A Nation of Holocaust Deniers?

It’s pretty vile having a Holocaust denier as a president. I feel partly responsible, because I didn’t vote in the election that brought President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Who knew the man stood any chance of winning? Who knew the man unlikely to win would use his presidency to challenge historical fact? Once he started up the whole business, I consoled myself and others by arguing this view did not represent that of most Iranians. Turns out, I was wrong.

I put the question to my family last Friday as everyone gathered around for tea and sweets after lunch (yes, it is Ramadan, so we made sure to praise the sole faster among us as we nibbled on syrup-drenched pastry). “You all believe the Holocaust actually happened, right?” I asked, confident everyone would say yes, and that we could then proceed to gossip about the Iranian-American female space tourist.

Instead, my relatives, my very own civilized, educated, well-traveled relatives, began hedging. “A small number were certainly murdered, but the rest probably died of war-times diseases,” said one, a urologist. “The numbers were exaggerated to justify creating a Jewish homeland,” said another, a hotel owner. A monarchist housewife: “Were there even six millions Jews in Germany before the war?” A computer science graduate: “I think it bears further historical research.”

Apparently, Ahmadinejad is not so alone. But what was going on? In Iran, I associate Holocaust skepticism with anti-Westernism and Islamic fundamentalism; with confrontational people who deny Israel’s right to exist and whose violently anti-Israel attitudes overlap with anti-Semitism in such a way that it’s hard to tell which animates which. Radical clerics and the people who came up with the Holocaust cartoon exhibit belong to this ideological minority, not my relatives. The conversation quickly skipped from the Holocaust to how Israel is Iran’s natural ally in the region, and what a shame it is that the two countries can’t band together and lord it over the Arabs. That’s when I realized there are two types of Holocaust skeptics in Iran. There’s the Ahmadinejad type, and then there’s the ordinary Iranian, who lives in denial about everything, not just one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century. Let me explain.

Iranians think all governments lie. Before the Islamic Revolution they considered the Shah a liar, just as they now consider the mullahs liars. That’s why most people believe Voice of America news tells the truth, while state television dissimulates. This mistrust stems from a cultural predilection toward conspiracy theories, and the widely held conviction that reality is that which you cannot see. Relatives and family friends with advanced degrees from prestigious Western universities still believe that the British run Iran, that Freemasons run the West, that Jimmy Carter engineered the Islamic Revolution, and that the CIA masterminded Sept. 11. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve nodded grimly through such conversations, privately thinking, Et tu? We are a doomed people. Given this culture of conspiracy, you can see how the Holocaust gets lumped along with Sept. 11 and their own revolution as just another historical sham that Iranians, shrewd connoisseurs of the cover-up, are able to see past.

The distinction between the two types matters, I suppose, because most Iranians don’t share Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel worldview. They have no blood feud with Israel, and would cheerfully accept better relations if it meant their daily lives would improve. It’s worth remembering that under the Shah, Iran had relations with Israel and no one much minded. Besides, Iranians are no dummies. Millions of middle-class Iranians travel to Turkey on vacation and see the shiny cars, international banks and consumer bounty that come along with a policy of accommodation. They want that for themselves. Sadly, their government wants to share its bounty with Hizballah.

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