That’s ridiculous, the holocaust never happ
Holocaust deniers on the internet are a very insidious group. Although this is my first post here I spent a great deal of time educating myself on this issue on another forum.
What’s interesting about the deniers is that they love to trot out the censorship arguement, target college campuses and play up the free-thinker image. I think the advice about wrestling a pig is pretty accurate advice.
Sometimes it’s fun to confuse them by asking them whether a Jew is Jewish by race or by religion.
i have two questions a bit off topic: How many non-jews were killed in the death camps? The homosexuals that were killed, were there any germans in there who were killed?
Secondly, is it true that the Nazis played the music of Richard Wagner in the death-camps?
…of course there were germans amongst the homosexuals, just as the jews were germans as well.
The number of non-Jews killed were about 5 million. The first people to be killed in the concentration camps were poltical prisioners like the German socialists and communists.
The exact number of homosexuals is unknown as the Nazis would often include purely poltical prisoners under the catergory of homosexuals. Also Gypsies (about half a million Gypsies died mostly in the gas chambers at Auschwitz), Russian prisoners of war, petty criminals and allied prisoners of war who tried to escape to many times ended up in the concentration or death camps.
Some of the (mostly Jewish) prisoners at the death camps, who were previously members of orchestras, were spared the gas chambers so that they could play in death camp orchestras for the pleasure of the guards.
While the “argumentum ad hominem” is a classic logical fallacy, it is quite true that the most important piece of information is the name of the messenger. When you have to deal with a Holocaust denier, what you should do is dig a little deeper to try to figure out WHY he or she denies it and why such denial is so important to him or her. I can think of only three reasons, each of which says more about the denier than about the historical evidence for the Holocaust:
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The denier refuses to accept the reality of the Holocaust because it is just too horrible to be believed; it shakes his or her faith in human nature.
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The denier is, for some reason or other, a Nazi sympathizer, but not to the extent of endorsing a “final solution to the Jewish problem,” therefore must believe that the actual historical Nazis never executed or intended such a thing.
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The denier is a Nazi sympathizer and not only really believes the Holocaust happened, but wants it to happen again, and maybe on an even vaster scale, as in “The Turner Diaries”; the denial is merely a debating tactic to make the Nazis appear a little bit more respectable to people who are too weak-kneed to grasp the nettle.
Can anyone out there think of a fourth (psychological) reason why someone would be a Holocaust denier?
As far as logical, rational arguments in refutation go, I think the strongest are:
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If there was no Holocaust, what happened to the Jews? They died in numbers far out of proportion to the civilian war deaths of the Gentile population. It is a matter of historical record that before the Second World War there were three million Jews in Poland alone, and after the war there were only a few thousand; if the Nazis did not put them to death, what happened to them?
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If the Holocaust was not real then it was one hell of a hoax. Who perpetrated that hoax, and why? What we think we know about the Holocaust is based on, among other sources, the Nuremberg trials, which were conducted in public by high-ranking U.S., British and Soviet military officers. If it was all a hoax then somebody managed to plant evidence sufficient to fool those officers – but how? Or else the generals, or their governments, were colluding in the hoax – but why?
Correction to the above: I mean to say, the most important piece of information IN ANY MESSAGE is the name of the messenger.
With all due respect, that is the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard. Seriously. Arguments stand or fall independent of the breed of horse from whose mouths they come. If your only response is to analyze a person’s ethnic background, then they are right and you are wrong. If you are right and they are wrong, then their ethnic background will have no impact on the veracity of the arguments.
There are two other categories of possible Holocaust deniers. Children who were raised in a anti-semitic environment might have grown up hearing the Holocaust routinely dismissed as propaganda. And naive people exposed to a glib Holocaust denier might not realize how superficial and easily refuted the arguments are. I mention these two groups because both are potentially capable of actually looking at the evidence and accepting the truth if it’s presented in a rational manner. Don’t assume every Holocaust denier deserves immediate hostility and ridicule.
Clarification: That line about “the most important piece of information in any message is the name of the messenger” I got out of a short story in the SubGenius lit. collection, “Three-Fisted Tales of ‘Bob’.” Don’t remember the name of the story or the author. It’s the sort of glib, cynical pronouncement you would expect out of a true SubG, but when I got to thinking about it, it made a lot of sense.
Certainly, it is not logical to say, “I reject what you say because everybody knows you are a liar and a fool!” Even if that’s perfectly true, it doesn’t signify. Even a liar sometimes tells the truth, even a fool is sometimes right. The validity or truth of the statement’s content stands on its own, it is independent of the character or motivations of the speaker.
However: Whenever you are faced with a message which is not IMMEDIATELY and OBVIOUSLY sensible and logical, anything which might raise your suspicions, anything which you have any reason to analyze a little further, then the first thing you should do is identify the messenger and try to figure out why he or she is making this assertion. That might be cheating, in logical terms, but it’s still a very effective method for getting to the heart of the matter. EVERY MESSAGE HAS SOME MOTIVATION BEHIND IT, and it’s not always detached, intellectual interest. Identifying the messenger and the messenger’s motives not only helps you evaluate the message, it helps you decide how to deal with the messenger.
Applying this to the OP: If your holocaust-denier is merely a stubborn optimist who can’t believe humans are capable of such things, or somebody who grew up around Nazi sympathizers and absorbed whatever they said, then it might be fruitful to engage that person and try to enlighten him or her. But if you determine your conversant is a genuine Nazi sympathizer who wants to see the job done right next time around, the best thing to do is break off the discussion immediately and, if it was a face-to-face discussion, gracefully but quickly move as far away as possible.
When did the term “Holocaust” come into existance to mean the killing of jews during WWII?
What if someone uses the term “Holocaust” to refer to the killing and starvation of millions of Ukranians by Bolshevik led Russians? Is that person guilty of a “hate crime”? Wasn’t the killing of Armenian Christians by Turkish muslims a holocaust?
If a person believes that only 4 million jews perished in the WWII “Holocaust”, are they guilty of “Holocaust” denial?
BrainGlutton, fair enough. We do have do make assessments when a full treatment is not available. While I’m sure you’ll agree that one needs to be skeptical of the value of such a hueristic, it can be a valuable tool in the real world. Thanks for the clarification.
Question:
What do you mean by the phrase “it doesn’t signify”? I’m not familiar with it.
The use of holocaust to mean any enormous massacre of people has been used for over 150 years. As such, it was used (with a lower-case h) almost from the day of the discovery of the death camps by the Allied armies. It picked up the capital H in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
The word is not “reserved” to the actions of the Nazis in WWII by anyone, and there are numerous references to the Armenian Holocaust and the Cambodian Holocaust, among others. The lack of a modifier usually indicates the WWII event, but that is a current usage because of the enormity of the event. (The word is not typically used to refer to the somewhat greater numbers of people who died of famine in the U.S.S.R. and China simply because those are not generally looked upon as deliberate attempts at murder–although Stalin and Mao are certainly responsible for the deaths. A combination of malevolent neglect and incompetence led to those events. On the other hand, I cannot picture anyone being chastised for using the word in that sense and cannot imagine why you would think that there would be a problem with such usage.)
Regarding the numbers: it would depend on what a person proposing different numbers did with them. If someone suggested that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 1.6 million Polish Jews and that his crimes should be reported more accurately (provided the person had evidence for the claim), then I cannot see a problem with it. If, however, a person tried to claim that Stalin had killed 1.6 million Polish Jews and that the “Holocaust industry” had “stolen” those deaths for “their own agenda,” I would tend to look on the latter claim with suspicion.
Actually,**tomndebb], the word holocaust means " a great burning" and it goes back several hundred years.
I’m not sure when the WWII killing of the jews was called the “Holocaust” , with a capital “H”, but I read somewhere that it first appeared in the 1960s.
I’m trying to figure out why the killing of jews in WWII is called the “Holocaust” with a capital “H”, when there have been similar massacres in the past that are not so honored with their own name.
So? The specific and original meaning of holocaust was a sacrifice that was destroyed by fire as an act of offering to God/the gods. However, the use of the word to indicate a massacre dates back at least to 1833. The O.E.D. notes holocaust is attested in 1965 and 1967 as a specific noun for the WWII genocide, but the word had been used since the end of the war in its more general sense of massacre. (It is probable that the word holocaust was used because of the burning of the bodies.)
Similar massacres? I think you’d be hard pressed to discover anyone who built railroads and camps, gas chambers and ovens, and then set out to systematically destroy an entire people just because of who they were. Most massacres previous to that were carried out by armies who either cut down whomever they could find or forced populations to remain in regions of disease or famine or forced them to move from their homes. Chivington at Sand Creek and Custer on the Washita performed horrible atrocities, the Trail of Tears was incredibly tragic, but there was no effort by the U.S. government to find and murder every human in the U.S. who was an Indian. The Turks did not deliberately set out to eliminate the Armenians. The first several thousands of deaths between 1894 and 1914 occurred during riots or the suppression of revolts. The final, serious massacre of several hundred thousand Armenians was a mixture of actual killing and deaths due to disease and starvation and exposure as the Armenians were forced to move from Anatolia to Syria. However, the object of the Turks was the removal of the Armenians from their traditional homeland to reduce their nationalist fervor (and to move them farther from the Russian borders, as the Armenians had begun to wage a guerrilla war in support of the Russian front). The Armenian massacre was not justifiable, but it was different in scope, in intention, and in its results from the attempted annihilation of the Jews of Europe.
What about the Bolshevist led starvation of millions of Ukranians? I would certainly call that a Holocaust.
And as I noted in my first post, 1) no one will complain if you do, but 2) it has not typically been referred to in that way because Stalin was trying to impose his will on that region, not obliterate the people. Stalin certainly took steps to exacerbate the famine and I am sure that he was happy that so many of his “enemies” died, but he did not set out to eliminate every Ukranian from the face of the earth.
I know of no one who claims that the Nazi massacres were the “worst” crimes in history; the state supported famines of the U.S.S.R. and China claimed more lives, the subjugation of the American peoples went on for far more years; the transportation of millions of people from Africa was cruel in and of itself and has had horrible ramifications for both Africa and the Americas to which they were taken. However, the explicit attempt to find and destroy an entire group of people has a certain perversity that does make it a unique event.
Beyond that uniqueness, there are probably other factors that have led to the way that the Nazi genocide has been publicized. The famines of the U.S.S.R. and China occrred behind the fences of closed, totalitarian societies where the numbers could only be estimated and no one could film the events as they happened. I’m sure that racism, on several levels, has worked against the perceptions of the pain inflicted on the Africans and the American indians, as people looked on the victims as “savages” who were somehow believed to have not suffered as much. The Armenians came up on the short end of the publicity battle as they were in an exotic location that was nearly as totalitarian as the Soviets and their massacre occurred in the midst of the most horrific war that the world had then seen. On the other hand, the massacre of the Jews in Europe was perpetrated by a supposedly civilized society against its own civilized inhabitants (or the civilized inhabitants of its neighbors) and many of the survivors came to the U.S. and lived among the rest of us.
So there are both reasons based on the singularity of the event and reasons based on such simple facts as the way that both the victims and the persecutors were “more like us” (the white, European or European-descended majority) than in other massacres.
http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/ucca.htm
7 million Ukranians starved to death by Bolshevik Russians. I would certainly call that a Holocaust!
Good. Knock yourself out.
No one on this thread has claimed that it was not.
Are you actually looking for a GQ answer? Or are you looking to start some Pit rant or Great Debate over whether the Shoah should be “allowed” to have its own name?