Holocaust denial: getting to the core
A man was just booted from a libertarian Yahoo-group I'm on, for Holocaust revisionism. He's been advocating this viewpoint on a number of libertarian lists. I'm not going to blacken the man's name here (he's doing quite a good job of that himself) so we'll just call him Mr. Wacko.
For those a little fuzzy on their theory of rights, note that this is not a case of censorship. This is fundamentally different from what Germany does to such folks. If a man makes a drooling ass of himself in my living room, I have a right to tell him to leave. So does the owner of a Yahoo list. Case closed.
That being said, I have no clue on how a self-identified libertarian can support Holocaust revisionism or revisionists. None. I can understand supporting the rights of these folks to spew their nonsense hither and yon. Truth will out in the end. But that's different than making their arguments for them.
Most people faced with Holocaust revisionism never understand the ultimate issue, and take the wrong tack in dealing with their arguments. One school takes on the revisionist arguments on a factual basis. Yes, there are holes in revisionism that you can drive a boxcar through. But discussing fact and interpretation is what historians do, and this just legitimizes revisionism as history. The other major school regards deniers as crazed anti-Semites and refuses to engage them in anything deeper than mockery and sarcasm. This "proves" to the denier that they have no argument.
There is a better way.
Let's for a moment accept virtually every Holocaust denial/diminishment argument ever made, as fact: the gas was for disinfection, not murder, they were fed so they could work, the starving inmates were starving because Allied bombing had disrupted supplies, yada yada. Let's go even farther, ditch the testimony of Mein Kampf etc. and say that Hitler loved the Jews and that he rounded them up in concentration camps for their own good, to save them from the "spontaneous public demonstration" of Kristallnacht, and was going to ship them to Israel as soon as the war was over.
Now, in libertarian theory, is it moral for a state to remove a group of people from their homes and take their property, even if it's for their own good? Of course not. Consider the universal condemnation of Kelo vs. New London among libertarians, regardless of Holocaust viewpoint. And that was a case where the victims were compensated for their loss. Yet I have never read an argument that the Jews were not transported, or that they were transported voluntarily. That thing cannot be argued: the camps exist, people were arrested, they had to pay exhorbitant taxes in order to leave the country, and had to leave their wealth behind, they were forbidden to carry so much as a club as weapon, let alone firearms. And every one of these violations of individual sovereignty was performed because of their ideas about a hypothetical superhuman, or their ancestors' ideas about that hypothetical superhuman...because of a collective identification.
Yet I have never heard a Holocaust denier admit that what the German government did was wrong. I've never once heard somebody say, "Da Jooz exaggerated what was going on so they could get Israel, but what was going on was wrong and shouldn't have happened." It's clearly not that they don't care about what happened, since they care so passionately about what they think didn't happen. So one must conclude that they approve of Hitler wanting to rid Germany of Jews. Further, I've never seen a hint from them that, had the Nazis actually done what history accuses them of, that it would have been wrong.
The arguments of Birdman Bryant et al that the Holocaust didn't happen because people weren't deliberately murdered remind me of the argument that waterboarding isn't really torture because it doesn't maim anyone. Since it isn't torture, we should stop using it, because it's obviously ineffective. But since it's used for the purpose and intent of torture and is effective as torture, it seems pretty obvious that torture is what it is. Likewise, if a whole bunch of Jews die while you are violating their human rights, the difference between murder and negligence is of no moral import.
The treatment of Jews by the NSDAP government is a big stinking turd. When you whitewash a big stinking turd, you are left with a big stinking turd with whitewash on it...and people who look at you and wonder what kind of insanity causes one to whitewash turds. The libertarian movement doesn't need that kind of crazy, regardless of how much organizational work they might do, or their commitment to the cause.
UPDATE 6/1: Comments to this post have been closed. I have a life, unlike those with a passion of Endlosungverbesserung
Comments
Posted by: rightwingprof
Posted on: May 4, 2007 10:06 AM
"Mr. Wacko."
No fair. I've been calling him that since before I put him in my killfile, and that's been well over a year ago.
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: May 4, 2007 01:00 PM
Now, now, Clay, we aren't talking about anyone particular here. ;-)
Posted by: Mark Richards
Posted on: May 30, 2007 08:17 PM
Any discussion of Holocaust revisionism must start by defining the terms. There are only three asprcts of Nazi treatment of the Jews in WWII that subject to argument: the six million total number of victims, the Nazi government plan of extermination, and the use of gas chambers for execution. That's it. The internment in concentration camps, the slave labor, the einsatzgruppen - no one questions any of that. Many people don't realize that if they believe "only" five million Jews were killed; or that six million were killed because Germany was just a nation of murderous sadistic brutes who didn't need orders from the top; or that six million were ordered killed by Hitler but were killed in any number of ways other than gassing, they would be by definition Holocaust revisionists (actually even worse, Holocaust deniers.)
It should also be remembered that all "death camps" were in Poland. That is significant because Eisenhauer specifically stopped Patton before he reached Berlin, allowing the Red Army the opportunity to "liberate" Berlin after driving across Poland. Thus, every "death camp" was liberated by the Soviets, so we have no first-hand accounts of what was going on. Everything we have, from Eisenhauer's famous tape to the eyewitness account of every single Allied soldier, is from area of the Third Reich that had no "death camps".
To put it simply, the Soviet KGB supplied the information to the Western press, which was pretty much Jews telling others other Jews what the enemies of the Jews did to Jews. Not exactly a recipe for unbiased truth.
So we start with no concrete evidence. When we acknowledge glaring inconsistencies the doubts begin. For example, Anne Frank spent time in Auschwitz before eventually dying of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. One might wonder why a regine bent on extermination of Jews would ship out a typhus-stricken Jew instead of just gassing her with the others. And we know about her because her father published her diary, the father who was lying in a hospital bed at Auschwitz when the Soviets arrived. Odd that Nazis would treat a man they intended to execute, and equally odd that they would leave him alive to testify to their enemies.
So what we have is some really outrageous claims that not only have no proof, but are also highly suspect. It should actually be the Holocaust supporters who have the burden of proof.
Holocaust belief has become something of a religion in that it relies entirely on faith, and faith by definition is belief without proof. A simple test most people can apply to themselves: you could be offered proof that aliens eliminated the dinosaurs, or the moon landing was a hoax, or JFK was killed by any number of suspects, or just about any other outrageous claim, and you might at least look at it. But offering evidence of exaggeration of the Holocaust is akin to telling a Christian that Jesus was not the son of God or telling a Muslim that Mohammad was a phony - they won't even look at it, and consider the proof to be an evil thing that cannot be allowed to contaminate one's mind. That fact should make folks consider where their strong feelings come from, and also why such evidence is illegal in so much of the world.
It should be remembered that Jews were considered the enemy of the German people. In considering how they were treated by the Nazis, it should be noted how any other people treat their enemies. The English created concentration camps for Boer women and children, and the US locked up Japanese in WWII. And POW always fare quite poorly when their captors are losing the war. So, if the points in question (only those three), are not actually true, then how different were the Nazis from other regimes in similar circumstances?
The "mainstream" side will never win by name-calling and pointless personal attacks. And they can't win in an open and free discussion. So what we have seen here is what we should expect until we finally get people to wake up and actually think for themselves.
Posted by: Avalanche
Posted on: May 31, 2007 11:11 AM
As a libertarian, don't you think anyone has the right to discuss and question *anything*? Should someone whitewashing a turd be thrown in jail (as HUNDREDS have been in Europe) for asking questions? You point your (and our) attention toward what was done (or not done) historically -- yet ignore (or is that, whitewash!?) what is being done today.
It should be entirely "legitimate" -- legal, allowed, protected -- that anyone may ask any question about any historical event. Why no complaints (or jailings!) about the 'revision' of the numbers of Cambodians or Ukranians or Chinese killed in historical "genocides"? (When did "it hurts my feelings for you to discuss this" become a legitimate cause for legal action? And why? And on whose behalf?)
Only for the "historical" (uninvestigate-able, "sacred") event/concept misnamed the "holocaust" is investigation or questioning punishable... (You do know it was named the holocaust because the original propaganda about it described it as the BURNING of jews in Germany?)
From the infamous Birdman's site:
...
Holocaust belief has become something of a religion in that it relies entirely on faith, and faith by definition is belief without proof. A simple test most people can apply to themselves: you could be offered proof that aliens eliminated the dinosaurs, or the moon landing was a hoax, or JFK was killed by any number of suspects, or just about any other outrageous claim, and you might at least look at it. But offering evidence of exaggeration of the Holocaust is akin to telling a Christian that Jesus was not the son of God or telling a Muslim that Mohammad was a phony - they won't even look at it, and consider the proof to be an evil thing that cannot be allowed to contaminate one's mind. That fact should make folks consider where their strong feelings come from, and also why such evidence is illegal in so much of the world.
...
(http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/Temp/Temp-WellDoneAnswerToTheQuickForum-MarkR.htm)
Posted by: Jeffrey Quick
Posted on: May 31, 2007 04:35 PM
Mark:
This blogserver's software is set to hold all comments to old posts for approval. I had to decide whether to approve messages, and whose. George Taylor, R. Burns: you didn't make the cut. Make an argument instead of insults, and I'll consider it.
"The internment in concentration camps, the slave labor, the einsatzgruppen - no one questions any of that." You later go on to compare this to the Boer camps and the Japanese-American camps. So...were not all these things equally evil? Would 9/11 have been less an assault on America if only one of the Twin Towers had gone down? See, I'm not a collectivist, so ONE Jew, killed through official policy, is Holocaust enough. I'm not interested in arguing details, personally, because I'm not a historian. Naturally, I think everyone has the right to argue details, assuming they're working from object fact and not cherry-picking evidence to support their desired conclusion. Yes, it's fair to investigate the probity of the KGB. We're found out all kinds of things from their files since the Cold War ended, and if great bits of the received Shoah story were fabricated by them, we would have found out. I fail to see why the Soviets would be creating the Holocaust narrative at the same time that Stalin was ginning up the Doctor's Plot and preparing his own Final Solution.
Avalanche:
The evil of German censorship of Holocaust deniers has no bearing on whether the Holocaust actually happened. Any argument supported by guns is weakened by that support.
Both of you:
Answer the question: do you disapprove of whatever-the-hell-it-was that Hitler did to the Jews? Because you admit he did something.
Posted by: Dave
Posted on: May 31, 2007 07:37 PM
I think most revisionists do disapprove of Hitler.
[Your good buddy Avalanche doesn't.-JAQ]
The original piece said this:
"Yet I have never heard a Holocaust denier admit that what the German government did was wrong."
However if you listen to the discussion between Jim Condit Jr and Chris Bjerkenes, neither of whom believe in the 6 million story you will see that they both disapprove strongly of Hitler. Whether Condit's thesis is correct I do not know and neither does he! You can download it at
http://www.jewishracism.com/interviews.htm
Also I have started reading Germar Rudolf's lectures on the holocaust and he states many times that the treatment of the ordinary (presumabley non Zionist) Jews was terrible. So saying that all revsionists somehow approve of Hitler is either disingenuous or based on ignorance in my humble opinion.
[Note carefully the wording in my statement above. I've never heard condemnation. I'm sure that it exists somewhere, just as some Moslems publically condemn the use of violence to convert people to Islam. It's certainly not a majority opinion, in my experience.]
Posted by: Avalanche
Posted on: June 1, 2007 01:19 AM
You addressed me:
------
The evil of German censorship of Holocaust deniers has no bearing on whether the Holocaust actually happened.
------
On the contrary, I think it does. *IF*, as is always the case, questioners (not "deniers," which is the standard slur to cut off discussion, isn't it?,) but, if people with questions about this historical event/concept) must be judicially prevented from investigating "whether the holocaust actually happened," then there is indeed a question of whether "it" happened.
[I think that the German government's reasons are a bit more complex than truth-suppression, but I will grant that it makes them look like they have something to hide.-JAQ]
Do you so completely differentiate between the Brits inventing concentration camps and the Germans
[Actually, in my argument to you, I didn't differentiate; what part of "equally evil" don't you understand?]
using them against their "internal enemy," the 'tribe' that had already declared war on them?
[A "tribe" of Germans that had declared war agaist the Germans? When did these alleged hostilities begin? It seems quite clear to be that Hitler fired the first salvos in that war. This charge gives away your game.]
Is that a reasonable differentiation?
[The British didn't have a "Bloemfonteyn conference" to plot "The final solution to the Boer problem." That awaited the likes of Mbeki and Mugabe.]
(Or are you going to claim that the *numbers* of jews allegedly killed makes a difference, in which case why does not determining the accuracy of the claimed numbers became a DUTY, instead of a crime?)
[I specifically claimed that the number of Jews made no moral difference at all ]
Look, historical revision -- that is, investigation and correction of knowledge about events occurring in earlier times -- is a standard function of historians. The only historians who are being hounded (and fired and jailed!) are the ones trying to ascertain the accuracy of (only some parts of) WWII history.
Av
(oh, and p.s., I'd say jailing hundreds who ask questions goes WAY beyond "evil censorship," wouldn't you?
[No. Jail, and ultimately guns, are the methods by which censorship is enforced.]
Did you know that the United States has a gov'tal agency to investigate "anti-semitism" all around the world?! What-in-the-hell are "WE" doing involved in that?! I don't see any govt'al interest in "investigating" the persecution of Chinese Christians, or Indian Sikhs or any other so-called religious minority.
And while I'm at it:
Did you know it is ILLEGAL in the U.S. to ask about israeli sourcing for goods and services? You can boycott ANY source of goods in the world except israel -- about whose products it's not even legal to ask about the source!? (Isn't this supposed to be AMERICA? Um, you know, like, "land of the free"?)
[Cite the law, please. This sounds like BS...I grew up with cheap Israeli marmelade.]