Holocaust Denial

[CatholicDefender]

I am somewhat disheartened by the apparent rise of Holocaust denial on the internet and elsewhere.

It seems holocaust denial and anti-semitism are one and the same.

Do you know any ways or info I can throw at those deniers to get them to STFU?!

I would think the biggest argument would be the near dissapearence of Judaism in Europe (i.e, all the traditional strong centers of Jewish culture in Germany and Eastern Europe are pretty much all gone!)

Any ideas?

[Court Jester]

Why try to shut them up? It's freedom of speech.
Everyone has a right to be openly stupid. It kinda helps identify them when they do.

[Rev. Rye]

Well, here's something I discovered recently: the success of any conspiracy is only as good as its weakest link. The more people that get involved, the more people who can potentially blow the whistle. 

To fake a Holocaust, one would need:

• All the people who would claim to be survivors, a number estimated to be (in 1945) around 3.14 million people. And, of course, it's clear that they would have been in on it.
  
• The members of the allied powers, American, British, and Soviet, and others, willing to create and build up the lie.
  
• Likely, the millions of survivors who would have to fake their own deaths (a very tricky thing to do for a single person, let alone several millions) to fulfill the "Six Million" figure (technically eleven million, if one counts the Gentiles). [Note: many of this number did die of causes other than direct Nazi cruelty, due to things like Typhus. It should be noted, however, that this cannot sufficient to explain all the deaths; in the Civil War, Andersonville prison had generally many of the same problems as Auschwitz, everything except for mass killings, with the added problems of living in a time before germ theory had caught on and in a place where, due to Lincoln's embargo, supplies were extremely low. The total death rate there: 25%.] This stage would have to involve 4.5 million people at least.
  
• The Germans who actually admitted to taking part in the atrocities. 
  

This can easily add up to over 10 million potential conspirators.

Meanwhile, Oxford Professor David R. Grimes, on his off-time as an oncologist, decided to see how mathematically viable many conspiracy theories are. Taking the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the PRISM scandal, and the FBI forensics cover-up, he figured out a mathematical model for how long certain conspiracies could exist before inevitably collapsing under their own weight. For instance: Grimes calculated that for NASA to cover up a faked moon landing would have required 411,000 people. It also suggested that with this number, it would have taken 3.68 years for the conspiracy to collapse. Since the equation he used is really bloody complicated, I asked him, using the "3.14 million Holocaust survivors" number (admittedly, ridiculously conservative) quoted above, how long it would take before the Holocaust would fail.

Firstly, taking a supremely conservative figure of 3.14 million survivors, the simple version of the model would predict that even will a very dedicated bunch of secret keepers, the conspiracy would hit a 95% chance of collapse less than 3 years into it, and essentially would fail with certainty in less than ten years. Bear in mind this is a rough picture; I could refine the mesh a little more and resolve it on a month by month basis but the over-all picture is clear, and attached! Now, I have a slightly different version of the model which considers the effect of conspirators dying off and if I get a chance I'll throw it in, but over-all this won't change the net result! Remember too this model assumes all agents are excellent secret keepers to an unrealistic degree..and even then, the whole thing would fail!

So, as you can see, it's a long shot that such a conspiacy would have survived to the Independence of Israel (which deniers tend to consider a major motive, even though Haredi Jews, who tend to vehemently oppose the modern state of Israel's mere existence, were also affected), and the odds of success are almost infinitesimally small after less than ten years.

TL;DR: to fake something on this magnitude and not have their cover blown in the 72 years since is mathemetically impossible. The claim the Allies could or did do so is an insult to the memory of the dead and the intelligence of the living.

[CatholicDefender]

I have heard that The Holocaust wasn't widely known in American and British circles in the immediate decade or so after the war. I think it wasn't until the early 1970s that the murder of 6 million Jews got the name of Holocaust.

Could that be because of it took place in Poland and the USSR far away from any any American or British reporters? I hear the Soviets were pretty tight-lipped and restrictive about providing access, and they and the eastern bloc engaged in a form of holocaust denial where the anti-semitic nature of Nazi Germany's crimes was vastly downplayed.

I am considering going on a trip to Germany, Poland and Prague to see the former sights of it myself. It is such a fascinating yet horrific period of human history.

In my opinion the Holocaust is the worst thing to have happened on the planet, worse in some ways than any of Stalin or Mao's crimes.

[Rev. Rye]

I have heard that The Holocaust wasn't widely known in American and British circles in the immediate decade or so after the war. I think it wasn't until the early 1970s that the murder of 6 million Jews got the name of Holocaust.

Could that be because of it took place in Poland and the USSR far away from any any American or British reporters? I hear the Soviets were pretty tight-lipped and restrictive about providing access, and they and the eastern bloc engaged in a form of holocaust denial where the anti-semitic nature of Nazi Germany's crimes was vastly downplayed.

I am considering going on a trip to Germany, Poland and Prague to see the former sights of it myself. It is such a fascinating yet horrific period of human history.

In my opinion the Holocaust is the worst thing to have happened on the planet, worse in some ways than any of Stalin or Mao's crimes.

If you wonder why it wasn't widely known, well, with the Nurembeg Trials airing the details of the worst of the Nazi regime to the general public, it really was widely known. However, for a little over a decade, it was one of those chapters of the war people didn't like to talk about, because, well, it was really fucking disturbing. And no doubt, the discovery of mass graves containing the bodies of thousands of Jews (at least the ones who weren't cremated) is something of a sad ending to the triumphant defeat of Adolf Hitler. What made things change? I suspect the one-two punch of George Lincoln Rockwell's decision to deny everything bad Hitler did and books like Elie Wiesel's Night kind of forced the subject out in the open.

And yes, the name Holocaust only became popular by the late 1960s, but it doesn't really subtract from the reality of the horror. There were other phrases used for it, "The Final Solution," "Shoah," and even the word "Genocide" itself was originally coined specifically to refer to what Hitler was doing to the Jews.

[The Grand Nudger]

Lelz, 1/10 for people biting.

[Astonished]

Lelz, 1/10 for people biting.

Troll? Should I not waste my time pointing out the hypocrisy of NOT denying all the bullshit behind the bible myth and yet defending THIS crap which was a primarily Catholic enterprise in the first place?

[Rev. Rye]

Lelz, 1/10 for people biting.

Honestly, at this point, I find myself wondering if this guy is really a troll or if he's legitimately ill-informed. If he is a troll, his responses in this thread show he's taking his sweet-ass time trying to get a rise out of people. If he isn't a troll, well, that still doesn't explain his shout-out to that Onion video poking fun at antisemitism and treating it as comfort.

[Pat Mustard]

I am somewhat disheartened by the apparent rise of Holocaust denial on the internet and elsewhere.

It seems holocaust denial and anti-semitism are one and the same.

Do you know any ways or info I can throw at those deniers to get them to STFU?!

I would think the biggest argument would be the near dissapearence of Judaism in Europe (i.e, all the traditional strong centers of Jewish culture in Germany and Eastern Europe are pretty much all gone!)

Any ideas?

Tell them it's as stupid as catolicism (no lie because about 90% of the anti-semitism which lead to the holocaust was generated by the catholic church).

[brewer]

[edit]

In my opinion the Holocaust is the worst thing to have happened on the planet, worse in some ways than any of Stalin or Mao's crimes.

bold mine

Nope, if we limit it to humanity, that would be religion.