ZGram - 7/16/2003 - "Holocaust debate? Heavens, no! Too much is at stake. Millions. And millions, and millions..."

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

July 16, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Common sense would tell rational people that recycling lies does not 
prove them to be true.  Debate would clarify who is the liar.  Truth 
hurts the liar, which is why liars shy away from debate. 

For years, revisionists have argued for debate.  Look who is shying 
away from debate.

Below is one Australian who is shying away from debate by recycling 
lies.  Every one of his lies have been disproven.  Yet with typical 
chutzpah he recycles them again, hoping it will keep the sheeple 
confused.

Here is Point (Andrew Markus) / Counterpoint (David Irving):

START]

Why Holocaust deniers are beyond Debate

Andrew Markus

THERE are two reasons why we should not engage in debates with 
Holocaust deniers.

The first parallels the reason for not debating with those who 
believe that the position of the planets at the moment of our birth 
determines our destiny or that the earth is flat.

  And they know it.  We do not argue with people who reject 
rationality -- just as we do not attempt to teach the laws of quantum 
physics in kindergartens.

The second reason is the one that leads us to wash in the morning, 
wear decent clothes and seek to pass on our values and beliefs to our 
children: we have self-respect. We have no need to validate our sense 
of self by seeking the approval of those who would destroy us, nor of 
their fellow travellers.

The likes of David Irving question whether there were gas chambers in 
the hell that went by the name of Auschwitz.

There is not one historian holding a position at a recognised 
university who questions the existence of gas chambers. Not in 
Germany, not in Poland, not in the United Kingdom, not in the United 
States of America, not in Australia. Not one -- for a simple reason. 
It is called evidence.

Hitler publicly announced in January 1939, and on many earlier 
occasions, his manic determination to destroy the Jewish people. 
Historians have the records of the Wannsee conference held in January 
1942 at which details of mass extermination were discussed. They have 
the text of Heinrich Himmler's secret speech of October 1943 at which 
he justified mass murder. The commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss, 
left a detailed testament of his crimes.

What more evidence is required? The testimonies of Polish bystanders 
-- peasants, town dwellers, members of the underground and Catholic 
clergy? Detailed records of train movements, photographs, 
architectural plans, a patent application by the crematorium 
designers Topf and Sons, the physical remains of Auschwitz-Birkenau 
-- including warehouses of personal belongings?

There is one other category of evidence -- survivors. Because 
Auschwitz-Birkenau -- unlike Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Chelmno 
-- served, in addition to its extermination role, as a labour camp, 
and because it was the last of the centres to remain operational, 
thousands of witnesses survived. They include Primo Levi and Elie 
Wiesel.

To debate with the likes of David Irving we thus have first to agree 
that this mass of evidence could possibly be fraudulent, perhaps the 
work of the Elders of Zion who secretly control the world. We have to 
assume that during the course of war, when the German armies were 
marching victorious over Europe and northern Africa, the agents of 
the Elders were secretly placing fraudulent documents in the archives 
of the Nazi Government. Or that after the war they were able to force 
hundreds of the innocent SS to confess to crimes that they had not 
committed. Or that they were hiding populations numbered in the 
millions. Or that they recruited and coached tens of thousands of 
witnesses, Jew and Gentile, to recite scripted tales of acts that 
never occurred -- and to continue reciting them to the present day.

Those willing to make such assumptions should debate the deniers. The 
leading American expert on Holocaust denial, Professor Deborah 
Lipstadt, never engages in such debate. She writes that "deniers want 
to be thought of as the 'other side'. Simply appearing with them on 
the same stage accords them that status."

Those concerned with ignorance of the Holocaust still in evidence in 
our society should engage in Holocaust education, without giving 
legitimacy to the assassins of memory.

=====


David Irving comments:

IT is amusing the way that Deborah Lipstadt's threadbare old 
arguments circle the globe, literally.

    No wonder she was too scared to step into the witness box in 
London, and expose her case to cross examination, even by a novice in 
legal matters like myself.

    There is the "flat earth" argument -- Lipstadt added to this her 
own argument that we should not argue with child-molesters, something 
she seemed obsessed with, as though she was trying to tell us 
something about her own childhood.

    There is the "not-one-recognized- historian" argument, nobody of 
merit who questions the existence of gas chambers -- not in Poland, 
nor in Germany, nor France, nor elsewhere. I challenged this 
"overwhelming consensus" argument when it was used by a young German 
historian, Peter Longerich, called as a witness for Lipstadt, in 
cross examination.

    I asked him if he would tell the Court the length of the prison 
terms imposed on historians in Germany, Poland, France or elsewhere 
who did dare to question these facts, and what his "consensus" was 
actually worth in the light of that?

    But this writer even trots out the old story that "mass 
extermination" was discussed at the Wannsee conference. Unless he has 
obtained a transcript of that conference of which other historians 
are unaware, then he is lying here too.

    There is not a word about extermination in the Wannsee conference: 
it is a discussion between mid-level civil servants on the logistics 
of getting rid of, as in booting-out, the Jews from the Reich 
territory.

    He relies on the Italian suicide Primo Levi, who wrote one novel 
about Auschwitz, and the notorious liar and fantasizer Elie Wiesel, 
who wrote another, though Wiesel sometimes gets confused about 
whether he was actually in Buchenwald or Auschwitz.

    He quotes Rudolf Höss, although even Raul Hilberg says that the 
testimony of Höss is worthless.

    More quixoticalloy, he also refers to the thousands of survivors 
of Auschwitz; but under my cross-examination Professor Robert Jan Van 
Pelt admitted that some 7,500 were in the camp when it was liberated 
in January 1945, and he had to agree that we never heard from them -- 
history only ever gets to hear from the same seven or eight 
professional Auschwitz survivors -- Henryk Tauber, Ada Bimko, and the 
rest.

    The sheer paucity of the arguments offered by this opinionated 
Australian writer just reveals the actual lack of evidence in support 
of the general case he seeks to make.

    No wonder he and his ilk don't want a debate, and use violence at 
every level in order to avoid it.

Too much is at stake. Millions. And millions, and millions.

[END]