to THE AUSTRALIAN
Matt Ridley entertains and informs perceptively with his take on how insult terminology is carefully coined and then deployed to wrong foot ideological opponents (‘Left leads the right in manufacturing words of mass distraction’, 4/7). However, his claim that ‘denier’ is ‘a revolting word’ seems over the top. There are those who deny that man-made global warming is occurring and endangering mankind; there are also a few erratics who deny that the Holocaust happened. It’s OK to call them deniers.
It is a pity, though, that Ridley did not seize the opportunity to point out that most of those who are damned as ‘Holocaust deniers’ are really only Holocaust revisionists. Such historians readily agree that the Nazi regime was anti-Jewish from start to finish and that many injustices and crimes against Jews were perpetrated under its authority; they simply claim that the facts have been significantly exaggerated. What is revolting in this case is not the term itself but its misuse involving a new context of persecution.
NJ, Belgrave, Vic