Why is it frowned upon to question the holocaust?

bilston

NuckingFacker wrote: »

Ohh, it did, but you don't hear about it every feckin day. I guess the wrong sort of people died in that one - not as media friendly.. If paddies ran the media, the famine would be reknowned. I'd also like to vote for a "Multiple thanks" button for eramens post.

The reason you don't hear about it everyday is nothing to do with who died it's because it happened 170 years ago, there is nobody left alive who experienced it and there hasn't been for a long time. There are many Holocaust survivors left so it remains a living memory. In 100 years it won't be talked about so much and sadly will most likely have been replaced by some other terrible event.

smcgiff

Mark Tapley wrote: »

He did say speaking of the Jews- "You have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism. You deserve to be punished, for this is your destiny."

That's just jealousy.

The Jews took their Cuchulainn and Giant's causeway myths and turned them into global religions.

That's our fault and not theirs.

Wibbs

It's an interesting question. It became one of western civilisation's sacred cows, an established fact, the reference point of horror written in stone. And it was a high watermark of horror, a blot on mankind, made somehow worse because it was perpetrated by one of the most civilised nations/cultures on the planet. The same culture that gave the world Beethoven and Bach also gave us Birkineau and Belson.

Because of it's emotive place in our collective hearts it has become unassailable in some ways, even hyped/Hollywooded up and this can lead to some inaccuracies creeping in. EG I was discussing the subject with an American who made the common error of conflating concentration camp with death/extermination camp. They couldn't be persuaded that for example Belson wasn't an extermination camp, had no gas chambers, nor mass crematoria. For them all camps were "death camps" and all were almost entirely aimed at the Jewish peoples of Europe. And this person was otherwise well clued in on the subject. For me that's both a shame and a mistake as it condenses unimaginable suffering into a made for TV given. The real history is more complex and often worse.

Interestingly for me anyway, is the Holocaust as a subject didn't really kick off in the common mind until quite a while after the events. The first real research and books on the subject only came along in the 1960's, Raul Hilberg a giant of the subject. His thoughts in the film Shoah are worth the price of admission on their own.

There can be a sense of a Holocaust "industry" at times and there can also be an element of politicing going on with it too.

The deniers I have little or no time for. Mainly because usually they do have an ulterior reasoning for their position, I say usually as there are some who don't and fair enough. There are some questions that I myself would have with some aspects of the history as it stands. EG the mobile extermination "gas vans". There are a fair few witnesses, but some of their testimony doesn't make sense for me, neither does the mechanism of killing itself.

All in all I don't like the idea of untouchable, written in stone facts, especially when it comes to history. Like I said the reality is always more complex, often more subtle and usually more horrific.

Wibbs

smcgiff wrote: »

The Jews took their Cuchulainn and Giant's causeway myths and turned them into global religions.

That's our fault and not theirs.

Ah SM I dunno about that at all. It's more accurate to say that non Jews co-opted Jewish myths/theology and grew them into global religions. The Jewish religion and culture wasn't big on proselytising. Take Christianity as an example. It's essentially Judaism 2.0. It started as a small Jewish sect(of which there were many), but it took a Roman Jew and the Romano-Greco world to turn it into a new religion. One that very clearly and very early on distanced itself from the source material and the people of that source. Even Jewish religious givens were rejected because they didn't fit the Romano-Greco mind(food restrictions and circumcision just two examples) Indeed the very reason the Jewish people came to those funeral pyres in the 1940's stems from that very fact.

Islam is another Judaism 2.0, with a large side order of Christianity 2.0. They kept the food and body modification stuff of the source material, but again distanced themselves very clearly from the source. It was the Arabic culture that drove it to a global religion.

smcgiff

Wibbs wrote: »

Ah SM I dunno about that at all. It's more accurate to say that non Jews co-opted Jewish myths/theology and grew them into global religions. The Jewish religion and culture wasn't big on proselytising. Take Christianity as an example. It's essentially Judaism 2.0. It started as a small Jewish sect(of which there were many), but it took a Roman Jew and the Romano-Greco world to turn it into a new religion. One that very clearly and very early on distanced itself from the source material and the people of that source. Even Jewish religious givens were rejected because they didn't fit the Romano-Greco mind(food restrictions and circumcision just two examples) Indeed the very reason the Jewish people came to those funeral pyres in the 1940's stems from that very fact.

Islam is another Judaism 2.0, with a large side order of Christianity 2.0. They kept the food and body modification stuff of the source material, but again distanced themselves very clearly from the source. It was the Arabic culture that drove it to a global religion.

Agree 100% - just mocking Voltaire's line where he accused the Jews of creating impertinent fables. That's what I meant (badly put) when saying it was our fault.

The Jews are very happy being 'the chosen people' and don't really want converts. Contrast this with other religions.

Honest opinion

playadeldick wrote: »

The Holocaust is the most researched and documented event in history.

Citation needed

indioblack

CruelCoin wrote: »

I reckon it's because the Americans would rather we not dig into the whole concentration camp thing, and re-publish their efforts in the Philippines or the British effort in South Africa.

Not sure they'd want the greater public to learn how they perfected the concentration camp idea, and the Germans just aped it off them.

It would be interesting to know more about how they "perfected the concentration camp idea".

Grayson

indioblack wrote: »

It would be interesting to know more about how they "perfected the concentration camp idea".

The British developed concentration camps in the Boer war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War#Concentration_camps_.281900.E2.80.931902.29

indioblack

Grayson wrote: »

The British developed concentration camps in the Boer war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War#Concentration_camps_.281900.E2.80.931902.29[/QUOTE]
Thanks for the link.

April O Neill

Grayson wrote: »

THAT FONT IS TOO BIG!

Well, that was kinda the point.

Grayson wrote: »

Actually, I think the only thing wrong with those sort of statements is the word only. only 3 million died, not 6 million for example. Only makes it sound like it's a lot smaller and I guess it is. I mean, three million more lived an that's loads. But 3 million died too. I think that it's just that language can fail to grasp it. Our language was never designed to talk about acts so bad.

This was my point.

hatrickpatrick

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:

Zebra3

Wibbs wrote: »

It's an interesting question. It became one of western civilisation's sacred cows, an established fact, the reference point of horror written in stone. And it was a high watermark of horror, a blot on mankind, made somehow worse because it was perpetrated by one of the most civilised nations/cultures on the planet.

I strongly disagree with this.

Germany, like the other imperial European powers, was an evil empire who raped its way around various parts of the globe.

Their genocidal campaigns in what is now Namibia in the early part of the 20th C. was par for the course amongst the European supremacist empires.

These countries were anything but civilised.

Zebra3

Grayson wrote: »

The British developed concentration camps in the Boer war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War#Concentration_camps_.281900.E2.80.931902.29

Yep, Hitler credits "England" with this invention in Mein Kampf, but it was actually the Spanish who it is generally thought who came up with the idea originally.

The USA used the phrase "reservations" to describe the camps they confined Native Americans in during their war of extermination.

Nodin

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:

AFAIK The original notion was to work most of them to death and eliminate the remainder. However they weren't dying fast enough to suit and mass shooting had, in the main, a detrimental effect on those carrying it out, was deemed inefficient and seen as too labour intensive. And given that the ultimate fate was death, regardless of behaviour, there would have been a limit to the usefulness or reliability of any labour.

Mark Tapley

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:

Isn't eyewitness testimony considered first hand evidence, especially corroborated eyewitness testimony.

HansHolzel

Hatrickpatrick has evidently never heard of Zyklon B.

Jimmy Garlic

In 1989 Auschwitz changed its plaque and reduced the number of deaths from 4 million to 1.5 million, a casual reduction of 2.5 million. The overall 6 million total never changed. Of course there are questions.

Nodin

Jimmy Garlic wrote: »

In 1989 Auschwitz changed its plaque and reduced the number of deaths from 4 million to 1.5 million, a casual reduction of 2.5 million. The overall 6 million total never changed. Of course there are questions.

The figure of four million was placed up there by the communist regime. Few took it seriously and when the communists went, so did the plaque.

Rascasse

Zebra3 wrote: »

Yep, Hitler credits "England" with this invention in Mein Kampf, but it was actually the Spanish who it is generally thought who came up with the idea originally.

The USA used the phrase "reservations" to describe the camps they confined Native Americans in during their war of extermination.

It's also worth clarifying the distinction between 'concentration camps' that existed in South Africa and elsewhere and the extermination camps that were created to murder Jews and gypsies, etc during the war. While many died in the concentration camps in SA it was a product of maladministration and disease and not due to policy or design. Whereas, the Nazi's extermination camps were created to kill as many people as quickly as possible. Completely different things even though most people refer to all of them as simply 'concentration camps'.


Regarding the numbers, I'm all for having a debate about things but at this point I don't think the total can really be challenged. Various people have tried to work it out and there seems to be a consensus around the 5 to 6 millions figure. Most people who argue a number substantially lower are either pushing a rather unpleasant agenda or are complete nutters (often both).

Cody Pomeray

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

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.

The problem here is that you could apply that to any genocide.

That the genocide of the European Jews and other minorities was senseless is common to both sides. The simple fact of being able to come up with a credible reason why it was senseless is not enough to overcome the prima facie evidence in the testimony of detainees, staff and the collection of scientific residues that exists in relation to gas chambers and extermination.

That is, this primary evidence shifts the burden of proof to the sceptics to demonstrate "no, it didn't happen like that". So far, the latter burden of proof has never been met. So saying 'gas chambers were a bad idea' is inadequate; I'm pretty sure everyone agrees that they were a bad idea.

smcgiff

Nodin wrote: »

AFAIK The original notion was to work most of them to death and eliminate the remainder. However they weren't dying fast enough to suit and mass shooting had, in the main, a detrimental effect on those carrying it out, was deemed inefficient and seen as too labour intensive. And given that the ultimate fate was death, regardless of behaviour, there would have been a limit to the usefulness or reliability of any labour.

And of course the young children, babies, old and infirm. They were never going to make good labourers. What to do, what to do.

entropi

OP, which holocaust?

There were many, and not widely publicised.

Seachmall

entropi wrote: »

OP, which holocaust?

There were many, and not widely publicised.

There's only one genocide known as "The Holocaust".

bnt

You see these kinds of tactics in other areas too e.g. religion vs evolution or climate change. It's not "denial", it's "asking questions" or "having a conversation", or (my favourite) "teaching the controversy" where no real controversy exists. This "questioning" is not a search for genuine truth, it's all about sowing doubts, because their ideology is threatened by the consensus opinion.

Meanwhile, the reasonable people (i.e. the ones without the offended ideology) have judged the evidence sufficient, accepted the general premise, and moved on to more relevant matters. All the major questions about the Holocaust were answered 60+ years ago, even where details were still to be uncovered. We will never have complete knowledge of what happened, given the lengths to which the Nazis went to cover it up. But even if there are discrepancies in the numbers, the basic facts of the Holocaust remain well-documented.

So what purpose does it serve now, more than 70 years afterwards, to argue about numbers? We remember the Holocaust not simply because it involved the Jews: it could have been anyone, and at other times in history, it was. When we say "Never Again", it's not only the events in Eastern Europe 70 years ago, it's a warning against all forms of genocide. The message hasn't yet reached everywhere, has it? :mad:

April O Neill

Rascasse wrote: »

Most people who argue a number substantially lower are either pushing a rather unpleasant agenda or are complete nutters (often both).

Exactly. I'm not even sure what they are trying to prove. Even if the figure IS lower, that's still too many.

No Pants

Seachmall wrote: »

There's only one genocide known as "The Holocaust".

That's a good point and a good follow-up question would be, "Why is that?" The Armenians had one before that and it's barely mentioned.

jobeenfitz

jimeryan22 wrote: »

Having the "opinion" the holocaust didn't happen I find far more "disturbing", in fact damn offending.. It's like saying the sun didn't come up today

I don't think the sun comes up or down every day. It just appears to.

Wibbs

Zebra3 wrote: »

I strongly disagree with this.

Germany, like the other imperial European powers, was an evil empire who raped its way around various parts of the globe.

Their genocidal campaigns in what is now Namibia in the early part of the 20th C. was par for the course amongst the European supremacist empires.

These countries were anything but civilised.

Certainly, but going on that basis we'll have to throw out every single large civilisation as uncultured and evil. There go the Greeks, there go the Babylonians, the Chin, the Romans...

Mark Tapley wrote: »

Isn't eyewitness testimony considered first hand evidence, especially corroborated eyewitness testimony.

Yes, however the problem can be where there is little or no corroboration. EG the Nazi Gas vans I mentioned before. Plus exaggeration after the fact is very common after any emotionally heightened event. People will also be prone to agreeing with the established story for all sorts of reasons. We can all have experience of that in our own circles of friends where an event in the collective past is stretched in the telling, often enough to the point where the reality of what actually happened is quite changed. Add in politics, revenge, the end of a just war and it can get very muddy. Then you have propaganda, even when it's for a just cause. EG It's not so long ago it was considered a fact that the Nazi's turned Jewish people into soap. This even still gets retold the odd time. Problem is it never happened(and had a long history as it was a similar accusation fired at Germany in the Great War). I mean think about it, what ardent Nazi is going to wash in the fat of people they saw as subhuman? Makes no sense. Another was Jewish people's tattooed skin being turned into lampshades and book bindings. Loads of witnesses and talk of it, yet not one scrap of evidence for it has ever emerged that stood any scrutiny. Never mind that tattoos would be rare among Jewish folk of that time anyway as it's against the religion.

Rascasse wrote: »

It's also worth clarifying the distinction between 'concentration camps' that existed in South Africa and elsewhere and the extermination camps that were created to murder Jews and gypsies, etc during the war. While many died in the concentration camps in SA it was a product of maladministration and disease and not due to policy or design. Whereas, the Nazi's extermination camps were created to kill as many people as quickly as possible. Completely different things even though most people refer to all of them as simply 'concentration camps'.

+1000. Too often those descriptions are conflated. Some German concentration camps had by comparison and considering quite low death rates. Belson an example of that until later in the war. Extermination camps on the other hand... When one considers there were "only" six of these type of camps and then consider the numbers shipped on one way trains it's staggering the level of murder that was taking place.

Actually that's where I take my evidence as hard; trains. The "special" trains and the meticulous German logging of same over the period of the war. Now special trains just meant they weren't a scheduled trip. So you had special trains for holidaying servicemen, even social clubs, but with one vital difference, each one had a return number. Every stop was logged on these trains, every cost, lots of paperwork. No mention of what was at the end of the line for the really special trains buried in the logs, but it's clear there most certainly was one. So where did all those people, those men women and children disappear to? Are there a couple of million Jews and others happily living somewhere in eastern Europe undiscovered? My arse there are.

bnt wrote: »

All the major questions about the Holocaust were answered 60+ years ago,

Actually that's not correct. It was only in the late 60's real scholarship was applied to the period and evidence sifted through, survivors interviewed etc.

MonaPizza

woodoo wrote: »

Surely any subject should be free to be researched, questioned, queried etc. Perhaps it would copper-fasten the current understanding of the holocaust beyond doubt. Or perhaps it may shed new light on exactly what happened. How many were really killed etc. Why be afraid of the truth.

Complain about the service you got in a care in tel Aviv and you're anti-Semitic. Complain about police brutality against a black kid and you're a n##get lover. Complain about pollution and you're a treehugger. Just don't complain you upstart.

Seachmall

No Pants wrote: »

That's a good point and a good follow-up question would be, "Why is that?" The Armenians had one before that and it's barely mentioned.

It seems to be a convention to name major incidents of a specific type with the definite article.

Wiki tells me that The Armenian Genocide (note: "The" Armenian Genocide) was referred to as "The Holocaust" before the Nazis came along.