One of the troubling things about the I/P diaries is that it tends to attract antisemites, hoping that if they cloak their antisemitism as "anti-Zionism," they can get a few licks in against The Jew. (Note that I am not saying that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, just that antisemites exploit anti-Zionism.) And, lo, last night we got a good example. I thought I'd use it as a teaching moment, and show what to look for when one of these creatures pops its head up in decent company.
[Edit:] Folks, as I explicitly said in my tip jar, this is not an I/P diary, and please don't try to turn it into one. Also, note that I'm not saying that a visit from the swastika-kissers is a daily event; I'm only saying that it's happened frequently enough to deserve -- God forbid! -- a diary on the subject, using yesterday's visit as an example.
What Holocaust deniers want to say, and would if they thought they could get away with it, is this: the Jews have made up the "six million" number, which is really much more than the actual number of killed, but the Jew-controlled media and academia is lying; investigating this massive international conspiracy is completely legitimate historical scholarship, but the iron fist of International Jewry will punish any brave crusader against Jewry who dares say otherwise; a massive amount of evidence plainly showing up the Jewish lie is therefore being suppressed, and if only I could show it all to you unimpeded, you'd realize that the Holocaust is a hoax.
The problem is, Holocaust deniers know that won't work, that they'll instantly (and justifiably) be labeled a crackpot by anyone with an IQ over that of a grapefruit, and their opportunity to spread their poison will be spoiled. So the whole art -- such as it is -- of promoting Holocaust denial in on the internet is to decide how close you can get to saying such a thing without blowing your cover as an allegedly rational human being.
One thing they don't do is say, "the Holocaust never happened." That is, they don't deny the Holocaust outright (unless they're talking among themselves); in public, they instead do everything they can to minimalize it, shrink it, cast doubts on it, and blame it wherever possible on the Jews themselves. Another thing they don’t do -- unless they’re sure of a sympathetic audience -- is say, “It’s the Jews doing this.” Instead, they’ll euphemize. It used to be the Bolsheviks wot dunnit; now it’s the Zionists, or “the international hegemony” (wink wink), or “certain powerful interests” (wink wink) or "golly, I don't know who's doing it but it sure does seem to be happening, don't it."
The Holocaust denial movement has been around for decades, and they've learned to weed out the talking points that take less than ten seconds or require more than general knowledge to refute. What they do is present a carefully polished amalgamations of half-truths, each one perhaps defensible to some degree individually but, when taken as a whole, clearly intended to paint a picture of the Holohoax.
So let's go through what [edit:] the unnamed user I'll call "X" had to say yesterday sentence by sentence.
What I said was that thought crimes about questioning the Holocaust are obscene.
There's pretty much a global recognition that Holocaust denial is hate speech. And it's true that there are countries in which hate speech in and of itself is a criminal offense. The poor schlub David Irving, for example -- who I'll bring up again later -- recently spent 13 months of a three-year sentence in jail in Austria for Holocaust denial before being permanently expelled from the country. But it's important to understand that these laws aren't "thought crimes" laws but hate speech laws; that is, they recognize that for all its pretensions, Holocaust denial isn’t the branch of academic inquiry it poses as, but a form of hate speech that should be treated like every other form of hate speech. Nevertheless, people like X will do everything they can to describe these laws as a specific construction specifically designed (by an unnamed institutional you-know-who) to prevent anyone from daring question “the official narrative.”
Texts of the Holocaust denial hate speech laws.
Like most Americans, I don’t approve of hate speech laws, and I don’t think Irving should have been jailed for telling lies. But it’s worth noting that, of the fourteen nations that have laws against Holocaust denial on their books, all but two were either part of the Reich or occupied by the Reich. You don’t need to imply an institutional you-know-who to understand why they’d be revolted, at a gut level, at a phenomenon apologizing for Nazi genocide.
Auschwitz changed the number on their plaque from 4 million killed to 1.5 million but the 6 million number remains sacrosanct.
This is one of the standard opening gambits I was talking about: the Auschwitz plaque gambit. After WWII, the Soviets put up a plaque at Auschwitz claiming that four million people had been murdered in Auschwitz. This figure was never taken seriously in the west (although you can see it in a few sloppy pop histories); it was based on a calculation that assumed that all of the killing machinery was used at 100% all the time. In 1990, with the end of the Soviet bloc, Polish historians almost immediately replaced the plaque with one bearing a figure in line with the figure historians accepted: about a million and a half.
Now, to Holocaust deniers, this meant more Jew monkey business -- or at least an excuse to claim more Jew monkey business. How can it be that it turns out that the Auschwitz death toll was overestimated by 2.5 million but the total number of dead didn’t change? Surely there’s the hand of the Jew in this calculation, and the continued use of the six million figure an article of dogma, “sacrosanct” as X calls it, is just a continuation of the Jew lie.
Well, as I said, historians never took that four million figure for Auschwitz seriously; none of the half-dozen independent demographic studies I know of went around from camp to camp, adding up the figures on the plaques, because it was clear from the start that those plaque numbers weren’t real, and weren’t used as input data in the independent studies.
I do not know the total number, yet do not see historical investigations as a threat to anything other than the "official narrative."
Well, if the Holocaust deniers say the figure wasn’t six million, then what was it? And this is where the denier has to judge his audience. If he’s talking to total fools and fellow antisemites, he’ll say it was in the hundred thousands or maybe as much as three million. In a forum like this, where X knows he’ll be called to justify any figure -- deadly for a denier -- he goes totally passive: he doesn’t know what the figure is, he just knows that there’s something wrong with the six million figure, because otherwise why would Europeans jail those brave, brave souls and brilliant scholars who dare say it wasn’t? Those brave, brave Holocaust-truthers who dare question “the official narrative”?
Take that as a compliment, folks; X knew he couldn’t spoon out the real bullshit, and had instead to go to the next line of attack, the “oh golly nobody knows, it’s just all so murky and I think I smell the hand of the Jew in the six million figure.”
Well, as I indicated above, we do know. We don’t know exactly because the Nazis intentionally did not keep thorough paperwork on the camp’s direct throughput (Jews off the ramp, Jews up the chimney). Why? Because the Nazis had been through the mass murder thing before, early in the war, with the T-4 euthanasia program, and when the figures got out, it lead to extraordinary international condemnation. The Nazis were not going to make the same mistake twice. This means that the total number of dead will never be known exactly -- but that’s a much different thing than saying that we don’t know roughly what the figures are. As I mentioned above, there have been at least half a dozen independent studies, using different methodologies to collect evidence, and they all tend to agree: at six million, a little below six million, a little above six million.
Note that these studies directly refute the Holocaust denier’s lies that somehow scholars are forbidden from doing “historical investigations.”
Deborah Lipstadt says that the claims of victims made into soap is a myth.
Professor Lipstadt, you might remember, won a really crushing victory in court against the Holocaust denier David Irving in the UK in 2000. Irving sued Lipstadt for libel after she called him a Holocaust denier in her definitive history of the Holocaust denial movement, “Denying the Holocaust.” So it’s a distinctly Rovian twist that X specifically mentions Lipstadt as if she were “questioning the official narrative,” because it implies that even the staunchest opponent of Holocaust denial agrees with at least part of their hooey.
What Lipstadt actually says is this: there were indeed early experiments by the Nazis in making soap from the bodies of British POWs. They never reached industrial scale. But the word got out, and the claim that the Germans were making soap from humans spread widely -- in part because the same claim had been made against them in WWI.
But let’s be clear. There are things “everybody knows” that are wrong. Betsy Ross didn’t design the American flag, even though “everybody knows” that she did. But what Holocaust deniers do is try to leverage those odd points here and there -- soap, human lampshades, that kind of thing -- where the common knowledge is wrong, and use them to imply that the base, core facts of the Holocaust are also wrong. And it’s just as bogus as trying to use the Betsy Ross thing to claim that the Revolutionary War didn’t happen and was really just a Jewish/Bolshevik/Zionist myth.
Both of these historical assertions could technically be prosecuted under Holocaust Revisionism thought crimes. No other area of investigation is accorded this status.
Well, this is just a repeat of what X said before. Some mysterious unnamed international force -- gee, I wonder who -- is preventing brave, brave “historical investigators” from blah blah blah.
I was wondering how long it would take for you to totally ignore what was being posted and go on the personal attack.
And lastly comes the martyrdom plea from our brave, brave warrior for truth. (As it happens, X is also a 9/11 truther, but that's for another day.) The iron fist of the Jew/Bolshevik/Zionist is oppressing our poor little Holocaust denier. Help, help, I’m being repressed! If only the international cabal weren’t trying to silence brave, brave “historical investigators” then at last the world would realize the true dimensions of the Jewish lie and rise up against their Jewish oppressors once and for all! But the Jewish (or Bolshevik, or Zionist, or choose your own euphemism) Thought Police are ever vigilant, trying to keep you, dear reader, in the dark.
Anyway, as I said yesterday, if you know the Holocaust denier Greatest Hits, you can see why X’s post lit up the bullshit detector like a Christmas tree. Any one of these sentences, taken alone, might plausibly sound plausible. But taken as a whole, they couldn't be clearer in intent.