Why don't you accept the label Holocaust deniers?

AnswerMan Replies:

Answerman has already responded to the first part of your question, under the post, “Did the Holocaust Exist?”

The second part of your question turns on the revisionist rejection of the term, Holocaust Denier. The main reason why revisionists reject that term is that it implies that the entirety of the Jewish tragedy is being rejected.

Revisionists do not deny the camp system, the targeting of the Jewish people, the persecution, theft, incarceration, and mass deaths. Many revisionists accept the claim that hundreds of thousands of Jews were shot on the Eastern Front, or elsewhere in Occupied Russia. What revisionists actually _do_ reject is the claim that millions of people were killed at “extermination camps”, and that these killings were a pre-planned and carefully orchestrated conspiracy. Of course, there is a wide divergence of opinion among revisionists concerning how much of the rest of the story is true, depending largely on how they wish to read the evidence. But no revisionist claims that “nothing happened.”

David Irving is a classic example. He accepts most of the Holocaust story, and even accepts the use of gas chambers. His complaints have had to do mostly with the scale of the alleged massacres and the quality of evidence offered for them. Yet, for all this, this 68 year old sits in a prison cell, sentenced for three years. No wonder he is angry at being called a “Holocaust Denier,” because the use of that abusive term, created by Deborah Lipstadt, is precisely the means whereby revisionists are first segregated, then demonized, and then eliminated.