Merged General Holocaust denial discussion thread

[Clayton Moore]

Nickterry accuses me of “lionising” Rudolf as a latter-day Galileo. I don’t know what reason he has to say this. Unlike Galileo, Rudolf will probably be remembered as an obscure crank. But I am willing to draw the parallel. Galileo was a thinker whose conclusions went considerably beyond the available evidence and he got into trouble for making satirical fun of the Pope. Had the optical evidence that later vinidicated him proved that he was a just a crank, then his imprisonment in my view would have been no less reprehensible. In any case his imprisonment would rightly have weakened faith in the authority of the learned geocentric professors. They all had very good scholarly reasons for saying what they said, but they also had a discernible motive for not saying anything else. A lay person should no longer trust them simply because they were sheep-skinned academics who had the right insignia of erudition. Nearly all the qualified scientists of our own day are emphatic that man-made climate change is upon us. I take their word for it. I accept their conclusions without understanding their reasons for holding them. Climate scientists are experts with no discernible motive to deceive themselves, and they have powerful lobby groups up against them. The climate deniers, absurdly, are given equal space. However, if some powerful lobby goups had made “climate denial” punishable by law, and if deniers were granted no space at all, then I would withdraw my trust. There would be a burden of proof to show that there was no potential denier who had been silenced by fear; a difficult burden to meet. Beliefs that are protected by law or taboo should in any case be automatically suspect. .

I think the term lionizing is a negative term and that you meant aggrandizing.

 

[Corsair 115]

Though less well-known, 1945 seems to me yet worse.

Well, if Germany had recognized in the fall of 1944 its position was hopeless, as was obvious to anyone with even a halfway functioning brain, and sued for peace it likely would have made 1945 less painful than it was. But the Nazi leadership was not particular rational. (And let us recall Hitler wanted a scorched earth policy. Better the German people collectively die rather than accept defeat according to the Führer.)

The Occupation imposed a sort of guilt clause upon the entire German people...

Well, their country initiated war against Poland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Holland, Luxembourg, Finland, Britain, and Russia, for starters, so there was much to atone for. Having a plan to starve to death millions in eastern Russia to make way for German settlers is another dark stain.

...in order to to justify excluding them from even a nominal say in their own fate.

And yet Germany held its first post-war federal election in August of 1949. It held another federal election in 1954. And another in 1957. And again 1961. Then 1965. Followed by 1969, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1983, 1987, 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2005, and 2009. That's a lot of national elections for a place that according to you had no say it its own fate.

Though I have sympathy for the German people of 1945, whose first democratic stirrings were crushed by the invading powers...

Then the population should not have supported the war. And the leadership should not have opted for war. And it most certainly should have seen the writing on the wall and surrendered sooner.

 

[Matthew Ellard]

Since we know the Germans took overcoats in situations and did not shoot or gas them, then a list detailing 290 000 overcoats and substantially fewer pairs of shoes and even fewer sets of underwear does not imply death.

Did the Germans also leave 20,000 square meters of human ash at the other places they took overcoats off prisoners? You can't consider two bits of evidence at once, can you?

Ask Clayton and he may help you over your limitations. There nothing wrong in asking your peers.

 

[Tolls]

Well, their country initiated war against Poland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Holland, Luxembourg, Finland, Britain, and Russia, for starters, so there was much to atone for. Having a plan to starve to death millions in eastern Russia to make way for German settlers is another dark stain.

Just to be picky, but ... no.
That was the Soviet Union.

 

[Gwynpaine]

Rudolf etc

On this page, various: I have certainly done nothing to aggrandize Rudolf. I will defend anyone who is put in gaol for challenging any state-protected doctrine. My claim, not so far disputed, is that Germany underwent harsher settlement in 1945 than in 1919. The reason this is not so well known is that Germans have accepted it with relative equanimity, for which we can all give thanks. In 1945 the Germans were punished as a guilty people, and as such were excluded from any say in their own national fate. That fate was decided by the big powers in 1948 with the decision to divide Germany. There was no division of German in the postwar settlement after the first war. The “re-education” project persisted formally until 1955 but after 1948 each side could boast a large supply of Good Germans. The Americans were happy to permit free elections, since the votes of Kurt Schumacher's patriotic social democrats were largely sequestered in Stalins zone.

I see that the harshness of the general settlement has not been disputed; but it is justified now, as it was then, on the grounds that the Germans were a guilty people. I myself believe in guilty governments. I don’t believe in guilty peoples. But democracy is an alien doctrine in this forum, so I shall not take time to expatiate. One might well ask why ordinary German soldiers fought so long and so hard, in the final period, on behalf of a criminal regime. One reason is that that, in the final period, they were protecting their homeland from invaders who, they believed, had promised the German people a very hard time.

As far as I am concerned, this correspondance is now closed

 

[little grey rabbit]

Just to be picky, but ... no.
That was the Soviet Union.

They didn't initiate war against France and Britain either. They issued an ultimatum and then declared war when Germany did not obey.

 

[Nick Terry]

Beliefs that are protected by law or taboo should in any case be automatically suspect

This is a kind of mantra from deniers (and their fellow travellers, useful idiots etc) but both of the charges are globally and historically untrue.

Very few countries in the western world have anti-denier laws, and those that do, have most often extended existing laws against incitement to racial hatred to cover the genre of propagandistic writings known as 'revisionism'. It is difficult to see how one can speak of the "belief" in the Holocaust being protected in Germany or France, but not in Britain, Russia, the US, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Italy, and most other countries affected by or close-up witnesses to the Second World War.

Even in countries where such laws exist, they are a recent development, emerging long after the 'revisionists' had made their opinions known. The Gayssot law was passed 12 years after the Faurisson affair; more than enough time to know that Faurisson was an antisemitic hack. Indeed, Faurisson and his cohorts made extremely bad use of the time they had in the public spotlight. Revisionism a la Faurisson was apparently something to be spewed out in endless articles, never a book, never anything substantial.

In Germany, too, the law did not change fundamentally until the mid-90s, when the lex Deckert revision altered the requirements to the 'simple Auschwitz lie'. Before then, you needed aggravating factors, such as the expression of overt antisemitism, to convict. But since the mid-90s, Rudolf and other German deniers, most especially Horst Mahler, have obliged prosecutors time and again by expressing their antisemitism. We have simply never been given a chance to see what a purified German 'scientific revisionism', minus its antisemitic fish-wrappings, would look like.

The judgements against Rudolf, which he has helpfully uploaded to his website (and got translated), make it perfectly clear that he was being prosecuted for his propaganda, not for his alleged science. The story of the emergence of the Rudolf report is actually quite gripping, because it involved so much skulduggery and deception, and offers so many insights into the mentality and modus operandi of the far right in the early 90s. But one thing it cannot be deemed, is scientific.

It's an irony of the chemical pseudo-debate that the multiple tests of the ruins of the crematoria all found cyanide traces. This fact is not in dispute, nor is the quantity of cyanide in much dispute, although justifiable criticisms can be made of both Leuchter and Rudolf for taking less than perfect samples. Leuchter evidently went out of his way to try and find no cyanide, but failed. Rudolf simply skewed his overall set of samples and really did not construct anything like a properly composed sample. That should leap out at anyone reading his tables. The real issue has always been the interpretation of the results, and there the argument has been lost by 'revisionists' in hundreds of discussions. It certainly doesn't help that dozens of cheerleaders have yapped away claiming that the chemical proof is definitive, while ignoring the manifold obvious objections.

Both Leuchter and Rudolf hark back to a time when the western world was more than prepared to air these issues and to listen to 'revisionists'. I have been repeatedly struck by the fact that ideas as obviously nonsensical as Holocaust denial have been considered in some seriousness by a large number of intellectuals, academics as well as, surely, hundreds of thousands of lay readers, and that the conclusion has always been that the ideas are bogus. 'Revisionists' could even get their ideas touted on national television in the US - not the most scientific or rigorous of venues, and a popular choice for many a crank - and could circulate them widely through drumming up a lot of publicity for their 'controversy'.

In the UK as well as worldwide, the Irving-Lipstadt trial was undoubtedly an opportunity for many to sit back and consider the evidence and arguments. As journalists observed, it became a kind of grotesque parlour-game of what-if. Indeed, that what-if game is played all the time whenever HD comes up for discussion. What if they are right? What would be entailed? What would we expect to find and see if these claims were true? That's why the dwindling band of true believer 'revisionists' are confronted continuously with questions they can never answer satisfactorily, like 'what happened to them then?' and 'how could all those SS men have been coerced?', to name but a few.

Most of the refrains that are offered up on this thread from the 'revisionists' are now extremely old. Leuchter was 23 years ago, the first Zundel trial took place more than a quarter of a century ago, the much-touted David Cole video was made 18 years ago, ditto Rudolf's report. Most of the memes are that old as well. Faurisson started blethering on about the Auschwitz swimming pool and the mysteries of how Churchill, Eisenhower and de Gaulle hadn't written anything on the Holocaust about 20 years ago. These things have been hashed out on countless occasions, for at least as long as there has been the modern internet, and it's really unsurprising when they induce such epic boredom today.

Most of the questions asked of deniers are also that old, too. Yet in 2 decades of fairly continuous discussion between deniers and non-deniers, no convincing answers have ever been forthcoming. That is another red flag.

This pseudo-debate has a history, one that for obvious reasons contemporary negationists (and their fellow travellers, useful idiots, etc) wish to ignore and to bury. It is really not difficult to find out about that history. A simple glance at the Wiki page for Holocaust denial does the trick. There are by now several dozen books on Holocaust denial, chronicling its emergence and discussing its claims. One can certainly quibble and dispute individual points and judgements in the books, but it is an undeniable fact that there was this guy named Rassinier, and then other guys like Hoggan, Harwood, Butz and Faurisson, and their writings said x, and their source base was y, and none of that is in rational dispute. So however much the deniers might hate Deborah Lipstadt, she did her primary job in Denying the Holocaust, which was to provide a history of denial.

It's very evident from this history that time and again, serious-minded people have considered the core claims behind 'revisionism'. The impact of the Faurisson affair on intellectuals in the 1980s was considerable. You can find numerous philosophers musing on it. And then, some time in the 90s, these musings trail off, until 'denial' becomes a cliche and a joke, to the point where a Google search for 'Holocaust denial' will associate fully 1/6th of the hits with 'global warming'. That's because after a while, it became more than obvious that the entire gambit was bullflop.

I don't see where there has been a 'taboo' on denial. Quite the opposite: the badly written rantings of a lunatic French professor, as well as other sundry cranks, were given more than their due consideration. The most prominent denier of all time was even allowed to drag a professor through a London libel court to sue her for calling him a Holocaust denier, and then used Holocaust denial arguments to prove his case. As an exercise in surrealism, Irving vs Lipstadt takes some beating.

If there is now a 'taboo' on denial, then that's because several decades of public antics and exposure have worn out what limited welcome it ever had. That's also why the laws changed in France and Germany. It's not difficult to examine Faurisson's writings from 1978 to 1990 before the Gayssot law was passed. Doing so is rather disappointing, because there isn't actually much there, even by 'revisionist' standards.

If denial is 'taboo', then so are many other ideas which have been aired in public and found wanting. The granddaddy of these pseudo-debates is undoubtedly the Velikovsky affair, back in the 1950s. The ideas were lunatic, but persuasive to some, and scientists hated them. They did not handle Velikovsky well, who thus was able to pose as a modern-day Galileo, as all cranks like to do. In the long run, though, the ideas have simply not stood up, and anyone who cites Velikovsky damns themselves entirely. You could not hope to get Velikovsky cited in classes on ancient history or astrophysics or any of the other disciplines he touched on.

Holocaust denial, after all, is one of many Bad Ideas which have swirled around the public sphere since 1945. That places the onus squarely on the shoulders of those who want to advocate it to explain why, after all the due consideration it has received, we are not entitled to conclude it is horsehockey, and treat it accordingly.

I'll quote a post made elsewhere on this very subject, which I think is extremely apposite. The person being addressed was, of course, a Holocaust denier pulling out the violin and whining that his beliefs were persecuted.

He states that academic freedom is dead with respect to the Holocaust, because anyone speaking out against the mainstream narrative may be fired. Hmm, maybe that is true. One could lose a teaching post over such a thing, assuming that one was employed in a history department, and actually teaching the Holocaust.

One could also assume that someone teaching flat earth theory in an earth sciences department might get the boot as well. Or any of a number of other positions that are considered "out of bounds" by academics.

Now, I assume he would agree that the reason one does not have the "freedom" to teach flat earth is simply that it isn't viewed as credible.

So now, how do we make the distinction between the position that is unteachable because it is beyond reason, and the one that is unteachable because there is a conspiracy of silence? Is it the one that he believes in himself that has been targetted for sinister supression by academics, while the rest he agrees are actual crankery? Is that what makes one topic special and the others just bunk? Is denial rejected by academics because it is bunk, or does denial only seem like bunk because it is rejected by academics? Is it the chicken or the egg?

Things are excluded from academia because they are nonsense, right? At least some things. So there is precedent there that we can all agree on. The burden then is to make his case for the "specialiness" of HD, to explain why this is not just the normal mechanism of academic rejection at work here, the way the body rejects tainted food with a vomit response.

At the moment, there's a thread burbling on where a 9/11 Truther is trying to convince the world that a list of 400 names of academics - irrespective of their discipline, expertise, employment status - is somehow significant proof against the conventionally accepted explanation for 9/11. I observed that the Twoofer should consider himself lucky, because Holocaust deniers would be hard pressed to find 40 individuals who qualify as proper academics who have ever endorsed any aspect of 'revisionism'. And that's since the end of World War II, worldwide.

Many of those 40 academics didn't even contribute anything to the genre of 'revisionism', they just lent their names to the masthead of the Journal for Historical Review, back when they thought it added credibility to have a far-right Argentinian economics professor who evidently believed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were literally true as one of their editorial board members. Another guy to mention would be Austin App, professor of English and crank letter-writer, whose contributions to revisionism amount to a few 10s of 1000s of words of unsourced ranting. Or we could mention another professor of English, unlike most of the academics actually still alive, who is a Muslim, and whose contributions to 'revisionism' consist of remarks made on YouTube videos and on the internet. Or even the weighty revisionist contributions of the vaunted Harry Elmer Barnes, whose comments on the Holocaust were ignorant even in the 1960s, and totally lacking any scholarly substantiation.

The pattern across this tiny set of fewer than 40 academics is not difficult to work out: strong ideological motivations, a lot of axe-grinding, countless insults and ad hominems from them, and a whole truckload of crankery, with very little to show by way of solid research outputs.

I'm happy to debate the what-if of an academic, doesn't matter where, deciding whether or not to embrace 'revisionism', but only if the actual track record is factored in. It's not a happy tale for 'revisionists', of course.

But it might just explain why the number of academics taking the plunge doesn't increase very often. Not because they're persecuted, not because they might have career problems, or get jailed, because there are countless academics in perfectly secure positions with tenure and good track records who could, if they wanted to, endorse 'revisionism' and not suffer any of those things. They don't come out and endorse 'revisionism' because it's been weighed in the balance often enough, and found wanting. They don't endorse 'revisionism' because the names bandied around by the lone associate professor of English when touting the genre, like Butz and Staeglich, date back to the 1970s and are totally outmoded even by 'revisionist' standards.

Most of all, they don't endorse revisionism, because there is nothing much to endorse. Academics want to make names for themselves and know that in order to do so, they have to show results, not insinuations, suspicions or vague handwaves. The set of fewer than 40 academics never came up with anything that could be called a genuine result, and most didn't even bother to try. They thought that merely lending their tenured asses to the cause would convince someone or other.

The hypothetical academic of this what-if speculation would know that the subject on which they might choose to opine has been extensively researched. At a very basic level, ignoring past research is an obvious fail. But the mountain of research grows every year. Most of the fewer than 40 academics embraced denial in an era when there wasn't as much available on the Holocaust, although the volume was already considerable by the 60s. That is no longer the case.

And that's why 'incidents' of denial in academia have declined precipitously, although graphing a set of fewer than 40 individuals is not going to produce much in the way of a curve. I count only five guys with any kind of academic affiliations who have stuck their tongues out in the past decade and embraced denial. They would be, Claudio Moffa, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies who has simply hosted conferences and given a lecture in a course, not produced any articles or monographs on the subject; Nicholas Kollerstrom, who is a stretch to include as he was merely an unpaid honorary research fellow in the history of early modern astronomy, but what the hell; the guy is a known conspiracy nut anyhow; Daniel McGowan, an emeritus professor from a liberal arts college and primarily a pro-Palestinian activist; Kaukub Siddique, an associate professor of literature and communications whose YouTube rants have already been mentioned; and let's be generous, 'Thomas Dalton', supposedly some kind of professor at some point or other, who is the one person out of the five who cobbled together a book of sorts on the topic.

That's five guys, who together have produced one book, a few articles for websites, and been filmed speaking in public and had the films put on YouTube.

Gee, I wonder why there aren't more academics queuing up to commit intellectual suicide...

 

[little grey rabbit]

This is a kind of mantra from deniers (and their fellow travellers, useful idiots etc) but both of the charges are globally and historically untrue.

Very few countries in the western world have anti-denier laws, and those that do, have most often extended existing laws against incitement to racial hatred to cover the genre of propagandistic writings known as 'revisionism'. It is difficult to see how one can speak of the "belief" in the Holocaust being protected in Germany or France, but not in Britain, Russia, the US, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Italy, and most other countries affected by or close-up witnesses to the Second World War.

Even in countries where such laws exist, they are a recent development, emerging long after the 'revisionists' had made their opinions known. The Gayssot law was passed 12 years after the Faurisson affair; more than enough time to know that Faurisson was an antisemitic hack. Indeed, Faurisson and his cohorts made extremely bad use of the time they had in the public spotlight. Revisionism a la Faurisson was apparently something to be spewed out in endless articles, never a book, never anything substantial.

In Germany, too, the law did not change fundamentally until the mid-90s, when the lex Deckert revision altered the requirements to the 'simple Auschwitz lie'. Before then, you needed aggravating factors, such as the expression of overt antisemitism, to convict. But since the mid-90s, Rudolf and other German deniers, most especially Horst Mahler, have obliged prosecutors time and again by expressing their antisemitism. We have simply never been given a chance to see what a purified German 'scientific revisionism', minus its antisemitic fish-wrappings, would look like.

The judgements against Rudolf, which he has helpfully uploaded to his website (and got translated), make it perfectly clear that he was being prosecuted for his propaganda, not for his alleged science. The story of the emergence of the Rudolf report is actually quite gripping, because it involved so much skulduggery and deception, and offers so many insights into the mentality and modus operandi of the far right in the early 90s. But one thing it cannot be deemed, is scientific.

It's an irony of the chemical pseudo-debate that the multiple tests of the ruins of the crematoria all found cyanide traces. This fact is not in dispute, nor is the quantity of cyanide in much dispute, although justifiable criticisms can be made of both Leuchter and Rudolf for taking less than perfect samples. Leuchter evidently went out of his way to try and find no cyanide, but failed. Rudolf simply skewed his overall set of samples and really did not construct anything like a properly composed sample. That should leap out at anyone reading his tables. The real issue has always been the interpretation of the results, and there the argument has been lost by 'revisionists' in hundreds of discussions. It certainly doesn't help that dozens of cheerleaders have yapped away claiming that the chemical proof is definitive, while ignoring the manifold obvious objections.

Both Leuchter and Rudolf hark back to a time when the western world was more than prepared to air these issues and to listen to 'revisionists'. I have been repeatedly struck by the fact that ideas as obviously nonsensical as Holocaust denial have been considered in some seriousness by a large number of intellectuals, academics as well as, surely, hundreds of thousands of lay readers, and that the conclusion has always been that the ideas are bogus. 'Revisionists' could even get their ideas touted on national television in the US - not the most scientific or rigorous of venues, and a popular choice for many a crank - and could circulate them widely through drumming up a lot of publicity for their 'controversy'.

In the UK as well as worldwide, the Irving-Lipstadt trial was undoubtedly an opportunity for many to sit back and consider the evidence and arguments. As journalists observed, it became a kind of grotesque parlour-game of what-if. Indeed, that what-if game is played all the time whenever HD comes up for discussion. What if they are right? What would be entailed? What would we expect to find and see if these claims were true? That's why the dwindling band of true believer 'revisionists' are confronted continuously with questions they can never answer satisfactorily, like 'what happened to them then?' and 'how could all those SS men have been coerced?', to name but a few.

Most of the refrains that are offered up on this thread from the 'revisionists' are now extremely old. Leuchter was 23 years ago, the first Zundel trial took place more than a quarter of a century ago, the much-touted David Cole video was made 18 years ago, ditto Rudolf's report. Most of the memes are that old as well. Faurisson started blethering on about the Auschwitz swimming pool and the mysteries of how Churchill, Eisenhower and de Gaulle hadn't written anything on the Holocaust about 20 years ago. These things have been hashed out on countless occasions, for at least as long as there has been the modern internet, and it's really unsurprising when they induce such epic boredom today.

Most of the questions asked of deniers are also that old, too. Yet in 2 decades of fairly continuous discussion between deniers and non-deniers, no convincing answers have ever been forthcoming. That is another red flag.

This pseudo-debate has a history, one that for obvious reasons contemporary negationists (and their fellow travellers, useful idiots, etc) wish to ignore and to bury. It is really not difficult to find out about that history. A simple glance at the Wiki page for Holocaust denial does the trick. There are by now several dozen books on Holocaust denial, chronicling its emergence and discussing its claims. One can certainly quibble and dispute individual points and judgements in the books, but it is an undeniable fact that there was this guy named Rassinier, and then other guys like Hoggan, Harwood, Butz and Faurisson, and their writings said x, and their source base was y, and none of that is in rational dispute. So however much the deniers might hate Deborah Lipstadt, she did her primary job in Denying the Holocaust, which was to provide a history of denial.

It's very evident from this history that time and again, serious-minded people have considered the core claims behind 'revisionism'. The impact of the Faurisson affair on intellectuals in the 1980s was considerable. You can find numerous philosophers musing on it. And then, some time in the 90s, these musings trail off, until 'denial' becomes a cliche and a joke, to the point where a Google search for 'Holocaust denial' will associate fully 1/6th of the hits with 'global warming'. That's because after a while, it became more than obvious that the entire gambit was bullflop.

I don't see where there has been a 'taboo' on denial. Quite the opposite: the badly written rantings of a lunatic French professor, as well as other sundry cranks, were given more than their due consideration. The most prominent denier of all time was even allowed to drag a professor through a London libel court to sue her for calling him a Holocaust denier, and then used Holocaust denial arguments to prove his case. As an exercise in surrealism, Irving vs Lipstadt takes some beating.

If there is now a 'taboo' on denial, then that's because several decades of public antics and exposure have worn out what limited welcome it ever had. That's also why the laws changed in France and Germany. It's not difficult to examine Faurisson's writings from 1978 to 1990 before the Gayssot law was passed. Doing so is rather disappointing, because there isn't actually much there, even by 'revisionist' standards.

If denial is 'taboo', then so are many other ideas which have been aired in public and found wanting. The granddaddy of these pseudo-debates is undoubtedly the Velikovsky affair, back in the 1950s. The ideas were lunatic, but persuasive to some, and scientists hated them. They did not handle Velikovsky well, who thus was able to pose as a modern-day Galileo, as all cranks like to do. In the long run, though, the ideas have simply not stood up, and anyone who cites Velikovsky damns themselves entirely. You could not hope to get Velikovsky cited in classes on ancient history or astrophysics or any of the other disciplines he touched on.

Holocaust denial, after all, is one of many Bad Ideas which have swirled around the public sphere since 1945. That places the onus squarely on the shoulders of those who want to advocate it to explain why, after all the due consideration it has received, we are not entitled to conclude it is horsehockey, and treat it accordingly.

I'll quote a post made elsewhere on this very subject, which I think is extremely apposite. The person being addressed was, of course, a Holocaust denier pulling out the violin and whining that his beliefs were persecuted.



At the moment, there's a thread burbling on where a 9/11 Truther is trying to convince the world that a list of 400 names of academics - irrespective of their discipline, expertise, employment status - is somehow significant proof against the conventionally accepted explanation for 9/11. I observed that the Twoofer should consider himself lucky, because Holocaust deniers would be hard pressed to find 40 individuals who qualify as proper academics who have ever endorsed any aspect of 'revisionism'. And that's since the end of World War II, worldwide.

Many of those 40 academics didn't even contribute anything to the genre of 'revisionism', they just lent their names to the masthead of the Journal for Historical Review, back when they thought it added credibility to have a far-right Argentinian economics professor who evidently believed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were literally true as one of their editorial board members. Another guy to mention would be Austin App, professor of English and crank letter-writer, whose contributions to revisionism amount to a few 10s of 1000s of words of unsourced ranting. Or we could mention another professor of English, unlike most of the academics actually still alive, who is a Muslim, and whose contributions to 'revisionism' consist of remarks made on YouTube videos and on the internet. Or even the weighty revisionist contributions of the vaunted Harry Elmer Barnes, whose comments on the Holocaust were ignorant even in the 1960s, and totally lacking any scholarly substantiation.

The pattern across this tiny set of fewer than 40 academics is not difficult to work out: strong ideological motivations, a lot of axe-grinding, countless insults and ad hominems from them, and a whole truckload of crankery, with very little to show by way of solid research outputs.

I'm happy to debate the what-if of an academic, doesn't matter where, deciding whether or not to embrace 'revisionism', but only if the actual track record is factored in. It's not a happy tale for 'revisionists', of course.

But it might just explain why the number of academics taking the plunge doesn't increase very often. Not because they're persecuted, not because they might have career problems, or get jailed, because there are countless academics in perfectly secure positions with tenure and good track records who could, if they wanted to, endorse 'revisionism' and not suffer any of those things. They don't come out and endorse 'revisionism' because it's been weighed in the balance often enough, and found wanting. They don't endorse 'revisionism' because the names bandied around by the lone associate professor of English when touting the genre, like Butz and Staeglich, date back to the 1970s and are totally outmoded even by 'revisionist' standards.

Most of all, they don't endorse revisionism, because there is nothing much to endorse. Academics want to make names for themselves and know that in order to do so, they have to show results, not insinuations, suspicions or vague handwaves. The set of fewer than 40 academics never came up with anything that could be called a genuine result, and most didn't even bother to try. They thought that merely lending their tenured asses to the cause would convince someone or other.

The hypothetical academic of this what-if speculation would know that the subject on which they might choose to opine has been extensively researched. At a very basic level, ignoring past research is an obvious fail. But the mountain of research grows every year. Most of the fewer than 40 academics embraced denial in an era when there wasn't as much available on the Holocaust, although the volume was already considerable by the 60s. That is no longer the case.

And that's why 'incidents' of denial in academia have declined precipitously, although graphing a set of fewer than 40 individuals is not going to produce much in the way of a curve. I count only five guys with any kind of academic affiliations who have stuck their tongues out in the past decade and embraced denial. They would be, Claudio Moffa, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies who has simply hosted conferences and given a lecture in a course, not produced any articles or monographs on the subject; Nicholas Kollerstrom, who is a stretch to include as he was merely an unpaid honorary research fellow in the history of early modern astronomy, but what the hell; the guy is a known conspiracy nut anyhow; Daniel McGowan, an emeritus professor from a liberal arts college and primarily a pro-Palestinian activist; Kaukub Siddique, an associate professor of literature and communications whose YouTube rants have already been mentioned; and let's be generous, 'Thomas Dalton', supposedly some kind of professor at some point or other, who is the one person out of the five who cobbled together a book of sorts on the topic.

That's five guys, who together have produced one book, a few articles for websites, and been filmed speaking in public and had the films put on YouTube.

Gee, I wonder why there aren't more academics queuing up to commit intellectual suicide...

Have underground flues suddenly grown in the ruins of Krema II, III, IV and V?

Wait a minute I will just go and check...........nope! Still no flues.

 

[Tolls]

They didn't initiate war against France and Britain either. They issued an ultimatum and then declared war when Germany did not obey.

Technically true (if you squint), but since they had guaranteed Polands security it's pretty clear that Germany attacking Poland would result in war with Britain and France.

In the same way that Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, but it was because Germany had violated the neutrality of a British ally.

Oh, and it's interesting that "don't invade our ally or we'll declare war on you" is an ultimatum in bunny world.

 

[Clayton Moore]

I see that the harshness of the general settlement has not been disputed; but it is justified now, as it was then, on the grounds that the Germans were a guilty people. I myself believe in guilty governments. I don’t believe in guilty peoples. But democracy is an alien doctrine in this forum, so I shall not take time to expatiate. One might well ask why ordinary German soldiers fought so long and so hard, in the final period, on behalf of a criminal regime. One reason is that that, in the final period, they were protecting their homeland from invaders who, they believed, had promised the German people a very hard time.

Well said.

 

[little grey rabbit]

Technically true (if you squint), but since they had guaranteed Polands security it's pretty clear that Germany attacking Poland would result in war with Britain and France.

In the same way that Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, but it was because Germany had violated the neutrality of a British ally.

Oh, and it's interesting that "don't invade our ally or we'll declare war on you" is an ultimatum in bunny world.

Nevertheless, all the evidence suggests that Britain wanted to have a war over Danzig and the corridor and was supporting the Poles in a hardline stance.

That might have been the right thing to do, but it means that declaring war was a choice - they were not attacked.

 

[uke2se]

Have underground flues suddenly grown in the ruins of Krema II, III, IV and V?

Wait a minute I will just go and check...........nope! Still no flues.

I think you just about achieved lift-off with that handwave.

 

[uke2se]

Nevertheless, all the evidence suggests that Britain wanted to have a war over Danzig and the corridor and was supporting the Poles in a hardline stance.

Nope, the evidence doesn't suggest that.

 

[Tolls]

Nevertheless, all the evidence suggests that Britain wanted to have a war over Danzig and the corridor and was supporting the Poles in a hardline stance.

That might have been the right thing to do, but it means that declaring war was a choice - they were not attacked.

Go to the "Who started the wars" thread then and argue your point. You'll fail because that's the sort of nonsens 911 attempted to argue and failed soundly (except in his head).

"They were not attacked" is not an argument when talking about treaties, guarantees and alliances. Britain was not attacked in 1914, but had a treaty obligation to Belgium. Similar to 1939.

 

[Clayton Moore]

Then the population should not have supported the war. And the leadership should not have opted for war. And it most certainly should have seen the writing on the wall and surrendered sooner.

Population supporting the war? That's rich.

And guess what? Zionists have been up to their wallets punishing the German population ever since.

The US has been going at it in two wars for almost a decade. And guess what? The US lied to its population to justify starting the wars!

And guess what? Neocon Zionists are the group that instigated those LIES.


Surprise!

 

[little grey rabbit]

It is pretty hard to see how one could possibly lose an argument by claiming Germany didn't initiate war with Britain and France, because this simply a matter of historical fact.

Britain issued an ultimatum and then declared war. End of story.

 

[little grey rabbit]

It is pretty hard to see how one could possibly lose an argument by claiming Germany didn't initiate war with Britain and France, because this simply a matter of historical fact.

Britain issued an ultimatum and then declared war. End of story.

 

[TSR]

I think the term lionizing is a negative term and that you meant aggrandizing.

.
... and like so many of the things you pretend to think, you are completely wrong about the word "lionize".

Unless you find it negative to be treated as an object of great interest or importance?
.

 

[TSR]

Population supporting the war? That's rich.

.
Almost as "rich" as your lies about anti-social behaviour and alienation...
.

< snip items, that even if true have no bearing on whether or not the Holocaust happened >

Surprise!

.
That you would run away from the evidence that you requested?

No, no surprize there: you quite literally have no way to deal with it so ignore it.

Just like you continue to ignore the ironic gall you have to be whining about others' supposed lies.
.

 

[Tolls]

It is pretty hard to see how one could possibly lose an argument by claiming Germany didn't initiate war with Britain and France, because this simply a matter of historical fact.

Britain issued an ultimatum and then declared war. End of story.

It's no wonder you have such a hard time with the holocaust stuff if you fail to see the connection between things as badly as this.