I’m doing my best to try to fight ignorance as the Great Cecil has taught us. Currently, I’m in a row with holocaust deniers on YouTube, of all places, over: Bishop Richard Williamson - Gas Chambers Anti-Semitism and the Truth
But the blatant lies, distortions and irrational canards are coming fast and furious from the deniers, and I have yet to find a website that debunks most or all of them in a single site.
Does anyone have any recommendations for comprehensive denial-debunking sites?
It’s the kind of thing you can’t really exhaustively debunk, because to be a Holocaust-denier you have to choose to ignore the evidence. So there is really no evidence that they won’t simply continue to choose to ignore.
These folks might be able to help: http://www.ushmm.org/
I’m afraid you’ve subtly misunderstood me. I am not so naive as to expect to be able to exhaustively debunk Holocaust revisionism or that any site or source could accomplish such a lofty goal.
What I’m looking for instead is a debunking site that covers an exhaustive range of Holocaust-denial “arguments”. In other words, a site with lots of counter-arguments (as opposed to a list of sites that debunk only a few arguments each, and also opposed to one site that debunks Holocaust revisionism exhaustively).
The ADL and so forth have not been helpful.
Thanks, I’ll check them out…
In 1996, writer David Irving sued an American academic for libel, on the basis that she claimed (in effect) that he was a Holocaust denier. The lawsuit effectively became about whether or not very large numbers of Jews died at Auschwitz. Lipstadt’s publishers conducted the litigation on her behalf. Irving acted as his own lawyer.
Lipstadt’s publishers gathered a very large body of historical evidence together to make it plain that Irving was not only wrong, but that no reasonable historian could hold the views he had expressed (thus demonstrating he was, in effect, not a legitimate scholar but a denier).
Much of the evidence can be found at this website, where the judgment in the High Court (which vindicated Lipstadt) can also be found.
Of course, as observed by lissener, deniers are not going to be swayed by direct reference to such a site. They assimilate, distort and then mock any evidence that does not fit within the conspiratorial world view they hold. But there it is, and it may provide ammunition in the debate you are having.
The key problem had in debates with these people (and all CTers) is that they are masters of a morass of tiny details in the evidence (some of which are true and some not) which no-one else can sensibly expect to have the energy to spend their life mastering. They thus create the illusion of dominance in debate.
They also are fixated by a style of reasoning that has been described as “crazed positivism”; seizing on one tiny detail or a series of them and then proceeding on the premise that such matters can somehow turn the world upside down and demonstrate that black is white.
Of course in principle, it is possible that one piece of new evidence can overturn what previously had been thought to be an unassailable understanding of the nature of things. Science always leaves open the theoretical possibilty that even so well-established a principle as that of gravity might be better understood in the future.
But in reality, where the accepted understanding is very well established, the “tiny detail” upon which deniers place reliance always turns out to be false, or a misinterpretation of the evidence. The world just does not work according to the principles of reasoning applied by deniers and CTers, but they have well-developed techniques of rhetoric to artificially inflate the appearance of credibility of their arguments.
I wish you success, but I have grave doubts that you can penetrate the impenetrable world-view of these people.
I’ve found another YouTube page on the same topic with even more ugly, credulous bullshit: here
Wow!:smack:
There is ample evidence that the Holocaust occurred exactly as typically described. Steven Spielberg headed a project to video record 50,000 eyewitnesses. With those films, accounts of survivors, films taken upon entering the camps, etc. there is no way to come up with evidence that the Holocaust did not occur that is persuasive to any open minded person. Holocaust deniers are unable to deal with this evidence and do not deal with it: they are deluded beyond reason by their belief. If one is to accept historical events as happening at all, the Holocaust is the best documented historical event I can think of. It is the equivalent of creation science in the place of evolution: the mountains of evidence can only be ignored by people who have no respect for fact in favor of their beliefs.
Thank you, Noel Prosequi, for your thoughtful words and for your link.
I had been aware of the David Irving trial, its outcome, and its involvement with the mind-bogglingly credulous crank Fred A. Leuchter, Jr, cited by Williamson as the “expert” he relies upon for his ludicrous nonsense. Errol Morris’ documentary of him and his “arguments” for Holocaust revisionism, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. remains one of the most compelling things I’ve ever seen.
Morris was shocked and disheartened that many who watched his original version didn’t realize that Leuchter’s claims and comments lacked all credibility, and instead of realizing what a crock of shit Leuchter was selling, they came away thinking the Holocaust had actually been debunked by him! Others knew it was bullshit, but thought Morris was endorsing Leuchter’s claims. Morris was thus forced to revise it it order to make it explicit that his documentary was a critical examination of such bullshit and was intended to reveal the idiocy and the dangers arising from pseudo-science and pseudo-history.
One of the best sites is Nizkor:
This is a site specifically dedicated to debunking Holocaust denial.
Ed
If you have an interest in the field, ambushed, you might find useful this book.
It is a thoughtful analysis of the events at the trial, and the source of the expression “crazed positivism” I used above.
Thanks very much, suranyi! It was exactly the kind of thing I had been looking for.
Thank you again. It’s now on order.
I’m not Jewish nor do I have any Jewish relatives, so this isn’t a personal or partisan issue for me. What matters to me is defending the truth, and surely it is the ugliest lies which most adamantly call for rebuttal and refutation.
As an aside, it saddens me that even some of my fellow skeptics in the city in which I reside keep telling me that I’m wasting my time trying to correct falsehoods and debate the credulous and the wrong-headed, insisting that these people never change their minds anyway. But I’ve learned from reading Thomas Gilovich’s exemplary book How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life and other sources that the claim that believer’s minds can’t be changed just isn’t so. Most people do have enough intellectual integrity to want to read or hear opposing viewpoints, even though relatively few actually change their minds much in the end. But there is zero chance of such a change if they are not provided the arguments and data rebutting their views in the first place.
The effort is never for naught. The truth matters.
If you are going to get involved in these sorts of debates, it is as well to bear a few things in mind.
“You cannot rationally argue out what wasn’t rationally argued in”. (I’ve seen this attribute to George Bernard Shaw, although I have never been able to find a citation.)
“That which can be asserted without reason can be dismissed without reason.” - Chris Hitchens.
“If you choose the evidence carefully enough, there are only white squares on a chessboard.” - Me
Fact is, most people just believe whatever they want to believe. If they can find some facts or some reasoning consistent with what they have already decided to believe, they take it on board, and they simply ignore or reject everything else. Whatever fits is good, whatever doesn’t fit is bad. This is how ideas such as revisionism, astrology and homeopathy can survive and propagate in the minds of men and women who are, by any pertinent criterion, intelligent people leading functional lives.
The only way you could win an argument with a Revisionist would be if you could first both agree on what constitutes good reasoning and good evidence. However, the fact that someone is a Revisionist means - or at least very strongly implies - that they and you do not share common understanding of ‘evidence’ and ‘reason’. So the attempt to even have a meaningful/productive argument, let alone ‘win’ it, is unlikely to succeed.
There are high profile cases (like the Irving trial) that do have to be contested, and it’s good that in such cases the shoddy non-arguments are exposed and debunked.
But to argue with these people in everyday life (in bars, at dinner parties and on message boards) can be largely a waste of time. It can even be counter-productive, implying as it does that these people actually have a case worth answering, or are capable of engaging in rational discussion. Trying to talk sense to an astrologer is like trying to teach algebra to a cat. It just isn’t going to work, and you may as well spend your time talking about something else. Ditto with your average everyday Revisionist.
Sigh…
My reply isn’t about you, it’s about that attitude. Let me start by asking you to cut back sharply on the condescension. But more to the point…
I’ve heard recited that same litany of craven, apathetic, lazy bullshit rationalizations for just not bothering all my adult life, and I’ve learned first-hand and often that it’s just so much ignominious, defeatist crap.
Gilovich’s book How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life and other sources have factually demonstrated that the claim that the average believer’s minds can’t be changed by a reasonable effort at debate, persuasion and the dissemination of factual knowledge just isn’t so. Most people do have enough intellectual integrity to want to read or hear opposing viewpoints, even if relatively few actually change their minds completely. But there is zero chance of such a change if they are not provided the arguments and data rebutting their views in the first place.
What someone with your attitude is doing at The Straight Dope, a site dedicated to fighting ignorance, bewilders me.
The effort is never for naught. The truth matters.
Defeatism be damned.
Ambushed. Dial it back on your personal comments. Thx.
samclem Moderator, General Questions
Not something on which I personally have sources with evidence, but, in hopes of pointing people in the right direction…
At the end of World War II, as the concentration camps were liberated by the U.S. Army (and British, Canadian, etc. allies as well of course), Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, CinC of the European Theater, gave explicit orders that the horrors they had unearthed be documented, so that future generations would know what sort of evil had been perpetrated by Nazi Germany. I’m fairly sure Montgomery echoed that command for the British Army as well. That should lead one to two contemporary records of what was found, learned, etc. preserved by the American and U.K. governments. Armed with that information, could anyone locate online links or ‘dead-tree’ official publications to aid in debunking Holocaust Deniers?