Holocaust Denial.

[Nick Terry]

Nick, maybe you can help me out. I'm not a Holocaust denier at all, but some years ago I recieved a flyer asking for donations from the Tolerance Museum that really bugged me. It described the Holocaust victims as being 6 million Jews with no mention of the 'other' 6 million non-Jewish victims. I was pretty upset that they forgot about the non-Jewish victims and it seemed they were engaging in some historical revision of their own.

Maybe you can address this topic in your book. There seems to be a tendency for some to present the Holocaust in a Jewish-only context and this gives the Holocaust deniers a valid reason to claim that the Holocaust is being exploited for political purposes. Even someone who believes the Holocaust happened can make this accusation when the Holocaust story is told with half of the victims missing. The fact is the Nazis were killing their own people even before the Holocaust. The Nazi idea of Lebensunwertes Leben, 'life unworthy of life', was the basis for the T-4 program and later, the Holocaust itself. But it seems organizations like the Tolerance Museum were focusing only on anti-semetism as the basis for the Holocaust. I think you need the 'life unworthy of life' concept, add anti-Semetism, and then you can have a Holocaust. I'm not sure how everyone is telling the Holocaust story but at least they should include all of the victims, not just the Jewish ones.

The irony with this is it's the Tolerance Museum (Simon Wiesenthal Museum) that evolved the 'six million Jews and five million others' meme that does the rounds.

I personally reserve the title 'Holocaust' to the mass murder of Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945. There was indeed something distinctive about this genocide, compared to the manifold other crimes of the Third Reich.

I think it's because of the Cold War that the majority of Nazism's other crimes have been so suppressed in the popular consciousness. Poland and the Soviet Union suffered worst in all regards; and they also lost the largest number of Holocaust victims. Probably 30 million Poles and Soviet citizens were killed in the war, of whom less than 1/3 were killed in action, and of whom more than 4 million were Jews. That means something like 12-16 million Slavic Polish, Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian civilians and POWs died of starvation, or were sent to camps, or were executed in reprisals, or were killed by some other means.

But as a proportion of the local population, this was only a fraction. 90% of Polish Jews were wiped out. Whatever one says, there's somethign distinctive about the intensity of that. And it's now accepted that the often-heard 'six million Polish citizens' figure is a political fudge to 'equalise' the number of Polish and Polish Jewish victims. More Polish Jews than Poles lost their lives in WWII.

It's different in the Ukraine and in Russia; 5-6 million Ukrainian civilians lost their lives of whom 1.5 million were Jews, and these figures overlap with the Polish ones because of border changes after the war. But you can see that there, the majority of victims were Slavs. And most of them died not by being deliberately killed, but because of famine.

What I think people should remember most of all today is that deliberate starvation was and is a crime against humanity. There are no gas chambers in Darfur, yet about a quarter of a million people have died there in the past few years largely from hunger. People can quibble as to whether it's 'genocide' or not, but I think the focus on terms and labels is not always helpful. People shouldn't have to wait for something to be deemed genocide before making their views known.

 

[Kiwiwriter]

And another point...

Finkelstein's book grew out of a review of Daniel Goldhagen's dreadful 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' for the New Left Review. The review article was fairly good, but the subsequent book was hyperbolic.

The idea that the Holocaust has been exploited for political purposes was made more effectively and with greater inside knowledge by Israeli journalist Tom Segev in 1991, in a book called The Seventh Million, which studies Israeli society's relationship to the Holocaust. For example, Menachem Begin had the Holocaust on the brain and this was a national embarrassment while he was Prime Minister. The idea that all Israelis or all Jews think the same way about this is bullship.

The point that the Swiss banks were raided for money... well, was this class-action suit lawyers being lawyers or was it because they were Jewish lawyers? Personally I think it's because they were lawyers.

Much of the rest was strained-carrots verbiage.

Peter Novick's The Holocaust and American Life is a much more informed critique of why the Holocaust became a contemporary US cultural touchstone over the entire postwar era.

It is also important to remember that German reparations on the Holocaust, which deniers and others use as "proof" that the Jews are merely extorting guilt money from goyim, are actually paid to SURVIVORS of the Holocaust.

Which means that if some organized Jewish cabal wanted to maximize this "shakedown," it would be in the cabal's interests to minimize the number of dead, so as to force more payments.

In addition, the court cases against Swiss banks holding Jewish property are aimed at those who have profited from theft, which is a serious criminal offense. The cases agains insurance companies are smaller in number -- most of the Jews killed by the Nazis didn't have life insurance -- and have important contractual implications as well as their moral dimensions.

The Holocaust is not a single narrative, like an Aesopian Fable...it is a complex and multi-national story of a series of events, extermination programs and campaigns, involving many of the Reich's overlapping and conflicting organizations, government, Nazi Party, and private sector. There is no "single story."

There is, however, a vast array of evidence...anecdotal, documented, photographic, physical, ranging from cyanide traces on wrecked gas chambers to SS memos to eyewitness accounts to prewar plans to postwar trials, and it all converges in one direction...that the Nazis put their energy, bureaucracy, and manpower to work to achieve the cold-blooded, sadistic, and grisly extermination of about six million Jews and a like number of other folks (Roma, Jehovah's Witness, Poles, gays), and succeed in killing these people, keeping the blame from touching Hitler, and leaving behind an appalling record of misery and pain.

Because of its massive nature and huge span, there are contradictions and differences in events and accounts. The methods of extermination in Babi Yar were different from those at Treblinka. But the overall impact and results are the same...massive piles of dead.

Deniers try to pursue the Holocaust as a criminal case, arguing that the Holocaust story is a Jewish conspiracy and a fraud, and that by pulling out these trivialities -- like the "human soap" story -- they will demolish the entire latticework. They believe that all they need to do is put "reasonable doubt" on the Holocaust, and the Nazis will be found not guilty of this heinous crime.

However, the Holocaust is a civil case. It is not based on "reasonable doubt," but on the "preponderance of the evidence." And the preponderance of the evidence is that it happened, pretty much as is taught in our schools.

And it's worth noting several other points:

1. Holocaust deniers say there is no "proof" of the Holocaust. That's because they dismiss the vast array of documented proof as being Jewish forgeries. How the Jews were able to forge documents in wildly different countries, in different languages, and maintain this forgery as fact for 65 years, they have difficulty explaining, and usually simply mumbly angrily about the "Jewish conspiracy." One wonders what they would accept as proof.

2. The myth of Holocaust denial is to present the Holocaust as a fraud perpetrated by a grand Jewish cabal to extract money from Gentiles, gain Jewish world power, create the State of Israel, and butcher Palestinians/complete the Satanic take-over of the world. In many ways, the core of Holocaust denial is an updating and rewriting of pre-existing anti-Semitic myths made most popular in recent times by the forgery "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" and Henry Ford's "The International Jew," which spouted the same nonsense...a secret Jewish cabal controls the world and is seeking to destroy Christianity and humanity at the behest of Satan and the Communists/bankers, in that order. It's a re-hash of old myths.

3. Further, Holocaust denial, in presenting the Jews as the villains of the piece, the deniers are displaying the blatant anti-Semitism and use of the "Grossenluge." In effect, the deniers are saying that the Jews may not have been exterminated on a horrific scale, but had they been, they deserved such treatment: the Jews, by their thinking, are by nature liars, cheats, thieves, extorters, murderers, and destroyers of society.

4. Remove the Holocaust from the history of World War II, and the moral compass is removed. Nazism goes from being an appalling blight on civilization, a murdering band of kleptomaniacs, sadists, amoral intellectuals, and thugs, to being a rough, tough, occasionally brutal, but viable nationalist movement, opposed to the villainies of Communism and the failures of democracy. Adolf Hitler goes from being a sociopathic killer to being the figure of his own propaganda...the aloof and all-knowing leader of the Aryan people in their struggle for a free racial life. The Holocaust prevents neo-Nazis from gaining adherents, media exposure, money, election victories, and power. The Holocaust keeps Nazism the domain of cranks, fanatics, ideologues, criminals, poorly-educated teenagers, permanent adolescents, Skinheads, paranoids, and most of all, cynical opportunists looking for undeserved fame and quick bucks.

5. So the real goal of Holocaust denial -- and one of their bigshots, Harold Covington, admitted as much -- is simply to rehabilitate Hitler and Nazism, to make it a viable political force again, and gain power. Once that's done, they will pick up where Hitler left off.

Then the Holocaust will again be a reality, but for completely different reasons. In that world, the heroes will be the SS who killed the Jews, and the process will be taught as a sterilization process -- the removal of a dangerous bacillus from the body of the Aryan race. The camps will become memorials to the kilers. The triumph of George Orwell.

 

[Kiwiwriter]

A good point...

Nick, maybe you can help me out. I'm not a Holocaust denier at all, but some years ago I recieved a flyer asking for donations from the Tolerance Museum that really bugged me. It described the Holocaust victims as being 6 million Jews with no mention of the 'other' 6 million non-Jewish victims. I was pretty upset that they forgot about the non-Jewish victims and it seemed they were engaging in some historical revision of their own.

Maybe you can address this topic in your book. There seems to be a tendency for some to present the Holocaust in a Jewish-only context and this gives the Holocaust deniers a valid reason to claim that the Holocaust is being exploited for political purposes. Even someone who believes the Holocaust happened can make this accusation when the Holocaust story is told with half of the victims missing. The fact is the Nazis were killing their own people even before the Holocaust. The Nazi idea of Lebensunwertes Leben, 'life unworthy of life', was the basis for the T-4 program and later, the Holocaust itself. But it seems organizations like the Tolerance Museum were focusing only on anti-semetism as the basis for the Holocaust. I think you need the 'life unworthy of life' concept, add anti-Semetism, and then you can have a Holocaust. I'm not sure how everyone is telling the Holocaust story but at least they should include all of the victims, not just the Jewish ones.

I would like to agree with Nick's response to this, particularly his comments about Darfur.

I would also like to add that the world's non-response to the horrors in Rwanda in 1994 are a replication of the world's non-response to the early days of Nazi anti-Semitism in Germany. Jews were barred from imigrating to safe havens in the 1930s...the major powers and the United Nations failed to intervene in Rwanda in 1994, where a million people were killed in six months. The Hutu militias didn't do anything as bureaucratic and grandiose as set up extermination camps and factories...they just chopped people up with machetes in the streets, leaving corpses strewn everywhere. Humanity fails to learn its lessons.

Another point...I actually regard the Nazi medical "experiments" as being worse than the Holocaust. These ghastly exercises in sadism and torture were undertaken by doctors who had stood up and sworn the Hippocratic Oath, and promised not to let harm befall their patients, regardless of their ethnicity or status as freeman or slave. Yet these doctors went ahead with this horrible stuff, and wrote up studies that were used by German universities and bodies of learning at the time. After the origin of these papers was discovered, their use was ended, of course. And Dr. Mengele, as we all know, headed off to Paraguay to avoid accountability. The sheer cruelty of these experiments, often inflicted on children, nauseates me.

I notice that the Holocaust deniers don't discuss that topic very much.

 

[grunion]

...Holocaust denial succeeded for a while in getting itself institutionalised, but has now run out of steam at least in the US. The Institute for Historical Review would be the equivalent of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, and was set up in 1979 but hasn't actually *done* anything since circa 2002. It still has a website, and still offers antisemitic commentary to news stories, but they haven't hosted a conference or published an issue of their journal since then. All the same, IHR spokesmen like Mark Weber are invited onto the lunatic fringe's internet radio shows to propagate their stale ideas. And you can of course come across a dozen websites reprinting the old archived material.

But they don't really come up with too many new ideas anymore...

It appears that Mahmoud Amadinejad is doing what he can to answer the dearth of new revisionist research with a conference presently underway in Teheran. The promoters shroud the conference in buzzwords to make it acceptable to the Skeptic community, conflating it with any other scientific conference, but describing this topic as one which could never take place in the Zionist-dominated west because apparently we are blinded by our fealty to the International Jewish Agenda.

Meanwhile the names of attendees reads like a roll call of anti-semites and their fellow travelers, people like David Duke (who, predictably, has stated that the Mossad and Ariel Sharon were behind the 9-11 attacks), Faurisson, and Toben.

As I understand it, the logic behind the conference goes something like: Since the Holocaust was the pretext for the creation of the state of Israel, once we effectively deny the Holocaust, we have denied the right of Israel to exist. One expects that will be the summary of "scientific findings" made by the confrence panel.

Through that line of argument they have even been able to attract those ultra-orthodox Jews who deny the existence of Israel as not being in line with Biblical teachngs.

There is no doubt in my mind that these people know perfectly well what happened. Iran's state-sponsorship of revisionism may give the revisionists the resources to gain increasing legitimacy, especially in the Muslim world.

 

[Yahzi]

The main evidence for the "holocaust" is eyewitnesses, survivors.

And the American soldiers who liberated the camps.

You cite two sources; as if the entire Holocaust had been fabricated by two lone authors. Apparently unaware of the many thousands of American soldiers who saw the camps with their own eyes.

There is only one word than can adequately express my reaction to you:

/ignore

 

[skepticism]

Read James Baque's book, Other Losses. He had access to the Russian archives, after the Soviet Union fell. It shows the "Other Losses" are Germans murdered by Eisenhower and the Allies, in 1945 to 1950. The real genocide is what the Allies did to the Germans.

American soldiers did see the camps. Some were honest enough to report what they saw. Eisenhower had given an order to shoot to kill any German woman or child who tried to give food to German POWs. the real genocide was put in writing, by the Allies, by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, in the Morgenthau Plan. It was a written document of genocide against the Germans. When it became too obvious, they redefined it as JCJ Directive 1067. People would say they hoped no one would notice that 1067 was the same as the Morgenthau Plan. 1067 & Morgenthau was a a plan to exterminate every German, starve Germany, with lack of food. Eisenhower did it to the POWs in the millions. FDR and the Allies planned to do it to every German. That's the real "holocaust," not the fake legend of 6 million.

The allies bombed every German city. In Dresden, they bombed every hospital, church and home. They murdered every civilian they could. They firebombed every German city, civilian targets, terrorist war crimes. They then distracted attention from their own terrorism with fake "holocaust" crimes, tortured confessions, and preyed on war hysteria and propaganda.

America bombed civilians in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. America pursued a war of "unconditional surrender" while telling the Germans that they would be exterminated if they unconditionally surrendered. The Allied war strategy was to prolong the war as long as possible to murder every German and starve any surviving German.

The real "holocaust" is what America, Britain and Russia did to Germany.

The holocaust legend promoters are nonskeptics who never question anything, who accept whatever garbage their government feeds them. It's like watching pigs eat trash.

 

[skepticism]

The only Jews who died were from military acts were from allied bombing of labor camps in Germany. Other Jews died from disease, Typhus.

The Allies carpet and fire bombed every German city, and transporation line. When the Allies prevented food from getting to camps & Jews, the camp residents and Jews began dying. As the Allies approached the camp scenes where they saw piles of corpses, they needed an alternative fake story to explain what the Allies had done.

 

[Thunder]

Skeptic- most census data for europe says there were between 10-12 million jews in eurpe before ww2. you quote one professor...who says there were 4 million. based on the fact that he is one guy against several well respected sources...he is most likely wrong.

by the way, are you accusing all the holocaust survivors who can name their dead relatives who went to the concentration camps and never came home, all liars? are you really accusing millions of people of being liars?

 

[Thunder]

Skeptic: please explain this image. it was made by the nazis in 1942 to show their progress of murdering jews in the baltics.

 

[332nd]

Read James Baque's book, Other Losses. He had access to the Russian archives, after the Soviet Union fell. It shows the "Other Losses" are Germans murdered by Eisenhower and the Allies, in 1945 to 1950. The real genocide is what the Allies did to the Germans.

American soldiers did see the camps. Some were honest enough to report what they saw. Eisenhower had given an order to shoot to kill any German woman or child who tried to give food to German POWs. the real genocide was put in writing, by the Allies, by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, in the Morgenthau Plan. It was a written document of genocide against the Germans. When it became too obvious, they redefined it as JCJ Directive 1067. People would say they hoped no one would notice that 1067 was the same as the Morgenthau Plan. 1067 & Morgenthau was a a plan to exterminate every German, starve Germany, with lack of food. Eisenhower did it to the POWs in the millions. FDR and the Allies planned to do it to every German. That's the real "holocaust," not the fake legend of 6 million.

The allies bombed every German city. In Dresden, they bombed every hospital, church and home. They murdered every civilian they could. They firebombed every German city, civilian targets, terrorist war crimes. They then distracted attention from their own terrorism with fake "holocaust" crimes, tortured confessions, and preyed on war hysteria and propaganda.

America bombed civilians in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. America pursued a war of "unconditional surrender" while telling the Germans that they would be exterminated if they unconditionally surrendered. The Allied war strategy was to prolong the war as long as possible to murder every German and starve any surviving German.

The real "holocaust" is what America, Britain and Russia did to Germany.

The holocaust legend promoters are nonskeptics who never question anything, who accept whatever garbage their government feeds them. It's like watching pigs eat trash.

The proof of this is where?

 

[Kiwiwriter]

Horse manure...

Read James Baque's book, Other Losses. He had access to the Russian archives, after the Soviet Union fell. It shows the "Other Losses" are Germans murdered by Eisenhower and the Allies, in 1945 to 1950. The real genocide is what the Allies did to the Germans.

American soldiers did see the camps. Some were honest enough to report what they saw. Eisenhower had given an order to shoot to kill any German woman or child who tried to give food to German POWs. the real genocide was put in writing, by the Allies, by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, in the Morgenthau Plan. It was a written document of genocide against the Germans. When it became too obvious, they redefined it as JCJ Directive 1067. People would say they hoped no one would notice that 1067 was the same as the Morgenthau Plan. 1067 & Morgenthau was a a plan to exterminate every German, starve Germany, with lack of food. Eisenhower did it to the POWs in the millions. FDR and the Allies planned to do it to every German. That's the real "holocaust," not the fake legend of 6 million.

The allies bombed every German city. In Dresden, they bombed every hospital, church and home. They murdered every civilian they could. They firebombed every German city, civilian targets, terrorist war crimes. They then distracted attention from their own terrorism with fake "holocaust" crimes, tortured confessions, and preyed on war hysteria and propaganda.

America bombed civilians in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. America pursued a war of "unconditional surrender" while telling the Germans that they would be exterminated if they unconditionally surrendered. The Allied war strategy was to prolong the war as long as possible to murder every German and starve any surviving German.

The real "holocaust" is what America, Britain and Russia did to Germany.

The holocaust legend promoters are nonskeptics who never question anything, who accept whatever garbage their government feeds them. It's like watching pigs eat trash.

Everything in the above is horse manure...Bacque's book has been discredited by historians for its sloppy and incompetent research. John Keegan's comment , "Since the report on the book, Bacque has wisely kept silent," stands for that.

The statistics on Dresden were inflated by Goebbels, as shown as recently as the Irving-Lipstadt trial, by the simple expedient of adding a "zero" to the total. 24,000 dead is the actual figure, and the city was a hot target, as Frederick Taylor's book shows.

And the Holocaust deniers have yet to present an alternative narrative as to how the "Holohoax" was created and maintained for 65 years.

 

[carlvs]

The holocaust legend promoters are nonskeptics who never question anything, who accept whatever garbage their government feeds them. It's like watching pigs eat trash.

Congrats, "skepticism..."

You're the first non-9/11 loon to earn a place on my ignore list - I would go further, but I would have to violate rules 1, 2, 5, & 8 to do so...

 

[Kiwiwriter]

Yeah, riiiiiiight...

The only Jews who died were from military acts were from allied bombing of labor camps in Germany. Other Jews died from disease, Typhus.

The Allies carpet and fire bombed every German city, and transporation line. When the Allies prevented food from getting to camps & Jews, the camp residents and Jews began dying. As the Allies approached the camp scenes where they saw piles of corpses, they needed an alternative fake story to explain what the Allies had done.

So explain to me that if the Allied bombing blew out communications and made it impossible for the Germans to move food and medicine around the Reich...

...how come the typhus was only in the concentration camps, and not in the cities and towns around them?

Answer: the typhus in the camps was caused by the brutality and neglect of the camp guards and administration, following the policies set by Berlin.

Typical Holocaust denial...blame the victims. Holocaust denial is the recycled and modern form of old anti-Semitic canards about Jewish conspiracies. Which one do you like better...the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion or the stories that Jews sacrifice Gentile babies at Passover?

 

[Bell]

The only Jews who died were from military acts were from allied bombing of labor camps in Germany. Other Jews died from disease, Typhus.

The Allies carpet and fire bombed every German city, and transporation line. When the Allies prevented food from getting to camps & Jews, the camp residents and Jews began dying. As the Allies approached the camp scenes where they saw piles of corpses, they needed an alternative fake story to explain what the Allies had done.

[breach of rule 8]

 

[grunion]

I don't think it's worth the effort to respond to Denier posts with any real facts or agrguments as they are not intended to engage in debate, and the posters do not hold themselves accountable for what they write. I think derision and disgust are the only appropriate reactions.

 

[twinstead]

Wow. Reading Holocaust revisionism is not very pleasant. And I thought 911 deniers were thoughtless, arrogant idiots.

Spittle spewing, irrational, rabid ideologues are interesting to observe, as long as one has his blood pressure under control.

 

[rikzilla]

Read James Baque's book, Other Losses. He had access to the Russian archives, after the Soviet Union fell. It shows the "Other Losses" are Germans murdered by Eisenhower and the Allies, in 1945 to 1950. The real genocide is what the Allies did to the Germans.

James Baque is just another darling of the IHR. There is no proof that his contentions are true. I did read excerpts of this book and basically "other losses" was a catchall category of non-specific German casualties. To say that other losses = murdered by Eisenhower is a lie.

American soldiers did see the camps. Some were honest enough to report what they saw. Eisenhower had given an order to shoot to kill any German woman or child who tried to give food to German POWs.

This is another lie.

the real genocide was put in writing, by the Allies, by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, in the Morgenthau Plan. It was a written document of genocide against the Germans. When it became too obvious, they redefined it as JCJ Directive 1067. People would say they hoped no one would notice that 1067 was the same as the Morgenthau Plan. 1067 & Morgenthau was a a plan to exterminate every German, starve Germany, with lack of food. Eisenhower did it to the POWs in the millions. FDR and the Allies planned to do it to every German. That's the real "holocaust," not the fake legend of 6 million.

You are not very smart are you? German prisoners were indeed mistreated and in some cases fed very little...this is true. But there was no plan to starve Germans. In wartime supplies are scarce and these scarcities explain much. But really, if the allies were into starving Germans they'd have hardly mounted the Berlin Airlift, or worked to rebuild West Germany. BTW; thanks for your admission of Holocaust Denial...an overt HDer is so much more honest than the sneakier kind...wouldn't you agree Russell?

The allies bombed every German city. In Dresden, they bombed every hospital, church and home. They murdered every civilian they could. They firebombed every German city, civilian targets, terrorist war crimes. They then distracted attention from their own terrorism with fake "holocaust" crimes, tortured confessions, and preyed on war hysteria and propaganda.

War sucks. It would have sucked even more had the Nazis been successful in their nuclear program.

America bombed civilians in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. America pursued a war of "unconditional surrender" while telling the Germans that they would be exterminated if they unconditionally surrendered. The Allied war strategy was to prolong the war as long as possible to murder every German and starve any surviving German.

What have you been smoking?

The real "holocaust" is what America, Britain and Russia did to Germany.

The holocaust legend promoters are nonskeptics who never question anything, who accept whatever garbage their government feeds them. It's like watching pigs eat trash.

Scurry back to Stormfront Herr Idiot...

-z

 

[twinstead]

The holocaust legend revisionist promoters are nonskeptics who never question anything, who accept whatever garbage their government ideologically-biased websites feed them. It's like watching pigs eat trash

There. Fixed.

 

[Kiwiwriter]

Yes, their pathology is fascinating...

Wow. Reading Holocaust revisionism is not very pleasant. And I thought 911 deniers were thoughtless, arrogant idiots.

Spittle spewing, irrational, rabid ideologues are interesting to observe, as long as one has his blood pressure under control.

You have really keep your emotions in check when coping with Holocaust revisionists. Part of their strategy is to infuriate their interlocutors, tom ake them explode with rage. That way the denier can look like a reasonable person, asking a few reasonable questions, while the defenders of the truth look like insane, screaming lunatics.

Holocaust deniers are an uglier crew than 9/11 nutters in a number of ways. David Irving himself said that one had to deliberately be tasteless about denying the Holocaust. At the Ernst Zundel trial, the Canadian ADL brought on Holocaust survivors to testify on their experiences, and Zundel and his lawyer turned it into a humiliating ordeal, berating and insulting them when their memories did not precisely match the historical record. And of course, Sara Salzman, who worked against Holocaust deniers on the web, suffered personal harassment, death threats, and abuse, which included the deniers forging letters in her name to politicians, threatening their lives, and making false and frivolous complaints to her bosses at work and her state's child welfare agencies. She finally nailed them on the federal anti-harassment statutes.

As for the pathology of these clowns, I'm often interested in their core beliefs. Clearly their education is selective and limited, and it's interesting how they deliberately exclude inconvenient facts that do not agree with their theories. They believe this stuff because they want to believe it, and never mind the facts. They've decided in their own minds that the Jews are evil, the Holocaust never happened, but they got what they deserved, and all the evidence otherwise is a Jewish conspiracy.

It's irrelevant to them what evidence you produce, survivors you bring in, or testimony you show, because to them, it's all a forgery, directed by that shadowy cabal of rabbis, bankers, and Bolsheviks they believe has secretly run and ruined the world ever since Christ was hung up on the Cross.

It's also interesting how they react when confronted with facts. Sometimes they just denounce it as a forgery, as said above. Sometimes they just fall back on their previous statements. Sometimes they just hurl ad hominem or straw man abuse (occasionally loaded with homo-erotic insults, which says more about them than anything). Sometimes they just run away, and come back six weeks later under a new internet handle, and spout the same arguments.

Mostly they slap the burden of proof on their opponents. They make statements about the Holocaust and demand you prove them right or wrong. They're actually expecting you to do the work for them. That's because they have no proof of their own, and more importantly, these guys lack the brains to do their own reading (they have to rely on neo-Nazi propaganda). Bear in mind that these are often not bright guys in the first place.

They blame the mythical Jewish conspiracy for their failures in life, not realizing that if they had stayed in school, stayed off of drugs, got a job, got out of their momma's basement, and bathed once in a while, they would not be living on welfare, and their lives would not revolve around the next neo-Nazi barbecue and rally...and might even have a girlfriend

They're hoping that one of the guys they argue with on the web will say, "My goodness, Adolf, you're right, the Holocaust is a hoax. Here, I've got the paper trail on how it was done right here in my files, straight from Bernard Baruch's typewriter!"

That, of course, reveals their essential laziness, evasiveness, and dishonesty. If they really had a case, they'd present it themselves.

I often wonder whether these guys are just economically frustrated and dispossessed angry white men, psychotic paranoid anti-Semites who see caftan-clad Chassidim behind every tree, addicted personalities whose life of organizing rallies, making videotapes, and running web pages is their "jones," or just cynical opportunists who have found cheap bucks and ego gratification in neo-Nazism.

 

[twinstead]

I often wonder whether these guys are just economically frustrated and dispossessed angry white men, psychotic paranoid anti-Semites who see caftan-clad Chassidim behind every tree, addicted personalities whose life of organizing rallies, making videotapes, and running web pages is their "jones," or just cynical opportunists who have found cheap bucks and ego gratification in neo-Nazism.

This is one of my first expierences with them, and my initial conclusion would be "all of the above".

It sounds like the best way to deal with these 'gentlemen' is to ignore them. Nothing good can come from debating them.

Now I know why some Holocaust groups are clamoring to make sure their story is remembered; as time goes on and the memory gets dimmer the door will be left even more open for these morons to ply their disgusting trade.