war or in popular literature with lower numbers based on other sources. The implication is that the numbers are random, unreliable, fantastic, unbelievable, etc. For one thing, if you focus only on scholarly sources, the number has been much more stable for decades. More importantly, revisionists also claim that the Holocaust is an invention of the 1960s. Well, if it was invented in the 1960s, then why were the numbers in the 1940s so high?
• They routinely ignore evidence that does not fit into their model. After numerous claims of their being "no evidence," they will change topics when that evidence materializes. After being asked repeatedly for real evidence, I offered the Stahlecker report of January, 1942, a document discussed in detail in Ezergailis, A.: The Holocaust in Latvia. 1941-1944. It mentions systematic mass murder, explains the methods used, diffculties encountered, the fact that the orders came from higher up, and very exact figures for the number of Jews killed in a specific geographic region for a specific period of time. It is a wartime, Nazi document used for internal Nazi-regime correspondence (not propagana, not a post-war trial account, etc.) This did not merit comment.
• They will abuse terminology to gain leverage where the facts don't fit. For example, revisionists claim that Eisenhower never mentions the Holocaust. Confronted with evidence from Eisenhower's memoir Crusade in Europe that he does in fact mention the camps and mass mistreatment and murder of Jews, and confronted with photographs of Eisenhower among the bodies of the victims and talking to survivors and eye-witnesses, and with evidence that he was very concerned with the plight of the Jews, deniers will still insist that he does not really mention extermination or "the Holocaust." The fact that the term Holocaust was not used to refer to until the late 1950s is ignored.
• Revisionists continually harp on the legal restrictions on free discussion in Europe and some other countries, including the jailing of some of their heroes like David Irving. While mainstreamers can explain these legal limitations on free speech, we cannot really defend them. We can insist, however, that all claims and publications are still legal in the United States and nothing prevents revisionists from learning German and the other relevant languages, going to Europe for research, and publishing their results after returning to the United States. All the relevant archives, with the possible exception of some Russian archives, are open for any interested scholar.
• Essentially, I have the impression that "revisionism" is, like UFO-belief and creationism and other bogus claims, not falsifiable and therefor in essence unscientific. There is not even in principle any evidence that would be enough to finally change their minds. Since it is a faith, not a revisable scientific conclusion based on evidence, evidence is not the issue. I see the ocnference in Tehran in this context. Unless they present new, hard evidence, it is not a scientific conference. Instead, it is more like a revival meeting where the faithful gather to reassure each other.

A strategy I have only mentioned but not pursued intensively would be to turn the tables and simply deny some other historical event, like the Soviet GULag or the American Civil War and to use all the Holocaust revisionist arguments to prove the point. Claim the photographs are faked or only show isolated incidents, claim that eye-witnesses were unduly influenced or were simply shilling for attention, show how the key documents are post-facto forgeries, take aerial photographs of the sites to show that they did not in fact exist, etc. Early last year, there was an effort by some to have a version of creation based on the Flying Spaghetti Monster cosmology given "equal time" in public schools in Kansas (Here is an older attempt at the same thing). The intent of the obvious "parody" was to point out the unscientific nature of creationist arguments when applied in another context. The same thing would work with Holocaust revisionism, I think. Fence-sitters would see the light.

I have not brought it up specifically in his discussion yet, but I think there might be a place for "Occam's Razor" in this context. Deniers have to come up with all kinds of ad hoc explanations for the mountains of documentation, while mainstream historians have one, simple explanation for the data: the Holocaust happened. In any case it is a good example of how historical discourse is indeed scientific discourse. It is not just an exchange of arbitrary claims or impressions about reality.

A friend of mine who used to spend time (as did I) arguing with religious believers, pointed out that believers go into the argument thinking they are faced with a position - in that case atheism or agnosticism - with some plausibility, but which is essentially ambiguous or not demonstrable. They quickly find themselves confronted with evidence and arguments they had never considered, because everyday popular accounts (and certainly clergy) do not mention them. Instead, they are confronted with a very solid, internally consistent, refined, body of thought that cannot be dismissed by sewing a few apparent anomalies here and there. It is the same thing with revisionism. It feeds on the superficiality of popular discourse. The archives are full of the evidence; the libraries are full of detailed, meticulous accounts of the events based on that evidence. Demonstrating that is more difficult than simply making claims about it in a superficial public context. But upon closer examination the perponderance of evidence is quite clear and the burden of proof is clearly - as always, in any field - on revisionism.