Holocaust Denial

Posted on July 4, 2002 in Falsehoods IRC/Chat Peace

A group of semi-pro Holocaust revisionists attempted to pare down the widely accepted figure of six million people killed to a “mere” 300,000 on #politics last night. Several chatters shaved the dignity off a fellow who called himself The_Yeti and left him to dash naked through the freezing response to his insistance that the Holocaust really wasn’t so bad. As always, they arrived in threes, hoping to prove by their absurd and bloodless martyrdom that they were the victims of a “Zionist conspiracy” to hold Christians guilty for the crimes of Hitler.

I have different grounds for concern about the use of the Holocaust as history by some groups. I hate how the seemingly impossible numbers of dead have made it easy for some to forgive lesser human rights crimes. Often, when you address yourself to unlawful detentions of political dissidents; or beatings in hidden cell blocks; or near drownings in concrete bathtubs; or the rape of conscientious objectors by their fellow violent prisoners; or the demolition of houses; or the security checkpoints that make it nearly impossible for Palestinians to cross their own towns in time to make it to university classes; or the smaller genocides that have happened to Mayan peoples or Amazonian Indians, you hear the excuse: “How can you compare us to Hitler?” They point to numbers, quantity, in the hope that you will not notice the nefarious nature of their practices. Because of Hitler, the Rios-Montt regime in Guatemala can pretend, with the help of full time conservative apologist David Horowitz, to be virtuous. Pol Pot could spend years executing educated people in Cambodia before he totted numbers large enough to impress The New York Times and the rest of the world’s media. Because of Hitler, we think the manufacture of weapons of murder to be just another business. And worst of all, we assign all the blame for the insanity to Hitler, denying the part of our own leaders in following and expanding upon the example. This is why I curse the Holocaust. Would that the number were only 300,000 as some hope! We’d have a lower tolerance for the bastinado and the submarine torture; for the internal politics of the PLO; for the trudgeon and the sharp knives; for the rocket attacks on Palestinian self determination and the outright illegal seizure of land on the West Bank because some Israelies believe that they have a manifest destiny; for rapes by Chilean secret police and Serb occupation forces. But alas! the Nazis were efficient and deadened us with enormous body counts that only a few deny.