I wonder why the US Congress finally acknowledged the Armenian genocide. It took over 100 years!!!
I expect he would have hesitated for considerably more than a second to say, at any rate on public TV, “We’re going to murder right off all the children and old people except for a few to do medical experiments on, keep some of the prettier young women alive so we can rape them, and work/starve the ablebodied adults to death.”
Whether that particular individual wanted to do so I don’t know – though I bet he could have been gotten there if his party got enough of a chance – but saying so in public tends to put off the people he needs to at least keep pacified in order to give his party a chance.
And pointing out that there’s plenty of historical evidence that that’s where letting Nazis get power winds up also tends to put people off Nazis. So yes, they’re going to deny that historical evidence.
– Sage Rat’s also right about the change the Holocaust caused in general Western culture in attitudes toward Jews.
Yup. The problem – well, one of the problems, and one often not brought out enough – with groups who take and/or keep power by working up hatred against an out-group is that, in order to continue keeping power, they always have to have an out-group to demonize. Whenever whichever outgroup they started with isn’t getting them enough traction, they have to move on to defining and attacking another one.
“Everybody’s wrong but me and thee and thee’s a little queer --”
(yes, I know that’s not quite the quote.)
Sure, like, “Yes, a great many political dissidents, including Jews, were rounded up by Germany during WWII, in the same sense that Americans rounded up and interred the Japanese. As it happens, things didn’t go we for Germany, and so conditions in the Germany internment campus were that much worse than in America, and through starvation and disease many people died. Yes, a few people were deliberately executed, but only in as much as they endorsed treason against the state. So it’s not that I’m saying millions of people didn’t die during WWII—indeed, many died—only that the situation in Germany wasn’t all that different than in the US, it was just a matter of much worse conditions. It’s a real shame the Soviet Union was so awful, though. I mean, what with their gulags and their purges, they killed even more than Germany, right? Those damn communists…”
Of course it’s a crock, but a committed white supremacist doesn’t really care about what’s true.
My older relative had a teacher who got fired for saying, “Communists, homosexuals, gypsies were rounded up and killed. Most happened to be Jewish.”… I asked for more about the guy, but he couldn’t remember.
The next time I do another newspaper.com free trial, I’d like to look at these questions raised, but comparing the years. What were they saying in 1948, 1958, etc.
As mentioned, Anglo-American elites did not consider Irish and Italians as white. The press depicted Irish literally as apes - see ubiquitous 19th-century cartoons. White supremacists of Irish or Italian background are nuts.
I have no use for deniers of the Nazi holocaust. I only learned of my uncle’s US Army unit’s role in liberating death camps after he died, when we looked through his notes. He witnessed. Deniers are scum.
I’m puzzled by 2000 years of antisemitism based of biblical tales. Jewish Jesus was executed as a “bandit”, a rebel leader, by Romans, not Jews. If Christians need to blame anyone, start with Italians.
Racial purity. That means inbreeding, right? Alsatian dogs suffer from hip displasia because of that. For the greatest purity, incest is indicated. Darwin, Poe, Einstein, Giuliani all married their cousins and are white, so there you have it.
Don’t accommodate deniers or the next holocaust will be here.
Politics. Turkey was in NATO. The Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was very much NOT. Real rapprochement did not begin until after 1991 when Armenia became independent and even then it was a far less important geopolitical entity to the U.S. than Turkey. Basically it took a good long while for relations with Turkey to sour to the point where political expediency was no longer the dominant issue.
Even at that it might not have happened if relations with Turkey had nose-dived so severely in the wake of the Syrian mess. Cynically, one might suggest the recognition was ultimately more political theater/punishment than a heartfelt belief finally acted on.
Congress did not. Only the House of Representatives did; the Senate has yet to act on the bill (And Moscow Mitch has indicated that he does not plan to bring it up for a vote.
Even the House took a long time; it was introduced 12 years ago, in 2007.
That is what neonazis privately think, but holocaust denial/minimization is a tool they use when speaking publicly. When the general public hears someone ostensibly just talking about the evidence and not being overtly hateful, it plants the seed in people’s minds that the actual hateful ideas behind it are reasonable to consider and debate. A small proportion of those people will actually buy into some of the arguments and become useful idiots to further spread the message.
And there are still people who deny it out there, or at least, claim it wasn’t an actual “genocide”. 
(I think it’s illegal to refer to it in Turkey, isn’t it?)
Well, that one is much more debatable. I mean, there was a war and the Armenians did side with the enemy*, and* what happened is less well known, not to mention it is hard to tell if the Government actually organized a planned systemic genocide. The Ottoman Empire was falling apart and massively corrupt and incompetent, so perhaps the “planned” part is questionable, as it’s reasonable to doubt they could plan a birthday party, let alone a genocide.
Most experts consider it so, but it’s somewhat debatable whereas the Nazi genocide is not.
Well, that raises a point. If you say it wasnt six million Jews, it was more like three or four or five million- you could be called a denier.
I got called a denier by pointing out that yes, Communists, homosexuals, and gypsies were also killed off. So were “politicals”, my Euro relatives were sent to Dachau where perhaps, they had it a tiny bit better than the Jews. But not much as when the Allies captured the camps, many Politicals were sent to Soviet Gulags.
So “denier” is waved around a bit too much.
WTF. That’s simply the truth. 6 million Holocaust victims were Jews, 6 million were other groups.
Prior to the public learning details about the Holocaust, anti-semitism was a lot more…I don’t want to say it was “respectable,” but it was a lot more mainstream, and could be again of the notion of a massive human atrocity could somehow be minimalized or denied.
I think the implication of “happened to be Jews” was that the Nazis weren’t intentionally trying to mass murder Jews.
Yeah, sure. But what I was told, and called a “denier’ is that "to mention anyone else but the Jews, who were the REAL targets of Nazi hatred, is to dilute the Holocaust” and thereby I was a “denier”.
It is very clearly supported by the historical record that the Ottomans orchestrated the Armenian genocide from the highest levels of government.
The Pashas (the 3 joint leaders of the Ottoman Empire at the time) admitted (or arguably bragged) as much.
Source: Popular Quotes regarding the Armenian Genocide of 1915
And Hitler mentions the genocide of Armenians
There are Holocaust deniers, and there are Holocaust minimizers
David Irving, the British writer of history books… is not so much an outright Holocaust denier as a Holocaust minimizer. He is convinced that no one was gassed at Auschwitz. He does not deny that many Jews died there, but claims this was mostly from disease. He also concedes that others were shot, in Poland and elsewhere, by overenthusiastic S.S. men, but he has argued that Hitler had nothing to do with this. So no gas, no plan by Hitler, thus no Holocaust. People who remember differently are, inI rving’s peculiar phrase, “the Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust, and Other Liars—A.S.S.H.O.L.E.S.”
Then there’s Fred Leuchter, who claimed cyanide wasn’t used in the camps to gas people but to delouse them. To “prove” this, he went to Auschwitz and other camps and surreptitiously chipped samples off walls, ceilings, and floors. Then he took them to a lab in Boston He didn’t tell the lab the source of the chunk or his intentions. The lab found only traces of cyanide in the sample, which Leuchter then trumpeted as proof nobody was gassed at the camps. But cyanide only penetrates the depth of a human hair, and when the lab pulverized the samples, they diluted them. Too late: Leutner had already spread word of his “proof.”
It’s easy to convince people of the lies they want to believe but difficult to argue them out of those beliefs, no matter how strong the evidence.
No, it isn’t.
You may have heard of a little thing called WWII?
Like all those Polish and French and other enemy Jews, you mean?
Other than by literally bragging about just that, you mean…
When your whole argument hinges around “weren’t quite as efficient at planning their murder as the Nazis would later be”, you may want to rethink your stance.
Anyway, a shittily-planned genocide is still a genocide, so still not debatable at all.
Holocaust deniers come in three flavors.
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Nazis (Odd because you would think anyone who is a real Nazi would be cool with mass murder.)
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Troublemakers (I recall a story of a denier who brought a Black lady as his date to a Holocaust denier dinner. Holocaust denier dinners seem to be a thing.)
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Kids who simply are saying strange stuff because they are not too educated.