At this point, you have actually provided nothing for any other poster to directly address.
You have a link to one silly website with some hacked up videos making claims about claims and you have paraphrased a couple of claims by other authors without providing any direct links to their claims. (Then you throw in that claim about what (imaginary) “official holocaust historians” say without providing a citation that any historian actually makes any such statements. That is the sort of thing that looks like a straw man: Denier A claims that Real Historian B made such-and-such a statement and if we ever find the actual statement, we then discover that it was both distorted in context and reversed in actual words by Denier A. It happens all the time in Holocaustr Denier and Conspiracy Theory trhreads, and the best way to avoid that problem is to cite the actual speakers with a direct link to their words.)
If you are looking for a serious discussion, please provide citations to actual remarks made either by the deniers or for what you claim have been made by genuine historians.
The purpose of Moderation in a forum dedicated to passionate argument is to keep threads from being more derailed than they typically are. I am not interested in merely “enforcing rules,” but in keeping discussions away from personal attacks of any kind. If you want to post on a board where every action is governed by a specific rule, you will need to look elsewhere.
Had I left off the Moderator tag, then I would be accused by various posters of being unclear as to whether my remarks were “official.” In my experience, personal remarks pretty nearly always lead to rules violations in terms of person insults. They also lead to hijacks. Neither of those situations are conducive to discussion.
If that was indeed happening, I gather the point would be to counter those who forcefully (and occasionally violently) act on their beliefs that Jews are bad, because “Jews are bad” and “holocaust never happened” are ideas that are quite heavily intertwined. It might also be the result of normal human snappishness and impatience upon being confronted with yet another round of specious claims, as holocaust denials routinely are. Feel free to share with us what you think is the single best and most irrefutable denial argument.
In any case, the forcefulness of the response is irrelevant to the truth of the original statement. Consider these cases:
Case 1:
Statement: Two plus two is four.
Calm response: No, it isn’t.
Forceful response: NO, IT ISN’T YOU FUCKING MORON!
Case 2:
Statement: Two plus two is five.
Calm response: No, it isn’t.
Forceful response: NO, IT ISN’T YOU FUCKING MORON!
The energy level of the response has no bearing on the truth of the original statement.
Additionally, if analysis of motivation is relevant in one case (i.e. holocaust claimers want support for Israel) I don’t see why it is is not also relevant in the complementary case (i.e. holocaust deniers hate Jews). Since not every holocaust claimer is a booster of Israel and I’m willing to accept that there exists at least one denier who is not specifically an anti-Semite (surely one exists, somewhere), would it not be best to leave issues of motivation out entirely?
Further, if there are such people as “official holocaust historians”, surely their names and writings are a matter of public record and you can elaborate at least a little.
Very good point … but the fact that there were white english sold into slavery [we were the dumping grounds for the british penal system pre-australia] still doesnt tend to show up in history books, and I have seen a descendant of one of them telling a history class about it and being totally dismissed as lying, even though she had a copy of his original manumission paperwork [there was apparently a deal if you served in the continental army you got manumitted. Who knew.] Seems like that person had just as little choice in coming over as the random african slave, and from what I understand, stood the same chance of dying in transit.
I hate to ask – but were any of the crematoriums used for live prisoners? This is something that I’ve wanted to ask for a while…but I’ve almost been afraid to.
Also, didn’t one general (I believe it was Patton) make an entire town go through one of the camps to make them see exactly what was going on? Because none of them could believe it.
Much of the Nazi methodology of mass extermination was dedicated towards making it as efficient as reasonably possible, and part of that was keeping the victims calm before being murdered. They sometimes even employed other Jews to go in and amongst the groups to be gassed to calm them down and convince them it was a harmless procedure.
You couldn’t keep people cowed and calm while trying to throw them into ovens. It’d be a gigantic riot.
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm—
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.*
See, you’ve been rebutted.
And that’s representative of the quality of “evidence” for Holocaust denial.
If one is serious about studying the subject, there are oodles of good sites for the purpose, many of them referenced on this page.
If one is not interested in gleaning the truth, one can selectively pick sites (carefully wiping off the drool) that reinforce what one wants to believe.
*from The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service, one of two poems I learned by heart. The other is Jabberwocky.
Anyone have a link to something that addresses the most obvious evidence- lots of Jews in Europe pre-1939, not so many post-1945, accounting for emigration?
There were two or three surveys taken between 1945 and 1947 that came up with varying figures showing a reduction of Jewish population by between 5.5 million nad 5.85 million people. (The “six million” figure is a rounding of those numbers.)
However, that does not actually address the OP because Holocaust Deniers sieze on the 11 to 17 million reduction in European population, (where another six million are generally assigned to deliberate murder by the Nazis of Slavs, Rom, homosexuals, communists, people with lower mental functioning, and others), and claim that it was simply the bad results of warfare, including bombing, starvation, disease, etc.
The reality is that the Nazis deliberately murdered around 12 million people, roughly half of whom were Jews. The death camps were not even established before the Wannsee Conference, and the Nazis had been happily murdering people using Einsatzgruppen and other efforts for several years prior to the establishment of death camps. Until we see an actual citation for one of human_extinction’s claims, there is not much point in trying to refute the nonsense attributed to Coles, Smith and Irving.
If human_extinction is really a disinterested observer, he might want to consider the Irving situation. Irving put a bunch of the crap that Coles made up along with some of his own nonsense in several books. He was challenged on his claims by Deborah Lipstadt, who pointed out his errors and identified him as a Holocaust Denier. He sued her for libel, filing the suit in Great Britain where the libel laws are strongly in favor of the plaintiff. (The defendant must prove the accuracy of the statements, regardless of any “good faith” errors and regardless whether harm is shown to the plaintiff.) The result of that trial was a complete vindication of Lipstadt with the court finding that she had demonstrated the accuracy of her claims that the Holocaust happened in the way described by mainstream historians and that Irving’s challenges to the Holocaust history were examples of sloppy research or deliberate distortion.
No, that simply wouldn’t work. Even Dachau, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka inmates had some semblance of normal human reactions left. That’s why there are signed orders for false shower heads for the gassing cellar - the victims believed they were about to take a shower, not die.
Indeed, it is the very size of the crematoria built by Topf & Sons at Auschwitz-Birkenau which nails the case shut even without all the first-hand reports of both victims and Nazis, demographic evidence and so on. The original crematoria could handle 1500 bodies per month - easily enough to accommodate even large ‘natural’ death artes due to eg. Typhus outbreaks. But the key point is that even this was nowhere near enough for Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is simply no reason whatsoever why the camp should go to the extraordinary effort and expense of building crematoria which could handle a staggering 30000 bodies per month if they only expected a fraction of this number of people to actually die.
Maybe this should be a different thread, and maybe asked on different day than today, during which I really should not be playing here and am overdue to get my family going to Services for Yom Kippur, but …
What is the appropriate way to respond to people like our op?
It is hard to believe that most who at this point are “questioning” the Holocaust are really just a innocently unaware of the reality of the facts as they make out.
Is it better to engage with facts and figures and thereby to elevate their position? To create a place in which two POVs have been staked out and some who really do not know conclude that the truth must be somewhere in between?
Or to call them out as presumed trolls or anti-Semites? (Speaking hypothetically, not per se about this particular op, mind you.)
Or to ignore them?
Right now the events of the Holocaust are recent enough that the deniers have a very hard time gaining much traction except among those already predisposed to think that Jews would make this up, but the generation of survivors is dieing off. The deniers lies and accusations of fabrications will be repeated again and again for generations to come.
Of course the Holocaust occured. James Baldwin wrote in 1962 “White people were, and are, astounded by the holocaust in Germany. They did not know that they could act that way. But I very much doubt whether black people were astounded.” I’m with him on this one. Personally, I think "Holocaust Denial"is a tactic used by anti-semites to rattle feathers and to draw attention. It’s a shame that it works so well.
I’m with Deborah Lipstadt on this. You can’t ‘debate’ these people. Debate requires a certain degree of integrity on both sides, and the deniers possess none of it. Their entire strategy is based on casting doubt rather than attempting anythign like scholarly analysis. It’s based on supposed inconsistencies - and when you argue with one of these clowns, they will pick on the slightest misstatements and magnify them. It is the idea that because a person cannot perfectly remember a time line from 65 years ago, they must be lying about everything that happened to them; because the Soviets initially overstated the deaths at Auschwitz all casualty figures are wrong etc etc.
They poison the well for serious debate and analysis. Thier argument that a single inconsistency makes for a fatal error in the entire history prevents any possibility of discussion. Unless they are excluded from the debate, serious analysis of the holocaust becomes impossible.
Now, when they take their views to the street, I am all in favor of debating them properly there.
Confronting their lies serves a purpose. You won’t convince the people who don’t want to be convinced. But there are other people who are genuinely ignorant and may have fallen for a lie just because they haven’t heard the truth. These are the people you want to reach with the facts.
I’d suggest that where there are people “like our OP” (we all know what people like *him *believe, never mind what he says, eh?) we should just do what we know “they” deserve to them.
Thank you. I hate to say I’m “relieved”, but I AM glad to learn this.
As for the OP, well, apparently he hasn’t heard the saying about having such an open mind that one’s brain falls out.
I’m sorry I didn’t get into this earlier, and I haven’t read the whole thread so I apologize if what I’m going to point out has been covered by someone else.
But if your OP is sincerely looking for clarification, there’s really only a couple things that need to be said. The OP makes the lamentably common mistake (the fallacy responsible, in large part, for the O.J. acquittal) that evidence is analogous to a chain; that if you can break a single link in this chain you’ve broken the chain and invalidated the evidence. This is not true, by any stretch of the imagination. Finding one piece of evidence–a minor piece, at that–like the details of the showers or the records or whatever–and discovering one aspect of you that you don’t understand, does not in any way whatsoever even begin to undermine the mountains upon mountains of irrefutable that otherwise exist. There is no crime in human history that is more thoroughly documented than the Holocaust.