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Comment on: The Holocaust never happened?

Bigthink — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 19:59:50 +0100

Big Ideas countering Big Lies

Fighting false details with detailed truth is good and important, but so is simply calling a big lie a big lie. "THE" Holocaust DID happen, it WAS evil and it CAN happen again. HAS happened again, IS happening again, albeit under different details, such as in Rwanda and Darfur.

The same failings of both individuals and society that allowed "IT" to happen are what encourage the deniers to think they can get us to doubt, to forget. So we must all be vigilant, not simply dismissive of the outrageous claims of the deniers that are so easily refuted.

Comment on: The Holocaust never happened?

Bigthink — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 07:58:29 +0100

Another popular holocaust denier, besides Ahmadinejad, is Ernst Zundel.

Born in Germany, Zundel founded a small publishing company to disseminate pro-Nazi and antisemitic material. One of the more famous pamphlets published by him was "Did 6 Million Really Die?"

The overall premise was that Holocaust was used as a tool by the allies against the Germans to undermine nationhood and national pride.

The author used a several forms of evidence. First, he criticized the War Crimes Trials (such as the famous example at Nuremberg), arguing that the prosecution's integrity was suspect, and that evidence presented (such as choppy video footage) was disputable and potentially fabricated.

Next, the pamphlet pointed to census records which showed that the Jewish population did not decline significantly between 1938-48, as would be expected with the death of 6 million people. Also, the author claims that the Jewish population in Nazi-Europe never exceeded 2.5 million, and that even if the Nazi's had killed all Jewish people within their borders, the number could never have been as high as 6 million.

Finally, the pamphlet argues that Holocaust's was fabricated as a result of an Ally conspiracy. Offering two theories, the author claims first that Allied Forces wanted to cover-up the death-toll wrung-up by atomic bombs, the Dresden Raids, and Stalin's Gulag. The second reason given is that the Allied Forces used the fabrication as a pretext to establish the state of Israel.

It should be noted that when Ernst Zundel was tried by the Canadian Supreme Court, the Court found that his publications misinterpreted historians and fabricated evidence. The general historical community has summarily disregarded Zundel's work as completely false, and scholars have since proven that his "evidence" was faulty.

Hope this helps.

Comment on: The Holocaust never happened?

Bigthink — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:55:27 +0100

The only place I've actually heard this argument is from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad), the president of Iran. My (incomplete) following of this statement led me to conclude that Ahmedinejad made this statement to provoke a public argument. He used the publicity of this provocative statement to draw out the facts around the Holocaust. Facts like what death camps there were, where they were, and who was responsible. After pulling these facts to the forefront of the conversation he used them to point out the fact that even though the Germans were responsible and that this was a European atrocity Moslems in Palestine are the ones paying for it. The renunciation of the Holocaust was unfounded and only intended to help illustrate the hypocrisy of the crimes being committed on the Palestinians by those that were so offended by the comment.