A Comment on the ADL’s Guide to Holocaust Revisionism

I recently came across a publication on the ADL’s website entitled “Holocaust Denial: An Online Guide to Exposing and Combating Anti-Semitic Propaganda.”  It seems to be a guide for the intellectually-limited who have come across “Holocaust denial” for the first time.  The whole article is predictable and unimpressive, but there is one paragraph in the introduction that is nonetheless very interesting.  After beginning the guide by equating the critical study of the Holocaust with anti-Semitism and describing the revisionist movement as a “diverse hate movement” consisting of groups such as KKK factions, racist skinheads, the Aryan Nations, and neo-Nazis, they go on to tell us:

Dressing themselves in pseudo-academic garb, they [“Holocaust deniers”] have adopted the term "revisionism" in order to mask and legitimate their enterprise. After all, the ongoing challenge to and revision of previously accepted historical interpretation is one of the hallmarks of the professional historian's craft.

The ADL is saying that all historians are revisionists, to one degree or another.  Of course this is true—how does one come to know historical truth?  Not by accepting some set of a priori axioms, but by serious study of complex events.  Therefore, the historian, by definition, must study facts critically and revise preconceived opinions when new facts come to light.  One who merely regurgitates information is no historian.  Nonetheless, according to the ADL, historians must make an exception when dealing with the Holocaust.  Historians who critically examine the established history and make revisions when necessary are not real historians but “Holocaust deniers” and “anti-Semites.” “Historians” who uncritically accept it as true a priori are now the genuine historians.  Quite bizarre, no?