I know there still is a significant number of rotten bastards who keep on claiming the Holocaust never happened, Zyklon B really was for delousing, yadda yadda.
I’m morbidly curious though : how come the same kind of carbon-based waste doesn’t argue that slavery never happened ? Surelely there is less of a paper trail, nevermind living witness, that could contradict a similar claim made for similar reasons. For that matter, how about the Native American/Precolumbian genocide(s) ? Is there anyone out there claiming they were all made up ?
Bonus question : moving back to the Holocaust deniers… why deny in the first place ? Assuming the grand majority of those to probably be anti-semitic crypto-neo-nazis to begin with, shouldn’t they be proud of Hitler’s “achievements” instead of denying they ever took place ?
Oh, and Happy New Year, too
I will take the easy one first,
WRT slavery, it is written our Constitution. It is hard enough to get an Amendment passed, let alone one that bans a fiction. This does not even take into account the courts decisions and such that would be difficult to make up.
The Holocaust horrifies people and will cause them to disregard any thing you have to say. Denying that it never happened will let weak minded people believe that your not so bad and start to listen to the rest of you garbage. People who like to think for themselves will see that you are living in a fantasy land of hate and ignorance.
I’d guess it was because there were no Nuremberg over slavery. Slavery was made illegal but it wasn’t retroactively declared a crime against humanity. With the Holocaust you had specific individuals who were put on trial for genocide and they were the ones who started denying that there had been any intentional organized plan to kill several million people. If slave owners had faced postwar trials where they faced imprisonment or execution, then they probably would have tried to claim there was no real slavery.
I think there’s a number of misconceptions regarding holocaust denial. It’s not a denial that Jews were deported or died in large numbers (even though the number of victims might be minimized), but a denial that there was a deliberate intent to eliminate them. The general idea is that the Nazi regime never ordered the final solution, and that the high death rates in camps had more mundane causes than deliberate extermination, like diseases, lack of food, etc… Think for instance of camps housing Russians POWs. As such, it isn’t as blatantly untenable a position as most would assume.
For instance, you mention Zyklon B being used for delousing. A book written I think during the 90s got a large recognition because, for the fist time, it essentially proved that Zyklon B was actually intended to be used in actual gas chambers, mostly on the basis of an extensive search in the archives of privates companies that had contracts with extermination camps. It hadn’t been an obvious, easy task.
The paper trail you’re expecting actually doesn’t exist. There’s no “Today, gassed 1017 Jews according to Hitler’s orders” document. In the best case scenario, the only evidence you will find about the fate of a particular person will be his name and date and place of birth on a register proving he entered the camp and the fact that he’s missing. In most cases, you won’t even have that. And the potential witnesses were…well, “missing” too. This gives a significant leeway to argue, for instance, that the figures are inflated.
So, actually, the “paper trail” in the case of slavery is vastly larger. It was done in the open, for a very long time, and all sorts of documents referring to it were written, by thousands of people, in many countries and during several centuries : statutes, contracts, wills, books arguing for or against it and so on.
As for the Amerindians, you’ll find that there’s actually a lot of disputes about this issue. You can show that the “trail of tears” actually took place, for instance, but demonstrating that the various governments had genocidal intents is another matter entirely. To begin with, it’s nowadays generally assumed that the disruptions of the American societies and the large death toll were caused much more by diseases than by the direct action of the Europeans.
And actually, you’ll find that they often are, if you take the time to read their websites. Negationist literature isn’t authored by neo-nazis. Rather by scholars who vigorously deny being anti-Semitic. And I would even suspect that many are sincere when they make this statement, and might rather be of the conspiracy theorist persuasion (even though it seems difficult to be a negationist without assuming also some sort of massive cover-up and probably some sort of Jewish conspiracy or at least willingness to leave the truth hidden).
I’ve run across many articles claiming that US slavery was actually good for the slaves, they liked it, etc. (Nevermind that they fled their masters the second a Union Army passed by.) So there is that level of denial.
There is also a certain amount of denial regarding American Indians.
Part of it was just honestly sloppy research at the beginning, but as the numbers have been made more accurate, a number of folks call the newer, better numbers “revisionism” and refuse to deal with them.
At the low end of the scale is an estimate of a bit more than 8 million inhabitants. At the high end of the scale is a claim for nearly 115 million. And in the middle is a (conveniently centrist) 50 million. The feuding over the differences between 50 million and 115 million appear to be the typical scholarly disputes betwen people with conflicting pet theories based on inadequate data. Advocates of the 8 and a half million people tend to be deniers.
The reason there’s Holocaust denial, but not Slavery Denial, is that there was never a book called “The Protocols of the Elders of Namibia.”
Jewish conspiracy theories have been in vogue since long before the Holocaust, indeed since before Hitler was born. The Holocaust conspiracy theory is based on such theories, most especially the Protocols - in fact, Holocaust denial is not only based on those theories, but it’s a critical aspect of maintaining Jewish conspiracy theories. If you believe Jews secretly run the world, it’s hard to square that with Jews being murdered by the millions, a clear indication Jews did not in fact control things. To continue believing Jews control things behind the scenes, it’s very convenient to manufacture a conspiracy that the Holocaust not only did not happen but is itself a Jewish conspiracy.
There’s no parallel with black people and slavery. There were never African conspiracy theories, never a parallel to the Christian-Jew dynamic, never a book that accused black people of being in a giant global conspiracy. Racism against Jews has historically been based on their being evil; against blacks based on their being inferior. You don’t need to pretend slavery never happened to keepo the myths about black people alive.
It’s quite easy to rewrite small parts of history. For instance, every person from Egypt or Syria, I’ve ever met will insist that Israel had help from American troops in 1967 and 1974. Not just American delivering goods, but American troops actually participated and fought the Egyptians and Syrians.
Why? 'Cause schools teach this. They say how could a tiny nation like Israel possibly win without the help of American troops. As generations pass it becomes stuck in the mindset.
I’ve never met anyone from Jordon or Lebanon who think this. Now I am sure there are people in those countries that believe either way, I wouldn’t dispute that. I am just saying it’s very easy to start stories and then have them take hold
America suffers from “white guilt” which prevents any real discussion of race problems. If you so much mention a person’s race, you’re considered a racist. And many people have taken advantage of that. Oprah has been duped by this often by having guest speak of great African achievements that either never were or were peformed by Egyptians or Ethiopians that were not in any way racially connected to the black people of the sub-Sahara, whom she’s trying to promote.
I don’t know of paper trails concerning the gas chambers and the extermination camps, but there are paper trails concerning pretty large scale, clearly genocidal actions by the Nazis against the Jews. The Operational Situation Reports of the Einsatzgruppen in the USSR include such statements as “On November 30, 1941, 10,600 Jews were shot in Riga.” It’s thus clear from the Nazis’ own records that not only were they killing large numbers of people, but that they were doing so simply because they were Jewish (at least one of these reports states that a number of persons were shot, with various reasons given for their deaths, such as “seditious and provocative activity since the arrival of the German Army”, “partisan activity”, “espionage”, and ending with “belonging to the Jewish race”, which is about as clear a statement of genocidal intent as it gets.)
And I complained about that very thing in IMHO, too :smack: Thanks for the correction.
Couldn’t the same be said about the Jews (and gays, Romani, commies etc…) ? Those millions of people didn’t just vanish off the face of the Earth, barring Icke’s evil space lizards.
That’s an interesting point, I hadn’t thought about that.
It is, if the unspoken conclusion is akin to “so that makes it OK”. And even should it not be the case, I’d say deliberately underfeeding and working someone (nevermind millions) to the point he/she’s just a walking skeleton isn’t really mundane either - it could be argued to be even more mind-bogglingly cruel, by an order of magnitude.
I know the Nazi leaders took great pains to destroy (or never write) all the top level paperwork regarding the camps, and I assume the same is true of camp commanders and their administrative documents, but I was thinking about more mundane bureaucratic papers. Local police stations reporting “N Jews arrested, names follow, put on trains”, station master logs e.g. “Train Foo passed through Lvov at 11.00. No incident”, etc…
However :
I hadn’t stopped to think about that. Contracts ? Wills ? I figured the whole thing was much more … informal, I guess. Go to the local fair, pick up 3 pounds of 'taters and 2 human beings, that sort of thing.
I know European boats involved in the triangular trade ostensibly shipped “ebony” or “African goods”, that’s what was written in the cargo manifest, and I assumed the same sort of deliberately vague “cover up” happened at the other end of the business.
I doubt anyone’s questioning that :dubious:. Please, please say it ain’t so.
ETA : Thanks everyone, for taking the time to answer my rather vague question.
One problem is the confusion caused by mixing “Holocaust Denial” with “Holocaust Revisionism”. Both terms are thrown around fairly interchangeably. I doubt many folks would consider themselves actual Deniers, but rather Revisionists. Revisionism can be as simple as wanting to clarify the exact numbers. I know I’ve heard 4million and 6million thrown around as total Jewish casualties. That’s a pretty large discrepency. I, for one, wouldn’t mind a new, impartial review of the numbers & facts. How many new documents have we gotten since the fall of the Soviet Union? The should be able to be used to adjust the ‘official’ history. Also, the methods or formulas the anthropological studies from the 40’s used may have been inaccurate. We should be able to do a re-evaluation of the numbers and methods used to determine them. Unfortunately, this cannot be done. It is illegal in Germany and other parts of Europe to even question the numbers, therefore a modern review cannot be completed. While I agree that neo-Nazi violent activities should be outlawed, I’m not totally convinced that academics should be deported to Germany or Austria and imprisoned. I believe these types of laws and restrictions only give the Deniers more ammunition about Jewish conspiracies to control thought. Honestly, how many areas of historical study are illegal to investigate?
