{"id":39713,"date":"2017-08-09T05:00:05","date_gmt":"2017-08-09T09:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=39713"},"modified":"2017-08-08T18:12:01","modified_gmt":"2017-08-08T22:12:01","slug":"ernst-zundel-the-zelig-of-holocaust-denial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/08\/09\/ernst-zundel-the-zelig-of-holocaust-denial\/","title":{"rendered":"Ernst Z\u00fcndel, “the Zelig of Holocaust denial”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the National Post<\/em>, Colby Cosh<\/a> tells the tale of Canada’s “favourite” holocaust denial specialist:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Ernst Z\u00fcndel in 1992 on the day of his legal victory in R. v. Z\u00fcndel<\/em> (via Wikipedia<\/em>)<\/p><\/div>Ernst Z\u00fcndel, the Zelig of Holocaust denial, died suddenly this weekend at his ancestral home in the Black Forest of Germany. If he had died sooner, before his 2005 deportation from this country, I am afraid he would have been widely described in obituaries as \u201cGerman-Canadian.\u201d He lived here from 1958 to 2000, unsuccessfully trying a couple of times to obtain official citizenship, and was visible for years as a self-styled opponent of Germanophobic stereotypes in the popular media.<\/p>\n

Foreseeably, Z\u00fcndel turned out to be the ultimate German stereotype himself: a war baby who used Canada as a refuge from conscription and anti-Nazi laws back home, all while obsessively re-litigating the Second World War in pseudonymous anti-Semitic pamphlets and books. Most ethnic Germans abroad wouldn\u2019t deny the Holocaust or complain of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, as Z\u00fcndel did, but\u2026 well, if you have studied German history seriously enough to talk about it socially, you will have run into folks who have funny ideas and tiny chips on their shoulder about, say, First World War reparations or the bombing of Dresden.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

It should be remembered that by 1986 Z\u00fcndel was already well on his way to establishing his place in Canadian legal history. He had already been convicted once under the Criminal Code\u2019s \u201cspreading false news\u201d section, eventually struck down by the Supreme Court in 1992\u2019s R. v. Z\u00fcndel<\/em>. Free speech absolutists argued then that the legal and social pursuit of Z\u00fcndel merely served to increase his notoriety.<\/p>\n

As a purely empirical question of history, this is hard to resolve. But we know that protests and the exertions of the police failed to stop Z\u00fcndel from winning over Irving, and thus acquiring international influence. It may have done nothing but enhance his credentials as a pseudo-intellectual grappler, defying social scorn and the force of law.<\/p>\n

The authorities were eventually able to bundle Z\u00fcndel off to Germany through a legal door that has since closed. He was deported as an undesirable alien on the basis of a ministerial \u201csecurity certificate\u201d \u2014 not long before the Supreme Court denounced the use of secret evidence in deportation proceedings, and made such certificates harder to obtain. After Z\u00fcndel\u2019s deportation, an apparatus of progressive opposition to security certificates was quick to materialize. One cannot help wondering: if he were still alive in Canada in 2017, and the state tried to banish him, who might be out marching on his behalf, defending him as an \u201cundocumented Canadian\u201d?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the National Post, Colby Cosh tells the tale of Canada’s “favourite” holocaust denial specialist: Ernst Z\u00fcndel, the Zelig of Holocaust denial, died suddenly this weekend at his ancestral home in the Black Forest of Germany. If he had died sooner, before his 2005 deportation from this country, I am afraid he would have been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1118,7,28,53,230],"tags":[304,186,1041,269,752],"class_list":["post-39713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-germany","category-history","category-media","category-politics","category-ww2","tag-antisemitism","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-holocaust","tag-propaganda","tag-supremecourt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-akx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39713"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39716,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39713\/revisions\/39716"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}