The author of A Voice for Men’s marital rape apologia is a Holocaust denier and Hitler fan. No, really.

The original humanist movement is a branch of atheism, so even though I don’t like some parts of it (there’s a little too much “religious people are stupid” rhetoric among said parts) I feel sorry for them that their name has been sullied by racists and misogynists.

Robert:

My own suspicion about Holocaust denialism is this: after WWII, anti-Semitism could no longer be respectable (in the West, at least). It still existed, of course. But the sorts of things that had been openly said and written beforehand – look at some of what G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc wrote – were no longer accepted in polite company. The denialists pine for the days of genteel Judenhass, and hope to bring them back.

I have this perception that, even in the “old days”, most Western Christians didn’t really condone the idea of murdering all Jews. However, since open antisemitism was standard, some people would’ve been easily able to develop a real obsession of hating the Jews.

What I don’t understand is, where do these people come nowadays, in Western society where the mainstream doesn’t seem to much perpetuate antisemitism and where there aren’t any social problems commonly associated with Jews (speaking from a Finnish non-Jewish person’s perspective).

There’s also his weird idea that Russia has finally recognised that the holocaust was a ‘Stalinist hoax’. Strange time for it with Stalin’s popularity at a 50 year high and Putin (ironically) pushing the anti-fascist line as hard as he can.

Not that holocaust deniers make sense on other levels, but that bit of illogicality caught my eye.

The psychology of the Holocaust is perversely fascinating. As noted above, the Nazis kept meticulous records of their crimes. But, at the same time they saw themselves as committing a necessary atrocity that must be kept secret from all the rest of Germany in perpetuity. It also turns out to be really hard to personally commit genocide. When the Holocaust started, they just had the army shoot row upon row of Jewish people and other undesirables into graves, but they had to stop doing that because it was bad for troop morale. A lot of the machinery of the concentration and death camps was designed to ensure that as few Germans as possible had to actually see what was going on.

I think some of that same perversity is what feeds into the desire among denialists to say simultaneously that the Holocaust never happened and that it totally should’ve. It’s a necessary bit of cognitive dissonance/paradox.

/Leum wanders off muttering about macabre things they learned in their Holocaust theology class…

The David Irving libel trial is in the process of becoming a film – which is excellent news, as it’s yet more publicity for one of the greatest and most satisfying own goals in British legal history.

(Irving’s supporters would prefer to think that he was the defendant, but he was actually the plaintiff.)

I’ve read that some of the denial is an extremely tortured way to discredit FDR by Koch brother cronies (something something FDR got us involved in a war for no reason also all that government intervention during the depression was bad)

This obviously ignores the EVERYTHING ELSE HORRIBLE that the nazis did.
(I’ve never seen a denialist even know what Action T4 was)

While pre-war anti-Semites did not advocate genocide, there was a definite cultural fixation on Jews as the Other. Chesterton denied that there could even *be* “English Jews”; their group status was an immutable characteristic. There could be Jews *living in* England, but they would always be outsiders in a land not their own. And Chesterton was not a raving bigot, by the standards of his time, and condemned the earliest reports of Nazi persecutions. That kind of thought is now restricted to a limited group of people, who dearly wish for it to be mainstream again. There are entire political parties in Europe that are dedicated to doing just that.

One of my ‘favourite’ things about these guys is that they claim that the holocaust, which has reams and reams of evidence, never happened, but the prehistoric time of cavemen hunting down mammoths all on their own while women stayed back eating bonbons and occasionally needing to be raped in order to create more human beings, THAT definitely happened exactly as the shitgolem envisioned.

I suppose one could argue that it’s internally consistent; these fuckheads’ outlook is ‘history played out exactly how I feel it should have, and I am deeply, deeply discriminated against because the present isn’t playing out exactly the way I feel it should, with me being able to rape indiscriminately and having total power over women and all other lesser ‘people’.’

Now, now. It’s not satire. You see, David just invoked Hitler, which means he just Godwined the MRM, which means everything he’s ever said is wrong forever.

Re: Holocaust Denial

Others have made good and accurate points. Post WWII it’s a cynical ploy of the fringe right to rally their base. It might even be a way to drive away anyone they don’t want. I’ve had the dubious fortune of a political con artist try to soft sell me Holocaust Denial. This was years ago when I was unfamiliar with the details of the phenomena and was actually curious what “evidence” the deniers thought they had. This person didn’t try to sell it directly, just tried to manipulate me by supporting my questions about the subject. Unfortunately for them the exchange inspired me to find and purchase Deborah Lipstadt’s book “Denying the Holocaust”, where she expertly debunks all the major denier points. This was the book that triggered David Irving’s libel suit.

Final fun fact: years after I disassociated with the con artist above, the group they were involved with hosted David Irving as a speaker. >:(

People who fall for Holocaust Denial can be racists, but they also can be uneducated with bad critical thinking skills. People pushing Holocaust Denial–knowing it’s a fraud– are predatory manipulators. I am completely unsurprised they’ve made alliances with other predatory manipulators.

Anyone with access to the internet has zero excuse for being a Holocaust Denier. It is one of the single most documented events in modern history. Ironically, the actual Nazis like Himmler, Heydrich, Eichmann, etc. would probably loathe the deniers. They were proud of it and Himmler triumphantly announced it.

Also, the whole ‘invented by the Russian’ thing is total bullshit. What, did the Russians get Eisenhower in on it?

Yesterday I was “privileged” to hear an explanation of why Hillary Clinton is a secret Muslim.

Glad that she’s okay with maintaining so many religious beliefs at once.