General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II

[000063]

Germany?

That's what you got out of all that?

 

[Dogzilla]

From the survivors themselves. Why is that so hard for you to understand?

To whom would the survivors themselves offer this testimony? To each other? Who would listen to their complaints? Ask yourself this: How many Jews complained to the Nazi government about their coreligionists being gassed? To whom did the Jews report such mistreatment? Do you think those complaints were taken seriously by the Nazi government? Do you think there was an investigation into the allegations or do you think the report was destroyed immediately after it was written? Do you think the Nazi government allowed the complainant to resume his daily activity--maybe talk to other Jews or the foreign press about his gassing complaint--or do you think the Nazi government would try to neutralize the troublemaker? The Allied armies seized all the official documents of the Nazi regime. How many records were there of Jews complaining to Nazi officials about Jews being gassed? Maybe zero complaints? Why would you expect the American response to Japanese Americans complaining about being exterminated to be any different than the Nazi Government's response to Jews who did the same thing?

And remember that the Final Solution to the Jewish Question exempted some Jews. There were Jews running around wearing yellow stars throughout the war. Why didn't the Americans introduce a similar badging to identify the Japanese Americans who were exempt? Because there weren't any Japanese Americans who were exempt! The Final Solution to the Japanese Question was intended to be a COMPLETE solution. ALL the Japanese were rounded up so there was nobody on the outside to keep an eye on those who were deported like there were with the Jews in Germany.

So during the war, the Jews got nowhere when they complained to a hostile government. But after the war, a new regime took over that was hostile to the regime that had been hostile to the Jews. So the Jews were able to air their grievances. During the war, the Japanese got nowhere when they complained to a hostile government. After the war, the same hostile regime was still in power. Not only was it still in power, it had also completely destroyed the one foreign government that might have been sensitive to their plight. So the Japanese grievances remained suppressed.

Why is this so difficult for you to understand?

You see, when you make the epistemological leap into the realm where not having evidence of a crime becomes evidence that the evidence of the crime was destroyed and that destroying the evidence of the crime proves the accused is guilty of committing the crime and of knowing he is guilty of the crime, a whole new world opens up to you. Truth is not based upon positive evidence but upon the inability of others to prove that it's not true. Problems can arise, as you can see, when your new epistomological standard is turned around against you.

 

[Dogzilla]

No, it was presented that nearly all of the Japanese Americans sent to the internment camps came back from them -- and more importantly in the case of your lame excuse for an argument, none of them went missing.

Evidence thingy?

This is in stark contrast to the millions of Jews who did not come back, and did go mission.

TSR says all the Jews were missing after the war. So Jews no longer exist. Got any evidence thingy of that?

You're really going to have to step up your game if you expect us to stop laughing at your posts.

Yeah, millions of Jews being wiped out is really funny. Har Har.

 

[Border Reiver]

So, Dog, if I understand your theory - the US government intended the Japanese internment to wipe out the Japanese Americans.

The continuation of the US government has precluded a neutral third party investigation into these allegations and the US documents that record the names and identities of everyone who was interned, died during the internment, was born during the internment, was released after WWII, and has campaigned for recognition and redress during WWII and since cannot be trusted or are in fact agents of the US government providing disinformation to the world. The same US government that couldn't manufacture some WMDs to hide in Iraq to justify their action?

 

[Dcdrac]

Dogzilla none of your convulted tortured nonesnese disproves the Holocaust took place.

The Stacks of HARD evidence that prove it happened against your fantasy history and attempts to twist logic.

 

[Nick Terry]

You see, when you make the epistemological leap into the realm where not having evidence of a crime becomes evidence that the evidence of the crime was destroyed and that destroying the evidence of the crime proves the accused is guilty of committing the crime and of knowing he is guilty of the crime, a whole new world opens up to you. Truth is not based upon positive evidence but upon the inability of others to prove that it's not true. Problems can arise, as you can see, when your new epistomological standard is turned around against you.

Who is making this epistemological leap of yours?

In the real world, there is clearly a extensive corpus of positive evidence for the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis and their Axis allies. Parts of that body of evidence has been used in multiple courtrooms under many different jurisdictions and legal systems, and the evidence has been studied extensively by historians for nearly 70 years.

The fact that you dispute some (in fact a tiny fraction) of that evidence is the only reason you are then asked what instead happened to the Jews. That has nothing to do with proving a negative, and does not mean that "truth is based upon the inability of others to prove that it's not true".

That last statement presumes that people here think the truth of the Holocaust is based on your inability to explain anything about the subject. Which is quite hilariously solipsistic on your part.

For most people on this thread, the truth of the Holocaust is based on reading a combination of primary and secondary sources - sometimes just a few memoirs and a couple of history books, in other cases many dozens or even hundreds of such books, along with documents on the internet - which hang together to produce a coherent explanation of the fate of the Jews in WWII.

Or to put it another way, and to name but two examples, most people on this thread believe Primo Levi and Raul Hilberg and disbelieve you.

The fact that you can't produce a coherent explanation of the fate of the Jews in WWII is one reason why people disbelieve your assertions and claims. It may indeed be the most important reason, because people generally find it easier to accept a new claim or radical claim when it does not have gaping great holes in its logical structure, and the fact that deniers have no coherent explanation of what happened instead is certainly just such a gaping great hole.

The epistemological significance of your inability to produce a coherent explanation is that no paradigm can be shifted until there is a better explanation of the same phenomenon. Or, to use Imre Lakatos's elegant harmonisation of Popper and Kuhn, until there is a better explanation, no previous explanation is actually falsified.

 

[Dogzilla]

So, all of the remaining physical evidence that is in Germany is not real? The stuff I saw over there was all a figment of my imagination? The eyewitness testimony and film evidence does not exist?

The Final Solution took place in what is now Poland. Whatever physical evidence you saw in Germany isn't evidence of the extermination of the Jews. (Whatever physical evidence you saw in Poland isn't evidence either). The stuff you saw over there wasn't a figment of your imagination but the interpretation of it was the figment of someone else's imagination. The eyewitness testimony is real. People really said those words. But they're eyewitnesses--the lowest form of evidence. When what they say is impossible, it can be--it must be--ignored. Any films you saw are not evidence of the final solution. There aren't any.

What I would like to see you supply is the physical and documentary evidence that the USA exterminated the Japanese-Americans during WWII, since you obviously have it all.

Hold both your arms in front of you with your palms facing upward. In your right hand is all the physical and documentary evidence of the Jews being exterminated. In your left hand is all the evidence of the Japanese extermination program. Weigh the evidence for yourself.

If you would like to see photographs of the Japanese being exterminated comparable to the heart wrenching photographs of the "Auschwitz album," google "Japanese internment". WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT! There you'll see pictures of Japanese standing in line, standing behind barbed wire, rows and rows of the huts used to house the tortured martyrs, etc. There are even photographs of old Japanese women walking with children by their side.

Do you really need to see evidence of the American homicidal gas chambers? Show me one of these for the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Do you want to see an example of the tons of evidence of the American attitude toward the Japanese untermenschen compared to the German attitude toward the Jews during the war? Ask yourself this: Do you think a German soldier fighting in the East who sent the severed head of a Jew to his girlfriend back in Berlin as a present is just having a little fun or do you think the guy is a sick twisted individual? Do you think a young lady who appreciates such a gift is happy and well adjusted or perhaps little psychotic herself? If the Nazi government disapproved of soldiers sending body parts to their loved ones back home, would you still think the practice is an indictment of Nazi depravity? Find me something like this from a German wartime publication (page 35).

Until then I'm going to have to believe that the Americans had an ingrained attitude necessary to support exterminating the Japanese that exceeded the German desire to exterminate the Jews. The Americans publicly bragged about having the technology to exterminate with lethal gas the Japanese. If the Germans did it, there's no way the Americans didn't.

 

[Dogzilla]

Get yourself a calculator and do the numbers. Include the alleged movement of all people, Jewish and non Jewish, to the camps.

Then scratch your head and say where was the outcry from the friends and relatives of the PEOPLE who are said to have gone missing?

Over a period of three years did the millions of friends and relatives not notice that their friends and relatives had disappeared?

Over that same period of three years no good people spoke up and leaked to the world that this was happening? Nor in the decade after and the decade after that?

Clay, there actually were millions of people who were displaced from their homes in Europe during the war. The Nazis did move alot of Germans into newly occupied territories and concentrated ethnic Germans scattered throughout eastern Europe in places they wanted Germanized. There were alot of people who fled the advancing armies in the west and in the east. Millions of Germans were forcibly uprooted from the east by the Russians and many people in Europe tried to escape being trapped in a Soviet zone of occupation. Europe had never seen a migration of so many people as it did during the war. So Nazi Germany moving Jews from one place to another isn't unbelievable or impossible. It really did happen. Just like it happened to many other non-Jewish people. In the process, people lost track of friends and relatives. If a husband, wife, and teenage son were separated and each one didn't know where the other two were after the war, they would be missing and would search for each other. If they were Jewish, the husband would assume his wife and son had been murdered, the wife would assume the husband and the son had been murdered, and the son would assume his mother and father had been murdered. Maybe they would look for each other right after the war but if they "knew" the others had been murdered, they probably wouldn't continue looking. Why look for somebody when you know they're dead? So you have a family of three that all survived and you also have six people who perished in the Shoah to report to Yad Vashem. A similarly situated family of five could all survive but lose contact with other, yielding twenty people who perished in the Shoah.

So deportation happened. People displaced during the war happened. People losing contact with people they knew happened. Deportation isn't ridiculous. It's saying that all the deported who happened to be Jewish were murdered is what is ridiculous.

 

[TSR]

Evidence thingy?

In history books. Try reading one some time.

TSR says all the Jews were missing after the war. So Jews no longer exist. Got any evidence thingy of that?

No, TSR did *not* say all Jews everywhere were missing. TSR very clearly says that the millions that dz claims never existed were documented as having run afoul of the Final Solution, and were never heard from again.

The evidence for this is copious.

What has no evidence is the various implications of dz's assertion that they never existed, one example of which is the Jäger Report. If, as dz insists, these Jews didn't exist, how does it explain this report?

Answer: it doesn't. I desperately tried to distract from its inability to do so by distorting what other say.

Yeah, millions of Jews being wiped out is really funny. Har Har.

No, its not.

The contortions you have forced upon yourself so as not to get tripped up by your assertion they never existed are what are humourous.

In a very sad way.

 

[Dogzilla]

http://www.bookdrum.com/books/if-this-is-a-man/9780349100135/summary.html

If This is a Man - Primo Levi

Primo Levi's account of his time as a prisoner of Auschwitz begins with his arrest as a Partisan in fascist Italy. After being interned in a detention camp, Levi is sent on a five day journey in a transport wagon to Auschwitz Birkenau, arriving in February 1944.

Levi is subjected to a degrading initiation into camp life at Monowitz, a subsidiary labour camp of Auschwitz. He enters the camp naked, his hair shorn. His camp identity number is tattooed onto his forearm. Levi realises he must learn the laws of the incomprehensible reality that he now inhabits. Numerous rules and regulations dictate his brutal day to day existence. Surviving on starvation rations, inmates face daily beatings whilst undertaking back-breaking labour. After a fortnight in the camp, Levi is consumed by an obsession with food and is unrecognisable to himself.

Arrested as a partisan? I thought he was arrested because he was a Jew? You mean the Nazis arrested a Jew for fighting against the German occupation and he wasn't executed immediately? That's odd.

If he had been executed immediately, would he have been executed as a partisan or would he have been an innocent Jew murdered in the holocaust? It seems to me there's something of a grey zone here, unless we just make a rule that no matter what a Jew might have done, his experience during the war makes him a "victim of the holocaust." But if we do that then all the Jews who died during in the war would be "victims of the holocaust." If we do that then Jews would necessarily either 1) survive the war or 2) be murdered by the Nazis as part of the Final Solution.

Good thing we don't have to dwell on the implications of this. Primo Levi survived the war so he must've been one of the special classes of Jews who were exempt from the final solution. So we have elderly Jews, Jews who served Germany during WWI and foreign Jews who actively fought to destroy the Nazi occupation who were exempt. Any other classes of exempt Jews?

 

[Dogzilla]

This is an extract from The Truce by Primo Levi

http://bostonreview.net/BR24.3/gambetta.html

And] a dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals. It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, apparently without tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending threat.

And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly and brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses, and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed into chaos; I am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream; my family, nature in flower, my home.

Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command, of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, "Wstawàch."

I had a dream I opened my locker at school and it was filled with oranges. I closed the locker because I was late for my algebra midterm but my feet were stuck to the concrete. People ignored my plight as the cacophonous silence flowed like a river of blood that blinded all who dared to look into it's invisible beauty. And a voice rang out, endless repeating the word I heard only once and never again: "Why?"

 

[TSR]

Arrested as a partisan?

Yes.

I thought he was arrested because he was a Jew?

Your ignorance is showing again.

You mean the Nazis arrested a Jew for fighting against the German occupation and he wasn't executed immediately? That's odd.

No, the *Nazis* didn't arrest him. Once again, your ignorance was showing.

The *Italians* arrested him.

If he had been executed immediately, would he have been executed as a partisan or would he have been an innocent Jew murdered in the holocaust?

False dichotomy.

It seems to me there's something of a grey zone here, unless we just make a rule that no matter what a Jew might have done, his experience during the war makes him a "victim of the holocaust." But if we do that then all the Jews who died during in the war would be "victims of the holocaust." If we do that then Jews would necessarily either 1) survive the war or 2) be murdered by the Nazis as part of the Final Solution.

But then, a *lot* of things seem to you which have only a passing resemblance to reality.

For example, your profound ignorance of the history you try to rewrite "seems" to you to be rational.

Good thing we don't have to dwell on the implications of this. Primo Levi survived the war so he must've been one of the special classes of Jews who were exempt from the final solution. So we have elderly Jews, Jews who served Germany during WWI and foreign Jews who actively fought to destroy the Nazi occupation who were exempt. Any other classes of exempt Jews?

And how, exactly, did Levi "actively fight to destroy the Nazis occupation"?

Or are you simply demonstrating that you haven't any clue about the nits at which you are pretending to pick?

 

[Straw Man]

The Final Solution took place in what is now Poland. Whatever physical evidence you saw in Germany isn't evidence of the extermination of the Jews. (Whatever physical evidence you saw in Poland isn't evidence either). The stuff you saw over there wasn't a figment of your imagination but the interpretation of it was the figment of someone else's imagination. The eyewitness testimony is real. People really said those words. But they're eyewitnesses--the lowest form of evidence. When what they say is impossible, it can be--it must be--ignored. Any films you saw are not evidence of the final solution. There aren't any.

Really? Eyewitness testimony is just words? My uncle was part of the 11th Armoured Division that liberated Belsen, and eventually when he told me about what they found.... Was it impossible that they were overwhelmed by thousands of starved creatures on the brink of death he was mistaken? The piles of bodies they buried. Were they not real, because a camp of thousands of walking skeletons can't be real, can it? And the pictures they took, not evidence at all? I suppose as a holocaust denier you will say something like it was a care centre for severe anorexics, and they starved themselves.

 

[Robrob]

False dichotomy.

Apparently he is attempting to claim the thousands of civilians executed as partisans somehow accounts for the MILLIONS of civilians who disappeared into the camps, never to be seen again.


Is this part of the "moved without leaving a forwarding address" shuck and jive?

 

[Dogzilla]

Really? Eyewitness testimony is just words? My uncle was part of the 11th Armoured Division that liberated Belsen, and eventually when he told me about what they found.... Was it impossible that they were overwhelmed by thousands of starved creatures on the brink of death he was mistaken? The piles of bodies they buried. Were they not real, because a camp of thousands of walking skeletons can't be real, can it? And the pictures they took, not evidence at all? I suppose as a holocaust denier you will say something like it was a care centre for severe anorexics, and they starved themselves.

The holocaust had been over for months by the time Belsen was liberated. Belsen wasn't a holocaust death camp anyway. The holocaust took place in Poland in camps such as Auschwitz. There were no death camps in Germany proper. What he witnessed wasn't a result of deliberate German policy but of the complete collapse of the German government and infrastructure. None of it had anything to do with the extermination of the Jews. The only connection between Belsen and the holocaust is that pictures taken by the British are shown as evidence for the holocaust because the holocaust death camps liberated by the Russians didn't have comparable images of horror to photograph. Besides the Russians couldn't figure out how to wind a watch. How would they know what to do with a camera?

 

[Robrob]

False dichotomy.

Apparently he is attempting to claim the thousands of civilians executed as partisans somehow accounts for the MILLIONS of civilians who disappeared into the camps, never to be seen again.


Is this part of the "moved without leaving a forwarding address" shuck and jive?

 

[Dogzilla]

Apparently he is attempting to claim the thousands of civilians executed as partisans somehow accounts for the MILLIONS of civilians who disappeared into the camps, never to be seen again.


Is this part of the "moved without leaving a forwarding address" shuck and jive?

No, just pointing out that one of the big name holocaust survivor witnesses wasn't actually a "victim of the holocaust." Or is Primo Levi just another Wiesel? A nobody that scholars don't use (as if scholars had any bearing on public knowledge of the holocaust anyway)?

 

[Straw Man]

The holocaust had been over for months by the time Belsen was liberated...[snip]

You now admit the Holocaust was real. Well done.

 

[000063]

No, just pointing out that one of the big name holocaust survivor witnesses wasn't actually a "victim of the holocaust."

Deniers care more about this "big name witness" than the general public. Historians less than either.

EDIT: Oh, my mistake, you weren't talking about Wiesel. Still wrong, as Doc Terry pointed out in #4361.

Or is Primo Levi just another Wiesel? A nobody that scholars don't use (as if scholars had any bearing on public knowledge of the holocaust anyway)?

Incorrect. Historians do have an impact on the public discourse, and the public perception of events, as pointed out repeatedly, often differs significantly from reality. There is a reason investigators, be they police or historian, don't rely on the MSM and public opinion to reach conclusions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

None of which has anything to do with the factual, scholarly understanding of the Holocaust.

I had a dream I opened my locker at school and it was filled with oranges. I closed the locker because I was late for my algebra midterm but my feet were stuck to the concrete. People ignored my plight as the cacophonous silence flowed like a river of blood that blinded all who dared to look into it's invisible beauty. And a voice rang out, endless repeating the word I heard only once and never again: "Why?"

Argument by mockery. Actually, deflection by mockery.

 

[Nick Terry]

The holocaust had been over for months by the time Belsen was liberated.

No, the Final Solution had been over for nearly six months before the liberation of the camps. The Holocaust qua genocide of European Jews didn't end until the Nazis were defeated.