Me and the Holocaust

Dr. Sean M. Quinlan, an Asst. Prof. of History at the University of Idaho, has written an open letter to U of I President Timothy White in which he renews various charges lodged against Douglas Wilson, Steve Wilkins, George Grant, and me a few years back. It makes the insightful contribution of linking us to a series of bombings and murders in Idaho and elsewhere. The letter was hastily pulled from its original location on the web, but it's been made available at http://right-mind.us/archive/2005/08/07/35632.aspx.

While Steve is given the role of racist, George the role of homophobe, and Doug the role of all-purpose bigot, I've been cast as the anti-Semite. Quinlan writes that I was a featured speaker at last year's history conference in Moscow (which I wasn't) and continues, "Leithart praised Holocaust denier and right-wing evangelist J. Rousas Rushdoony as an 'American original.'" He is referring to an obituary I wrote for the Weekly Standard at the time of Rushdoony's death. Below I reproduce a letter to the editor of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News responding to this same charge from another U of I professor:

To the editor,

In his December 27/28 editorial in the Daily News, Dale Graden leaves the impression that I praised Rousas J. Rushdoony (not “J. Rousas Rushdoony,” as Graden has it) for being a Holocaust denier in my obituary in The Weekly Standard. I did not. In fact, I never mentioned the Holocaust at all. I praised Rushdoony for being a profound Christian thinker, and assessed his influence on the Christian Right and the rise of Christian education. Anyone who actually read the obituary would realize, too, that I am not an uncritical admirer of Rushdoony or his influence.

When I wrote the obituary, I was not even aware that Rushdoony had written on the Holocaust, though I had read a good bit of Rushdoony. There was a reason for that: The Holocaust is barely mentioned at all in Rushdoony’s voluminous writings. He never wrote a book on the subject, and no major articles. So far as I’ve been able to determine, what Graden misleadingly calls Rushdoony’s “writings on the Holocaust” consist of a few pages in a single 800-page book.

It is true that Rushdoony was sympathetic to some aspects of Holocaust “revisionism.” In particular, he disputed the claim that 6 million Jews were killed. On the other hand, he did not deny that Jews were persecuted and murdered in Nazi Germany, he denounced Nazi treatment of Jews as an atrocity, and, unlike many “revisionists,” he did not deny that the Germans pursued a policy of extermination.

Whatever Rushdoony believed about the Holocaust, I have never endorsed or promoted Holocaust revisionism in any form. Graden resorts to the most tenuous kind of guilt-by-association to taint me, implicitly New St Andrews and Christ Church, with anti-Semitism.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, August 08, 2005 at 11:16 AM

Permission is given to use material on this site, provided the source is cited, blog entries are republished in full, and the author is notified in advance.