Sunday, November 30, 2008

The Subtext of Denial

Deniers attempt to morally justify most Nazi acts that they do not deny. Siegert and Rudolf have defended reprisals; Hargis has defended the shooting of Jewish children; and both Berg and Porter have defended deportations to 'internment' camps. These defenses only make sense if we assume a threshold for the definition of genocide that is far higher than that used by the UN. Deniers state there was no genocide of the Jews; thus deportations, reprisal killings, and even executions of children, are not genocide.

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Why do deniers insist on this high threshold for genocide and is it logically sustainable? The two parts of this question are interconnected. Deniers insist on the high threshold partially because they wish to impose a fallacy of personal incredulity on the events they deny. Their argument, in a nutshell, is that gassing claims and atrocity 'propaganda' require the Germans to have exhibited a degree of personal cruelty and malevolence that is psychopathic and demonic. The Holocaust is thus, in their view, a form of mystical demonology.

This position is only sustainable, however, by ignoring the malice present in the Nazi acts that deniers are happy to defend. Was it cruel to rob Jews of their property? Hargis says 'no'. Was it cruel to break up families and separate the sexes? Apparently not. Most importantly of all, the threshold ignores simple maths. A ratio of killing that equates a hundred Jews to one dead German - which Siegert and Rudolf defend - is a more cruel ratio than if a decision had been made to kill between five and six million Jews in reprisal for the deaths of over two million Germans in World War I. The acceptance by deniers of the fact that Germany employed a 100:1 killing ratio should therefore destroy any incredulity defense when faced with evidence that Hitler authorized a genocide, and a vengeful SS carried out that genocide, in fulfillment of a desire to exterminate a 'race' that had 'stabbed Germany in the back.'

However, contra deniers and contra Goldhagen, to accept that these acts were cruel, and that the perpetrators were therefore perfectly capable of killing six million Jews, is not to engage in demonology. When an ideology of vengeance, which may be held by just a few individuals, is spread through a state bureaucracy with a culture of violence, the state can commit acts of cruelty without most of its members being sadists or psychopaths or 'exterminationist antisemites.' Moreover, the genocidal nature of Nazi acts does not preclude comparisons with similar acts by other states. Anti-deniers should not, in my view, argue that the Nazi state was 'uniquely' genocidal whilst ignoring genocidal acts committed by the allies, but nor should they ignore the fact that Nazi genocide had racial underpinnings that made it more likely to escalate into an attempt to kill every Jew in Europe, thereby exceeding all other genocidal acts in their attempted scope and comprehensiveness.

Instead, anti-deniers need to be more mindful of a high denier threshold for genocide when debating such issues as the gas chambers at the death camps. It would be a dangerous error to create the impression that anti-deniers were agreeing with deniers that the crucial crossing of the threshold of genocide did not occur until the Nazis began to gas children at Chelmno, or until the Einsatzgruppen began to shoot women and children in the USSR. The threshold was crossed far earlier than that, in acts that deniers have never claimed did not take place. The full moral meaning of that fact is a fundamental truth that deniers cannot face. Their shifting of moral boundaries is therefore the ultimate 'denial within denial'.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

News from denierbud

After we have long taunted the author of the "One Third of the Holocaust" video clips about his not linking to our rebuttals of his productions, it's only fair to point out that he has finally linked to those rebuttals, on the "Rebuttals" page of a new site on which denierbud has put together all his videos and writings.

I don't know how long the text quoted below has been there as I don't look up denierbud's publications on a regular basis, so I'll assume it's at least as old as denierbud's new site:

This website will publish any rebuttal written by a full or associate professor in a History department of a recognized university, right here, unedited, at the top of this page.

Currently there are rebuttals written to episodes of One Third of the Holocaust. They are written by people who are not tenured professors in History departments, and the writers do engage in ad hominem put downs. Nevertheless they can be found here. Read them and make your own decision.


One wonders who denierbud thinks he is to require rebuttals from "tenured professors in History departments". Does he have any academic credentials? If so, that's not what becomes apparent from the arguments in his videos and writings, which are sometimes hilariously infantile. And someone who makes such high demands on the qualification of who writes rebuttals to his wisdom should at least reveal who he is and what educational background he has. Tenured professors in history departments of recognized universities might want to know who they are addressing.

As to the fellow's second argument, it's an amusing spectacle to see someone indulge in something as offensive as denying the proven murder of millions of innocent people and at the same time complain about "ad hominem put downs". This hypocritical whining and the nitpicking about his critics' academic qualifications seem to be the only arguments denierbud can offer against our rebuttals.

Anyway, we recommend our readers to do just what denierbud asks his readers to do: watch the videos and read what denierbud has written, then read our rebuttals, then decide for yourselves about the merit of one and the other.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

Hargis Defends the Robbery of Jewish Property by the Nazi State

At the height of his public embarrassment, Hargis spews forth his antisemitic filth here:
Revisionists do not argue that Jews were not deported, relocated, and at times had their assets seized (assets that many felt were nefariously gained).
Hargis does not tell us who this 'many' were and he does not cite any evidence for this supposedly popular viewpoint, which he makes clear that he shares.

Monday, November 03, 2008

The Crazy World of Walter Sanning (Part 9)

Below are two further cases of blatant manipulation and distortion by Sanning to consider.

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Firstly, Sanning states (p. 103) that a Canadian-Jewish journalist by the name of Arthur Raymond Davies, attended a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee meeting in the fall of 1944, during which the secretary, Schachne Epstein, "reported the evacuation of 3.5 million Jews from the territories occupied by Germany".

RODOH poster Warheitseeker has kindly located the original passage in Davies' book and posted it here. This is what Davies actually wrote:
He thanked the Jews of the world for their aid to the Soviet people. He greeted the Jews of Poland. He revealed that the Germans had killed about five million Jews and that the Soviet Union had succeeded in saving three-and-a-half million.
So what does Sanning add and omit? Firstly, Epstein does not mention evacuation; Sanning infers it without telling his readers that he is drawing an inference rather than reporting direct speech. This in itself is dishonest. Secondly, Epstein does not specify that the 'saved' Jews had ever lived in territories occupied by Germany. Epstein may simply mean that, by blocking the German advance, the USSR had saved Jews in unoccupied areas of both the USSR and the rest of the world.

Thirdly, Sanning omits the most obvious rebuttal of his interpretation: the mention of five million Jewish murder victims. Clearly, many of these victims must have been living in areas that Sanning claims were evacuated. Moreover, Sanning's entire thesis is a denial of these five million deaths, therefore it is blatantly dishonest to use a source that actually refers to them in the same sentence as the "3.5 million" saved Jews that Sanning quote-mines.

Sanning's second distortion occurs on p.112, where he queries the sex ratios of Soviet Jews:
On the basis of the age distribution of the Jews in the RSFSR 705,290 Jews of the recorded 2,267,814 Jews in the Soviet Union (1959) belonged to the age group "0-28 years" which at the end of WWII hadn't either been born yet or was too young for military service; its sex structure should have been more or less balanced. The male/female composition among those 29 years and older thus was 677,984 and 884,540, respectively. [...]
Sanning has therefore, outrageously, taken the age profile for a Soviet Republic, the RSFSR, which suffered proportionally far fewer Holocaust deaths than the western republics, and used it for a projection on to the entire Soviet population, which he has then used as 'evidence' that a Holocaust did not occur in the western USSR! This alone disqualifies him as an honest demographer.

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Butz and Hargis Expose Themselves to Ridicule

Even by 'revisionist' standards, the latest claim made by Butz, and defended by his dullard lapdog Hargis, beggars belief. In this astonishingly ill-educated essay, Butz claims that, when Himmler wrote his famous "keine liquidierung" note, "Himmler was either reporting to Heydrich that the transport had not been canceled, or in some sense discussed the fact with him." In the crazy world of Butz, 'liquidated' therefore meant 'canceled' when used by the head of the SS.

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You would think that Hargis would steer clear of this idiocy, but instead he has placed both feet firmly in his mouth. He has devoted this CODOH thread to the issue and then ignored or deleted the multiple objections thrown up by his brethren, especially Wahrheit's excellent points about chronology (Himmler's note was written after the transport had already arrived in Riga) and Himmler's reprimand of Jeckeln. Fortunately, this thread at RODOH has captured the discussion as it has developed, and preserved Warheit's deleted rebuttal.

Let us firstly summarize the linguistic issues. Hargis uses the 'Scheiffler-Weiss German and English Dictionary', 1981, to claim that liquidierung means "to wind up pending affairs." However, it is clear from on-line dictionaries that this function of the word only applies to the liquidation of a company by a financial liquidator. Googling the quoted text "wind up existing affairs" brings up only the CODOH thread and this Korean guide to the role of a liquidator. Butz and Hargis must therefore know that they are abusing a financial linguistic application by imposing it on Himmler's far more obvious meaning. This is recognized on the CODOH thread by 'Vlad', who posted on date and time stamp "Sat Nov 01, 2008 9:29 pm" that:
Butz's German seems to be very limited indeed, otherwise he wouldn't have come up with such a far-fetched "theory". One doesn't liquidate trains or transports, neither in English nor in German.
However, whereas Vlad seems prepared to put this down to poor German, Butz has no such excuse, because he says he discussed his essay with German-born Germar Rudolf before the latter was deported. We can imagine how Germar must have raised his eyebrows in disbelief before encouraging Butz to blunder on with his project anyway. Such is Rudolf's dishonesty and Butz's willingness to deny linguistic evidence.

The real meaning of 'liquidierung' in SS usage is made clear in Longerich's 'Glossary' prepared for the Lipstadt trial:
1.5 For example, in January 1942 the head of the Gestapo, Müller, issued an ordinance according to which terms such as "liquidation" (Liquidation) and "liquidate" (liquidieren) were words "used by the Soviet rulers". In German reports, essays, etc. such terms should only be used in this connection.
As jnovitz acknowledges on the CODOH thread, Goebbels imported this Soviet usage into his Total War speech, when he said:
The German people, in any event, is unwilling to bow to this danger. Behind the oncoming Soviet divisions we see the Jewish liquidation commandos, and behind them terror, the specter of mass starvation and complete anarchy
Similarly, Vlad points out that:
Cornelia Schmitz-Berning in her Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus (p. 390) quotes a press directive, issued in November 1941, in which the replacement of standrechtliche Erschießung [shooting under martial law] by liquidieren was censored as "highly inappropriate".
Butz and Hargis really should have thought this through before subjecting themselves and their movement to this public embarrassment.