Guenter Lewy

On 17 November 2008 Lewy filed a defamation suit against the Southern Poverty Law Center, Inc., and writer-editor David Holthouse in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. On 28 September 2010 the case was settled when the SPLC agreed to publish a retraction and apologize to Lewy for suggesting that he was "a Turkish agent". In its statement, the SPLC stated that it had erred in assuming that "any scholar who challenges the Armenian genocide narrative necessarily has been financially compromised by the government of Turkey." The settlement with Lewy included an undisclosed monetary payment. Lewy's counsel in the case, David Salzman and Bruce Fein, lead the Turkish Coalition of America's Turkish American Legal Defense Fund.

Lewy's book The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide was published in 2006 by University of Utah Press after it was rejected by eleven publishers. In the book, Lewy argues that there is insufficient evidence of the Young Turk regime organizing the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. In Lewy's view, they have not been proven to have been governmentally organized. About the number of Armenian victims, Lewy argues that it "can only be estimated, because no death statistics for this period exist"; calculating the total losses of Ottoman Armenians between 1914 and 1919, Lewy uses the figure of 1,750,000 individuals for the pre-war population in the whole Ottoman Empire, figure used by historians like Charles Dowsett and Malcolm E. Yapp, then estimate the number of survivors in 1919 to around 1,108,000, making an average of several estimations, including the tabulation of George Montgomery (American official in the Paris Peace Conference in charge of Near East) and the figure of the Armenian National Council of Constantinople; so, Lewy estimates the total losses for World War I to around 642,000.

America in Vietnam, which appeared seven years after the Winter Soldier Investigation, became controversial in the context of the 2004 United States presidential election. Presidential hopeful John Kerry had been involved with the Winter Soldier Investigation; in the context of the campaign, Lewy's suggestion that the Winter Soldier Investigation was dishonest and politically motivated was frequently cited to impugn John Kerry's reputation. Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the group of which Kerry had been a part, alleged that American war policy and conduct in Vietnam was resulting in war crimes being committed. Lewy suggests that the group used "fake witnesses" in the Winter Soldier hearing in Detroit, and that its allegations were formally investigated.

In September 2004, Lewy published an essay in Commentary entitled "Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?": "[E]ven if some episodes can be considered genocidal—that is, tending toward genocide—they certainly do not justify condemning an entire society." The paper is highly critical of Ward Churchill, particularly in regards to his attributing the word "genocide" to the destruction of American Indian civilization. Lewy dismissed as bogus Churchill's assertion that the United States Army intentionally spread smallpox among American Indians by distributing infected blankets in 1837.

Lewy argues in The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, published in 2000, that the Gypsies' overall plight does "not constitute genocide within the meaning of the genocide convention". Lewy concludes that in the case of the Nazi persecution of the Gypsies the "use of the term 'genocide' would seem to involve a dilution of the concept", but that the question is not to determine if the Holocaust is the Nazi's worst crime; to refuse the "genocide" label is not, Lewy argues, a way to minimize the sufferings of Gypsies, Poles, Russians and other non-Jewish victims of Nazism. The introduction is devoted to the long history of violence against Gypsies before the Nazis took power, with a special focus on the laws adopted in Bavaria and some other German Länder at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, showing the continuity between the last year of the Weimar Republic and the first years of Nazi regime. In a section entitled "Roots of Hostility", Lewy argues that the main reason of the persecution against Gypsies before 1933 was prejudice. Though Gypsies are not a violent people, he adds that prejudice is not always the single reason; the misbehavior of a minority among nomadic Gypsies contributed also to hostility and prejudices.

Lewy had suggested that his America in Vietnam, published in 1978, would "clear away the cobwebs of mythology that inhibit the correct understanding of what went on—and what went wrong—in Vietnam." The text, which argues against traditional or "orthodox" interpretations of the war as an unnecessary, unjust, and/or unwinnable war replete with disastrous mistakes and widespread American atrocities, has proven influential for many western scholars that share similar views of the conflict. It predated and influenced other reinterpretations including those of Norman Podhoretz, Mark Moyar, and Michael Lind. America in Vietnam thus attracted both criticism and support of Lewy for belonging to the "revisionist" school on Vietnam. Lewy argues,

In recalling the 1971 congressional testimony of some American veterans who were critical of the war, one of whom compared American action in Vietnam to genocide, Lewy suggests that some "witnesses sounded as if they had memorized North Vietnamese propaganda." The book is critical of domestic opponents of American participation in the Vietnam War. In using the phrases "peace activists" or "peace demonstrations", Lewy often puts quotation marks around the word "peace", implying alternative motivations for the activism. The author alleges a possible connection between cases of sabotage in the Navy and the anti-war movement: "Between 1965 and 1970, the Navy experienced a growing number of cases of sabotage and arson on its ships, but no evidence could be found that antiwar activists had directly participated in a sabotage attempt on a Navy vessel. Cases of fragging and avoidance of combat may well have been instigated at times by antiwar militants, though no hard evidence of organized subversion was ever discovered."

First published in 1964, Lewy's The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany has proven both controversial and influential. Rolf Hochhuth's play The Deputy had appeared only a year earlier, indicting the Vatican for failing to act to save the Jews during the Holocaust; amidst the Vatican's outrage with the play, Lewy's text continued in the same vein, "One is inclined to conclude that the Pope and his advisers—influenced by the long tradition of moderate anti-Semitism so widely accepted in Vatican circles—did not view the plight of the Jews with a real sense of urgency and moral outrage. For this assertion no documentation is possible, but it is a conclusion difficult to avoid."

Lewy criticizes what he terms the "war crime industry", and what he perceives to be the double standards of the Western media, which, he alleged, neglected to report equally on the crimes of Vietnamese communists, giving the figure of 36,725 political assassinations perpetrated by the VC/NVA between 1957 and 1972. About the crimes committed by American soldiers, Lewy asserts that "between January 1965 and March 1973, 201 Army personnel in Vietnam were convicted by court-martial of serious offenses against Vietnamese. During the period of March 1965 to August 1971, 77 Marines were convicted of serious crimes against Vietnamese."

According to Mark Potok, editor of the Intelligence Report journal of Southern Poverty Law Center, the facts of the Armenian genocide are quite well known. The ruling party of the day massacred intellectuals, forced hundreds of thousands of Armenians into what amounted to death marches, and systematically despoiled the victims of their property. Professor Raphael Lemkin coined the word "genocide" in 1943 with the Armenian slaughter in mind. In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) wrote the Turkish foreign minister to remind him that the massacre of Christian Armenians was indeed "a systematic genocide".

In 1939 he migrated from Nazi Germany to Mandatory Palestine. After World War II, he migrated to the United States to reunite with his parents. Lewy earned a BA at City College in New York City and a MA and PhD at Columbia University. He has been on the faculties of Columbia University, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He currently lives in Washington, D.C., and was a frequent contributor to Commentary.

Guenter Lewy (born 22 August 1923) is a German-born American author and political scientist who is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His works span several topics, but he is most often associated with his 1978 book on the Vietnam War, America in Vietnam, and several controversial works that deal with the applicability of the term genocide to various historical events. Lewy sees the word genocide as an inappropriate label for either Romani genocide or Armenian genocide.

Lewy was born in Breslau, Germany, (now Wrocław, Poland) in 1923. At the age of nine he joined a German-Jewish scouts organization called Die Greifen (lit. "the griffins"), which he has suggested was important in shaping his desire for an academic career. Described by Lewy as a "quasi-Romantic" group, Die Greifen emphasized music, literature, and song, particularly Landsknechtlieder, encouraging the youths to avoid becoming "Spiessbürger" ("philistines"). By 1938, as persecution of Jews in Germany increased, Lewy began to lobby his family to leave Germany behind. After Kristallnacht, in November 1938, when his father was interned in Buchenwald for four months and he was beaten, his parents sent him to Mandatory Palestine. Later in the war, when Lewy was of fighting age, he voluntarily took up arms against Germany, serving in the Jewish Brigade.