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.