Is Pat Buchanan a holocaust denier?

[davefoc]

I am not a Pat Buchanan fan but the claim that he is a holocaust denier has been made a few times in this forum and I doubted that the claim was true.

The term holocaust denier as it is generally used is somewhat more inclusive than one might guess by the words. It has come to encompass people who dispute significant details of the holocaust generally accepted as fact even if the individuals acknowledge that Jews and other groups suffered and died in great numbers during WWII at the hands of the Nazis.

Wikipedia has an article on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial

If Pat Buchanan is a holocaust denier (by the generally accepted definition of the phrase) then he would have to believe at least some of the items in the list of ten common beliefs of holocaust deniers in the Wikipedia article. Or at the very least he would need to believe something similar.

While Pat Buchanan seems to have made numerous racially insensitive or even racist comments over the years I think the principal basis for the holocaust denier claim is:
1. He defended an individual believed by many to be a death camp leader (John Demjenjuk)
2. He repeated a claim that diesel engine exhaust wasn't used to kill people in Treblinka.

Even if he was wrong about the innocence of John Demjenjuk I don't think that would provide evidence for or against the claim that he is a holocaust denier. He believed that Demjenjuk was not the camp leader that he was accused of being and in fact an Israeli court found that he was right about that. However the US government continues to believe Demjenjuk was a death camp leader and is seeking to deport him.

Buchanan's repeating a holocaust denier type claim that diesel exhaust wasn't used to kill people at Treblinka is better evidence that Buchanan is a holocaust denier. In fact it seems that he was wrong about it and what is worse he seems to be unwilling to discuss it.

Despite the above, I think the claim that Buchanan is a holocaust denier is probably wrong unless the term holocaust denier is extended beyond what it is generally accepted to mean today. I can see where Buchanan could arguably believe some things somewhat similar to Wikipedia's list of holocaust denier claims but I haven't seen anything that makes me think he believes or promotes any of them to a significant degree.

An article on this:
http://veritas3.holocaust-history.org/~jamie/buchanan/

 

[hgc]

No, he's not, in the sense of denying that the holocaust happened, or that the numbers are wildly off, as far as I know. But the diesel exhaust claim is the problem. It has been widely debunked, and is quite easy to understand, and yet he doesn't retract (again, as far as I know). I don't know how to interpret it, except to say that he wants to play on the fringes of holocaust denial and Nazi glorification by bandying this micro-denial about diesel exhaust and praising Hitler for his leadership skills.

I think that Buchanan is at his heart a racist and a fascist, holding forth numerous times on the decline of American civilization due to the influx of non-Euro imigrants and their "values," and appreciating the Nazis for their patriotic fervor.

 

[crimresearch]

Asked and answered:


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Pat Buchanan is a holocaust denier?

Can you post some evidence?
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I'm guessing that some folks might be referring to this:
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Buchanan, Pat: "Dividing Line." _New York Post_, Saturday, March 17,1990
This so-called "Holocaust Survivor Syndrome" involves "group fantasies of martyrdom and heroics." Reportedly, half of the 20,000 survivor testimonies in Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem are considered "unreliable," not to be used in trials.

Finally, the death engine. During the war, the underground government of the Warsaw Ghetto reported to London that the Jews of Treblinka were being electrocuted and steamed to death.

The Israeli court, however, concluded that the murder weapon for 850,000 was the diesel engine from a Soviet tank which drove its exhaust into the death chamber. All died in 20 minutes, Finkenstein swore in 1945.

The problem is: Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody. In 1988, 97 kids, trapped 400 feet underground in a Washington, DC tunnel while two locomotives spewed diesel exhaust into the car, emerged unharmed after 45 minutes.
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It is an article he wrote on whether or not John Demjanjuk was the real Ivan the Terrible, as opposed to Ivan Marchenko..it was not specifically a Holocaust denial piece.

But combined with his other writing along the lines of 'Hitler had some good ideas', and Buchanan falls into the category of 'looks like, walks like, quacks like'.
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http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=54658

 

[Skeptic]

The best web source on Buchanan's holocaust denial is Nizkor's . It is generally by the way an excellent web site for those of you dealing with holocaust deniers, in the same way the talk.origins web site is a one-stop place for debating creationists.

 

[davefoc]

Crimresearch,
Thank you for reposting your post. It was the post that inspired me to start this thread.

I respectfully disagree that the information in your post proves that Buchanan is a holocaust denier.

I think there is already a problem with that phrase in that it has a meaning more inclusive than the words that make up the phrase imply.

I believe you are trying to expand the meaning still farther with your characterization of Buchanan as a holocaust denier. I think this is a bad idea. Buchanan has written lots of stuff that people can decide they don't like and they can disagree with him on those specific issues without calling him names that are arguably inapproriate. The problem for me is that calling him names serves more to polarize opinion than to a discussion of his ideas.

Expaning the meaning of the phrase to cover people like Buchanan would also dilute the meaning of the phrase to the point that its meaning to describe people like David Irving would be lost.

Thank you skeptic for your link. It does seem to be a nearly definitive source on the issue of whether Buchanan is anti-semetic or not.

And thank you hgc for showing the good sense to agree with my view completely. I can see you have a brilliant mind.

 

[Random]

I have always held the opinion that Pat was not a closet Holocaust denier, but rather a closet Holocaust supporter. He's really carefull about expressing his opinions in public, but he does let the occasional looney idea past his filter, like holding all African-American teenagers in Internment camps to combat the spread of narcotics in the US, or prohibiting anyone who pays less than $300 in taxes from voting.

 

[crimresearch]

Crimresearch,
Thank you for reposting your post. It was the post that inspired me to start this thread.

I respectfully disagree that the information in your post proves that Buchanan is a holocaust denier.

I think there is already a problem with that phrase in that it has a meaning more inclusive than the words that make up the phrase imply.

I believe you are trying to expand the meaning still farther with your characterization of Buchanan as a holocaust denier. I think this is a bad idea. Buchanan has written lots of stuff that people can decide they don't like and they can disagree with him on those specific issues without calling him names that are arguably inapproriate. The problem for me is that calling him names serves more to polarize opinion than to a discussion of his ideas.

Expaning the meaning of the phrase to cover people like Buchanan would also dilute the meaning of the phrase to the point that its meaning to describe people like David Irving would be lost.

Thank you skeptic for your link. It does seem to be a nearly definitive source on the issue of whether Buchanan is anti-semetic or not.

And thank you hgc for showing the good sense to agree with my view completely. I can see you have a brilliant mind.

I never called Buchanan a holocaust denier, someone else did, and I posted that reference in order to show people that it wasn't fabricated from thin air, but rather from a reaction to Buchanan's actual words, even though they skirted direct denial of the Holocaust, while at the same time, using denier-like language.

Buchanan's version of beng 'clever' is to come as close as he can to offensive rhetoric, and hide behind 'it was just a question', or 'I was only talking about one incident'. He is a weasel and a button pusher.

So my characterization of Buchanan as a mimic of holocaust deniers without enough courage of his convictions to come right out and wear the mantle, seems the most carrect and useful.