Six Million Deniers—The Hyperbolic Holocaust

The Holocaust that is continually drummed into our senses today is hyperbole—the weapon of choice not only for those who undertake to deceive, but as well the salve of choice for those who feel, rightly or not, that they have been wronged. This goes also for the descendants and even political sympathizers of those who felt they had been wronged, especially those interest groups and sovereign states that stand to benefit from the sympathy that such protestations arouse in third parties.

Like so many Holocaust movies and hagiographic legends in general, the regnant Holocaust narrative is Based on a True Story, but … it has grown with the passage of time. A minor slave revolt never noted in Egypt’s own historiography becomes The Exodus (capital letters can be used to alert the skeptical to the presence of this quintessentially human vice). A taxpayers’ insurrection in North America becomes a noble people’s grasp at Independence (capital letters again). And a European country’s (actually, several European countries’) attempt to quell the rising dominance of the recently emancipated Jews in their societies becomes the Nazis’ monumentally evil project to exterminate the Jewish race. (Holocaust must always be capitalized, except in archaic usages like “nuclear holocaust,” which is not hyperbolic in the least.)

Hyperbole, of course, is not a Jewish invention nor even, by any means, any sort of Jewish monopoly. But to the extent that it is practiced persistently, imaginatively, volubly, articulately, and ultimately in an environment constrained to marginalize, even persecute, voices that might contradict it, it might be groups wrapping themselves in the Star of David that have brought the evil craft to heights—or lows—rarely if ever previously attained. Democracy, or its simulacra as practiced in the US, Israel, and many other places, lends itself to the success of such gambits.

The installation of the “Holocaust” (or Shoah) as the flaming image of the ungodly insult visited upon the body of world Jewry is as bright an example as anyone might propose to embody this towering edifice of victimhood that today overshadows the West in all its organs of the production of both “knowledge” (academia) and opinion (the press).

But there is an ugly handmaiden to these scarlet letters, and that is the appellation “Holocaust denier” (“denier” most definitely does not merit capitalization). This verbal implement of abuse may be seen, upon contemplation, to betray the use of that very same irresistible device—hyperbole—upon those who might dare to raise a voice to temper the first hyperbole, that phantasmagorical Holocaust. The device, while virtually irresistible to those who would deploy it, is likewise virtually insuperable to those great masses without the time or interest to plumb the matter more-deeply who by it are disposed to regard with suspicion if not outright disgust those who have been smeared (never mind by whom—it’s the Press, isn’t it? ) with it.

The hyperbole starts with the original hyperbolic term, “Holocaust.” This is, of course, that body of (literally) unbelievable hatred and sadistic murderousness visited upon the innocent, suffering masses of European Jewry during the Second World War by those (literally) unbelievably hateful and sadistic Germans and perhaps a few accomplices from within countries conquered and occupied by the Germans’ unbelievably hateful and sadistic armed forces.

Atop this firmly ensconced hyperbolic term is erected yet another hyperbole, the term, “denier” (no capitals). Here might be espied a case of hyperbolic “leverage”—the piling atop one hyperbole of yet another hyperbole, with which to attain new heights of deception, misguided sympathy and tragically even greater amounts of misguided antipathy toward the villains in the horror story thereby instilled in the minds of the gullible masses subjected thereto, in many cases, by law[1].

Most of those made to wear the scarlet “D” on their foreheads do not in any way, shape or form “deny” that National Socialist policy in Germany entailed grievous slights to the welfare of Jews within its territory, including especially Jews who had entered its territory in the tumultuous aftermath of World War I without the permission of the German government (“illegal immigration”)[2]. Nor do revisionists, who prefer that description to the prejudicial “denier,” deny that, as the global war against Germany wore on, Germany, like the United States, interned suspected enemies of its government in Spartan camps in remote territories.

But the “D” sticks, and it may not be denied, shaded, qualified, nor subjected to the slightest degree of nuance, as even those who oppose “Zionist” policies sometimes manage to duck the hyperbolic “anti-Semitic” label that their opponents seek to affix to them.

Denial. Revisionists often question the notion that the German government had, or sought to implement, a policy to exterminate the Jews of Europe. These are “deniers.”

Others (many of the same ones) question that the German government designed, erected and operated gas chambers with which to kill millions of “racial undesirables.” These also are “deniers.”

Others (many of the same ones) question that the extermination program (see above) killed as many as six million Jews. These also are “deniers.”

Hyperbole. It is all hyperbole, compounded (leveraged upon itself). Holocaust Deniers (my capital letter).

Be warned, if you mean to apprehend the truth. And get away with it.

Let alone speak it.