In all honesty the
goals and
objectives of Holocaust denial are rather divorced these days from their
motivations.
Although some deniers are exceptionally delusional even by denier standards, and might actually believe that 'revisionism' is capable of bringing about a Third Reich revival or bringing down the state of Israel, the majority are probably realistic enough in their heart of hearts to know that they are little more than an irritant, and therefore, their goals and objectives are as follows:
- to act like jackasses
- to get attention and be told they are jackasses
- to gratify their egos by getting attention and being told they are jackasses
- to convince themselves they are special and important because everyone tells them they are jackasses
- to provoke such disgust and contempt by being jackasses that they are insulted, disciplined, banned, ejected or - fantasy of fantasies - jailed, thereby validating their belief that they are Galileo
In short, the overwhelming majority of deniers embrace their views for the same reasons as any other garden variety conspiracist troll touts their shtick: narcissicism, the Dunning-Krueger effect, and a wholly irrational belief that they are privy to a great insight into recent history which as it is roundly rejected by 99.9% of the population, is self-evidently 'true' to them, since they are contrarians.
Though some of this breed claim they believe in something called 'Revisionism', in my experience the number of deniers who actually agree with 'Revisionist' texts longer than a short article penned by Faurisson and who have really read from cover to cover books by Butz etc, is less than 10% of all denier trolls online. Another 10-30% pretend they believe in something called 'Revisionism', but in fact have never read an entire denier book cover to cover. The rest simply make it up as they go along, supplemented with occasional glances at shorter denier articles or the odd YouTube-style video.
The majority of denier arguments are formulated as memes, which is why they repeat themselves over and over and over again, simultaneously seeking to annoy and bore their targets to death. Occasionally a denier might stir itself enough from its lethargy to engage in a classic Gish Gallop, but this is actually a rare event, and most prefer to engage in a pseudointellectual Thermopylae discussing one piece of evidence at a time, viz. most of the discussions on this forum. Requests to discuss more than one piece of evidence at a time usually result in the denier spewing out rationalisations as to why this is impossible or attempts to change the subject, or are met with deafening silence. In this respect, denier argumentation online has descended to roughly the same level as any other conspiraloon belief system, except that a certain minority of deniers are evidently deeply uncomfortable making conspiracy claims and try to avoid them like the plague, while the rest blether tediously about a wholly undefined and unproved 'holohoax'.
In a few cases - largely confined to the group of deniers who pretend to believe in 'Revisionism' - denial is also really little more than 80s retro, fantasising about supposed glory days which the deniers either experienced or believe they experienced because of what they have read on VHO, CODOH, IHR etc. They would much rather the clock be turned back to 1985 than 1935.
While it is quite true that the overwhelming majority of deniers are antisemites and fall down the 'revisonist' rabbit hole because of their antisemitism, in actual practice this antisemitism does not really define their goals and objectives. To the extent that there is any relationship at all between deniers' antisemitism and their goals, it is to act like jackasses by annoying 'the Jews'. Irritating 'the Jews' might therefore be considered the prime objective of the majority of deniers. Getting a rise out of them and sucking 'the Jews' into a prolonged argument would be best. Forcing 'the Jews' to ban/eject/jail them would be better still, as martyrdom evidently validates their embrace of the delusional architecture of denial. Since fundamentally deniers are only in it to act like jackasses, they have a fairly high success rate in getting themselves banned/ejected/jailed, which allows the delusional system to propel itself forward a little longer.
Fundamentally, therefore, denial is a form of masochism. This is the only possible conclusion I can come to which explains little grey rabbit, anyway.
