This is from an obscure and tedious book about the Haitian revolution of the early 19th century. The author felt the need not only to analogise the situation via the Holocaust, but to offer a brief defense of its narrative, though it has nothing directly to do with his subject.
Silencing the Past, Michael Trouillot, 1995, pg 12
Notes:
The employment of semantic verbiage: "the relation between scholarship and political responsibility", i.e. "we must uphold the status quo". It's not about truth. It never was, from the moment the Gas Chambers emerged out of the halls of Soviet propaganda ministries.
It points out that Vidal-Naquet's mother died at Auschwitz, as if that lends him some sort of infallibility on this question, or makes his case more convincing. I suppose it does, in the standard emotional-sentimental storm which the mainstream wishes to cook up in the mind of the reader. The "martyr credibility" is very strained and tiresome.
“Challenge narratives -- no, not THAT one!”. The writer here has no problem with Lipstadt using the Holocaust the confirm the status quo of liberal democracy & Zionism, but then sets up a straw-man of Revisionists being Nazis, and puts in their mouth an argument that none of us ever make -- namely, "we may be Nazis but what does that matter?". Rubbish. Lipstadt can launch an "ideological critique" of revisionism, i.e. dismiss its theories because of politics, but we can't dismiss the orthodox narrative for its own obvious political manipulation. What a lark.
