Tonight, I posted a comment to a post on RWNutjob's page. He gave a long winded and pretty lame conspiracy theory backed by faulty reasoning, giving poor comparisons and illogical conclusions. I don't have time to point out the reasoning flaws, because I hope to not have to read those words again.
Still, my comment stands here, as well, as his page may change, and he may choose to remove comments or remove a blog. Not likely, but if you refuse to go to his page, as I have generally done in the past, you won't read it. There were many other fine comments, as well.
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Mike! Clearly you have never left the sacred soil of the delusional US and learned another language, lived in another country, or walked in the footsteps of those who witnessed the last century, before during and after the occupation. There is a reason one is not allowed to "deny" the Holocaust happened, that would be on par with committing treason.I wish had known my danish grandfather, but I didn't really. I was young when he died. I am told he was part of the underground movement to get as many Jews to safety as possible. He didn't need to, I mean, he was a white christian, but he did his duty to himself and humanity. I have been to some of the harbor piers that the small boats were launched from. I have walked over the remains of Nazi bunkers along the beach. Thankfully, the Danes were pretty successful at smuggling out so many. But, in defending "their Jews", many Danes still lost their lives. The King wore a yellow star armband in solidarity, and rode his horse among the citizens every day during occupation. As a student of danish, one is required to learn civil rights, human rights, european history and local law. Next to my school lies Mindelunden park, the memorial for the resistance fighters and those who were murdered by the Nazis. I learned more about human rights and democracy living abroad in Spain and Denmark, than in any history or "civics" classes in the US. And I have had a top notch education, and was an honors student. Today, I am a licensed family practice physician, so I think my intellect is probably pretty good with reasoning skills.
Americans know surprisingly little about a lot of things, including the bankrolling of Nazis by American sympathizers in the Republican Party. Americans also don't know that Europe is not a country, or that the social contracts of Social Welfare and Medicine were part of the reparations from the war so that all citizens were committed to welfare of each other. Naturally, if we think someone as repulsive as Paul Ryan is worthy of the vice presidency, we cannot grasp the comprehension of the atrocities my grandparents and many others lived through. I was fortunate, in school, to meet people who were refugees from a the ongoing war in Bosnia, refugees from Iraq and Iran (this was about the time Bin Laden was on the scene, but Americans were busy fussing over a blow job instead of actually reading the news, everyone else knew what was going on). I met people who watched their villages burned down, and lost their families. I was classmates with the Minister of Education from Rwanda, one of the only ministers who was not executed during the uprisings. I met people in political asylum, who would be shot upon returning to their homeland. And, embarrassing to me, all of them were appalled when we arrived to school one day to face the news of the Columbine shootings. No one could understand how America, with everything, could be be so base and vile.
Mike, your religious beliefs are yours, and you may keep them. But to believe that you can disprove the atrocities of the holocaust because you can't comprehend them diminishes the humanity of millions of people. The millions of Jews who were hunted and killed, the millions of Jews who were displaced, the millions of gypsies who were hunted and killed, the millions of citizens of all the European countries whose lives were destroyed by the fascist parties of Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, and France, the millions of people whose neighborhoods still bear the scars of occupation and murder.
You can lie to yourself and your family all you want. But it is still a lie, even if you believe it. I dare you to get on a plane and go to the concentration camps and speak to survivors yourself and continue believing the foolishness you wrote of today. Even if you did, it wouldn't change the truth of what happened. Standing in the home of Ann Frank, and touching the wallpaper she stared at, and staring out the window will never put me in her shoes, or teach me the fear they lived in until they were captured and murdered. Slavery and imprisonment is still a crime, even if we justify it for political means. Most Americans are not aware of the forcible encarceration of Japanese Americans or the loss of their rights and property for being Japanese. Most Americans are not aware of the laws we made against every single ethnic group that came here that was not white and northern European and christian. I don't care what our Founding Fathers meant, because they were racist and misogynist slave owners. If you want to stand in that company, I pity you.
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IT HAPPENED. It's not a lie--it never was. Eisenhower made a trip particularly to see the camps with his own eyes so that he could personally refute anyone who insisted the Nazi atrocities could never have happened.
The danger is, the survivors who can bear witness to the truth are becoming scarcer. I recommend a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. If Poland is too far to go.
Rated.
What is worthy of discussion, I'd say, is how the Holocaust is used politically. There are actually two Holocausts: The complex of historical events that killed millions of people during the Second World War, and the paranoid fantasy used to justify comparable inhuman actions today, including the impending Israeli attack on Iran. I feel it is essential to separate the two. George Santayana said that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Let me suggest here that one can also learn the wrong things from history. Perhaps respect for human life and basic human dignity would be a good lesson.
Rated.
Oddly, rwnut closed the post (which was comprised mostly of quotes of others) with what seems to be his opinion: "The long and the short of it though is that the Holocaust has been greatly distorted and is but one of a long series of human atrocities." Taken literally, the closing sentence indicates in a political sense that rwnut recognizes the nazi genocide (numbers of victims, range of committed atrocities aside) to be 'the Holocaust' just as you do.
How wonderful it would be if The Holocaust were indeed behind us and how convenient it is to militarist Judeo-Christian zionUSt$ to claim that such is the case.
http://open.salon.com/blog/oesheepdog/2010/04/09/how_i_helped_teach_a_gentile_to_never_forget_the_holocaust
Rated for each single victim,alive or dead
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Rw, this sort of post always frightens and saddens me, since it's not only hateful, but it totally leaves the floor of reality. As someone who has actually taught Nazi and Holocaust history at the university level for many years, and who keeps close tabs on recent research and debates, I can assure you that there is at least as much evidence to document the organized murder of the European Jews as there is for the moon landing (a bizarre comparison, by the way). And on a purely personal level, I can have no doubt: My father actually helped liberate some of these camps at the end of WWII, I've met several camp survivors with their tattooed arms, and even old Nazis – raging anti-Semites, in fact – I've talked to freely admit the existence of a master plan. While there will always be debate on the details (as with any other historical event), there is no debate on the big picture.
This historian you cite is using a very old and very transparent trick: Take the Nazis' own pronouncements, and then point out the many inconsistencies in the historical record, many of which arise from the competing interests and strategies at the time. The Nazis used coded language to conceal their intentions, for fear of alienating their own citizens and allied nations, and other groups wanted to keep the Jews alive for slave labor purposes (e.g. the Schindler story). There were endless clashes, and it's taken decades to work out the full story - hence the two plaques you display at the top of the article.
Here's my nutshell - or mustard seed - retelling of the Holocaust: Hitler was determined to eliminate the Jews from German society, e.g. by kicking them out of their careers and social status, and then from Germany as a whole. Once he found himself the master of more and more of Europe, he wanted to eliminate them from Europe. He didn't want to get his own hands dirty, so he placed the job in the hands of the SS. They began planning for emigration to the US, Palestine etc., then - as the population under their control mounted, to Madagascar. When that proved impossible, they wanted to deport them all to Siberia after the defeat of the USSR. When that failed, and they were left with mouths to feed and space and hygienic issues in the midst of a Europe on the move, local commanders took it into their hands to start murdering the Jews under their control. The SS under Heydrich formalized this, and mass killing - increasingly in killing centers instead of by SS death squads - was underway by 1942. The murder was also partially influenced by Hitler's bizarre belief that Jews were hostages against US involvement in the war, and that they must all die.
The Jews were as much victims of the internal logic of the Nazi system as they were to individual perpetrators. Contrary to the popular view, the Third Reich wasn’t organized top-down, but had competing power centers. The Nazis regarded Jews as a resource, just like Ukrainian grain and Czech armaments factories. Himmler, Heydrich and the SS were hoping for a bigger piece of the postwar pie by killing all the 11 million Jews of Europe before the end of the war, thus impressing Hitler with their ruthlessness and efficiency. In fact, a great many factors came together. The reason why there is no direct order linking all this to Hitler is that Hitler avoided signing such orders. Today we call this "deniability," and as you can see, it worked. The moment he expressed his desire to "remove" Jews from Europe, the results that we saw, i.e. up to 6 million murdered Jews, were pretty much inevitable.
The pure overkill of the anti-Jewish campaign has come to mask the Nazis’ larger plans, which included the gradual extermination of the Polish and Russian nations, leaving only a remainder to serve as permanent slaves to the Aryan master race. The SS’s “General Plan for the East” called for tens of millions of murders, using gassing and incineration facilities dwarfing anything in Auschwitz or Treblinka. The Jews were only exceptional in their bad luck, since they and the Gypsies were just the first names on what would have become a global death list.
Your historian just ignores all these facts and highlights the many misconceptions. For example, the business about the lampshades made of human skin is largely bogus, and the same goes for the soap. One of the most hair-raising comparisons is always to the US internment camps for Japanese-Americans during WWII. As terrible and unjust as they were, there is no comparison to a slave labor camp or a killing factory like Treblinka. It's apples and oranges.
His account reminds me of an elaborate 90-minute German-language revisionist documentary on Youtube that tells the whole Nazi story as an epic of national pride and self-defense against Anglo-American victimization. It doesn’t use the word “Jew” once.
What both you and this historian are correct about is that the Holocaust has been consistently misused for political purposes ever since 1945. Perhaps the most appalling exploitation of this crime is the way it’s being used to justify a preemptive war on the sovereign nation of Iran on trumped up WMD charges, as if Iran had any connection whatsoever to Hitler and the SS. Norman Finkelstein writes about this sort of thing in “The Holocaust Industry” and “Chutzpa.” This matter is certainly open to debate. Holocaust revisionism, on the other hand, is nothing but hateful anti-Jewish propaganda.
This week I have been witness to some horrible things that many people have said to each other, here, and have chosen not to delve into it. Since I have long avoided the dustups as much as I can, and have had a long policy of preferring to comment solely on the post, not other commenters, I did not see the value in shouting at the wind. Still, there are some whose opinion I do value more, and they know I have had some conversations in private about the grotesque verbal abuse, character defamation and insults that were being perpetuated in the name of fighting bigotry. It was astonishing.
I don't read Nutjob's work, for the most part, because it disgusts me. I was happy (actually, no, really angry) to have to write what I wrote last night. And here it is, just about the only evidence of what his vile work represented. No Alan, it is not too long. You may want to archive it on your own blog, as well.
98% spam and this between the spam.
Through Quaker meeting, I heard and saw witness of the ongoing conflicts between Israel and Palestine, from committed peacekeepers. I think it is atrocious, but that does not make me an anti-semite. I don't see an end to this fight any time soon, but I am glad there are still peacemakers on both sides, and people invested in conflict resolution who are willing to go to the borders of these conflicts and try to get both sides to stop killing.
Thank you for your level-headed and eloquent post. I have only one comment to add.
Denying or twisting history dooms humans only to repeating the same mistakes. Not only in the case of the Holocaust but also in other historic events.
Rated♥
That is a good and bad thing. We are doomed, it seems, to repeat these cycles, our memory no longer than a generation or two. We learn new facts, and change our frames of reference. Depending on which side of the line you are on, you are either a freedom fighter or a guerrilla.
There is a really strange and wonderful movie called, Everything is Illuminated. A young American man, Jewish, tracks his family to the Ukraine. In his hunt for his ancestors, he bears witness to atrocities that have since been buried and forgotten. And, the sunflowers were all real (not CGI).
All of Europe and Asia (and elsewhere) is steeped in the blood of others, the soil made from the bones of farmers and soldiers, warriors and slaves. It is for us to remind ourselves that every life is significant, and every murder matters. No matter where we live, someone has died there before us. No one's suffering is more valuable than another's. We can justify our cruelty any way we like, but it is still cruelty.
Sometimes I am deeply ashamed of my species in general, often when I pray I apologize to God for what humans do and pray His/Her heart will be soothed. I cannot imagine the pain of God in knowing that we hurt each other so monstrously and think nothing of it, sometimes lusting in inflicting suffering on another. When I think about God and the holocaust, I shudder and am glad I am not God. What little I know is enough to make me hurt.
I didn't read nutjobs post, I had no idea he talked about the holocaust, I scrolled quickly down to the comment box. The comment he left was enough for me to visit his post and leave a comment without reading what he wrote, I assumed it was toxic because it was him. I've seen him around enough that just seeing his comment on any post makes me shudder with revulsion. I don't read what he writes because I'm sensitive to such things and have experienced only vile and repulsive things coming out of him. That has been my only experience the times I've come across his comments.
I don't pity him, he gets off on what he's doing and it grosses me out. I pity myself (and anyone else who is repulsed by him) each time I stumble across his comments.
The ideological cult fathered by Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl had great success with introducing into secular lexicon of numerous languages the concept of anti-semitism or anti-Semitism, regardless the meaning of Semite. Getting the term 'Holocaust' into popular lexicons with all the implications associated to it by the (now highly militant) cult can hardly be more of success than it is today.
The wealth of the rulers of the Americas and most European societies was/is derivative of perpetual holocausts. Centuries of African slave trade were holocaustic enterprises primarily insured by, when not as well backed by, U.S. and English financial engineers and markets.
The founders of Texas built their nation on genocide, though of course since the term 'genocide' had yet to be invented the concept of 'patriotism' served the same purpose much as it does today for USraeli militarist. On the heels of the astoundingly rewarding capital successes of European/American-perpetrated genocides or holocausts in the Americas, in early 20thCE Armenians suffered Turkey's genocidal ambitions; less than two decades later the roots of nazi-perpetrated genocide were well in place for yet another round of mankind's presumably unchallengeable genocides; US in Vietnam following less than a generation later.
Use of the word holocaust (with or without 'the' or ' The') with upper case "h" has become something far more than a convention. It is akin to a cult's hand salute. Something propagandized to the point that one's refusal to salute incurs a righteous wrath questioning the core one's being with acrid epithets such as "self-hating Jew", Jew-hater [aka 'anti-semitic' or 'anti-Semitic'], Nazi sympathizer, racist or bigot, pathologically insane, or worse.
Jews invading and claiming that land using the excuse their ancestors lived there 2000 years ago is like millions of Anglo-Americans suddenly deciding to invade England, drive out the current inhabitants, establish a state, brutally kill people who live there, and force the humiliated survivors to live in horrible conditions in ghettos.
Before anyone gets hot under the collar and decides to accuse me of anti-semitism, just remember I am 1/8 Jewish ancestry, and I think Jews are being anti-Palestinian, although that term just does not have the same volatile meaning as the term anti-semite, as if Palestinians are just rats or something.
I consider Jews and Palestinians of equal worth and value. The only real solution I can figure is they should just go back to the original Abramist religion that unites all Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and all marry and have kids so in the next generation there is no difference. Then again, their descendants would just invent another reason to fight, wouldn't they. Then people would make up more dehumanizing terms for the "others".
I used to consider myself an Abramist, and developed quite an elaborate cultural view uniting concepts and views of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I have become more atheist. These days I consider myself a scientist interested in facts. I consider no human race superior or inferior to any other.
Terrible holocausts have occurred all over this planet the last hundred years in every nation in which billions of people have died in wars and disasters, Russians, Germans, Jews, Armenians, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Africans, and many others. While the Jews suffered a horrible holocaust, it is sad that the living ones in Israel are involved in doing to others what was done to them.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3176/3176-h/3176-h.htm
These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of bareness that never, never, never, do shake the glare from their harsh outlines…; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under six funereal palms. … A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. … We reached [Mount] Tabor safely. … We never saw a human being on the whole route.
To think there has been a genocide of the Palestinian people is ludicrous. Many stealth Jew haters even here. Pertsonally I love O.B's passion and insight -here flaw is how she lumps people like Paul Ryan and for that matter myself into the same cauldron with haters. He is one of the good guys as I know I am. There is so much pre-judgement going on by these elitists here. I live in Massachusetts with many of you. "How did Nixon win, I do not know anyone who voted for him, is this Chardonnay from Napa?"
You cannot be enlighted and be bashing a person who will be part of the line that defends Jews and other groups that might be scapegoated in the future. He is one of the good guys, you disagree fine but, you slander and you create the world you profess to despise.
But, this is not about Romney or you voting. This is about forgetting what we have already learned. It is a short ride from economic downfall to fascist takeover of government. As we are a fairly armed populace and half of us less live than two paychecks from poverty, it won't take much to ignite a fire.
In fact that meeting in 1942 at Wannsee where 14 Nazi officials met and decided to kill all the Jews of Europe 8 0f the 14 held Doctorates.
Being a PHD and considering yourself reasonable was not even in question on that date in that room amongst that highly educated think tank.
Obama cut 700 million out of Medicare -not a peep. Show me were Ryan has attacked Medicare?he is trying to save it and improve it -read his bill. Existing seniors and anyone within ten years of retirement are not affected by his recomendations, how is that repulsive-
Watch him being attached and see how good and civil and reasonable he is under an embarrassing attack-http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-balan/2012/07/20/norah-odonnell-challenges-paul-ryan-tax-rate-extension-afraid-call-th