It's interesting talking in person with a Holocaust denier.
They start out by explaining there is no evidence of the Holocaust, and in fact the Nazis killed few Jews.
So you ask them why this idea is so widely believed, and they explain it is because the Jews have a vast conspiracy to mislead the world so as to gain favor for themselves and the state of Israel.
So you ask them, "Have the Jews done anything else bad?" and their eyes light up, and they go into an long rant about one terrible thing after another the Jews have done, throughout the whole course of human history.
And by the end they have made the Jews look so bad that it would have been a simply wonderful thing for Hitler to try to kill them all off.
I have observed two different kinds of revisionists.
The first kind are simply Jew haters. After they say that they don't believe that the Nazis tried to kill all of the Jews, they either imply or say outright that they should have.
The second kind has an Asperger Syndrome like fixation on details. If the true number was 5.4 million or 6.5 million Jewish people killed, they take exception to the "6 million" figure.
I sadly can't deny that such people exist but it seems profoundly weird to me that anyone could just hate a bunch of random people they've never met. Some sort of wiring bug.
Good point about the fixation-on-details type. However, it is the Jew haters who sometimes get organized and do real damage to the world. Also, nasty politicians can sometimes convert large numbers of people into Jew haters.
So what are your thoughts on this argument? It sounds like you were convinced, and the comment reads like a slightly clever way to spread these hateful ideas. (I can't speak for your intent.)
Oh, sorry, I should have made my point clearer. This is that Holocaust deniers often say they are not antisemitic,just trying to be factual, but if you question them the right way, it turns out they are.
What is really going on in their minds is that they mistakenly believe Jews are evil, and so they defend anyone who think the same, in this case the Nazis against the accusation of killing millions of Jews, even though they themselves think it would be great.
As horrible as the Holocaust was, I think the thing from the Second World War that has scared me most is probably the Dirlewanger brigade[0]. I guess it's the difference between someone who kills you because that's his task, and someone who kills you because he likes it. Dirlewanger[1] was a cartoon villain. In a work of fiction he would have been easily dismissed as not believable, but he was very real.
He was hardly the only murderous sadist; you can find many in the history of Holocaust camps. Look up Joseph Mengele, for example, who would perform sadistic medical procedures (called experiments, but really for sadism) on prisoners, including children, and without anesthesia. Too sickening to describe here.
Lavrentiy Beria was the head of the NKVD (USSR secret police) during WW2 and also a serial rapist/murderer, the high ups including Stalin all knew, but considered him good enough at his job to essentially let it slide though of course they never let their female relatives anywhere near him.
I often wonder what people actually have understood other than "the Nazis were bad". It's not enough to not be a racist, and it's not enough to have excuses for putting up with war and exploitation and double standards.
We live in an age where narcissism and outer appearances are glorified more than ever, where showing off and fitting in are accepted and the only debate is on how to best do that, where the atrocities and all our complicity in them is a constant background hum, where tribalism and identity politics and other things are considered "natural", where people hide their own person behind pseudo-objectivity, surveillance is everywhere and eternal, robocops are around the corner, we engage in constant double think about "consumers" deserving the crap shoved onto them by corporations. It's all just human nature, it's "science" (with a deus ex machina always around the corner) -- I would say things like the above are the things which people like Hannah Arendt or Sebastian Haffner or other people I would consider heavy weights on the subject pointed out as crucial, that is, when you asked them about the Nazis, they didn't talk about the content of their ideas so much as about their personalities, the personalities and excuses of their followers, obedience and a lack of connection with oneself and reality, and so on. In comparison to that stuff they all seemed to agree that the "content" of the Nazi ideology was just smoke and mirrors. Even their methods held more content than their content did, if you will. Sure, they needed enemies and a cult of their own supposed superiority, but any details beyond that were subject to change.
Every time I learn about something like Abu Ghraib, I die a little inside. That is, I get diminished a little, and every following day I live on this planet without the perpetrators of those deeds being brought to justice I get diminished some more. That's bad enough, but the way most people don't even notice that is really scary.
Please, don't take this as me snapping at you. I have no way of knowing how exactly you meant what you said, but I am reminded every single day of parallels to Nazi Germany that are perfectly accepted in polite society, so I had to rant a bit.
If we're looking for ways to meaningfully understand Nazi-ism, and actually look beyond "omg bad" and "death camps" into the ideals and philosophies and the sociopolitical situation leading to the party's rise... well, you could do far worse than to start with Harper's "Who Goes Nazi?" (1941).
If you're talking about the HN comment thread, then please don't make it worse by posting like this. Instead, the way to be a good community member is by flagging the comments you find egregious so that moderators have a chance to see them.
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Sorry, I didn't notice this. I was talking about the comment thread in the external website. I didn't specify because at the time the sleeper nazi accounts hadn't yet activated here.
Disgusting, but sociologically fascinating, too. And very valuable to keep around, in case anyone falls under the mistaken impression that the nazis were simply born evil.
"Once the war ended, Zeidel traveled overland before smuggling himself in the autumn of 1945 to what would become the State of Israel"
Well there's the Holocaust deniers on the one hand.
But then, it does no harm at all for the state of Israel to see a story like this appear just when it has decided to extend still further the settlements in the West bank.
This is a very serious claim right here. Any concrete data on "Czarist government" undertaking pogroms?
The whole discourse right here reeks of 60's university left's "commies good, czars bad". This is when commies could murder the same number of people, off-war, on their not the most busy day, as the "Czarist government" during the whole early XX century.
Readit News
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005267
Deleted Comment
They start out by explaining there is no evidence of the Holocaust, and in fact the Nazis killed few Jews.
So you ask them why this idea is so widely believed, and they explain it is because the Jews have a vast conspiracy to mislead the world so as to gain favor for themselves and the state of Israel.
So you ask them, "Have the Jews done anything else bad?" and their eyes light up, and they go into an long rant about one terrible thing after another the Jews have done, throughout the whole course of human history.
And by the end they have made the Jews look so bad that it would have been a simply wonderful thing for Hitler to try to kill them all off.
The first kind are simply Jew haters. After they say that they don't believe that the Nazis tried to kill all of the Jews, they either imply or say outright that they should have.
The second kind has an Asperger Syndrome like fixation on details. If the true number was 5.4 million or 6.5 million Jewish people killed, they take exception to the "6 million" figure.
I sadly can't deny that such people exist but it seems profoundly weird to me that anyone could just hate a bunch of random people they've never met. Some sort of wiring bug.
What is really going on in their minds is that they mistakenly believe Jews are evil, and so they defend anyone who think the same, in this case the Nazis against the accusation of killing millions of Jews, even though they themselves think it would be great.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Dirlewanger
We live in an age where narcissism and outer appearances are glorified more than ever, where showing off and fitting in are accepted and the only debate is on how to best do that, where the atrocities and all our complicity in them is a constant background hum, where tribalism and identity politics and other things are considered "natural", where people hide their own person behind pseudo-objectivity, surveillance is everywhere and eternal, robocops are around the corner, we engage in constant double think about "consumers" deserving the crap shoved onto them by corporations. It's all just human nature, it's "science" (with a deus ex machina always around the corner) -- I would say things like the above are the things which people like Hannah Arendt or Sebastian Haffner or other people I would consider heavy weights on the subject pointed out as crucial, that is, when you asked them about the Nazis, they didn't talk about the content of their ideas so much as about their personalities, the personalities and excuses of their followers, obedience and a lack of connection with oneself and reality, and so on. In comparison to that stuff they all seemed to agree that the "content" of the Nazi ideology was just smoke and mirrors. Even their methods held more content than their content did, if you will. Sure, they needed enemies and a cult of their own supposed superiority, but any details beyond that were subject to change.
Every time I learn about something like Abu Ghraib, I die a little inside. That is, I get diminished a little, and every following day I live on this planet without the perpetrators of those deeds being brought to justice I get diminished some more. That's bad enough, but the way most people don't even notice that is really scary.
Please, don't take this as me snapping at you. I have no way of knowing how exactly you meant what you said, but I am reminded every single day of parallels to Nazi Germany that are perfectly accepted in polite society, so I had to rant a bit.
http://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
To flag a comment (assuming your account has > 30 karma), click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click 'flag' at the top.
Well there's the Holocaust deniers on the one hand.
But then, it does no harm at all for the state of Israel to see a story like this appear just when it has decided to extend still further the settlements in the West bank.
Dead Comment
> undertaken by the Czarist government
This is a very serious claim right here. Any concrete data on "Czarist government" undertaking pogroms?
The whole discourse right here reeks of 60's university left's "commies good, czars bad". This is when commies could murder the same number of people, off-war, on their not the most busy day, as the "Czarist government" during the whole early XX century.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment