Those who casually dismiss Holocaust deniers as psychotic are missing the point. Outright denial is merely the most straightforward of a variety of unsavory responses to the Holocaust that have emerged in recent years. The Holocaust, after all, is the most awkward fact in twentieth-century history. All roads lead to it, and many go no farther. Economic determinism, the aestheticization of history, the denial by liberals of the existence of evil, even the very idea of progress itself: such shibboleths of modern thought look uniformly and unutterably foolish when weighed in the balance with the burnt corpses of six million Jews. For anyone who nonetheless persists in espousing such stylish notions, the Holocaust is, to borrow from the phrasebook of the KGB, an “unwanted witness.”

Small wonder, then, that those who find the reality of the Holocaust impossible to square with their own views should seek to do to it what the KGB did to its own unwanted witnesses (and what many Western intellectuals labored mightily to do to the memory of the forty million people murdered by the KGB). Hence Holocaust denial. Hence, too, Holocaust “minimization,” a staple item of latter-day radical black rhetoric to which the American public at large was introduced by Khalid Muhammad’s notorious speech at Howard University, an event which left progressive-minded journalists scrambling to find new ways to define black anti-Semitism down. And—perhaps most insidious of all—hence the “deconstruction” of the Holocaust to which the most daring of postmodernist historians