Denial - Proving the Holocaust Happened
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Does anyone else find it sad that we've gotten to this point? Not bashing the movie or such, but the fact that there is a movie about people like this? The fact that denying the Holocaust has become popular enough that a movie can be made about that subject?
Is that why this was made? Maybe the people who made it were just inspired by an old stupidity, or inspired to show a similar example of blatant denial we once faced to juxtapose it to perhaps current blatant denial?Sniper Team 4 said:
Well, in regards to libel, I guess you could argue that the defendant is being accused of accusing the accuser of something.Recusant said:
It's even creepier than you realize. If you're feeling overly positive about the world sometime, take a walk around the street and ask those you pass how many people died in the Holocaust. The sheer number of times you'll hear "six million" will fix you up right quick; quite a few people seem to think the gays, Communists, Catholics, Anarchists, Armenians and other general undesirables just up and killed themselves.bjj hero said:
I am far from an expert in this matter but I imagine that since there is no question about "guilt" in the case (ie. the case is brought to trial because the accused did what they're accused of), the case is down to whether or not what was done was unlawful or not, rather than whether or not the accused is guilty. So it's not a matter of proving guilt, but of whether or not an action was unlawful.Recusant said:
This is too complicated to address here, but there are reasons. Chief among them is anti-semitism which is still alive and well. However it's a little harder to hate a people who are victims, so by reducing or denying them victimhood, they become less human, less sympathetic and easier to hate. There are entire essays and editorials on the subject of my one sentence and I won't detail that any further. There are also political reasons which are indirectly anti-semitic, eg. anti-Israel, pro-Arab or white nationalist/supremacist beliefs. The latter do still exist.bjj hero said:
Another reason is down to the left/"progressives". In the game of "victimhood olympics", there's not much space for the Jews anymore. Now victims are women, gays, blacks and other minorities. In their need to be the biggest victims, historical victimhood has less of a place, except where it supports the progressives' story. This article [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2016/04/21/calling-out-the-holocaust-is-the-logical-end-point-of-the-lefts/] speaks much better about it, but an excerpt to highlight the point
I believe the first speaker was applauded. It's shameful, but the tragedy is that it's done by people who claim to be the least racist, the least homophobic, the least insensitive.
I've actually heard people say that the Holocaust was made up by the British and the Americans to discredit the Nazis post WW2 and that if there was any small amount of abuse against the Jews then Hitler didn't know about it and didn't order it. So I guess people trying to legitimize Hitler and the Nazis.KingsGambit said:
I also remember a girl who just didn't believe that it happens just because she believed that humans couldn't do that to each other on that scale. No malice intended by her, just incredible naivety. This was at school so I bet (I hope) she's not still that naive these days.
Maybe I am nieve, but to address the first speaker: This is not atrocity top trumps. If you feel other genocides are overlooked then plan and arrange awareness events for them, rather than banning all memorial days. Without getting too political, I am unimpressed with some of the Israeli governments actions but you cannot pin that on a whole race and it does not take away from the horrors of WWII.KingsGambit said:
Look at internet culture and it's hostility towards Jews. I cannot sincerely act surprised about such things anymore when terms like "Jew Gold" and Le Happy Merchant are frequent things used unironically in this culture. I don't see how anyone can.
Yeah, World War II defies almost all logic when you actually break down the numbers on it, and I really don't think most people realize just how bad it was. The holocaust was horrendous, but mostly because of how cold and industrialized the whole process was. The way pseudoscience, politics and prejudice shaped a national policy into something so abominable.Bobular said:
In terms of overall deaths though, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the unfathomable mountain of corpses that World War II created. Over 60 million people are estimated to have died in WWII. That was about 3% of the world's population in 1940. If that kind of event happened today, that would be something like 210 MILLION people dead. Or roughly 2/3 the population of the United States. Or the entire populations of the UK, France *and* Germany combined.
It's perfectly fine to glorify the heroism. A lot of brave people did some amazing things on all sides of WWII, but we can't ever let ourselves forget the horrors. I really don't think our species could survive another total war. Not with modern weapons.
I fail to see how any of this has anything to do with the left "denying" the Holocaust. Pointing out that schools barely even scratch the surface of genocides in Namibia, Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda, etc is not the same as someone claiming the Holocaust never happened, holy fuck why do I even have to explain this? I dare you to find one single western "leftist" outside of an incomprehensible tumblr blog openly denying the Holocaust. As in, asserting that it never happened, or was greatly exaggerated.KingsGambit said:
You're stretching out waaaay out of the atmosphere to find some way to blame this on "leftists". You had me until that part, which is actually quite disrespectful to try to twist "maybe talk about these other genocides every now and then" as "the murder of these 6 million people never happened." Learning about the Holocaust is extremely important, which is why there's been numerous Hollywood movies made about it, and tends to be a huge part of the curriculum in schools. Pretending like it's something that only the Nazis tried to do is disrespectful to that core message, however.
I got rather well-acquainted with this issue when two rather persistent holocaust deniers trolled a lightly moderated message board I attended. Typically it starts with people who may have more sympathetic views towards fascist and nationalist ideologies, even if they don't care as much about Germany specifically (though they usually do). Since the Holocaust is the most direct and visceral counter-argument against fascist/third position/nationalist ideologies (see what happens when you let these guys in), it makes sense that fans of the ideology would find some way to claim the Holocaust wasn't a big deal. Obviously, if you believe that it never happened or wasn't that bad or was par for the course, then of course you don't feel like you're disrespecting anyone.bjj hero said:
And what is described in the review is exactly how it works, trolling by pointing out dubious kernels of uncertainty. One of the biggest problems is that the Soviets took over the vast majority of concentration camps, there were a lot more on the eastern front than the west. Just as a refresher, the west and the Soviets would be locked in a staring contest for 40 years, and they weren't about to let in a bunch of western researchers poke around the camps, and internal information from the Soviets weren't always entirely accurate or reliable. When the wall fell, we had much better access to them, but PROVING that a particular room that was obviously used for gassing 45+ years after the fact, or PROVING that Zyklon B canisters were used in those rooms is quite difficult. They latch onto these tiny little kernels of uncertainty to create a different narrative, one where the camps weren't all that bad, they weren't looking to mass murder people, and that the Soviets (who justifiably hated the Nazis with every fiber of their being) exaggerated this simple "work camps" into something much worse for propaganda purposes. The Soviets had work camps and gulags and even the Americans had Japanese internment, so a few work camps in Germany shouldn't be any big deal, right? You blend that with anti-semitism, and every "Holocaust survivor" is just a Jew who lied about it in order to push some cultural-marxist agenda where Communists and Capitalist liberals alike were angels and the other side was pure evil.
Obviously we have mountains of evidence now from a great number of sources, both eyewitnesses and physical evidence, that the Holocaust really did happen and it was one of the worst things any country had ever done. But it makes a very dark kind of sense when you start to delve into the rabbit hole of people who want to believe in "alternative" interpretations of history so their country/ethnic group/political alignment doesn't look so horrible.
Where to start? Firstly, something doesn't have to be "the same as" to be relevant. You "fail to see" because you aren't understanding what's being said. I can put it into a more topical context and maybe that will help.hentropy said:
Currently in the USA there is a movement shouting that "Black Lives Matter". It is in response to the disproportionately high number of shootings of blacks in the US by the police, often innocent, unarmed people who've committed no crime. The police in these shootings for the most part get away with literal murder. Further, black criminals usually face much harsher sentencing than their white counterparts (ie. a black criminal will often get a harsher sentence for the same crime). In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, a justified campaign to bring attention to injustice and systemic racism, other voices have begun chanting "All lives matter".
Now the thinking behind "All lives matter" is that all unjustified shootings by police should be questioned and condemned, that all victims are tragic. This is however a racist response and same as the speaker quoted in the article I linked. Saying "All lives matter" is covering up the issue, it is saying that black lives shouldn't need particular attention because *all* lives matter. But it is missing the point that there is observable, statistical, demonstrable, quantifiable evidence that police and the US judiciary are unfairly prejudiced against blacks. I'm not saying these are precisely the same thing, before you reply to say they aren't exactly identical in every detail. There is, however, a direct parallel here.
You may agree that the Holocaust shouldn't be memorialised for whatever reason, or not. But the implication of denying the memorial "because there are other genocides out there", that Jews shouldn't have any more attention is racist, and couching it behind the guise of "equality" makes it much more tragic and IMO, quite sinister. bjj hero above has said it, IMO, the best way possible and he demonstrates what a decent, normal human being should feel. It is not atrocity top trumps, there it nothing to stop anyone from organising similar memorials for the victims of other tragedies. Read the article I linked to to understand more.
I'll add one minor point as an aside. You'll notice on the news that when accidents are reported, they always make a point of mentioning victims from your country specifically. "10 killed in XYZ, 2 were American" or the like. They do it because it's more relevant. It sounds horrible to say, but it's true. In the same way, it stands to reason that a tragedy in Europe would be more significant to us in Europe, than tragedies elsewhere. We have relatives and survivors of the holocaust living amongst us still, their (great) grandkids are in classrooms right now at local schools. The Holocaust is more significant to us in Europe because it's still in our collective memories, because it was singularly horrific beyond even most other horrific things and quite relevantly, unlike with most other atrocities, there are still folks out there trying to deny it or twist it. I'll also briefly quote rcs619 above, "we can't let ourselves forget the horrors".
Well they are quite different, All Lives Matters tries to co-opt the slogan in order to draw attention away from black victims of police brutality. In other words, to try and nullify Black Lives Matter in the minds of the average voter.KingsGambit said:
But it is interesting you bring it up, because in a discussion about holocaust denial you feel the need to go on a long tirade about how "the left does it too" in order to draw attention away from the usual suspects, ie far right-wingers and nationalists. Oh noes one person at one wacky left-wing college in one country said one thing once! Totally worth bringing up alongside Holocaust Denial, which has been a pervasive phenomenon that has gripped the far-right and nationalists all across the world for decades and results in continued hate crimes to this day!
For the record, I do support a World Genocide Remembrance Day along with a Holocaust Memorial day. I don't think one should be replaced by the other. At the same time, there is frustration because not every group that has been the victim of genocide has the numbers or the influence in the west to ensure that their genocide is given attention as well. The sad thing is that if we were to give a day to every atrocity and genocide that has ever happened in the 20th century alone, it would be near constant.
I don't know exactly how the British school system works, and the article in question is meant to persuade rather than inform me (so of course they only cherry-picked one part of the speech and didn't link or quote any other part). So you'll excuse me if I continue not to take it too seriously.
I do have to ask the question though, what does this have to do with holocaust denial? Nothing. No one at that conference denied the Holocaust. Even if it was racist as you say, that is only tangentially related. You brought it up because you feel the need to take pot shots at the "other side" as part of a well-worn balance fallacy, and it's transparent as hell. Deflecting blame on incomparable examples in order to protect one's tribe seems to be the political order of the day.
Small, private, and notoriously left-wing colleges whether they are in the US or UK are not only unrepresentative of society at large but unrepresentative of most colleges and students. It would be really nice if people stopped talking about them [http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/shut-up-about-harvard/] in arguments to make cheap political points that are impossible to extrapolate to the entire college culture or industry. In the US we have tiny, wacky liberal colleges that complain about microagressions and cultural appropriation in lunch menus. But we also have wacky conservative colleges that will expel you for having premarital sex and force people to attend political rallies. An exclusive focus on either is rather silly considering 99% of students don't go to either.
I cannot explain it any better, I'm sorry, I don't think you are able to understand. If my earlier posts or the article, or the parallel i drew cannot help, then I have no more words to help you understand. Just understand this instead...tho you cannot see the problem, know that it is there and that people like that speaker and those who applauded her are part of it. It is about reducing the victimhood of the Jews in the Holocaust, since victimhood is a political currency. I'm sorry you're unable to understand the issue and I'm unable to explain it any better. Your asking me to "excuse you if you continue not to take it too seriously" tells me any more words will be wasted.hentropy said:
I will keep my question short and simple in kind. How? How is what she said reducing the victimhood of Jews? This seems to be the crux of the issue. I just don't personally believe that pointing out that other genocides have happened and we should focus on them more means we should focus on the Jewish Holocaust less. It's not a zero-sum game.KingsGambit said:
And I do fully understand your intentions in bringing this up, as I noted in the last post. You're likely a conservative, or at least an anti-liberal, who can't focus on any particular issue without somehow finding a way to blame it all on "leftists".
You know, I love a good conspiracy theory... but I've never understood the logic behind the ones inherently based on the notion that HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of people are collectively lying about something.
At least the random person on the street will stick with "oops" when you correct them.
Sorry if this comment comes off as aggressive, but as a Jew, I don't expect everyone to have much more knowledge of the Holocaust than a fading memory of history classes. So I'm going to respectfully suggest that repeating a number you idly remember hearing multiple times in reference to the Halocaust is "slightly" less disrespectful than adamantly claiming it never happened.Recusant said:
At least the random person on the street will stick with "oops" when you correct them.