Thursday, November 17, 2005

No - honestly. . . .


The People who did it don’t deny it, but plenty of others do. “The Holocaust never happened,” says British “historian” David Irving in his book Hitler’s War and the War Path one of 30 books he has published on the subject.

Despite countless accounts from survivors, despite films and photos and eyewitness accounts from our military, despite written records, confessions and overwhelming evidence, people who want to believe that it never happened, believe it never happened and that the Jews are perpetrating a hoax for fun and profit.

I’ve argued with such people personally and they usually deny that they hate Jews, but with such people who don’t hate them, they don’t need enemies. Although I have a bit of a personal stake in this argument, I usually refrain from addressing them directly in the belief that you can’t argue the devil into righteousness or an idiot into wisdom. Belief is a terrible and often incurable disease.

There are degrees of denial. Mel Gibson’s father Hutton Gibson argues that it was only exaggerated – a few Jews were killed but the rest went to Australia and New Jersey. They will all burn in hell however – for killing Jesus – so what’s the difference? Gibson also believes that the Second Vatican Counsel was a plot by Mormons and Jews to take over the Church, so we don’t have to presume sanity as part of his opinions or really of the opinions of any of these revisionists. Yet they are everywhere and some of them make movies that produce holy swoons in millions of belief junkies and some of them write history books that other believers believe.

At one time I attended Northwestern University where Professor of Electrical Engineering Arthur Butz who insisted that aerial photos of the ruins proved that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, still has tenure. At one time I toured Dachau, just outside of Munich and at one time I knew a man who escaped that camp. I saw the fingernail marks on the steel walls of the gas chambers. I have strong feelings about people of this ilk such as Germar Rudolf best known for his Rudolf Report, a pseudo scientific study first published in 1993 in German and in 2003 in English, which supports the assertions of Fred Leuchter on the non-existence of the Auschwitz gas chambers. So perhaps you’ll want to take my words with a grain of salt, if not Zyklon-B, but the website The Revisionist is like an inflamed boil full of the pustulent words of these men and their laments about how poorly the world treats them.

David Irving got the worst of it. He was stupid enough to show up this week in Austria where they know better about what is revisionism and what is the truth and where they have had enough from the Nazis and historical revisionists, thank you very much. This kind of crap is illegal in Germany and Austria.

I read in the Guardian that Irving is now in a cell in Graz and that he remained in custody, according to the Austria Press Agency. Calls by the Guardian to the Graz court went unanswered late Thursday afternoon but as far as I’m concerned, it never happened, there is no jail in Graz and David Irving is just a hoax.



11 comments:

mrsleep said...

I have happen to work next to a very intelligent, educated, bible toting man with 5 kids, and he is convinced Hitler's regime is overblown.

I was so incredulous, I didn't even attempt to engage him in debate.

Capt. Fogg said...

You can't tell by looking - and you can't change their minds.

Crankyboy said...

I have written 30 books on crankiness. By the way, you mean it wasn't like Hogan's Heros? I would have loved to have heard that pitch to tv execs.

Capt. Fogg said...

You never wrote the books, Hogan's Heroes never was on the air, there never was a war and neither of us exist.

Saddam did however, have WMD.

Intellectual Insurgent said...

The guy's views are insane, but I still can't understand why he has been arrested. If having stupid views is a crime, then the entire Congress and Bush Administration should be behind bars.

I rarely bring up my race, but it's relevant here. I am Arab and it blows my mind the anti-Jewish stuff others feel comfortable to tell me, assuming I will agree. I was reading The Coming Of The Third Reich on vacation and one of my fellow travelers (a Christian Englishman) asked me about the book. He then went off about how the Jews need to own up to their responsibility for the Holocaust). I asked, "own up for what, being victims?" He responded, "no, for bringing it upon themselves."

People accuse Arabs of being anti-Jewish, but that is not the first time I have heard drivel like that from non-Arabs. You'd be amazed what people will say when they think they are in safe company.

phinky said...

Gee, I have a co-worker like mrsleep's. However, he has four kids and his mother is Jewish. Yep, I work with a holocaust downplayer who is technically a Jew. He doesn't actually deny the holocaust, he does think it was partly the fault of the Jews, Roma, gays and others who were targeted by the Nazis. You just have to wonder about some people.

Capt. Fogg said...

I'm sure there is no Austrian law that punishes laws - there is a song called "Die Gendanken Sind Frei" which means "thoughts are free" but it's illegal to display the Swastika, even on the web, and to write books such as Irvings. I would imagine they are very adamant about such things never happening again.

The idea that the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally ill brought it on themselves is not comprhensible to me, but I've always believed that a great deal of evil lurks in very ordinary people and they will believe what it takes to make themselves comfortable with that evil.

Hitler had a great deal of support in England and in the US during the 1930's and I'm not at all surprised to hear these "secret" opinions.

phinky said...

When I in the Army and assigned to Germany, part of my job was to monitor neo-Nazi activity as part of "force protection". It is illegal in Germany to give the Nazi salute and say "seig heil".

d nova said...

this guy sued (in UK) an emory u professor for libel when she criticized him.

he lost.

d nova said...

oh

here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/irving/article/0,2763,661985,00.html

Capt. Fogg said...

Thanks for that info - it warms my heart when bad things happen to guys like that.