One slightly off-topic nitpick I’ve always wondered about… if the Holocaust is the primary justification for the existence of Israel, then why isn’t Israel located in, say, southern Germany?? We already forcibly “repatriated” millions of Germans back to Germany after the war (causing 1000’s of deaths btw) - we could just have easily have cleared, lets say, Bavaria for the Jews - they’d been more established in Germany then in the Middle East at that point anyways. As far as I’m concerned, that would have made more sense at the time, and might have prevented the 50 years of bloodshed since in the Middle East…
Substantial amounts of such records do survive and many, many - perhaps even the majority, I’m not sure offhand - of the individual railway shipments to the death camps can be documented from them. In some cases, like at Treblinka, you also get Polish railway workers secretly recording the transports on behalf of their resistance movements. Indeed the Germans were apparently chalking the numbers in each truck on its side and the Poles were summing these up as the trains trundled past.
Nonsense. I’m no supporter of legislating against Holocaust denial, but those laws that do exist have had exactly zero effect on serious academic research into the subject. The few individuals who have been prosecuted under them are those who were already ignored by Holocaust scholars as loonies.
Slavery? Nonsense. Slave ships? Poppycock.
They were all stowaways. Every last one of them.
Then when they got here, all they were asking was for a roof over their heads, some labor to perform and an occasional hot meal. Those lovely southern people, with their legendary hospitality, took them in and provided all three. What did they get for their trouble? Lies. Slander. An entire culture defamed.
.
The vast majority of Jewish victims weren’t German. Nearly half were Polish for example. Others came from Denmark, France, Italy, Greece, Holland, etc. I don’t see any of them being very comfortable in Germany.
To the OP, most denier types when it comes to slavery argued that the life of a slave wasn’t that bad, that they were members of the family, that they suffered worse after the war, etc.
Unfortunately, it is so. There are people who are denying there was any organized intention to commit genocide against the Jews or any other group.
Change that to “claim to be sincere” and it’s more believable.
People who are into major Holocaust denial (excuse me, “revisionism”) are basically anti-Semites attempting to use a historical crutch as cover for their pet hate. Attempts to convince us otherwise are laughably insincere. It’s like those people who claim they’re not against ordinary Jews, just the “Zionist World Order” or “the Rothschilds”.
And the reason neo-Nazi skinheads aren’t writing “negationist literature” is that it’s too taxing on their crocodile brains to put together more than a couple semi-literate sentences at a time. Wearing uniforms and bashing minorities is more their speed. On the other hand, a once respected historian like David Irving would be horrified at being grouped with neo-Nazis. People like that try to keep gnawing away at history, hoping that once the last death camp survivors are gone it’ll be easier to sell their lies.
On the subject of slavery, there are plenty of people who keep trying to push the idea that it was relatively benevolent, or that it would have died out if the evil North hadn’t invaded the South (Civil War revisionism (such as the claim that preserving slavery wasn’t the prime reason for the South’s precipitating the war) has largely departed this board, but I can remember a few years ago when a number of posters were still promoting it).
Yeah, the Germans had already run all of their Jews out in the Middle Ages. It was the other countries that were more tolerant until the Nazis invaded them and made a policy of executing occupied countries’ Jews.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Those exist in abundance, and tons of people have witnessed it happening or have been involved in it. There’s no conceivable way to deny Jews were deported in large numbers. That would be why Holocaust deniers do not try to deny it.
Yes, but it doesn’t prove it was ordered and deliberately organized at the highest level. It doesn’t prove it happened to millions of people, either.
It might have been isolated incidents, ordered by some overzealous middle-ranking officers, or some such. Shit happens in a war, and all that.
In my view, Holocaust denial isn’t the equivalent of for instance denying that there was a moon landing, as some people assume, but the equivalent of saying : “Yes, there was an Apollo program, and a moon lander, but nobody was on-board, and the parts where we see people walking on the moon were faked in a studio”. Easier to defend that a plain “Moon hoax” theory.
A few examples of Holocaust deniers who are “sincerely” not bigots:
First, David Irving. During proceedings in his libel suit against an American professor who labeled him a Holocaust denier, it was revealed that Irving had sung the following little ditty to his infant daughter in her stroller:
I am a Baby Aryan
Not Jewish or Sectarian
I have no plans to marry an
Ape or Rastafarian.
Irving denied (:)) to the court that this was racist or anti-Semitic. "Referring to his suggestion that a survivor may have faked her Auschwitz tattoo, Mr Irving said his comments were not anti-Semitic but were critical of those Jewish survivors who turned “their suffering into profit”. " I’m sure he was quite sincere. :dubious:
Then there’s Ernst Zundel, who for years has had a major Holocaust denial website (I believe his wife’s been active in it since Ernst has been behind bars). Zundel’s literary output includes the following:
“…the Jews give us – their White hosts – wars, depressions, inflation, unemployment, energy shortages, higher and higher taxes and air piracy. Like sheep, they expect us to go down the road with them – all the way to the kosher slaughterhouse. We White people of America have done nothing so far which would frustrate the Jews’ expectations or their ambitions of becoming the world’s slavemasters.”
Among Zundel’s supporters is American physician Lorraine Day, who testified on his behalf during his Canadian deportation hearing. Day (who’s involved in promoting false cancer cures), runs a website (“The Good News About God!”) which, in addition to defending Zundel, Irving and other Holocaust deniers, is full of lurid and grotesque rantings against Jews and their purported worldwide conspiracies:
“Judaism is a “chameleon” culture/religion. It “becomes” whatever is necessary in order to deceive and trick non-Jews…”
These and other Holocaust deniers typically claim they’re not really against “average” Jews, just those nasty evil Jews who promote Holocaust lies to serve their aims of world financial/political domination.
Read what these people are saying (if you can stand it) and decide for yourselves how sincere their disavowals of anti-Semitism are.
Right now I think I need a shower.
And I sincerely hope that clairobscur is just channeling the alleged thoughts of deniers when he says
Huh…no. That’s almost the other way around. Jews were expelled from France and England during the middle-ages, and from Spain and Portugal at the very end of it. “Germany” was late in this game, and being divided in numerous essentially independent principalities, cities, etc…, the expulsions were AFAIK never complete in the HRE.
In western Europe, the only area where the Jews weren’t massively expelled was Italy, also and probably not coincidentally not united.
It doesn’t prove that all of them are bigots. You don’t need to have an agenda to be a conspiracy theorist, you just need to be a crackpot. If it weren’t true, there wouldn’t be Moon hoaxers, to use again this example, because nobody, as far as I can tell, has any interest in denying that moon landings took place.
(Apart from selling books on the subject, which might also be a possible motivation.)
Feel free then to list the “many” Holocaust deniers who you “suspect… are sincere” when they “vigorously deny being anti-Semitic”.
Setting aside the distinct probability that Jews would be none too comfortable in a country that systematically set out to exterminate their entire race, much of Germany was a smoking piece of rubble after the war.
I can’t. That’s why I wrote “and I would even suspect” rather than " who sincerely deny being anti-Semitic".
That’s just my opinion based on :
1- What I read about them in the medias (since Holocaust denial is a crime here, there’s a case once in a while), which isn’t always conclusive of them being anti-Semite (And you’d expect their accusers would dig up a statement to this effect every time they could find one)
2- More importantly, as I wrote in my previous post, the fact that being a crackpot doesn’t require an agenda. People (including scholars and scientists) are coming up with and/or supporting the weirdest theories all the time without any sensible reason to do so. Why would it be different for Holocaust denial?
I think part of it is that the holocaust has become a symbol of something bigger than itself. It’s become shorthand for pure evil. It’s eclipsed a lot of the other bad things in history (and probably rightly so.) A reference to Nazis these days barely actually references the real Nazis and the horrible things they did. It means a lot more.
So this of course attracts the crazies. Compare this to the slave trade, which most of us understand “it is what it is.” Attacking that isn’t attacking and sacred cows and won’t stir up much outrage. We’d just think a “slavery denier” was just being kind of random.
Just ran across an interesting recent commentary by a prominent Holocaust denier, Mark Weber of the “Institute For Historical Review”. Weber is conceding that despite the “impressive” efforts of he and other Holocaust deniers, a central objective of their campaign (striking at “Jewish-Zionist power”) is failing:
Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community. In my view, and as I have repeatedly emphasized, the task of exposing and countering this power is a crucially important one. In that effort, Holocaust revisionism cannot play a central role.
Weber, surprisingly, is acknowledging that in addition to the familiar bogeymen who are countering his campaign, there is substantial historical evidence working against him. While he thinks that Holocaust denial as a tactic is a failure, he apparently finds hope in another trend.
This shift has…been noticed at the Institute for Historical Review. Over the past ten years, sales of IHR books, discs, flyers and other items about Holocaust history have steadily declined, along with inquiries about Holocaust history and requests for interviews on this subject. At the same time, and obviously reflecting broader social-cultural trends, there has been a marked rise in sales of IHR books, discs, flyers and other items about Jewish-Zionist power, the role of Jews in society, and so forth. This has been matched by an increase in the number of inquiries and requests for interviews on those issues.
So - will current Holocaust deniers, at least in the West, be shifting their emphases to other, potentially more successful ways to propagate anti-Semitism? Time will tell.
Another take on Weber’s “revisionism” here.
clairobscr:
Well, lots of what we call Germany now was in the French sphere of influence in the early middle ages. The Jewish community of the Rhineland that was massacred during the First Crusade was certainly at least partially located in modern Germany.
Yea!
We should have just given them…Utah 
I imagine (but am pulling this out of my butt) that Jews pushed for it. However, I always wondered the same thing as you posted.