So I saw an article, today, about how the President of Iran says that he doesn’t believe the Holocaust actually happened. I don’t really understand this. I mean, what do people mean when they say that the Holocaust didn’t happen? How do they deny it in the face of all the evidence (testimonial, film, etc) that it happened, happened to so many people, et al? Is it just that Jews weren’t the only ones that were killed, and that political prisoners, etc were also sent to the concentration camps?
Seriously, I don’t get this. If you guys could help me out, here, I’d appreciate it.
I think what’s behind it for people like Ahmadinejad is that he believes that the state of Israel is illegitimate, and that the “myth” of the Holocaust has been used by supporters of Israel to give it legitimacy. If the Holocaust had no connection with present-day Middle Eastern politics, he would not be interested in it, and would not regularly deny its existence.
The Iranian President’s position on Holocaust denial is not in the same league as wacko conspiracy theory people. It is the cynical position of a politician trying to antagonize the opposition and preach to his base.
The underlying issue is the perception that Jews are using it as a symphathy grabber. Therefore there is a strong motivation for denying it, or at least significantly downplaying it. And it’s for this reason that it’s mostly denied by anti-Semites or by Arabs (who believe it was used to bolster support for a Jewish state in Israel).
Another issue is that there’s apparently relatively little hard evidence for gas chambers specifically, because no one survived them and the Nazis did not refer to them explicitly.
The way it works is not just by claiming that it’s a massive conspiracy, but by pointing to the small inconsistencies that exist WRT every major event in human history, and touting these as evidence of the entire story being fabricated. (Other conspiracy theories use similar approaches.)
A better description of them is Holocaust revisionists, not deniers. They don’t generally deny that it happened, instead they try to change some of the details. They will say, for example that “only” 1 million or fewer died, instead of the 12-17 million victims in the standard history. They will also say that the victims died from starvation and disease, and there was no policy of deliberate extermination.
They also tend to do a similar thing to what moon hoaxers, truthers, etc. do, where they consider that if they can put one small piece of evidence into doubt, that will bring the whole edifice of conspiracy tumbling down. Sort of like the whole story is an upside-down pyramid, balancing on one thing. It’s a classic strategy for conspiracy-minded folks in general.
Like, “the melting point of steel is incredibly high, so the beams couldn’t have melted, and therefore 9/11 was really a secret demolition job planned by the Bush regime!”
Many of these folks start from the assumption that there’s a secret Jewish cabal that controls everything in the world. But if there were, then they obviously wouldn’t have permitted the Holocaust to occur. Therefore, it logically didn’t. But it’s also to the cabal’s advantage for people to think it did happen, so they re-wrote a bunch of history books and planted evidence, thereby explaining why so many non-Jews believe it did happen. And the fact that they were able to pull this off just proves how powerful the cabal really is, so of course we were correct to assume that they run everything.
Deinal of the holocaust can be anything from “Yes, Jews were killed but it was just another part of war, just like all the Russians killed.” In otherwords there was no organized effort to single Jews out. They were killed but so were others.
Others say Jews were singled out but it was at a local level not from Hitler down on.
Similar to when the Germans invaded the Soviets they raped and killed and pillaged, but then when the Soviets invaded Germany they did the same thing. In other words that’s just how it is with war when tempers run high.
The fact that there have been documented cases of Jews testifying and being proved false, also comes up a lot. Of course this ignores the thousands of Jews testifying and being proved right, and focusing only on the few who lied or “mis-remembered”
Documented evidence is presented as “plants” or “Allied Propaganda” to represent Germans as soley evil.
You have a simlar thing with the Armenian Holocaust and Turkish denial and lots of other examples throughout history.
Unfortunately the further you get away from an event the harder it is to prove it to the satisfaction of everyone.
The main idea of Holocaust denial is to admit that a lot of Jews ended up dead but to deny that there was a specific plan for genocide. The argument is essentially that a world war was going on and a lot of people died, some of whom happened to be Jewish. Deniers generally claim that Jews have exaggerated the number of Jews who were killed, exaggerated the way they were killed, and are seeking to have Jewish victims get some special status that non-Jewish victims don’t get.
How do people deny the reality of evolution, in the face of all the evidence? How do people believe in gods, demons, angels, miracles, etc., in the face of a total lack of evidence? People believe what they choose to believe.
They have evidence, too. Mainly, they have small anomalies in eyewitness accounts, small discrepancies in written records, and similar little things that don’t quite add up. Their strategy is to focus intently on all of the little things that aren’t perfectly explicable at first glance and to use them to try and cast doubt on everything. They not only miss the forest for the trees, they miss the trees for the bark, and then proceed to use small bark deformities to bolster their argument the forest itself is a fiction.
Think Perry Mason or Columbo, pulling the thread and watching the whole thing unravel. Except Columbo lived in a fictional universe where small discrepancies are always evidence of something, whereas in the real world small discrepancies are an artifact of failing memories, imperfect record-keeping, and other imperfections in human endeavor.
Note that sometimes they just make shit up. Or they scream at you for a while and call you a ‘sheeple’. Those things happen as well.
The underlying reason for Holocaust revisionism/denial now is a hatred of Jews and, more specifically, a desire to destroy Israel. The theory is that Israel only exists due to war guilt created in Europeans by the Holocaust, so if the Holocaust can be discredited everything will go back to the way it was in 1947 before Israel was created. Note the primary flaw in that line of reasoning in 2009.
On the issue of Ahmedinejad even in the article quoted above, he dose’nt explicitly deny that the Holocaust happened, just that he has some “questions”. He is in short a very good politician, since pretty much any thing he says on the issue will be attacked and he can turn to his base and say “see, I told you so”.
I would say that it is sad that the issue has become so politically charged that rational arguement can no longer be done. It actually stenghtens people with nefarious designs. David Irving case in point.
Finally, Holocaust is at the end of the day, just another historical event and less relevent outside of Europe and the English speaking world. Irans abiding memory of the war will be of occupation by the UK and the Soviets, Chinas of the Japanese invasion, SE Asias of Japanese occupation.
I remember this one guy saying that if 6 million Jews were gassed, it would have taken X amount of gas to do it and the Germans at the time didn’t have X amount of gas. And anyway, each gas chamber only held Y amount of people meaning it would have taken over 10 years to do it based on the number of chambers the Germans had and they didn’t have that much time.
I once had a conversation (many years ago) with a person of German ancestry – his parents (I think? maybe grandparents?) had come to the US just prior to WWI, and he basically couldn’t believe that his relatives, his people, Germans, could have behaved that way. It’s the same sort of misplaced patriotism, denial that leads people to think that American soldiers wouldn’t commit rape and murder in Vietnam, in Iraq, etc. Or that Americans wouldn’t torture prisoners.
It doesn’t help that in the Muslim world there isn’t a lot of info about the Holocaust shown in the media or taught at school. Everyone’s heard of it, but it’s easier to dismiss if it comes across as a rumor.