Iran’s Holocaust conference and the dead end of bourgeois nationalism

In his year-end press conference, President George W. Bush once again condemned the Iranian government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the officially sponsored conference of Holocaust deniers convened in Teheran earlier this month, declaring that it “heralded a really backward view of the history of the world.”

This is from a US president whose administration frankly discusses the options of supporting a sectarian civil war that would result in the “the uprooting or extermination” of Iraq’s more than 5 million Sunni Arabs and of provoking a region-wide Sunni-Shia war that could claim millions more victims (New York Times, Dec. 17, “The Capital Awaits a Masterstroke on Iraq”).

The denunciations of the Iran conference have been nearly universal. Leaders of governments in Europe and America as well as the Vatican—all of whose predecessors actively collaborated in the Holocaust, ignored and covered it up or worked strenuously to prevent its survivors from entering their territories—were among the loudest critics.

The hypocrisy underlying such condemnation is plain. The aim of Washington and its allies is to use the issue to provide one more justification for another war of aggression in the Middle East aimed at securing domination over the region’s vast energy supplies.

Having said that, the conference convened by the Iranian regime was as shameful as it was reactionary.

It managed to turn Teheran into a temporary Mecca for the jetsam and flotsam of Holocaust denial and outright neo-fascism. Such unlikely friends of the “Iranian revolution” as David Duke, a former “Imperial Wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan and self-described “white nationalist,” were provided a platform courtesy of the Iranian government to spew their anti-Semitic and racist filth.

By Bill Van Auken
23 December 2006