The Times (London)

February 9, 2019 Saturday

 

by Matthew Parris

 

 

'Ashocking three million Britons," reported a newspaper at the end of last month, "don't believe the Nazi death camps ever existed, according to a new survey released on Holocaust Remembrance Day." The rest of the news media reported this only slightly less breathlessly. The survey they cited had been commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, a government-funded charity. The report from (and about) Britain was widely headlined abroad, including in Israel, as a worrying truth about our country.

 

Though the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust stand by their poll, I knew something must be wrong. I've never met anyone who believes the Holocaust never happened, and my social circle cuts across class, race and religion and includes a fair few Muslims. A clutch of Islamists, antisemites and right-wing nutters in Britain do believe this poisonous rubbish, but they can be nothing like five per cent of our fellow citizens. So I wrote a paragraph in Wednesday's Times Notebook suggesting it was more likely that one in 20 don't know what the word "Holocaust" means.

 

BBC Radio 4's More or Less programme, which takes a quizzical look at statistical claims in the news, then tackled this poll finding, with Peter Lynn, professor of survey methodology at the University of Essex, remarking that it "sounded a bit unlikely". All the more so, he suggested, because when asked how many people were murdered in the Holocaust, only five out of 2,000 (0.25 per cent) assented to "zero". Professor Lynn speculated that respondents may have assented to the "never happened" question by mistake because the two questions that preceded it (about it being important "to know about the Holocaust" and to "educate people about the Holocaust") called for an obvious "yes".

 

Whatever the explanation, few would honestly think it likely that one in 20 of us are Holocaust deniers. And, as the radio programme pointed out, there's a history of skewed surveys on issues that arouse (righteous) passions among campaigners. A 1990s survey in the United States put Holocaust deniers at a shocking 20 per cent but after eliminating the distorting effect of a confusing question, the true proportion of deniers worked out at a tenth of that figure.

 

This column, though, goes wider than the Holocaust. It's about the inbuilt and usually innocent desire of campaigning organisations to bring us bad news. I remember from the 1980s the fury of some gay rights campaigners when a West End play about homosexuals, badged with pink triangles and gassed in Hitler's extermination camps, was greeted with scepticism that the number was even significant compared with six million murdered Jews. It was a pity that either side chose to argue about this; not unlike the tensions aroused by the Armenian wish that the appalling Turkish mass slaughter of Armenians from 1915 to 1917 should qualify them for inclusion in Holocaust Memorial Day. An unedifying spat ensued.

 

It's an objective fact that Jewish loss dwarfs all others in sheer horror and numbers, but any impression of competition for the outrage of history is a tricky road to travel. It's an objective fact that Armenian losses were massive and cruel and Turkish slaughter systematic. Does more need to be said? Perhaps these issues are too freighted with anxiety, pain and passion for rational discussion to be possible. So let me take an infinitely smaller and less stark example. I write this from Catalonia, where yellow-ribbon symbols are painted across highways and hang from lampposts and balconies everywhere, even appearing on brooches and earrings; where the restaurant I dined in last night has switched to yellow napkins; and where my sister is preparing to join a new campaign of public demonstrations. The judicial trial of imprisoned Catalan separatist politicians is starting.

 

I'm deep in separatist territory and personally sympathetic to Catalan outrage at the incarceration of their elected politicians, but I cannot help noticing a certain grisly satisfaction that some Catalanistas take in stories of persecution. On social media, images of injured and bloody Catalan demonstrators beaten by Spanish police circulate to clucks of indignation that are justified yet (to me) have the ring of … I will not say "gratification" but there's something almost satisfied in the response. Some Catalans do have a problem with victimhood, and succumb to a temptation to wallow in it: a pity not because they have no right to, but because as a frame of mind it doesn't help. Though victimhood may be a reality, it is possible to get psychologically stuck in its rehearsal. This is not good for people and can actually hurt a cause.

 

Just as we British have a tendency to see our history through the sometimes distorting prism of victory and success (the Armada, Waterloo, two world wars, the Falklands; the industrial revolution, votes for women, the splitting of the atom), Catalans prefer to enjoy their history as a catalogue of reverses and injustices: military defeats (Catalonia has lost every war it has been involved in) and persecution by Madrid (General Franco's laws against the use of the Catalan language); and now the imprisonment of Catalan politicians. It risks becoming a habit of mind.

 

I'm afraid that if inquiries were to reveal beyond question that the apparent assaults by the police on Catalan referendum demonstrators in Barcelona in 2017 were in fact carried out in self-defence, then the first, instinctive response of many Catalans would be disappointment; and the second would be www.denial.No inquiry could conclude this, of course, but the question "would you be pleased or sorry if your complaint turned out to be unfounded?" can be instructive in cases beyond just the Catalan one.

 

When is it right to want the news to be bad? I have not yet properly acknowledged the best defence of actively seeking bad news. It's the reason for the very existence of organisations like the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, and it's a noble aim. If the truth is shocking then we should make sure it is uncovered and made public. Campaigners must highlight it, spread the news abroad, rub mankind's face in it if necessary. Ask William Wilberforce, Florence Nightingale, Mahatma Gandhi, Primo Levi, Nelson Mandela. Or even (in his own estimation on a much humbler scale) the Times's Andrew Norfolk, who uncovered sexual abuse in Rotherham.

 

But a burning desire to expose callousness and ignorance can edge imperceptibly into a wish to find evidence of it. Without meaning to, and though they acted only in good faith, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust's poll has defamed this country. Its findings deserve sceptical scrutiny.

 

The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust's poll defamed Britain