What Does Holocaust Denial Really Mean?

In Boston (Stoughton) Jews Gone Wilders I made the following observation without actually defining Holocaust revisionism (denial).

Although Wilders asserts over and over that he is trying to rally support against European anti-hate-speech laws and for the establishment US-style First Ammendment rights in Europe [in order to make sure that criticism of Islam is not prosecutable], at no point in Stoughton or elsewhere has he addressed Europe's laws that have criminalized Holocaust revisionism.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges Professor Emeritus Daniel McGowan addresses the definition of Holocaust revisionism or denial in What Does Holocaust Denial Really Mean?

But putting aside the virile hate directed against those who question the veracity of the typical Holocaust narrative, what is it that these people believe and say at the risk of imprisonment and bodily harm? For most Holocaust revisionists or deniers if you prefer, their arguments boil down to three simple contentions:

1. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was intended to be ethnic cleansing, not extermination.
2. There were no homicidal gas chambers used by the Third Reich.
3. There were fewer than 6 million Jews killed of the 55 million who died in WWII.

Are these revisionist contentions so odious as to cause those who believe them to be reviled, beaten, and imprisoned? More importantly, is it possible that revisionist contentions are true, or even partially true, and that they are despised because they contradict the story of the Holocaust, a story which has been elevated to the level of a religion in hundreds of films, memorials, museums, and docu-dramas?

Is it sacrilegious to ask, “If Hitler was intent on extermination, how did Elie Wiesel, his father, and two of his sisters survive the worst period of incarceration at Auschwitz?” Wiesel claims that people were thrown alive into burning pits, yet even the Israeli-trained guides at Auschwitz refute this claim.

Is it really “beyond international discourse” to question the efficacy and the forensic evidence of homicidal gas chambers? If other myths, like making soap from human fat, have been dismissed as Allied war propaganda, why is it “unacceptable behavior” to ask if the gas chamber at Dachau was not reconstructed by the Americans because no other homicidal gas chamber could be found and used as evidence at the Nuremburg trials?

For more than fifty years Jewish scholars have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to document each Jewish victim of the Nazi Holocaust. The Nazis were German, obsessed with paperwork and recordkeeping. Yet only 3 million names have been collected and many of them died of natural causes. So why is it heresy to doubt that fewer than 6 million Jews were murdered in the Second World War?

“Holocaust Denial” might be no more eccentric or no more criminal than claiming the earth is flat, except that the Holocaust itself has been used as the sword and shield in the quest to build a Jewish state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, where even today over half the population is not Jewish.

[To read the entire article, click here.]

To tell the truth I have some problems with Holocaust revisionism.

1. It often looks more like apologetics than good historiography.
2. Revisionists often seem to ignore the possibility that German Nazi policy with regard to Jews may have evolved over time.
3. Most Holocaust revivisionists lack sufficient knowledge of Slavic languages and Hungarian to make use of very important E. European and Russian source materials.

To be fair I have to acknowledge that non-revisionist histories of the Holocaust often suffer from the 2nd and 3rd failings -- even some scholarly works that often appear very carefully researched.

In fact, the much praised Origins of the Final Solution by Christopher R. Browning makes no use of important Russian and Hungarian archival materials.

In any case after reading numerous revisionist books and articles, I have to ask whether it genuinely represents a threat to anyone or to anything except parts of the Zionist legitimization narrative.

In contrast, the Islamophobic hate speech of Geert Wilders and his colleagues both in Europe and the USA has the look of incitement to deprive Muslims of rights, to drive them out, to kill them in Europe as well as in the USA, and ultimately to destroy all predominantly Muslim nation-states.

While laws against Holocaust revisionism (denial) should be stricken from the books, people like Geert Wilders, Jonathan Hausman and Charles Jacobs really do belong in jail.


Posted using ShareThis
Sphere: Related Content