The Holocaust Denial
Gill Seidel
(Beyond the Pale Collective, Leeds, 1986)
This is very good and should prove useful for some time. Although it is focused on the groups and individuals – chiefly in France, the UK and the US – which are the chief participants in attempts to revise the Holocaust out of existence, it offers the only attempt I am aware of at an integrated survey of recent and current neo-nazi activities. Much of this will be familiar in outline to readers of Searchlight, but even the familiar sections – WACL, Northern League, Pearson, GRECE – have been nicely summarised and, best of all, thoroughly documented. The 28 pages of chapter 3 have 111 footnotes, all of them appropriate.
The last chapter, ‘Contemporary racism and anti-Semitism’, I’m less sure of. I’m not at all sure that I accept, as Heidel claims, that all anti-Zionists are anti-Semites. Heidel has also contributed a chapter to the Ideology of the New Right (ed. Ruth Levitas, Oxford, 1986) which is more or less an expansion of this final chapter. My opinions on the current “line” in anti-racist strategies are of no relevance here, but when I read in Heidel’s essay that “the racism of the neo-conservative New Right is cultural” it seems to me that something has gone wrong. ‘Cultural racism’?