I would like to thank the skeptics here at JREF for helping me come to recent epiphany.
All my life, I never quite understood why people denied the Holocaust. It never made sense to me why people who hate Jews would deny what is arguably thier greatest achievement, the systematic erradication of nearly all of the Jewish population of central Europe.
My time on these boards has not only exposed me to critical thinking, but also to analysis of non-critical thinking. This combined with a recent resurgence in threads denying the Holocaust have help me achieve this epiphany.
To begin, I will move briefly to a topic that belongs more in religion. Specifically a rather odd subset of Christians that seem to define themselves not in thier worship of God, but more in thier opposition to Satan. We see elements of this in the writings of Jack Chick and some of the bizzare anti-D&D rhetoric. These are people who have invested so much in thier self-image as glorious crusaders against the great evil of Satan and satanic influence in the world, that they cannot allow themselves to even consider the possibility that Satan does not exist. Any evidence that Satan is not real is just lies put forth by Satan to lull us into complaceny in thier minds.
If we take that mindset but change Satan to a global conspiracy of Jews secretly holding the real power, we move to a brand of anti-semitism that breeds Holocaust Denial. In this mindset the evil power wielded by the Jews is as epic as that weilded by Satan to the above-mentioned Christians. Thier faith, for lack of a better word, is predicated on the fear of this all-powerful conspiracy.
This is why the Holocaust is problematic for them. If the Jews weild so much power (and did so long before 1930) why did they not use their power to prevent Hitler from coming to power? Why did they idly sit by and allow 6 million of thier own to be slaughtered? In short, the existence of the Holocaust is anathema to thier world view in which the world is secretly governed by a cabal of all-powerful Jews.
One of the problems of simply denying the Holocaust, though, is the sheer volume of evidence in support of it. The physical evidence, the testimony of survivors and the testimony of Nazis. However, this problem is actually very easily and elegantly solved in that mindset by claiming the whole thing is a hoax. The elegence is that by claiming it was a hoax, it not only removes the existance of the Holocaust as an historical fact, but reinforces thier preset world view because the sheer scale of such a hoax would require an epicly powerful and nefarious entity. The question of why the Jews would do such a thing is as easily dismissed as if asking a theist why God (or Satan) does anything: "God moves in mysterious ways." It is simply a matter of faith that the Jews are so evil that mere mortals cannot fully understand why they do anything.
So I would appreciate your comments. Am I on to something, or am I just talking out of my backside? Is this even all that original or have others posited this theory before?
at nomadic Tuvan horse herders or something.
