The Holocaust Global Vision conference ended yesterday in Tehran, if it in fact took place at all.

The Iranian regime assembled a collection of oddballs — principally from Europe and the United States — to discuss the merits of various Holocaust-denial theories. The event was an embarrassment to most Iranians, but it was not organized for them. The conference was sponsored by the Iranian foreign ministry, and was openly aimed at undermining Israel and the legitimacy of the Jewish state. In essence, the conference was an Iranian information operation, and its participants mere tools of the theocracy. The conference concluded with a promise to establish a fact-finding commission to get to the bottom of this 60-year controversy, and continue the study of the Holocaust in an environment in which “both sides” may freely debate. Any idea no matter how absurd can flourish under state sponsorship. We have not heard the end of this.

International umbrage notwithstanding, it is not shocking that Tehran would host such a conference. Ahmadinejad has been a consistent Holocaust denier. Nor is this view uncommon in that part of the world. Ask the average man in the street. You will hear a wide range of opinions, from The Holocaust did not happen, to Something happened but nowhere near as severe as believed, to Why couldn’t the Nazis have done a better job?

What is more interesting is the psychology of the deniers from the West. Anyone living in a free society with access to the rich documentary and human evidence of the Holocaust who nevertheless believes it did not happen is at base a troubled soul.

There are many motives at play. David Duke, for example, is simply a bigot. For him, Holocaust denial is a logical extension of anti-Semitism. The ultra-orthodox anti-Zionist rabbis who attended are extremists in their own right, none being outright deniers but questioning the extent of the killing and how it was used to sanctify the creation of Israel. Others were from a variety of persuasions, but all seeking to come to grips with their propensity to see the world through a conspiratorial lens. Holocaust denial is a form of conspiracism — the event was and is an enormous hoax, perpetrated on a credulous world to benefit the authors of the scheme, the Zionist movement. The deniers view themselves as messengers, sounding the alarm; those possessing special insights or intellectual gifts, able to see through the conspiracy; people of strong character, not to be taken in. They find emotional validation in their refusal to be victimized.

Tehran played the role of enabler for this earnest group. The regime brought them together, probably the largest gathering of coreligionists they have ever seen. It took them seriously when they never had been before. It gave them a platform and global media coverage, supplying the recognition they felt they deserved. The experience gave a sense of justification to the participants, simply by being able to utter forbidden thoughts. This was particularly true among those from countries where it is illegal to speak these ideas. Moreover, this gave the Iranians propaganda points to make about Western hypocrisy, preaching free speech but disallowing these dangerous views. Not that speech in Iran is particularly free — I am waiting for the conference that brings together those who deny the divinity of the Koran.

It is useless to ban these ideas, even counterproductive. When unconscionable thoughts cannot be exposed, debated, and cleansed from the intellectual palate, they fester. They gain strength from being forbidden; and we never will be rid of their proponents. Those who become attached to views such as this are driven by a psychology that makes them susceptible to other manifestations of the conspiracy mindset. If it wasn’t Holocaust denial it would be JFK-assassination fixation, UFO/Area 51 theories, the Illuminati, or 9/11 denial, which coexists comfortably with Holocaust denial and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its identification of Jews as the source of all evil.

The conspiracists have always existed, and always will. Thankfully, they live in such a tenuous relationship with reality that they rarely affect the lives of others in any significant way. They are mostly isolated, found singly or in small clusters. Their lives are lonely, burdened as they are with a truth that others refuse to acknowledge. As Thomas Mann wrote in Munich in 1904:

Strange regions there are, strange minds, strange realms of the spirit…. At the edge of large cities, where streetlamps are scarce and policemen walk by twos, are houses where you mount until you can mount no further, up and up into attics under the roof, where pale young geniuses, criminals of the dream, sit with folded arms and brood.

Or, these days, sit and blog. Sadly, Mann’s “criminals of the dream” did not stay in the attic. Their brooding led them eventually to the streets, Hitler, Roehm, Hess, and their followers. Eventually they took power, as sometimes happens, and began to make their dream real. And not only in Germany, but Italy, Russia, China, and elsewhere. The people least taken seriously, those frequently ignored, shunned, or laughed at, found themselves commanding the fates of millions. Sometimes history plays these tricks on the rational world; the oddballs take charge. The Lenins, the Maos, the Pol Pots — even Ahmadinejad, in a low-rent kind of way — they are no different than the types collected in Tehran. It is a mistake not to take such people seriously, and not to accept that they believe what they say they believe. The liberal impulse to discount the extremist, to rationalize his views, to refuse to take his threats literally, especially when he is in power, is itself a form of denial.

French historian Marc Bloch wrote, “any compromise with untruth, no matter what the pretext, is the mark of a human soul’s ultimate corruption.” Bloch lived by these words, through the reality of the trenches in the First World War, and as a resistance fighter in the Second. Moreover, he died by them, captured by the Gestapo in his hometown of Lyons and executed with 27 others in a field at Saint-Didier-de-Formans, ten days after the Normandy landings. If a historical event of the scale of and as well documented as the Holocaust can be denied, then anything can be. Without the past, without memory, without history, we are nothing, adrift. We place our destiny and dignity in the hands of the misfits and their projected psychoses. This movement is not an attack on the Holocaust, but on the very notion of historical meaning. It is a revolt against reality, a threat not only to the past but to the future.

— James S. Robbins is senior fellow in national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, a trustee for the Leaders for Liberty Foundation, and author of Last in Their Class: Custer, Picket and the Goats of West Point. Robbins is also an NRO contributor.