Why is it frowned upon to question the holocaust?

Grand Moff Tarkin wrote: »

The Russian people had a higher death count than the Jewish people and there is not nearly half the drama made out of it.

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

In my view it's perfectly healthy to question history and absolutely should not be regarded as evidence of racism or any other such bullsh!t. History is there to be investigated and questioned.

Personally I don't doubt that the Nazis did in fact have concentration camps in which they killed millions of people. But I have some doubts specifically about the gas chambers, simply because all of them were apparently blown up as the Allies were advancing - when people go to Auschwitz, they're actually looking at a reconstruction of what a gas chamber might have looked like. So in terms of hard evidence specifically for gas chambers, I'd question that. Testimony from people at the Nuremberg Trials could very easily have been coerced given how appallingly we know both armies behaved when it came to POWs. I'm not even suggesting that gas chambers weren't used as a method of execution, I'm simply saying that there's actually no first hand evidence for their existence - it's all based on witness testimony rather than on the hard fact of actually finding an intact gas chamber.
I personally reckon it's more likely that people in concentration camps were used as slave labour until they died from overwork, malnutrition, disease, etc. I mean if you think about it, why kill six million people directly when you could be using them to augment your military-industrial complex instead? Six million people could build an absolute f*ckload of artillery which would otherwise probably bankrupt the country, so for me the idea of directly executing all those people instead of exploiting them has always seemed a bit bizarre.

Of course, this makes me an anti semite who thinks all Jews should die, all disabled people should be sterilized and Germany should reign supreme over the entire planet. Because, y'know, "zomg questioning history". :rolleyes:

Seaneh wrote: »

The Holocaust happened, and 5-6 million Jews, 1-2 million Roma and a few million "others" were killed, it's a near unfathomable reality and something we should never forget.

But in the last 30 or 40 years, certain groups and individuals have made it into a sacred cow, something you can't even talk about and something they use to their own profit.
People like Norman Finkelstein, in his books "The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering" and "Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History" along with the likes of Baruch Kimmerling (professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Benny Morris (professor at Ben-Gurion University in Be'er Sheva), Avi Shlaim (Iraqi Born Jewish Israeli citizen, professor at Oxford) have been trying to stop the misuse of Jewish suffering in Europe in the first half of the last century as justification for the actions of Israel since 1948 and fight against the idea that scholarly research of the events around, during and after the Holocaust is somehow to be discouraged.

From Wikipedia:
"Finkelstein states that his consciousness of "the Nazi holocaust" is rooted in his parents' experiences in the Warsaw ghetto; with the exception of his parents themselves, "every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis". Nonetheless, during his childhood, no one ever asked any questions about what his mother and father had suffered. He suggests, "This was not a respectful silence. It was indifference." It was only after the establishment of "the Holocaust industry", he suggests, that outpourings of anguish over the plight of the Jews in World War II began. This ideology in turn served to endow Israel with a status as "'victim' state" despite its "horrendous" human rights record."


The idea being, that AIPAC et al use the suffering of Jews in Europe 80 years ago as some sort of basis for Israel to justify their disgusting actions in the present and anyone who questions Israel is a anti-Semitic Nazi lover and anyone who questions their use of the holocaust as justification for their bigotry is a "denier".