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 Zündel, 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 docudramas?
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.
Notes:
[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)
Daniel McGowan is
Professor Emeritus of Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
The above article is published with the permission of the
author.