I’m currently reading The Lampshade by Marc Jacobson (which seems quite pop and not entirely thoroughly researched, but entertaining all the same), and I’ve got up to the part where he interviews a Holocaust denier. There’s a question that’s been rattling around in my head about Holocaust deniers for some time, so I thought I’d see what Dopers had to say about it.
Now, from what I understand Holocaust deniers don’t tend to deny the whole thing: they say that the numbers were much less than the mainstream historical record, they say gas chambers were never used, that kind of thing. But they don’t deny work camps, starving, beatings, or the Nazi rhetoric and wishes - at least, not that I’ve seen. So here’s my question…why does it matter?
IANAHD, I believe these things happened as history tells us. But to be perfectly, bluntly honest (and I feel like this may be an unpopular opinion), I really don’t care if it was six million Jews (Roma, Poles, LGBT, mentally ill…) killed, or only two million. Those kinds of numbers, to be quite frank, are much too large for me to get my head around. I don’t care if the method of execution the Nazis used was gas chambers, or if they killed people using the butt of a rifle. The details of it all seem to me to be entirely beside the point.
Surely the really important facts here are very, very simple - and surely we all agree on them? The Nazis decided that large numbers of people and classes of people were not human, so they killed them in extremely nasty ways. It was shocking and terrible and something we should remember and learn from, so history doesn’t repeat itself (while we’re at it, we might remember just who it was who invented concentration camps, and that these things can happen right here at home - but that’s off the topic).
So why does anyone feel that the “fact” the numbers of people killed in the Holocaust are lower than the historical record tells us important enough to devote so much time and effort to?
You do realize that Holocaust deniers are mostly people who hate Jews, right? There are probably a few who are just nutty conspiracy theory types, but most of them think the Nazis had the right idea. I’m not any kind of expert on this sort of thing, but as best as I can tell Holocaust deniers generally feel it’s important to deny that the Holocaust was as bad as it was for several reasons:
They want to make the Nazis seem more sympathetic. Some probably believe the Nazis really weren’t as bad as history tells us, others are probably deliberately lying because they know Nazis are unpopular with the general public.
They want the Jews to seem less sympathetic. Many Holocaust deniers are quite open about claiming that there’s an international Jewish conspiracy responsible for inventing all kinds of lies about the Holocaust just so the rest of the world would feel sorry for them.
Some of them apparently think so highly of Hitler that they can’t believe that, if he’d really set out to exterminate the Jews, he could have failed to do so.
You’re probably right - I’m just thrown off because the guy in this book is portrayed by the (Jewish) author as being really friendly, open, and self-described as looking for a “Jewish-friendly” resolution.
There are no “Jewish-friendly” resolutions to the existence of systematic Holocaust denial.
It is an expression of virulent anti-Semitism, designed to 1) make modern-day hatred more acceptable by obscuring its consequences, 2) promote suspicions that Jews are “taking advantage” of the Holocaust and thus engender resentment, and 3) inflict pain on victims and their descendants through the pretense that the Holocaust’s horrors never existed or were grossly exaggerated.
Similar motives are behind the pretense that slavery was a relatively benign institution. It’s bigotry, pure and simple.
Yeah, I know, but the guy in the book didn’t seem to. He came across as cheerful and naive. He may be an exception, badly portrayed, or engaging in a remarkable amount of doublethink, however.
Now I definitely see how they’re doing #3, but it’s 1 and 2 here that get me - is this willful blindness then? They really believe that 6 million people being murdered gets a well-deserved shocked and sombered reaction, but if it’s only two million - well, that’s Jews taking advantage? (Two million is the number I’ve heard given).
I don’t know what it says about me, but my emotional reaction to the Holocaust wouldn’t really change if I did believe the Holocaust deniers’ claims. I can only begin to understand what happened by looking at individual cases, and it seems to me that no matter what the numbers, the consequences are dramatic enough that were we to accept the Holocaust deniers’ version hook line and sinker - well fuck, that really wouldn’t make a difference. I mean, look at the pictures of people who were kept in concentration camps! Look at the mass graves!
I suppose the answer to all of this is: “bigotry blinds people”, isn’t it?
Ironically, or not, the Holocaust is one of the best documented ‘events’ in recent history.
Besides the millions of eye-witnesses, there are multiple levels of confirmation ranging from preserved infrastructure, a giant spectrum of photographic and documentary evidence (the latter including huge amounts of document evidence), and large numbers of accounts/confessions by the perpetrators (and recall that Eichmann didn’t deny the charges against him, only that he was following orders). Still, . . .
. . . I’ve always felt that the most convincing evidence are the countless extended families which wound up being represented by one or two survivors after the war. The Holocaust deniers would have us believe somehow that all those hundreds of thousands of geographically and linguistically disparate families, from France and Holland in the west, to Poland in the east, and from Latvia in the north to Ukraine and Romania in the south, all, immediately and simultaneously upon the end of the war, got their stories straight.
I know very little about Holocaust Denial in general, but it seems like I read (right here on the SDMB) about a very famous, prominent Denier who is Jewish, but still claims that the whole thing was blown way out of proportion, and that while the Nazi ideology was clearly Bad News For The Jews, they never did the vile things (mass exterminations, primarily) that people think they did.
One very ugly recent development, based on images and Facebook notes sent to me by a very conservative relative, is to deny that extreme conservatives had anything to do with the holocaust by blaming it on the liberals, the “logic” is that since the Nazis were liberals (Several books and articles from conservatives have used this stupid logic) it follows then that extreme conservatives or neo-nazi groups are the “good guys” today :smack:
It is horrible, but to me it is interesting to see the twists they have to do to ignore that people like Einstein (yes he had Jewish parents but but they and he were secular/agnostic) and many other European liberals ended up running away from the Nazis or ended up in the concentration camps.
What is even more twisted is that I do notice that several of the sources of that meme are also Neo-nazis. At the same time that they minimize the Holocaust to defend themselves from their sorry heritage, they do launch into what I would describe as the ultimate act of projection: They claim that the Jews/liberals/the left are planning to do a “white genocide” so anything is justified in the efforts to stop them.
Indeed, idiotic bigot logic that works mostly with the Nazis of today but sadly, as my relative shows, there is a lot of denial information on this subject running around under the radar of the mainstream media that is fooling a good number of Americans right now, not only with denials of the holocaust, but also with denials of the real agenda that the past and modern followers of fascism are trying to hide.
Nazism was not an “extreme conservative” ideology. It was revolutionary. Extreme conservatism was more like Austrofascism or Franco’s rule.
Part of the issue with holocaust denial is that by making it illegal you give it a certain validity. Not the historical fact itself, but the looking into it. If the state is in the business of making opinions illegal, then it is a free man’s obligation to look into those opinions.
“Willful blindness” gives more credit to a lot of these folks than they deserve. It’s just flat outright lying.
Two million is “better” because it’s a bit more palatable – it sounds like the speaker isn’t completely insane and in total denial. But in fact they are in total denial, which becomes clear when they deny there was a deliberate extermination program, and attribute most of the deaths simply to overcrowded, underfed prisoners dying of disease, slow starvation (in a country being bombed every day when most of the entire population was starting to go hungry), and the occasional brutal (but never officially sanctioned) camp guard.
And by this narrative they make it fuzzier. Seriously, I know a fair amount about the Holocaust, and I don’t really know how many were killed by execution in comparison to the numbers killed by hunger and disease. And I don’t particularly because I understand that death by hunger and disease was part of the plan. But a lot of people don’t get that – they see those deaths as, oh, I dunno… incidental? accidental?
So there are the liars, and there are some who believe the lies and spread them. They’re the"willfully blind", as they could certainly find out the facts if they do the research.
Here’s one theory. HD’s want attention. To go with the flow and say all research and history shows it happened makes them invisible among the multitudes, but to refute the mainstream allows them to stand out. Look at me: I’m loud, I’m proud, and I’m not part of the crowd!
It excuses Hitler and the Nazis. If you bring the amount killed down to under a million, you’re approaching the levels of deaths other countries caused. The argument is “Sure, the Germans may have killed 500,000 people. But the French killed 500,000 in Algeria and the British killed 500,000 in India and the Americans killed 500,000 in Vietnam.”
I never understand why neo-nazis bother to deny the holocaust (in public). If you hate the Jews so much surely you’d be happy so many were wiped out by your ideological predecessors. Holocaust denial is just barmy any way you look at it.
Every single conspiracy theorist I’ve encountered–not most of them, not just more than half, but every single one–is an anti-Semite. Whenever I’ve queried said CTs on their particular flavor of the moment “theory,” every time it ends up with one of the obviously anti-Semitic “theories” being touted as proof of the flavor of the moment.
What, even the grassy knoll guys? The moon hoaxers? Anti-vax?
For what it’s worth, I’m friends with a CT nut - mostly 9/11 stuff, and more general anti-government kookiness. His (considerably more level-headed) wife is Jewish, as, by extension, is their daughter. Never caught a whiff of any sort of bigotry off him.