If someone writes a book claiming they are a Holocaust survivor, how would we know they are telling the truth?
I don’t know, but if the text relies heavily on the use of leet, I’d have my suspicions.
Same way as any other history book. Review it closely for internal consistency. Cross-check with known historical facts. Review the sources or citations. Check any documentary sources it cites. Does it hang together overall as a consistent account.
Christian Identity movement. The theory holds that white people are the true Israelites, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Jewish people are the cursed descendants of Cain, the serpent seed.
Everyone’s talked about the racist and anti-Semitic aspect of these “hard right” nutbag groups. The third leg of that stool is anti-Federalism. I think it is important to remember these groups did not spring up recently. They have evolved over generations and the underlying philosophies aren’t just random crazy. It’s a particular kind of non-random highly organized crazy
It is, of course, still propagated, and believed, by a range of people who want to hate the Jews, claim “lost tribe” status for themselves, or both; the usual argument runs “Those people who claim they’re Jews aren’t really Jews, they’re Khazars, and my group is the real lost tribe, which therefore proves something” as if being a member of a so-called “lost tribe” proved anything at all, least of all the existence of those tribes what got themselves lost to begin with.
Fredirich Nietzsche called Antisemitism not a mental disorder but a “brain disease” from which his sister suffered - he had first-hand experience. I can’t disagree. We know that religious frenzy stems from cerebral malfunctions. Ethnic hatred could see similar causation.
I’m not aware of Hitchens ever describing him as the “ultimate authority” on anything and certainly not the holocaust. I doubt Hitchens would even recognise the concept of any human as an “ultimate authority”. Irving was (and is still in many cases) considered a serious historical source in some areas, a fucking nutjob in others.
Hitchens did not agree with Irving on his holocaust views but he did defend his right to publish and spoke out against his conviction for what he thought and what he might be about to say. His was a defence of free speech, not an endorsement of the speech itself.
As for “befriending” him, I’ll leave it to reader to decipherHitchens own words. Seems to me like Hitch did what Hitch did. He reached out to learn more but at no point does it read like a cosy buddy-buddy relationship.
So best to be clear with the facts I think. People might get the wrong impression from what you wrote and think that Hitchens had some sympathy towards holocaust-denial. He did not.
And we should take Hitchens’ word on who’s the ultimate authority on history as valid because… ? Last I checked, Hitchens didn’t have any background whatsofuckingever in history or historical research.
Historians almost unilaterally jettisoned Irving’s ass decades (plural) ago. He might have been a mere “controversial figure” at some point in the 70s or 80s but he’s moved well into outright crackpottery since.
And by “unilaterally” I of course meant “unanimously”
I’m saying that certain personalities with fans have influence. Here’s one video
I hate censorship. That’s all. Hitchens was DEAD wrong on Iraq (and some of his fans decided it must be a just war if HITCH is for it), but I don’t want him banned, even though that endorsement of the war might have prevented more resistance.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say with a link to that video, it doesn’t seem to contradict anything I wrote.
As for his views on the second Iraq war, I’m not sure how it is possible to come to definitive conclusion one way or the other as there is no way to know what happens if Saddam’s dynasty remains in power.
When did Ilhan Omar deny the reality of the Nazi murder of millions of Jews?
If you turn your head sideways, squint really hard, and ignore the statement she released explaining her vote, you can get to where she “denied the Holocaust”.
Not what anyone said. She voted “present” when a vote to recognize the Armenian Genocide, a holocaust mostly forgotten these days, came up. That is a form of denial. Refusing to recognize something is a form of denial. Interestingly, she was the only Democratic Representative to vote against it.
So the first and most fundamental thing we need to understand about nazis is that they lie. Constantly. There is no “truth” to them, there is only power. They are very clear and explicit about their intention to lie to the “normies”, couching every statement in performative irony that allows those who aren’t neo-nazis to think “edgy humor” and those who are to think “I agree with that”. Any attempt to engage with their views honestly or earnestly is a failed effort, because most of them know full well that what they actually propose (a white fascist ethnostate) is going to be incredibly unpopular.
So what they do doesn’t really need to make sense in terms of their beliefs, or their convictions, because they lie about what both of those things are constantly. So. With that in mind, why deny the holocaust? What purpose does it serve? I honestly don’t have much to add to what people have already mentioned (rehabilitating the nazi image, furthering paranoid conspiracy theories about jews, etc.). What comes to mind for me is epistemic strategy, relating to both the “Big Lie” and “Firehose” schools of propaganda. To contest every point, to clog the airwaves with so much bullshit that determining the truth becomes difficult. In that environment, fascists, who always are better at speaking the language of moral certainty than the language of facts, tend to do considerably better than liberals.
“Whiteness”, as a concept, is not well-defined. It certainly has never had much to do with skin tone - just ask the Irish and Italians who were treated as non-white in the past. Throughout history, whiteness has been used not as a racial categorization, but as the absence of racialization. White people are the people who don’t have some discriminated-against racial category. And when “white” people stop treating you as different, you are, effectively, “white”.
Jews? Jews were not seen as white. And to modern white supremacists, they still usually aren’t.
hi-fives in Danskin
Imagine a hypothetical “expert” on the Napoleonic wars who, despite the accuracy of any other claims he made, also insists that Napoleon rode a fire-breathing dragon into battle at Waterloo. Once it becomes clear that he’s not joking and legitimately believes this, do we keep calling him an “expert”, or do we shake our heads and laugh him out of the room?
Here is her statement on the vote - Rep. Ilhan Omar Statement on H.R. 4695 and H.Res. 296 | Representative Ilhan Omar
While I disagree with her reasoning, I don’t see it as a denial in any meaningful way.
Her statement breaks down into “The evidence isn’t in yet” and “Other bad things happened”; the first is a lie, and the kind of lie used by denialists, and the second is irrelevant when discussing her vote about that bad thing. So she denied the Armenian Genocide and threw up chaff when people called her on it.
Where does she say “The evidence isn’t in yet”? She wrote
I don’t see that as questioning the evidence, just a statement that consensus doesn’t come from a political vote. I can see a way to read that as questioning the evidence, but it comes off as a pretty stretched reading IMO. You may feel differently.
The “Other bad things happened” part is true, but I agree with you that it’s poor reasoning to use that to avoid voting on this issue.
Congress ignored this for over 100 years, and I think some are looking for any reason to hate Rep. Omar.
I concur, I mean “whataboutism” isnt a good reason.
I mean there are still some arguments that the Armenian horror wasnt quite *technically *a "genocide’, but she didnt use them. Oddly, since there are strong arguments that the deaths and dwindling of the US Natives wasnt a “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such” or a *“planned systemic genocide”. *
I mean you could apply "genocide’ to the Fire bombing of Germany or the bombing of Japan too. Nuking Japan was certainly a “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such”. Let’s not overuse the term.
Mind you, I do think that the Armenian situation does qualify.