Double standard on Holocaust revisionism
Bigtime blogger Ed Brayton has posted an article condemning actual and proposed European bans on questioning the alleged Jewish holocaust and other genocides. While I commend Ed for posting the article, I want to know why I have been ostracized for saying things that Ed apparently can say with impunity. Darwinists have smeared me as a "Holocaust denier" and someone told me that he and others on a big website wanted to link to or cite my articles about the evolution controversy but did not do so because of fear of being associated with a holocaust revisionist. I thus missed out on a possible opportunity to get a big increase in traffic for this blog. The only difference between me and Ed is that I have made actual holocaust-revisionist statements, but those statements can in no way be considered to be anti-Semitic or neo-Nazi or whatever. Here are some of my points, most of which I have never seen before and which might be unprecedented:
(1) A "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no objective and reliable way of identifying Jews and non-Jews.
(2) There has been a wild variation in the official death count for Auschwitz, from 1 million to 4 million.
(3) People would have been afraid to participate in persecution or extermination of Jews because of fear of being classified as Jews themselves. According to official holocaust history, many of the "Jewish" victims of Nazi persecution and/or the Holocaust did not think of themselves as Jews -- not even as secular Jews or descendants of Jews.
(4) If the Nazis had an official program to exterminate the Jews, we should have heard more complaints from holocaust survivors who believed that they were mistakenly identified as Jews.
(5) People would have balked at supporting the Holocaust -- or even persecution of Jews -- after any of their own relatives or friends were classified as Jews.
(6) The book IBM and the Holocaust's claim that the Nazis were able to identify all the Jews of Europe by means of prehistoric IBM Hollerith card machines is absurd.
(7) Most of the alleged Jewish victims of the Holocaust lived in countries that did not have the Nazis' obsession with Jew identification.
(8) The drastic changes in the map of Europe after WW I made genealogy and population record-keeping especially difficult.
(9) Except for tattooing in the concentration camps, the Nazis made no attempt to permanently identify those whom they determined to be Jews.
This problem of Jew identification reminds me of a humorous incident in the 1977 movie comedy "Fun with Dick and Jane." "Dick," a laid-off aerospace engineer, was practicing his Spanish on some Mexicans. La Migra suddenly appeared and the Mexicans split. Then La Migra arrested Dick because they overheard him speaking Spanish to the Mexicans and therefore thought that he was Mexican. This was kind of a spoof of English-speaking people who like to practice their foreign language skills on foreigners who speak good English.
Then there was the story of the English lady who did a lot of traveling to foreign countries and was asked why she didn't bother to learn a little of the foreign languages of the countries that she visited. She answered in her thick English accent, "well, I never could see much point in it because so many people speak English." LOL
(1) A "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no objective and reliable way of identifying Jews and non-Jews.
(2) There has been a wild variation in the official death count for Auschwitz, from 1 million to 4 million.
(3) People would have been afraid to participate in persecution or extermination of Jews because of fear of being classified as Jews themselves. According to official holocaust history, many of the "Jewish" victims of Nazi persecution and/or the Holocaust did not think of themselves as Jews -- not even as secular Jews or descendants of Jews.
(4) If the Nazis had an official program to exterminate the Jews, we should have heard more complaints from holocaust survivors who believed that they were mistakenly identified as Jews.
(5) People would have balked at supporting the Holocaust -- or even persecution of Jews -- after any of their own relatives or friends were classified as Jews.
(6) The book IBM and the Holocaust's claim that the Nazis were able to identify all the Jews of Europe by means of prehistoric IBM Hollerith card machines is absurd.
(7) Most of the alleged Jewish victims of the Holocaust lived in countries that did not have the Nazis' obsession with Jew identification.
(8) The drastic changes in the map of Europe after WW I made genealogy and population record-keeping especially difficult.
(9) Except for tattooing in the concentration camps, the Nazis made no attempt to permanently identify those whom they determined to be Jews.
This problem of Jew identification reminds me of a humorous incident in the 1977 movie comedy "Fun with Dick and Jane." "Dick," a laid-off aerospace engineer, was practicing his Spanish on some Mexicans. La Migra suddenly appeared and the Mexicans split. Then La Migra arrested Dick because they overheard him speaking Spanish to the Mexicans and therefore thought that he was Mexican. This was kind of a spoof of English-speaking people who like to practice their foreign language skills on foreigners who speak good English.
Then there was the story of the English lady who did a lot of traveling to foreign countries and was asked why she didn't bother to learn a little of the foreign languages of the countries that she visited. She answered in her thick English accent, "well, I never could see much point in it because so many people speak English." LOL
Labels: Holocaust revisionism (1 of 2)
posted by Larry Fafarman | 2/04/2007 11:39:00 AM
12 Comments:
What happened to the trolls? No visitor has posted a comment anywhere on this blog in several days.
They probably just realized that your comments are usually well-considered and admirably objective. Thus they are hard to simply rant against.
Jim Sherwood said...
>>>>> They probably just realized that your comments are usually well-considered and admirably objective. Thus they are hard to simply rant against. <<<<<
Well, thanks, Jim. But trolls usually don't operate that way. Usually, the more sensible a post is, the more likely it is to be attacked by trolls. So I think that the quality of my posts is slipping.
I will post a comment :)
Your comments may be objective but I don't think they are well-considered... and it might be due to inexperience with the world outside the US.
Europe is not, and was not, the United States. In the 1940's most countries, except for the United States and ironically the Soviet Union, were associated with a state religion. If you were not associated with that religion, it was so indicated on your passport and identification cards. This was so that authorities could know how to bury you and whether to call a priest or a minister in the event that you were dying. Especially in Germany this was important since it was half Protestant, half Catholic. Of course the documents such as birth certificate also indicated which church you were baptized in etc... and would indicate if you were Jewish, Muslim, or other religion.
Even today this kind of information is the default in many countries. Only in the US have we been so obsessed with keeping identities private.
The vast majority of people knew if they were a target or not of Nazisim. For example in Denmark, in 1943, 7,000 Jews escaped to Sweden in a few days. If your name was Jewish, and your identification indicated Jewish, and you were on the list at the local synagoge, well, it was time to go. In total, only about 600 were captured.
In eastern europe millions of Jews dressed and lived very differently from their Christian neighbors. Check out "The Pale" on wikipedia. It was not hard to identify these people.
In the 1940's only Jews and Muslims were circumcized, so it was a fairly humiliating way for men to be screened... and yes, it was a very common approach. In France it was even done on the street.
If you ever are in Jerusalem it would be important for you to go to Yad Vashem. Also, Washington DC has a worthwhile Holocaust museum.
There are two important questions to ask yourself:
Why do I care so much about this issue that I blog about it?
Are millions of people who lost relatives in the death camps all lying?
Finally, why do you disparage someone who might comment on your blog, before they even comment? In other words, if someone disagrees with you they are a "troll" by definition? How very American. Perhaps you are one of the 80% of Americans who don't hold a passport yet somehow are so expert on the rest of the world that they know everyone else is wrong by birth.
Jim Sherwood said...
Come on Larry! Have things gotten so bad that you have to discuss this with yourself?
> They probably just realized that your comments are usually well-considered and admirably objective. <
We have yet to see such comments.
> Usually, the more sensible a post is, the more likely it is to be attacked by trolls. <
Make a sensible post and see.
> So I think that the quality of my posts is slipping. <
When you are in a hole, stop digging!
I'm not fully persuaded, either, by the view that I don't exist. Such ideas are amusing, but strike me as excessively paranoid.
See my first three comments on Larry's Jan. 31 posting on Elsberry. I quoted Fred Hoyle on "the paranoia that prevails" among believers in Darwinism, and on the origin of that paranoia.
Henrik Kibak said ( 2-07-07 @ 11:47:09 PM ) --
>>>>>Your comments may be objective but I don't think they are well-considered... <<<<<
First, in answering your comment, I am not conceding any of the points that I made above.
Also, one of my biggest complaints is that there has been little or no debate over the points in my opening post. For example, in regard to the identification of Jews and non-Jews, it is generally assumed that the Nazis and their collaborators always "just knew" who the Jews were and who were not Jews -- it is just another of those "just-so" stories.
>>>>> In the 1940's most countries, except for the United States and ironically the Soviet Union, were associated with a state religion. <<<<<<
Do you have any proof of that? Today there are a lot of countries in Europe -- I would say most of them -- that do not have state religions.
As for the Soviet Union, there were supposedly quite a few Jewish victims of the Holocaust, though most Soviet Jews survived.
>>>>>If you were not associated with that religion, it was so indicated on your passport and identification cards. <<<<<<
Did Europeans of the 1930's and 1940's -- particularly those who did not travel -- run around with ID cards or papers? Even in the US today, driver's licenses have become de facto ID cards -- in fact, the California Dept. of Motor Vehicles issues fake driver's licenses to non-drivers for use as identification. How many Europeans of the 1930's and 1940's had driver's licenses? How many owned cars? What about those who couldn't drive because they were too young, too old, or disabled? And why would their driver's licenses have said stated their religions?
>>>>>> Of course the documents such as birth certificate also indicated which church you were baptized in etc... and would indicate if you were Jewish, Muslim, or other religion.
Even today this kind of information is the default in many countries. Only in the US have we been so obsessed with keeping identities private. <<<<<<
I find that hard to believe. Europe today is in many cases more secular than the USA -- for example, most of Europe has lower church attendance than the USA.
Also, the US Census Department gathers a lot of information on US residents, though it is against the law for that department to share its information with any other government entity.
The USA has actually been a pioneer and leader in personal identification and population record-keeping. I believe that New York City was one of the first places to issue birth certificates. Automated census-taking was pioneered in the 1890 US census by Herman Hollerith. The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) has a fingerprint department -- how many countries in Europe keep millions of fingerprint records? Now -- partly as a result of terrorism and heavy illegal immigration -- there is even talk of a national ID card. So I strongly disagree with your contention that the USA has been behind Europe in this area. Also, as I said, the drastic changes in the map of Europe after WW I made population record-keeping especially difficult.
>>>>>The vast majority of people knew if they were a target or not of Nazisim. <<<<<<
According to official holocaust history, large numbers of the "Jewish" victims of the Nazis did not think of themselves as Jews, not even secular Jews or descendants of Jews.
>>>>> In eastern europe millions of Jews dressed and lived very differently from their Christian neighbors. <<<<<
I also wonder why they did not try to disguise themselves to try to escape from the Nazis. The Nazis never made any secret of their extreme anti-Semitism.
>>>>> In the 1940's only Jews and Muslims were circumcized, so it was a fairly humiliating way for men to be screened <<<<<
So how could the women be screened? And why haven't the Muslims complained that they were victims of the Nazis too?
Another big question -- why did the author of the recent book IBM and the Holocaust claim that he discovered the big secret of how the Nazis identified all the Jews of Europe? And why did he say that few had asked the question of how the Nazis identified Jews?
>>>>> If you ever are in Jerusalem it would be important for you to go to Yad Vashem. Also, Washington DC has a worthwhile Holocaust museum. <<<<<
Interestingly, in Los Angeles I frequently walked by the Museum of Tolerance when going to and from a gym I used to visit. I thought of paying admission to visit the exhibits, but never did. I don't think that there is much that I would have learned there, though.
>>>>>There are two important questions to ask yourself:
Why do I care so much about this issue that I blog about it? <<<<
One big reason is that I believe in freedom of expression. Even in the USA, holocaust revisionists have become so persecuted that I have been told that people do not want to link to my evolution-controversy articles because of fear of being associated with a holocaust revisionist. I became interested in the evolution controversy for the same reason -- I saw an attempt to suppress criticism of evolution theory.
And why are you so interested in this issue? Your blogger.com profile says that you are a biochemistry professor.
>>>>> Are millions of people who lost relatives in the death camps all lying? <<<<<<
I am just trying to get either good answers to my questions above or an admission that the Holocaust may have been exaggerated.
>>>>>Finally, why do you disparage someone who might comment on your blog, before they even comment? In other words, if someone disagrees with you they are a "troll" by definition? <<<<<
Trolls used to be the most regular commenters on this blog -- they would comment even when they had nothing to add or detract. I certainly did not mean to imply that all of the commenters on this blog are trolls.
> ViW, what is your evidence that Jim Sherwood is Larry's alter ego and not an actual person? Granted, it is possible, but I am not persuaded. <
Since ViW seems to have abandoned us, I will answer for him. The writing style, particularly the trite childish poems, is as good as Larry's fingerprint. Is there anyone else but the real Dave who is being fooled by this?
You are too close, Dave. Back up a bit and you will be able to see the forest.
Some Darwin's of paranoid whim
Say "Surely that's Larry, not Jim!"
I'm flattered by that
But hey, I'm a cat
From elsewhere, who thinks well of him.
I hasten to correct certain errors in punctuation which I made by hastening too much, lest I should be accused of being simultaneously non-existent and illiterate. The poem should have read:
Some "Darwins" of paranoid whim
Say "Surely that's Larry, not Jim."
I'm flattered by that,
But hey, I'm a cat
From elsewhere, who thinks well of him.
Thanks, Jim, it's nice to be appreciated.
> Thanks, Jim, it's nice to be appreciated. <
But isn't it a shame when you are the only one who appreciates yourself?
Your correction of yourself is too thin. Nice try Larry(Jim).
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