My post the other week about the use of AI to generate images purportedly of the Holocaust has had quite a lot of attention. Some of this has been derived from my posting a link alongside critiques of the images as they’ve appeared (and re-appeared) in my social media. I’ve had three basic responses to these comments:

Firstly, responses by people who are what used to be called “hard” Holocaust deniers. These claim that the images are no more fake than any other image of the Holocaust. This recalls David Irving’s rallying cry to fellow deniers to “Sink the Auschwitz!” Irving said that they had to “make it tasteless” to get attention: a strategy developed by the late (and unlamented) Ernst Zündel, who used publications such as  “Secret Nazi Polar Expeditions” (1978) and “Hitler at the South Pole” (1979) to get himself invited into television studios to “defend” his views. He also doubtless tapped into the subculture of what we might term today credulous edgelords, many of whom probably went on to buy turquoise shell suits in emulation of David Icke. 

(Icke, by the way, has dropped his New Age pretence of trying to create world peace in favour of screaming “Rothschild Zionist!” at pictures of people he disagrees with. No more shell suits either.) 

Secondly, there have been comments espousing “soft” denial, especially minimisation.  One response ran: “the reason they were running low on food was because the allies uS Great Britain Etc [sic.] were bombing the railways. Otherwise it was typhus killing those Jews.” 

Both of these types of comment are to be expected. The effort to distort and deny the scale of the Holocaust started while the Holocaust was still happening, and hasn’t let up since. As Tony Kushner has described, this went alongside a “liberal” suspicion that Jews had brought their fate upon themselves – that there was (and this was an actual phrase used) “no smoke without fire”. Nothing has tortured a certain kind of antisemitic fantasist more than actual Jewish victimhood, often recorded by its perpetrators. That such people seek to muddy the historical waters is not surprising. 

But other kinds of indignation have been less expected, and are much more worrying in strategic terms. I expect to draw the ire of deniers, but the people who’ve rejected my challenges to these fakes as an attack on Holocaust memory have been a shock. Particularly when they claim that the fakes reflect realities they’ve read about or even seen on site visits.

Mostly, those kinds of objections can be met with facts. Since the responder accepts the Holocaust as an item of knowledge, they are usually able to accept arguments based on factual information and evidence (even if this is time-consuming, especially as a volunteer.) 

But the last kind of objection is the most difficult. These claim that any kind of Holocaust remembrance, however divorced from facts, is worthy of reverence. Since I treat fake images of real events (even if rarely referenced or even employing names) as fakes, I am guilty of (at best) carping or (at worst) challenging the reality of the Holocaust. Challenging Holocaust distortion is now (for some people) on a par with (or worse than) Holocaust distortion itself. We are not so much through the looking glass as picking the shards of critical discourse out of our eyes. 

The use of these images is already blurring the boundaries between real and imagined. If it is allowed to go unchallenged it will rapidly become impossible to restrict their use. As we know from the success of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the inadequacy of Holocaust representations is not disqualifying – in fact, it can even be a reason for their success. And there are -as Baudrillard warned – no originals to correct, no negatives to destroy. All we have is experience and expertise, challenges, and the exercise of choice.

The scholar Andy Pearce has done a lot of work on what he terms “Holocaust consciousness” – where the object is simply to create a rather numinous sense of the Holocaust’s reality rather than engage in rigorous education or discussion. We are reaping the fruit of this direction of work, and we need to ask ourselves if we can change course. It is not enough to be aware of the Holocaust; we must ensure that it is known.

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