I think it would be fitting that the world know your real name. No insult is enough to describe your evil ignorance. It is thoroughly documented that six million people were murdered, and rather than look at the volumes of evidence, you ignore it and tell us about some other evil fucks who decided on the back of a napkin that the evidence of murder is insufficient. Holocaust denial is the mark of the beast.
If there is one good thing about human_extinction’s stupidity, is that it allows me to say something completely off the fucking wall in a different thread/forum and have me still contributing more positively to this place than he/she is. That’s a good feeling. 
You don’t fight ignorance like this, it just makes those who consider themselves to have a so called “open mind” more sympathetic towards the denier’s position.
Yes, to an extent it is bizarre to have an “open mind” about something like the holocaust, or moon landings, or whatever, but there is a huge population of basically decent folk who just don’t realise the strength of the evidence behind these events.
Don’t let them be swayed to the denier’s POV by self righteousness please.
I posted the following in that thread, but I think it bears a repeat here:
**My uncle worked under the great John Ford during the war, in London, in the OSS. Some sort of film unit. My uncle actually went through spy training, although he never actually worked as a spy. But he was up in some planes flying over and behind enemy lines, filming them from above.
His unit in London developed all of the first footage of the concentration camps, making him among the first people in the world ever to see this. For the rest of his life, he had absolutely zero tolerance for fools who asserted it to be a hoax.**
The above is why holocaust denial will probably be politically mainstream by 2050. As it stops being part of living memory, people will keep trying to disprove it, and they’ll eventually succeed.
It will never be politically mainstream in a western style democracy.
Whether we still have western style democracies in 2050 is an interesting question…
It absolutely will be politically mainstream, because historical revisionism is now politically mainstream. The idea that there’s never one single story about how history happened is more popular right now than it’s ever been and it’s only going to get more popular. “Asking questions” about the legitimacy of our understanding of the Holocaust will be seen as a positive thing, a tearing down of the old established patriarchy and hegemony of historical knowledge.
Your argument rests on the completely asinine assumption that “historical revisionism” is merely some sort of game that historians engage in out of a perverse interest in being contrary. It is not.
While most historians would definitely agree that there is “never one single story” about any particular historical event or period or phenomenon, this is not, for the vast majority of the profession, some sort of absolutist relativism. While there may be no single story, not all stories are equally plausible, and some are downright ridiculous. Evidence matters to a good historian, and good historians do not give a story credence just because it happens to be “revisionist.”
While revisionism, for a certain ill-informed subsection of the community, has come to be a sort of synonym for “leftist political correctness,” the fact is that revising history is what all good historians should be doing, all the time. Some stories stand the test of time, and persist in spite of efforts to challenge them; other stories change in the light of new evidence, or new interpretations of old evidence.
The idea that there is not a single story is simply good historical thinking. It in no way implies that all evidence is created equal, that all stories deserve equal consideration, or that all interpretations are valid. That’s just in your feeble imagination.
If you consider something to be particularly absurd and outlandish, wouldn’t it be a product of a powerful imagination rather than a feeble one?
Disprove? Na. However it will in time become just another footnote in history known only to history buffs and experts. As it is, it is probably given way too much notice for its historical importance. It happened. It was 60+ years ago. Now can we go on to more pressing and relevant issues?
I think as long as Israel exists, people will try to justify it by bringing up the holocaust, and as long as that happens, then people will also try to deny that the holocaust happens.
11 million.
Many people and countries have disasters in their past. The Irish have the potato famine, the Germans have two world wars, the Polish have a world war, the Russians have revolution, world wars, communist mass slaughter, Ukraine has the famine, in America you have the decimination or extermination of the Indians. China has the Japanese invasion and Mao, Japan has WW-II, etc. And Europe as a whole has been baptised in bloody murder thousands of times. The only reason the Holocaust is more relevant to me as part of European history than the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, the killings of Attila the Hun, or Djengis Khan or the centuries of Ottoman Turk oppression is that it is slightly more recent. But only as a minor catastrophe in a string of catastrophes that marked the early part of the 20th century.
All of the above is true, but I think the Holocaust is somewhat unique in that it happened to a people and NOT to a country. The Jews didn’t have a country. Finally, after the Holocaust, Europe and the US basically threw up its hands and said, “hell, it’s time to give them a country already,” and so Israel was created. However, Israel, being loathed and despised by the rest of the world, constantly needs to justify its existence. And so people use the Holocaust as the justification.
Countries, they suffer tragedies, and eventually recover. They rebuild, they re-populate and life goes on. But since the Holocaust happened to a people, and not a country, it is way more complicated.
Some of these things should be brought up more. Others, although horrible atrocities, are not unique. For instance, schools can teach on the horrors of colonialism and conquest, without needing to go in depth on any specific example. The Native Americans, the Aborigines in Australia, Native Africans etc… It’s all the same unfortunate story.
The Holocaust, however, is unique. This was the attempted extermination of an entire ethic group, done in a systematic and bureaucratic way by modern industrialized nation.
The scope and clinical execution alone, would make any reasonably skeptical person doubt such an event could happen, if it weren’t for the fact that we are constantly reminded that it did.
And that’s the point. You can’t prevent something from happening unless you accept that it possible that it can. And the only way we know it can happen is if we are consistently reminded that it did, and are aware of the events that lead up to it.
The holocaust deniers don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of their lunatic theories ever becoming ‘politically mainstream’. Events with such a huge impact on a century, and the Holocaust certainly had that, don’t just vanish from the pages of history or become ‘explained away’ as fabrications.
The Turkish authorities have been using all the powers of the state for the best part of a century to eradicate the Armenian genocide from memory and persuade the world it didn’t happen. All to no effect at all. The Armenians know it happened and they will never let the world forget that it did. So it is with the Jews and the Jewish Holocaust. While there is one Jew with breath in his body the truth of the Holocaust will never be allowed to fade.
I would like to see someone in the holocaust denial camp answer the question of “but where did all those millions of people go, if they weren’t murdered by the nazi’s?” with the answer of “they were taken away in alien space ships”. The combination of illogical would please me.
When I back packed Europe a few years ago, I made a point of visiting a concentration camp (Dachau) and a few WWII museums in Berlin. I cannot control the mind of a person crazy enough enough to deny the holocaust, but I for one will never forget.
I think this is of key importance. The Holocaust should act as a direct warning to people today that just because we’re educated, sophisticated, and industrialized does not mean we’re immune from the kind of poison that can create a holocaust.
The same should be said for the horrific human toll caused by Communism. Maybe even more so, because people still flirt with Communism today.
I don’t agree, at least in terms of the way you argue it.
Sure, the holocaust is unique, like just any historical phenomenon. But it’s not unique in the way it’s so often portrayed. I get frustrated by the constant attempt to place Hitler and the Holocaust outside of history, to assume that they constitute a phenomenon that is so unusual that it cannot be explained logically and historically. I think, in fact, that the scariest thing about Hitler and the Holocaust is that they are eminently comprehensible, and that they are different only in degree from many other cases of horrible inhumanity that one could point to in the historical record.
Hitler and the Holocaust are often portrayed as somehow inexplicable by reference to normal ideas of logic and historicism. But to take this position is to suggest that we really can’t say anything about them at all, that they are like the boogey-man under the bed, existing not as a real historical phenomena, but simply as a metaphor to be dragged out when we need to embody “evil.”
Sam Stone has, predictably enough, trotted out communism as being in a similar category. I would have chosen Stalinism or Sovietism, or something more historically accurate and less imbued with Sam’s particular brand of prairie redneckism, but his point is essentially valid: there are other historical phenomena that can be placed into this category. There’s nothing inherently genocidal about communism as a political and economic philosophy, but the way it was practiced by the Soviet Union under Stalin was eminently comparable to the holocaust, even if there were important differences.
You could say something similar even about the genocide in East Timor under the Suharto regime. Sure, the absolute numbers are smaller than the holocaust, but this doesn’t mean that the historical event itself is incomparable. Same with Pol Pot in Cambodia. The fact that the holocaust was modernized and bureaucratized was important, but attempts to see it as sui generis too often ignore what it had in common with so many other examples of human depravity.
Just MHO.
To assume that in 2050 the lack of living memory will leave the way clear for Holocaust deniers, is to also forget that the revisionists will also be long dead, and their reasons for denying will die with them.