Dear Editor,
I don’t read Freddie Kissoon’s writings because they are filled with bile and falsehoods and tend to be unidimensional, singing for his supper, nothing professional or objective. His column (Aug 8) questioning the Holocaust and a response from the scholarly Dr. Bertrand Ramcharan (Kiskadee Watch September 30) were forwarded to me. Freddie’s argument about the Holocaust demands a response, not because historical questions should be forbidden, but because the column presents a profoundly misleading standard for determining historical truth. His writing on the Holocaust is not scholarship. His argument does not withstand serious historical scrutiny.
Like Bertie, I too am surprised that a government newspaper published a commentary that is anti-Jewish. Given the influence of Jews and Israel in the West and USA, I think the government takes a big risk to affiliate with anything anti-semitic and anti-Jewish. No one, certainly not someone doing PR for the government, should question facts about the holocaust and the victimhood of Jews. Why Freddie would touch that subject so sensitive to Jews and Israel and publish it in the government paper and why the paper itself published it is inexplicable. What was the need to write that column? Who asked him to write it?
Freddie feels that Hitler did not give an order to incinerate Jews and agrees with a revisionist historian, David Irving, that the claims about the Holocaust were exaggerated. There is a mountain of evidence to debunk that falsehood.
I don’t know what Mr. Kissoon studied, if anything. I earned a doctorate in history, albeit Indian history, but I also studied and taught European history for many years. And I visited several Holocaust museums in Israel (Yad Vashem when I was a visiting scholar in 1985), Poland, Germany, Austria, Holland, France, Switzerland, New York and other places over the last four decades. I can assure Freddie that evidence is overwhelming that the holocaust occurred and claims about the persecution and suffering of Jews were not exaggerated. Holocaust denial is not historical inquiry.
There is nothing wrong with questioning historical claims, and I did that multiple times. Scholars constantly examine evidence – documents, testimony, photographs, demographic records, administrative correspondence, etc. But skepticism becomes intellectually irresponsible when the overwhelming body of evidence is dismissed because one particular document was missing. Freddie wants to see a signed order from Adolf Hitler to exterminate Jews. A verbal order was not enough!
The Holocaust was not established as historical fact because historians discovered a single piece of paper bearing Hitler’s signature. (Man Freddie, is whe you study history, at somebody’s bottom house?) It is established through a vast and mutually corroborating body of evidence: Nazi administrative records, deportation and transportation documents, construction and operational records from extermination camps, German military and governmental correspondence, photographs, physical evidence, survivor testimony, perpetrator testimony, demographic studies, records of the postwar trials, and so many other reports.
The absence of a particular document is therefore not evidence that the event itself did not occur, nor does it establish that its scale was fabricated or substantially exaggerated.
The Holocaust must be understood with the same standards of evidence used when one writes about colonialism, slavery, indentureship, Wismar Massacre, or any other historical atrocity. Guyana, with its own complicated history of colonialism, indentureship, slavery, ethnic conflict, and political violence, should understand particularly well why historical memory matters.
The government should disassociate from Freddie’s views on the Holocaust. The government, Guyanese, and all scholars of history and social sciences should condemn Freddie’s attack on the victims of the Holocaust.
Yours faithfully,
Vishnu Bisram
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