The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 117

LOS ANGELES TIMES FRIDAY, JANUARY 28, 2000 B13tF Commentary PERSPECTIVE ON THE HOLOCAUST The Growing Assault on the Truth of Absolute Evil Those who would deny it twist testimony, disbelieve evidence and dismiss the obvious. By MICHAEL BERENBAUM cepts and even the archeological remains of the sites reinforce the documents. They all tell the story of the evolution of Nazi genocide, from the infamous Nuremberg laws to the introduction of segregation, economic confiscation and apartheid, to the mobile killing units that killed bullet by bullet, person by person, and ultimately to -nfji 111 German corporations, and Italian insurance companies that have come forward to settle past claims. The leaders of more than a score of countries will gather in Stockholm this week to advocate education about the Holocaust as an antidote to racism, anti-Semitism and intolerance and as a tool for teaching the values of human dignity, not just history. They, too, must be under Jewish control.

How serious is the problem? A Roper Poll that found that 20 of Americans believe it is possible that the Holocaust did not happen was withdrawn as unscientific. Its question was ambiguous. A new Roper Poll indicated that 8 of all Americans are prone to Holocaust denial, a far more marginal phenomenon but still of considerable concern. For if the Holocaust is denied while the eyewitnesses are among us, what will happen after they are no longer? Ignorance of the Holocaust is more pervasive and the challenge of education and documentation is more important. Thus, the outcome of the conference in Stockholm will overshadow whatever occurs in the London courtroom.

Michael Berenbaum is the former president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and director of the Research Institute of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Zyklon are bandied about as proof that no gassing, took place in the gas chambers. A recent documentary film, "Mr. Death," has exposed the test as unscientific and the expert as a fraud. There is soft-core and hard-core denial.

Soft-core denial is the refusal to face the evil of the Holocaust, the search for the happy ending or the good that can mitigate the overwhelming evil of the what took place and thus protect us from the difficult fact that educated, cultured and civilized people can commit the most heinous crimes. The Holocaust forces a confrontation with absolute evil. It denies the consolation of triumphant goodness. It is about atrocity, not tragedy. In the end, what we will learn will never be equal to the price that was paid for such knowledge.

Hard-core denial is more pernicious, more evil. The motivation of some survivors is political. Hitler gave fascism a bad name. If the magnitude of the crime can be diminished, then fascism can enjoy new prominence. Other deniers are anti-Semitic.

If the Holocaust is a hoax, then the most outrageous fantasies of the anti-Semites are true. Jews could be seen as controlling the archives of many countries, the judiciary, the media, the Swiss banks and vors' accounts, or minor factual errors, all testimony is discarded as worthless. To deniers, perpetrator testimony is equally worthless, the fruits of coercion. 7 historians dispute information, then all positions in the debate are equally credible. Raul Hilberg, the dean of Holocaust historians, has conservatively estimated the Jewish dead at 5.1 million.

The eminent German historian, Wolfgang Benz, has argued that 6.1 million Jews were killed. If two such eminent historians can be at odds, then a figure of less than 1 million Jewish dead can also be put forward as credible. Documents are taken out of context, misread, misinterpreted or mistranslated. An example from the Lipstadt trial: Irving had claimed that he discovered irrefutable documentary proof that Hitler had ordered a halt to the murder of Jews. Under cross-examination it became clear that the document in question was an order given by SS chief Heinrich Himmler to halt the killing of one trainload of Jews from Berlin.

Half-truths are stretched to cover a myriad of falsehoods. Dubious experts draw conclusions with bizarre methods. A new "definitive test" is made, and the conclusion reduces all previous knowledge to rubble. Thus, the "definitive scientific tests" of the gas chamber walls for the residue of the gas In a London courtroom, British writer David Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt, author of "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," for calling him a Holocaust denier. "I do not deny the Holocaust," he said.

"I merely redefine it." Irving's "redefinition" includes that there was no killing of Jews in gas chambers and that Adolf Hitler did not order, and perhaps for a time did not know of, the "Jewish problem's" Final Solution the Nazi name for the Holocaust. How could this happen? After all, documentation of the Holocaust is vast. The killers have never denied the crime. The Germans kept meticulous records, and massive documentation exists in the archives of many countries. Aerial surveillance, photographic evidence, intelligence inter the gas chambers at death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka assembly-line death factories.

Throughout the years, survivors of the Holocaust have bore witness in memoirs, audio and video testimony and at trials. The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation has videotaped more than 50,000 survivors in 33 languages in 57 countries. These eyewitnesses reiterate the story of the Holocaust, testimony by testimony. The perpetrators, too, have told their stories in diaries and letters, memoirs and trial testimony. Yet how, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, can the Holocaust be denied? A series of techniques are employed: there is any conflict in testimony, the entire testimony is negated, not just the issue in dispute.

So, for instance, if there are discrepancies between survi DRAWINGBOARD CONRAD the People to Save Democracy sures designed to guarantee deposits. As a result of the investigations that ensued, the corrupt practices of some banks were exposed. Other banks began to fail. By April 1999, the government had intervened in 70 of the banking system, falling hostage to legislation that forced it to guarantee all deposits without any limitations. To meet this demand, the Central Bank began to issue currency.

Inflation skyrocketed to 60-plus, the sucre plunged in value and, perhaps more important, trust in the ability of the authorities to handle the situation was lost. People took to the streets to protest, blocking traffic and paralyzing cities and towns. And the government reacted, yielding to the demands of those who protested the loudest. In the countryside, the indigenous people, a small but respectable group of citizens, created their own organizations seeking to influence the decisions that would soon affect their lives. The authorities met with them to seek ways to find common ground.

Overwhelmed with the economic crisis, however, the government could not fulfill its promises regarding tax and fiscal reform. The military, whose ranks come mostly from the poorest sectors of the population, had sent clear signals that they would not attack the protesters, the very people they identified most closely with. The momentum of the indigenous movement kept on growing with the support of leftist groups, so-called progressive intellectuals and nongovernmental organizations. Their goal, however, seemed unrealistic. They wanted to form a popular government.

In doing so, they ignored a simple rule: You can't achieve democracy through undemocratic means. Their movement had grown because it was inherently democratic. Yet to imple- Ecuador: Trust in the ability of the authorities was lost as a popular movement, using undemocratic tools, emerged. By JAIME MANTILLA QUITO, Ecuador Another military adventure in Ecuador has come to an end, and one could say democracy has been preserved. Yet the people who were supposed to benefit from this have been tremendously shortchanged in these tragic events.

After all was said and done, the institutions, the executive and the army all were weakened This does not bode well for the newly installed president, Gustavo Noboa. The real tragedy, however, is that the deposed president, Jamil Mahuad, who was constitutionally elected, fell prey to the political groups that put their own interests above those of their nation. Last year was a troubled and sobering year for Mahuad. Convinced that the recurrent border problem with Peru had altered the perception of reality in both countries, this young and studious politician with a Harvard degree took it upon himself to solve the problem once and for all. Within three months of his election in August 1998, he had signed a peace treaty with Peru a huge accomplishment But an economic crisis was looming.

The destructive effects of El Nino had taken a toll on Ecuador, bringing havoc to agriculture along the coast Floods devastated both export and subsistence crops. The road system was destroyed. The banks, which only a few years earlier had liberalized their controls, began to collapse. The downfall of Ecuador's main bank forced the government to improvise mea mis-' mrr i i i Supper Bowl At first the president refused to resign, but he did abandon the presidential palace That was all the senior army officials needed. Pressured by the United States, they sought a constitutional end to the crisis.

By Jan. 22, Noboa, the former vice president had assumed the presidency within a constitutional framework. Yes, Ecuador was able to preserve democracy, but at what cost? And who will pay for this tragedy? I assume it will be the people. Jaime Mantilla is the publisher of Diario Hoy in Quito, Ecuador. room to maneuver.

The indigenous movement and the left, however, would not give him the benefit of the doubt. The coup came about when the insurgents took over the Congress and then marched to the National Palace, only to find the president had left. At that moment, they named three of their peers to a governing junta. They had no strategy, no clear objectives and no concrete plans as to how they would govern. The whole revolutionary experience was mostly an emotional outpouring.

ment their revolutionary ideal, they used undemocratic tools. Mahuad's government failed to understand the writing on the wall. The discontent of the people was such that a coup d'etat seemed inevitable. The vast majority of the population already was asking for Mahuad's resignation. After a prolonged period of hesitation, Mahuad finally announced his plan to adopt the U.S.

dollar as Ecuador's currency. Many people believed that this measure would allow the president some He Had a Dream. Amen Double Standard, Lots of Blame Family: Singer-actor Jester Hairston brought 'sons of slaves' and 'sons of slave owners' together. Jester would look up Hairstons in the phone book and call them. He sat down at the table of brother hood with many black and white Hairston families all over this natioa I know he made an impact because in 1980, at a meeting of the Hairston clan, I was among five "sons of a slave owner" who came to the table of brotherhood with hundreds of Hairston "sons of slaves." As a white person, I felt awkward and guilty.

Jester rose and led the group in singing his trademark song "Amen." When Jester sang, you smiled a smile that started on your face and spread to of the ex-Soviet republics away from the former Soviet region, and now for the inability of the Kremlin to finish off the Chechen terrorists once and forever. An exaggeration? Of course. Yet the truth of the matter is that the West is to blame for what's happening in Russia and Chechnya. It is not just Russia that mishandled Chechnya. Chechnya's problem is a local symptom of a global failure a failure of cooperation between Russia and the West Instead of nurturing grass-roots movements and democratic process, the West preferred to deal with former nomenklatura leaders first and foremost Boris N.

Yeltsin and supported them even when they ordered a military storm of the national Parliament in 1993 and launched a bloody war against Chechnya in 1994. After all that, it is difficult to believe in the West's good intentions or to take seriously President Clinton's warning that Russia would "pay a heavy price" for its continued brutal assault on Chechen civilians. It is illogical to believe that in 1994-1996 Clinton was not yet aware of what was happening in Russia and, therefore, could not stand firm against human rights violations. It makes more sense to speculate that it is only now, after the NATO's "victorious" mission in Yugoslavia, that the West and the U.S. found it convenient to start detaching themselves from Russia and pushing it against the wall for what it has been doing all these years.

This is politics, and in politics that's called a "double standard." The truth of the matter is that, so far, the West has been wasting its moral credibility in the eyes of Russians, not using it for truly engaging Russia in the global society of nations. What to do now? Can Russia's relationship with the West be repaired? There is no obvious answer. The thaw of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's era cannot be returned. The West had better start designing a long-overdue strategy of cooperative relations with the Eurasian giant.

"Junior partnership" will no longer work. This time, it must be a strategy of Russia's global engagement that is morally consistent and free of double standards. Andrei P. Tsygankov holds an advanced degree from Moscow State University and is finishing a doctoral program at USC's School of International Relations. Foreign policy: With a Yugoslav victory under its belt, the U.S.

holds Russia to the fire in Chechnya. By ANDREI P. TSYGANKOV What was it that Russia could have learned from the West's recent intervention in Yugoslavia? Or, put differently, what was it that the West wanted Russia to learn from its resistance to brutalities of Slobodan Milosevic's regime in Kosovo? To many Western politicians, the answer is obvious Russia, as well as other parts of the globe, should have gotten the message that from now on, no one would be allowed to grossly violate human rights. What Russia has learned from the NATO campaign in Yugoslavia is something very different, however. Russia has learned that the West, led by the U.S., will do everything possible to establish its global hegemony and that, in attempting to accomplish this goal, it will continue to appeal to the rhetoric of human rights.

Why such a gap in perceptions? In part, the gap has to so with semi-authoritarian nature of Russia's new political regime, in which the military recently has gained an upper hand in the country's decisionmaking process. Russia's heavy-handed approach to Chechnya's separatism is a case in point. Russia's recent ultimatum to Grozny and its readiness to level the city to the ground demonstrate that military authorities, supported by the former KGB officer and now acting President Vladimir V. Putin, are committed to eliminating the threat of terrorism at any cost. Yet the other part of the story has to do with the West's double standard in handling the affairs in Eur asia and beyond.

In Russia, the argument about the West's hypocritical stand is well known and embraced wholeheartedly. An average Russian might tell you how Moscow initiated the peaceful end of the Cold War and in exchange in the name of market democracy and human rights protection got mass robbery and a catastrophic decline in living standards, the NATO expansion and the airstrikes in Yugoslavia. Politicians might explain how Russia was made to accept the humiliating status of the West's junior partner. In today's Russia, the West is routinely blamed for the shock-therapy approach in economic reform, the orientation By WILL HAIRSTON The world lost more than a widely respected actor and singer when it lost Jester Hairston on Jan. 18 at age 98.

To the Hairston family, white and black, he was a great spiritual leader who brought us together to sing in harmony. I hope our nation can learn a few bars of Jester's song. I am a white man who, in 1995, decided to follow Martin Luther King's dream of racial harmony because, in 1980, 1 heard Jester's song. Jester made it fun to take the hand of the other side of our family, the side that had suffered in slavery. He didn't focus on the suffering but was a master at bringing the music born out of the suffering to life for many generations.

When most people think of Jester Hairston, they think of his roles as Roily Forbes in the 1980s sitcom "Amen," as Jethro in "The Alamo" or as Spence Robinson in 'To Kill a Mockingbird." One could fill many pages with the honors from his long and rich career as an arranger, composer and traveling choir leader. I remember him being very proud of leading a large choir of Russians in singing his trademark song "Amen," which he dubbed for Sidney Poitier in the 1963 film "Lilies of the Field." Yet, to me, his other legacy is even greater. Like Martin Luther King Jester faced a world filled with racial prejudice. Like King, he overcame much to get an outstanding education. I don't know how King and Jester could avoid the bitterness and reach out with such an overcoming love, but they did.

King overcame hatred by preaching love with a powerful "soul force." Jester overcame hatred by singing love with a powerful "soul force." In 1963, King challenged our nation with his powerful dream that someday the sons of slaves and the sons of slave owners would sit down together at the table of brotherhood. By the time King gave that speech, Jester had been doing that very thing for decades. As he traveled far and wide in his career, Jester and Will Hairston your whole being. It produced an infectious joy that made you feel very lucky to be there. I let the fear and awkwardness get the better of me for the next 15 years.

Then, in 1995, 1 remembered Jester's song. I called him, and he told me many wonderful, often hilarious, stories of the white families that he had shared meals with on his travels. Around Jester, racial reconciliation wasn't just a dream, it was a fun reality. Since that conversation in 1995, 1 have been attending the Hairston clan reunions again. Before the last one, a white cousin of mine from Minneapolis called and said he wanted to come.

While a student at the University of Minnesota, he got a call from Jester, who took him out to eat. Heaven only knows how many bridges Jester built in his lifetime. Yes, Jester was a screen star, a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild. He even has his own star on Hollywood Boulevard. But our family, white and black, knows that he was also a great spiritual leader.

Will Hairston lives in Harrisonburg, Va..