I’ve always been fascinated with the tactical advantage enjoyed by people who can lie. Maybe it’s because I’m very bad at it myself – it’s not the moral qualms, it’s the way I look transparently shifty.

Some years ago, in fact, I wrote a play about a particularly imaginative subcategory of liar, Holocaust deniers. I’ve been thinking lately about what I learned while writing the play; particularly about how people who are willing to lie – and are good at it – gain advantages over their opponents.

If you’re going to lie about someone who’s telling the truth, the deniers show us, do these things:

1) Level the playing field. If your opponent (the truth teller) has status or credentials to back him up, then promote your own, or if you don’t have them, make them up. Thus, since Holocaust deniers are arguing against (among others) historians, they themselves pretend to be historians – they create “institutes” with neutral names, and publish academic “journals” and books they can cite in footnotes. Never admit to what’s really going on – a personal attack. Instead, say your interest is merely discovering the truth. Never admit to any other motive… such as, say, rehabilitating the Nazis, or hating the Jews. You’re above that.

2) Accuse your opponent of lying. This always unnerves them, because like most people, they’re unprepared to defend the veracity of things they have always known to be true. An accusation that a person made up the basic events of his own life will most likely leave him sputtering and defensive – it unmoors him from what he thought were the bases of discourse. Maybe some survivor thought his attacker was going to argue about whether the Holocaust was a good or bad thing, an easy argument to win. Then all of a sudden the survivor is forced to prove that he really did survive Auschwitz, and he has no ready reaction.

3) Build your case from the trivial to the broad. Most everyone misremembers things, or embellishes a story in minor ways over the course of time. Pounce on these, and use them as proof of your opponent’s duplicity. Always cite the rhetorical principle of “False in one thing, false in all.” If your opponent, say, remembers a bombing raid on a concentration camp at a time when Allied records show no bombing raids, use that discrepancy to attack his veracity on everything… even, if need be, on whether the concentration camp actually existed. If you’re lucky, the opponent will fall for the trap, and try to prove his minor point, making him appear vulnerable on the larger issue.

4) Because this attack could be used in reverse, never admit any mistake or falsehood. As soon as you do, you let the opponent gain the initiative. So: are there multiple witnesses backing up your opponent’s version of events? They’re lying, or mistaken, or morally compromised. (One of the classic denier’s arguments is, in essence, that the hundreds of thousands of personal witnesses to the Holocaust can’t be trusted because they’re Jews, and therefore biased.) The documents backing up your opponent were forged, probably by your opponent; the confessions coerced by torture, the court opinions corrupt, the historians and academics partisans for his side. You become more and more ridiculous as you progress, but that doesn’t matter: you keep the burden of proof on the person telling the truth.

I wish I could tell you, now, that I discovered the magic bullet for defeating these kind of people. The truth will out, eventually, and all the other soothing bromides apply… but only when its no longer in anyone’s interest to promote the lie. In this country, for example, Holocaust denial is a tragic little joke, as rejected as most other kinds of overt racism. But in others, where it’s in the interest of the powerful to promote anti-Semitism, it still thrives.

What the truth needs: somebody who’ll get rich and powerful by telling it.

Links: For those interested in my play, DENIAL, it’s in some libraries and available for purchase here. One production of the play was attended by Arthur Butz, one of the most prominent deniers and a model for the play’s central character. His review is here.