[Peace-discuss] a note on Holocaust denial

[David Gehrig]

Folks, some thoughts on Holocaust denial, from someone who's studied it 
for fifteen years. It's going only to peace-discuss.

I think some background would be helpful here.

Holocaust denial is a conspiracy theory of neo-Nazi origins claiming 
that literally millions of Jews have secretly collaborated on a global 
fraud orders of magnitude larger and more complex than any James Bond 
villain could even dream of.

Intellectually, it's on par with the folks who think that NASA and 
Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing. But on top of its idiocy, it 
adds a thick, wide, and inescapable layer of antisemitic wackdoodlism.

Here's what I mean. The Watergate scandal involved under fifty 
conspirators, was protected by the most powerful man in the world, but 
it still rattled apart in just two years. The conspiracy theory that 
Holocaust deniers push requires not fifty Jews, not five hundred Jews, 
not five thousand Jews, not fifty thousand Jews, not five hundred 
thousand Jews, but five million Jews -- roughly a quarter of the world's 
Jewish population -- to stick impeccably to a criminal script flawlessly 
for over sixty years. As such, it ascribes to the Jews an inexplicable 
and inhuman capacity for criminality of the largest imaginable 
dimensions.

What would you say to someone who tells you that one quarter of all 
people of Italian descent are active in the Cosa Nostra? You would 
rightly assail his idiocy, his paranoia, and his bigotry. Yet this is 
not that different from what Holocaust deniers claim about the world's 
Jews.

It is like a burning cross. There is no dignified way to turn your eyes 
and pretend you didn't see it when it happens in your own town.

If there is interest, I'd be happy to give a talk on the topic -- its 
neo-Nazi origins, and its attempt in the mid-2000's to repaint itself as 
"anti-Zionist" rather than "pro-Adolf" in order to try recruiting on the 
progressive left, while telling exactly the same lies. Few on the left 
have been fooled. But, as we have learned locally, few is not none.

David @%<