Funny thing is, antisemitism has never had the traditional cultural presence here that it always had in Germany; the U.S. didn’t even get large numbers of Jews until the late 19th Century, when millions of Ashkenazi from the Jewish Pale (western Russian Empire) started fleeing oppression by the tsars.
But, to an American “White Nationalist” today, Jews must be attacked and degraded because:
The Jewish threat is central to Hitler’s ideology, which is so inspirational to WNs everywhere.
Jews = Communism. (It is not true that there ever was an “International Jewish-Communist Conspiracy,” but it is perfectly true that Jews figured heavily in the 19th- and 20th-Century Communist and Socialist movements in Eastern Europe – and not hard to understand why an oppressed minority would be attracted to a political movement committed to radical equality.)
American Jews figured heavily in the American civil rights movement.
I think it’s basically about trying to delegitimize political support for Israel and sympathy for perceived “Jewish” causes in general.
Are there really people who categorize those who point out that other groups were targeted in the Holocaust along with the Jews as “deniers?”
I used to have a casual acquaintance with a death camp survivor who was a Jehovah’s Witness. I wonder if they’d call him a “denier.” I don’t understand why it would bother anyone to acknowledge that Jews weren’t the only victims. Do they deny that to be the case (and if so, doesn’t that make THEM the deniers), or do they think those other groups are less important. I don’t understand their objection at all. What reasoning do they use?
You’re looking for logic from people who follow a personally cult of a short, dark, mercurial failed artist and Austrian army corporal who preached the military prowess and racial superiority of an ‘Aryan race’ of blue-eyed and blond Scandinavians. It is so bizarre only bad science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard was able to top the movement it in its absurdity. They had great costumes, though.
What is still peculiar to me is the small but vocal minority of self-proclaimed lefty apologists who still try to defend Marxist and Maoist implementations of Communism, or indeed, communism in any practicable form (i.e. imposed by force of revolution inciting the masses of the proletariat against the bourgeois, et cetera) on the basis of argument that, “It just hasn’t been done right yet.” At 100 million or more zilched from implementations of communism on four continents, often with such brutality that would have even impressed the Balkan voivodes of the Middle Ages, it would seem the experiment in national communism of all flavors has been adequately tested and pretty decidedly failed. That particular omelet, to extend a popular justifying metaphor , has been long since eaten.
I don’t understand them either, but it does seem to me to be an occasional phenomenon with people who have been oppressed/have ancestors who were oppressed. I’ve run into women who insist women were historically worse off than everyone and dismiss the historical oppression of others; gays who do the same with women; blacks who do the same with gays AND women; and so on. Some people seem to think that it’s some sort of contest where only the most oppressed deserves sympathy.
I would argue that the Nazis were just as focused on killing, enslaving, and displacing Slavic peoples in the east to gain Lebensraum as they were on exterminating the Jews.
The simple answer is that Holocaust deniers don’t want people to think Jews are victims. A lot of them wouldn’t mind a “real” Jewish genocide, but I believe most of them actually think the holocaust is a hoax, because they actually believe in a Jewish conspiracy.
I’m sure this is true. But the core of Hitler’s philosophy, his speeches, everything he wrote, everything that his high-ranking Nazis believed in, and everything that was pounded into people’s heads through propaganda, starting in elementary school, was anti-Semitism. They didn’t make children’s books that showed the difference between a Slavic nose and an Aryan nose.
I have never seen or heard of anyone defining a Holocaust denier on this basis.
What I have heard claimed on occasion is that Jews who take part in events to commemorate the Holocaust are denying the experiences of non-Jewish victims if they don’t explicitly incorporate those experiences into every program or memorial.
That always seemed insensitive and dumb to me - sort of like criticizing black people commemorating experiences under slavery for omitting references to people around the world who are still enslaved.
Actually, they did – the Nazis had quite the fetish for the formalities of legalism even as they destroyed the rule of law. Before they rounded up all the Jews in some town or other, you can be sure that the paperwork estalishing that it was illegal for Jews to live there had been properly filled out and filed.
Nor have I. However, I have encountered Jews who were outraged that a Holocaust museum or Holocaust memorial dared to recognize that Gypsies and homosexuals were also victims of the Holocaust.
I strongly suspect that some significant percentage of Holocaust deniers are really just lying. They know full well the Holocaust really happened, they just want to make it look like it didn’t. Their main reasons for this, as mentioned by others already, would be:
Make Nazis look good
Make Jews look bad
It’s got to be hard to recruit people to neo-Nazism if they associate your side with pure evil and feel sympathetic toward Jewish people past and present due to what they suffered during the Third Reich. But if they can manage to turn it around so that the Holocaust is basically a hoax dreamed up by the Jews to make the noble Nazis look bad then the Jews become the evil ones and the Nazis become the innocent victims! Anyone who falls for this will be a lot more likely to join the neo-Nazi movement than someone who correctly believes that the Nazis were responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent civilians.
Plenty of neo-Nazis must really have come to believe that the Holocaust was a hoax, but they believe it because they’ve been told to believe it and because they want to believe it. They’re stupid, irrational people who swallowed a stupid, irrational story. For most it probably makes them feel better about their personal failures and poor circumstances to think that they’re really part of a superior race that’s been unfairly and dishonestly kept down by a fiendish enemy.
There are two ways of looking at the OP. So far, the thing addressed (including by me) has been the overall intention of deniers. But there is also a more tactical intent going on that defines the way in which they deny.
The aim has traditionally been to catch small mistakes and inconsistencies, with the intention of creating overall doubt. The numbers killed in the Holocaust have been changed over time, for example (for very good reasons, not least that there weren’t handy-dandy lists of everyone murdered).
Deniers realize they are going to be laughed out of court if they simply state that the holocaust never happened. But by instead pointing to minor inconsistencies, they attempt to cast doubt over the entire evidence of the period. This isn’t to say, of course, that there aren’t people who do stand up and deny the whole shebang. But more recently they have done so in private, and the more “academic” of the lying bastards have practiced the salami technique.
FWIW, I’ve heard Jews (some, not many) insist that the Holocaust was unique in world history, suggesting that no one has ever been persecuted or mass-murdered to the degree they have been, that the Holocaust was not only uniquely Jewish but unique in history. That assertion doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny, obviously, and the reasons for making that claim don’t either.
But it nonetheless seems like a form of Holocaust-denial itself - except that it’s instead denying (or at least belittling) the other genocides of every *other *ethnic group in history that has faced them, and even those of their fellow victims of the Nazi one itself. Just ftr, depending on the estimates, an even higher percentage of Roma were killed than Jews - but where is their memorial? Or those of the homosexuals, the Communists, the disabled, etc.?
I think the first may be a little bit broader than just that. I would argue that the most insidious form of Holocaust denial isn’t from people performing chemical analysis of concentration camp doors at all, but from the somewhat broader group that minimises the roles that the Wehrmacht or the civilian populace on the whole played in the war crimes of the German state in the 30s and 40s. It’s gotten better in recent years, but I know even among my friends there are people who still believe (if they don’t openly proselytise) in the noble-but-misled German Heer, fighting for their country and completely unaware of what “fighting for their country” meant.
Eventually this will probably become the same simmering but rarely boiling-over issue that the “heritage not hate” aspects of the Confederate flag became. Maybe it already has. Given that I’m a Young Person, I’m not sure about my friends; perhaps it has something to do with the masses of multiplayer video games set in World War II that, since video games still occasionally have a hard time being taken seriously on weighty issues, reduce the German and Japanese militaries to ideology-less factions of cool technology.
It’s still an issue of scope–whether you deny the scope of the crimes or the scope of the criminals. The goal, I think, is the same–to make people look good, or at least to make them look less guilty. It starts from the same place. And in this sense I’m not sure who is worse, as a denier: the person who conjures a million Jews murdered at Birkenau back to life through their denial, or the person who absolves ten million people of that murder through theirs.
One thing that may also face Holocaust-deniers is one that faces me. After a couple of courses in college I decided I wanted to be a Holocaust scholar. A couple more and I realised I couldn’t do it. I was simply not able to wrap my head around the enormity of it. I may say how many people died in the camps, but how close does merely reciting–even believing–that number get me to truly understanding the depths of what happened? In that sense, what are Holocaust-deniers or revisionists of whatever stripe trying to accomplish? Perhaps the same thing 9/11 conspiracy theorists are: trying to make sense of and rationalise an event of such scope that it borders on the fringes of what people can rationally understand, and coming to the entirely wrong conclusions.
Once in Venice, CA, I was given literature from some skinheads when parking for a beach day. (I didn’t want it, but the size of these tattooed freaks…) Their literature pointed to a smaller figure of “only” 60,000 Jews dying during WWII, saying this is an example of how Jews lie all the time, playing on our sympathy.
It seems to be about the numbers for these so-called organizations. They admit to Hitler killing Jews, but much less than what the Jews say on the total number of killings. They never mentioned the word Holocaust in the pamphlet, but they like to point us in the direction of “how Jews lie.” Excuse me while I grind my teeth…
From the looks of these guys, I didn’t think they could count to 6, let alone 60,000.
Surprised they weren’t cranking any Prussian Blue from their stereo. :rolleyes:
No German, soldier or civilian, was completely innocent, but painting all of them as irredeemably evil is an overly simplistic distortion. Many of the atrocities were committed by paramilitary groups operating behind the German advances. An Erich von Manstein can’t be looked at as being as culpable as someone like Himmler.
Don’t forget the Jehovah’s Witnesses who were put in the camps specifically because they refused to swear allegiance to Hitler or the Third Reich. You would think a group who chose to die with the Jews rather than go along with the Nazis would deserve some respect. I hope the kind of attitude you refer to isn’t widespread.
Of course–it wasn’t my intent to imply otherwise. In fact I would say that treating any aspect of the issue in stark terms of “good” and “evil” may have the unfortunate act of rendering the Holocaust a horror story as opposed to a literal study in the actions people are capable of. This is why I described the group that seeks to minimise that culpability. There were people in Germany–more I think even than is commonly recognised–who were opposed to the actions of the government. I didn’t mean to make it seem otherwise. The problem is the tendency to compartmentalise, which allowed people for too long to portray the German Army as non-complicit in the crimes of the German state (laying the entire burden largely or solely on the SS) and the citizenry at large as innocent or ignorant of what was going on (laying the burden largely or solely on members of the Nazi party).
This is itself a simplistic way of looking at things, too, and I think falls well under the scope of Holocaust revisionism or denial. The proper thing to do, I would think, would not be to condemn everyone–that’s as useless as the converse–but to regard the Holocaust not as some isolated, mysterious event that just transpired somehow but as the result of the actions, direct and indirect, of tens of millions of people. Holocaust denial, to me, is that which tries to unmake the Holocaust in any form–whether that is to lop a few zeros off the death toll, or to try to render it an event that occured in isolation as the crazed schemes of a handful of madmen. To some degree, I admit to considering the latter worse. Regardless of whether it was ten million or ten thousand, those murdered were the victims of terrible things. Denying the mechanisms by which this occured, or was permitted to occur (I am in no means accusing you of this, mind) or minimising the role that the entire system (the plurality of evil?) rather than its masterminds played gets at the heart of trying to ensure the “never again” bit.
But I didn’t mean, either, to render the whole citizenry of Germany and the occupied territories as a faceless hoard of soulless machines, either. They’re humans, not figures that can be tallied in a ledger of “innocent” and “guilty”. Perhaps I was not sufficiently clear.
I don’t think it is too widespread. My impression is that amongst the older generation, especially survivors themselves, there was a tendency to ignore other victims – partially, I think, because in the years after the war the data was there on what happened to the Jews and less on what exactly happened to the Roma, the dissidents, the Jehovahs witnesses, and the homosexuals.
Particularly the homosexuals; cultural prejudices kept the homosexuals’ fate under the Nazis very much out of the discourse. It was really AIDS which brought it out for the first time, I think. There is some evidence that homosexuals prisoners were treated even more brutally than others.
In my Hebrew school class (c. 1990-95) we learned about the Jewish story in greater detail, of course, but we also learned about the fate of the Gypsies and the political dissidents. Not the homosexuals, or, oddly, the Jehovah’s witnesses. What are the numbers for them?
Another trend which I think is interesting is an increased focus on the ‘Righteous among the Nations’. For a while there was an attitude that they didn’t need to be honoured because they were so few out of so many, I think purely out of anger but that has thankfully changed a great deal.
Holocaust denial has also, as a goal now, manipulating people’s fear of the abridgement of ‘free speech’ to make people take their message more seriously. The people who peacefully protested when David Irving was invited to speak at the Oxford Union (a private club) were accused of trying to stifle ‘free speech’ and ‘debate’.