By Richard Cohen
WashPost
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Shush. Do not call. Do not e-mail. I am on pins and needles. The newly reinstated Roman Catholic bishop who has been ordered by the pope to recant his statements denying the Holocaust now concedes that "many honest and intelligent people" disagree with him, so he's going to look into the matter and see if he has been wrong. With virtually unbearable anticipation, I await his findings.
Bishop Richard Williamson, installed in the schismatic Society of St. Pius X and invited back into the church by Pope Benedict XVI just last month, said his examination of the evidence will have its limits. "I will not go to Auschwitz," he told the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel via e-mail. No matter. People with his mind-set have already been there.
Still, he could go to Treblinka, also in Poland, or any of the other Polish camps -- Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek. In Germany, Austria and elsewhere he could visit Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenburg, Mauthausen, Ravensbrueck or the many subsidiary camps -- a trek that could take him across Europe and into the cold reality of historic horror.
Holocaust denial suggests a mind perforated by anti-Semitism, a bigotry so extreme that it blinds the bigot to mounds of shoes and hair and eyeglasses, all of these exhibited at various Holocaust museums. To be a denier, it is necessary to believe that all the survivors -- Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel and all the others -- staggered out of the camps, got together and agreed to fabricate a story.
(More here.)
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