Which to a certain extent proves that the wilder the idea, the more likely it’s in a book. Maybe the Nazis had the right idea?
We had many many detainees in WW II. You have to understand that according to the Geneva conventions in force at the time, a country had the right to detain all citizens of any country it had declared war on. So the US had the legal right to detain all German, Italian, and Japanese citizens (as well as any of the other associated countries).
As far as I know, the rules of detention were pretty clear. You had the right to put detainees in custody, but you had to establish decent care for them. Your interests were naturally to keep them as comfortable as possible, so as to ensure that your own citizens detained abroad would be well-treated.
As far as I know, the internment of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast in WW II was not related to the laws of detainment. American citizens were interned in the camps. Only Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were interned; Japanese-Americans in Hawaii were not.
The US Army found out the result the hard way. Enough Japanese-Americans volunteered for the Army to form an entire super-regiment, the famous 442nd Regimental Combat Team that served in Italy and France. However, over 90% of them were from Hawaii. The Army tried to recruit from the internment camps :eek: but found no takers. Wonder why.
The internment camps weren’t death camps, and the US had no policy of trying to exterminate Japanese-Americans. I’m not sure that most Americans involved in the internment themselves had a clear idea of what they were trying to do. We did have a formal declaration of war against Japan, and therefore a legal right (according to international standards of the time) to detain Japanese citizens. We also had a right to arrest Japanese citizens (and Americans) who violated the law. Even detainees were not immune to the law, and the consequences could be harsh even for minor violations.
The detainees in Gitmo are in a different situation. To compare WW II and today is shallow, uncritical, and knee-jerk thinking.
“The children are not the enemy at the moment. The enemy is the blood in them. The enemy is their growing up to become a Jew who could be dangerous. And because of that the children were also affected”
I am posting to all very old threads lol. Sorry. But I’m new here and lots of interesting stuff. I think it’s very hurtful. People in any ethnic or minority group would like feel this way. It would be equivalent to someone saying to an African American “You were never slave and you were never denied civil rights” or to a Native American “You never lost your land, nobody ever harmed you”. I think when you are a member of such a group, this is a very emotional and hurtful statement, because you feel the pain of it personally. My grandmother lost most of her family at Sobibor, and I have met people who have denied this. In fact, my father is from Italy and my own grandfather (who grew up under fascism) said to me when I was growing up that “the Jews were taking over Germany and had to be stopped, lots of people were killed and the Jews have to make it all about them when it wasn’t.” Stuff like this cuts people to the core. My mother was Jewish and her life was seriously affected by these events, and as a result, so was mine. It really ruined my mother’s family. I think sometimes people don’t understand that these cultural traumas go on and on in families for a long time. When you see you see the hurt in your grandmother and your mother growing up it affects you personally and even when it’s just a group you belong to, it hurts your soul. I guess perhaps any American could understand if someone said “9/11 never happened”, it would be extremely offensive, because everybody was so hurt by it. But if you add to that the additional years of persecution, oppression and hatred, I think it makes it even more personal, if that makes sense?
The numbers of people is not nearly as important as the degree to which they are organized and able to make their voices heard. A small number of people who know how Public Relations Agents make use of the media to get their stories told can make their point heard much more effectively than can a large number of people.
The number of people is important but their ability to organize the media is perhaps even more important. In America, several groups who were treated badly (like the Chinese) took a long time before they had an effective degree of control over the media. But once they did, they were able to make themselves heard and racial prejudice against them soon was a thing of the past. I wager most people today have heard about the Chinese Benevolent Society. But they didn’t hear about them until only recently.
You might want to consider, however, that reviving multiple threads on closely related topics in a very short time is counter-productive. If you read through those threads, you will note that others have made points similar to yours, already. In addition, posters to whom you are responding may no longer be posting, here, lessening the impact of your responses…
Please consider letting some of the threads that you have already revived run their course before reviving additional threads.
It’s a knee-jerk thing. People like to feel smarter/better than others. If A denies a holocaust, then B can say “A is ignorant because A doesn’t agree with me/thegovernment/mygovernment/myunderstanding/whateverybodybelieves”. Also, B can accuse A of anti-semitism, an inflammatory accusation, without censure, and without the need to provide proof of said anti-semitism. Fling mud without having to back it up??? It’s a gimme!
America’s outrage meter is governed by whether the victims look like them, whether that region has any exploitable resources, or if there is any political and/or economical gain if we were to intervene in the conflict.
Because the people of Rwanda were black, because Rwanda has no exploitable resources, and there is no political and economical gain in intervening in that region. It is much easier to sleep at night if one brushes the genocide as an unfortunate side effect of a brutal civil war between two low-IQ tribes.
What possible motives, other than ignorance, insanity and/or hatefulness, could anyone possibly have to take the trouble to specifically ‘deny’ a well-documented and reasonably recent historical event?
If someone was to, say, ‘deny’ that WW1 occurred, what reaction do you expect people to have? Open-minded ‘well, that’s your opinion, as good as any other’, or ‘you are nuts. My grandfather died in WW1, are now you are saying it didn’t happen?’
Sure, you will get a “knee-jerk” reaction, and rightfully so - because people who say stupid things get labelled as stupid.
Attempting to revise the methodology or statistics of the Holocaust is lazily deemed “denial” by many. 6 million is basically the estimate of all Jews who were living in Europe. Is it valid to claim that the Holocaust lasted from 1933 all the way to 1945? Is 6 million indeed the accurate number?
There is no direct evidence for the ordering of gassings. The Nazi’s used euphemisms in their language, and those gruesome pictures we have all seen are victims of starvation and typhus. Without the evidence of Hitler or any other top-level Nazi official saying “gas all the Jews,” it becomes a game of putting together puzzle pieces and reading through innuendo. (For example, a prominent meme is that the “Final Solution” was to deport the all the Jews to Palestine, rather than mass extermination). There are no pictures of gassing victims or incinerators full of burning bodies. This evidence gap leaves room for true deniers to make wild claims like it was all a conspiracy to create sympathy for the Jews.
Why is this in any way significant? If the number was 4 million or 7 million, it still amounts to much the same thing, doesn’t it?
There are plenty of eye-witness accounts, including those of Germans admitting they helped to design, build and operate such things, and there are, in fact, pictures of the incinerators with bodies in them.
There are plenty of eye-witness accounts, including those of Germans admitting they helped to design, build and operate such things, and there are, in fact, pictures of the incinerators with bodies in them.
Two seconds of searching on Wikipedia:
There is no “evidence gap”.
[/QUOTE]
Another drawback to Holocaust denial is the violence it does to the concept of “history” and “truth”. The absurd lengths to which Holocaust deniers need to go to deny one of the most extensively documented horrors in history need to be challenged. And by “challenged” I mean “clearly rebutted, and their perpetrators sneered at”.
In 1984 Orwell writes that “truisms are true. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center”. And elsewhere in the same book he writes “Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4. If that is granted, all else follows”.
Once we allow people with a political agenda to try to promote historical standards that deny real truth, truth is lost, and freedom is gone.
Real things are real. Those who don’t like the implications of reality often try to deny it. That cannot be allowed to stand.
Attempts to revise the methodology or statistics of the Holocaust are not deemed “denial” out of laziness; they are deemed denial because that is what it invariably turns out to be. 6 million is not basically the estimate of all the Jews who were living in Europe, In 1933, approximately 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, comprising 1.7% of the total European population. This number represented more than 60 percent of the world’s Jewish population at that time, estimated at 15.3 million. The figure of ~6 million Jews and ~5 million other ‘racial undesirables’ being murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust are very well established figures; anyone trying to substantially revise them has quite a mountain to climb, and starting off by claiming 6 million was just the estimate of the number of Jews living in Europe at the time when the figure was actually 9.5 million isn’t off to a very good start.
As Malthus notes, there is no “evidence gap”. It’s absurd to claim that there is; there are mountains of evidence of the Holocaust having occurred.
I’m not sure if you are aware of it or not, but you are hitting on almost all of the “points” used by the IHR, notably:
[ul]
[li]6 million wasn’t the right number, or we’re Just Asking Questions about the number.[/li]
[li]There is no evidence of gassing.[/li]
[li]The dead died of typhus.[/li]
[li]The Final Solution meant deporting Jews, not mass extermination.[/li]
[li]There’s no paper trail that high ranking Nazis knew the Holocaust was happening, if it was happening.[/li][/ul]All of these “points” are steaming piles of horseshit.
More fun to speculate if the Nazis had conquered some country in the Middle East, deported the Jews there to set up their own country - then thirty years later they discovered large amounts of oil.
