What Does "Holocaust Denial" Really Mean?

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-- 

What Does "Holocaust Denial" Really Mean?





The Holocaust[1] (spelled with a capital H) usually refers to the 
killing of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II.  It is 
supposed to be the German's "Final Solution" to the Jewish problem. 
Much of the systematic extermination was to have taken place in 
concentration camps by shooting, gassing, and burning alive innocent 
victims of the Third Reich.



Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zundel, Robert Faurisson, and others who do not 
believe this account and who dare to say so in public are reviled as 
bigots, anti-Semites, racists, and worse.  Their alternate historical 
scenarios are not termed simply revisionist, but are demeaned as 
Holocaust denial.



Politicians pandering to the Jewish or Christian Zionist vote label 
Holocaust revisionist papers and conferences "beyond the pale of 
international discourse and acceptable behavior."[2] Non-Zionist 
Jews, like Rabbi Dovid Weiss of the Neturei Karta, are denounced as 
"self-haters" and are shunned and spat upon.  Even Professor Norman 
Finkelstein, whose parents were both Holocaust survivors and who 
wrote the book, The Holocaust Industry, has been branded a Holocaust 
denier.



But putting aside the virile hate directed against those who question 
the veracity of the typical Holocaust narrative, what is it that 
these people believe and say at the risk of imprisonment and bodily 
harm?  For most Holocaust revisionists, or deniers if you prefer, 
their arguments boil down to these three simple contentions:



1.  Hitler's "Final Solution" was intended to be ethnic cleansing, 
not extermination.

2.  There were no homicidal gas chambers used by the Third Reich.

3.  There were fewer than 6 million Jews killed of the alleged 55 
million who died in WWII.



Are these revisionist contentions so odious as to cause those who 
believe them to be reviled, beaten, and imprisoned?  More 
importantly, is it possible that revisionist contentions are true, or 
even partially true, and that they are despised because they 
contradict the story of the Holocaust, a story which has been 
elevated to the level of a religion in hundreds of films, memorials, 
museums, and docu-dramas?



Is it sacrilegious to ask, "If Hitler was intent on extermination, 
how did Elie Wiesel, his father, and two of his sisters survive the 
worst period of incarceration at Auschwitz?"  Wiesel claims that 
people were thrown alive into burning pits, yet even the 
Israeli-trained guides at Auschwitz do not make this claim.



Is it really "beyond international discourse" to question the 
efficacy and the forensic evidence of homicidal gas chambers?  If 
other myths, like making soap from human fat, have been dismissed as 
Allied war propaganda, why is it "unacceptable behavior" to ask if 
the gas chamber at Dachau was not reconstructed by the Americans 
because no other homicidal gas chamber could be found and used as 
evidence at the Nuremburg trials?



For more than fifty years Jewish scholars have spent hundreds of 
millions of dollars to document each Jewish victim of the Nazi 
Holocaust.  The Nazis were German, obsessed with record keeping.  Yet 
only 3 million names have been collected and many of them died of 
natural causes.  So why is it so wrong to doubt that fewer than 6 
million Jews were murdered in the Second World War?



"Holocaust Denial" might be no more eccentric or no more criminal 
than claiming the earth is flat, except that the Holocaust itself has 
been used as the sword and shield in the quest to build a Jewish 
state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, where even 
today over half the population is not Jewish.



The Holocaust narrative makes Jews the ultimate victim no matter how 
they dispossess or dehumanize or ethnically cleanse the indigenous 
Palestinian people.  The Holocaust narrative allows Yad Vashem, the 
finest Holocaust museum in the world, to repeat the mantra of "Never 
Forget" while it sits on Arab lands stolen from Ein Karem and 
overlooking the unmarked graves of Palestinians massacred by Jewish 
terrorists at Deir Yassin.  The Holocaust story eliminates any 
comparison of Ketziot or Gaza to the concentration camps they indeed 
are.



The Holocaust is used to silence critics of Israel in what the Jewish 
scholar, Marc Ellis, has called the ecumenical deal:  you Christians 
look the other way while we bludgeon the Palestinians and build our 
Jewish state and we won't remind you that Hitler was a good Catholic 
long before he was a good Nazi.



The Holocaust narrative of systematic, industrialized extermination 
has also been an important tool to drive the United States into Iraq 
and now into Iran.  The title of the recent Israeli conference at Yad 
Vashem made this crystal clear:  "Holocaust Denial:  Paving the Way 
to Genocide."



"Remember the Holocaust" will be the battle cry of the next great 
clash of good (Judeo/Christian values) and evil (radical Islamic 
aggression) and those who question it must be demonized if not burned 
at the stake.



Daniel McGowan

Professor Emeritus

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Geneva, NY  14456



315-781-3418

mcgowan at hws.edu


[1] 
<https://webmail.hws.edu/exchange/mcgowan/Drafts/RE:%20Atrocity%20Gods.EML/1_text.htm#_ftnref1> 
Holocaust. Dictionary.com. The American Heritage(r) New Dictionary of 
Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. 
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Holocaust 
<http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Holocaust>  (accessed: 
February 09, 2007).

[2] 
<https://webmail.hws.edu/exchange/mcgowan/Drafts/RE:%20Atrocity%20Gods.EML/1_text.htm#_ftnref2> 
http://clinton.senate.gov/news/statements/details.cfm?id=268474 
<http://clinton.senate.gov/news/statements/details.cfm?id=268474> 
(accessed: February 09, 2007)