I was having a leisurely pint with a friend in Dublin city last night. We were sitting outside a pub and met a friend of my friend’s. They hadn’t seen each other in years. We all got chatting. Eventually the topic of conversation steered towards talking about the holocaust. The foaf came out with the old statement “The victor writes the history books.” That was the first alarm bell for me.
Later he was saying that estimates for the numbers who died in the Holocaust were inflated vastly. Having somewhat of an awareness of the topic I agreed with him that figures might have been inflated, perhaps because it would be hard to ever get a precise figure on the amount of people who died. IE any figure would always be an estimate not an absolute final figure.
He then started saying that the Zionists had colluded with the Nazis and that the Zionists exploit and exploited the holocaust to their own ends. I pointed out to him that people may well exploit the memory of the Holocaust and you can criticise that but that in no way undermines the historical actuality of the Holocaust happening.
He then claimed there was no proof that peoples’ bodies had been cremated at Treblinka. It was at this point I said to him “You might be able to point out certain discrepancies in the details of accounts of the Holocaust but the fact is it happened. You’re not going to persuade me otherwise.” He pretty much stopped talking to me then. It was so strange talking to the guy because he was obviously intelligent enough but he possessed what seemed to me a perverse grasp of history.
It is weird, but I think it’s essentially the same mindset that moon hoaxers or 9/11 truthers have; they look for any small discrepancies and point to them as evidence that the whole thing is made up. Any wrong detail, and they presume that the whole thing will crumble, as if the entire weight of evidence rests on one small detail.
Why people would focus on the Holocaust particularly, I do not understand. Anti-Semitism, I guess?
What worries me is what is going to happen when there’s not one left alive who experienced it or knew someone who experienced it. At that point, there will be no direct witnesses to counter the deniers who claim that all the physical evidence is faked imagery or testimony.
Anti-semitism always strikes me as strange but particularly in Ireland where the Jewish community is small and not very visible. The guy must have been an Anti-Semite but I just don’t know why you’d pick that as your particular axe to grind.
Well, I guess that everyone has reasons for their prejudices. In an area where there is a large Jewish community, it’s probably harder to believe that they tend to be evil, devious, rich, powerful bankers who are aiming for world domination. The evidence will tend to suggest that Jewish people are just regular folks who are trying to make a living.
If the foaf had hardly met any Jewish people, the idea of them being the non-fiction equivalent of Ernst Stavro Blofeldt might be a little more plausible.
Edit: “Plausible” is the wrong word. I can’t think of a better way of expressing that except perhaps “believable by the gullible”.
Have you been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.? It is an amazing experience.
I ask because the OP reminds me of a quotation from General Eisenhower that is chiselled in stone outside. When I saw it, I thought that it would be very appropriate for all of the holocaust deniers to read.
I don’t have a photograph of it and I don’t remember the wording. I thought maybe that someone else might know what is there near the entrance.
As disgusting as I find the deniers, I am not alarmed by the statement, “The victor writes the history books.” If America had lost the Revolutionary War, George Washington, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and many, many others would have been “traitors to the Crown” – not heroes. This is just an example of how victory changes the way the truth is perceived.
Unfortunately, the presence of anti-Semitism has very little correlation with the size of the local Jewish community. There are anti-Semites in places with many Jews, and anti-Semites in places where there are no Jews at all.
There’s an interesting little book that addresses this topic called Why People Believe Weird Things. The author, Michaels Shermer admits that many of the people out there who believe in stuff like this are not stupid, they are just making common errors in logic to an extreme degree. I thought it was a pretty cool book, covering everything from alien abductions to holocaust denial. You might want to check it out.
The strange thing to me is how a lot of denyers do so out of admiration for the Nazis/Hitler. Except for the Holocaust, what did they do except make a lot of enemies and lose a war–demolishing their own country in the process? What’s to admire?
You’d think that anti-semites in love with Hitler would be shouting the praises of the ‘final solution’, not denying it.
People will often believe what they want to believe, but I just don’t get the motivation to fool oneself with this particular delusion.
Yeah I’ve read this book. I ordered it once before ages ago online and it was out of stock. Then one day I was in the office of one of my lecturers and I noticed it on his desk, I asked him for a loan. It’s a good book although I think it could have perhaps been more substantial.
Sometimes I think Holocaust denial has less to do with anti-semitism (although that’s certainly a factor in some of it) than with some people’s inability to grasp the enormity of the event. I wonder whether, if as much exposure were given to Stalin’s or Pol Pot’s purges, people would deny them, too. I think some people just can’t process that level of evil.
It would be interesting to know how many Holocaust deniers also believe in JFK/RFK murder conspiracies, government complicity in the 9-11 attacks, and other so-called conspiracies.
Actually, go straight for the throat and pick up Denying History: Who Says The Holocaust Never Happened And Why Do They Say It?, by Shermer and Alex Grobman. It’s an incredibly powerful and entertaining read, and it makes sushi out of the main Holocaust deniers and their arguments. Of special note is the section with a brief biography of the best-known deniers, detailing their backgrounds, qualifications (if any) and probable reasons for their Holocaust denial. The reasons are as varied as the people: you get German ultranationalists and anti-Semites (as might be expected) as well as people craving legitimacy in the world of history, and people who just like to stir shit up.
Hell, give me your address and I’ll mail you my copy. It’s that good.
I’ll add JFK Assassination buffs and Shakespeare authorship questioners to the groups (as well as all conspiracy theorists). They all have in common the misconception that simply raising an objection automatically disqualifies all other facts.
There’s also no attempt to research their objections; they are usually taken verbatim from someone else, without determining if anyone else has an explanation.
For example the “airplane fuel can’t melt steel” argument of 9/11 continues, despite the fact that only 9/11 truthers ever claimed the steel was melted.
I can have an incredibly bad memory at times. However, one day, when I was working at the Burdines in South Beach, I was in the women’s wear department by the door and ringing up this little old lady. Very nice woman as far as generic retail transactions goes. Then I saw her arm. She had a tattoo on her arm. It was a holocaust tattoo. Here’s an image of one: http://www.markmallett.com/blog/wp-images/Holocaust_tattoo.jpg
THAT was when I realized how close history was. THAT was when I realized it wasn’t some horrifying thing that had been blown up over the years. That was when I realized it something from an old dusty, irrelevent history book.
I’m pretty darn sure that woman is dead now. I think what it would be like to be her and to hear such idiotic, fanatical, insane, insulting, crass, bullshit. And I think, bless her, she made to a place that was sunny and warm and free.
Thanks for the recommendation and the offer but I should be able to track down the book myself. If I have problems acquiring a copy of my own I might get back to you on the offer if that would be ok?
If someone ever tried to tell me that the Holocaust didn’t happen, I’d just have to tell them to talk to my old Auntie in Rome who was a young woman in Rome during World War II and saw her Jewish neighbours being carried away and never coming back. She’d give them a right piece of her mind, I assure you!
She’d tell them about her colleague who lived on that same street and who was working while all this happened, and then came home and all of his family was gone. And after that she would tell about how her family and another non-Jewish neighbour started hiding some Jews that escaped the first gathering, and even dug a secret passage between the two houses to smuggle them from one place to the other.
She’s eighty-something and she still can’t forget this.
