be it illegal to deny the holocaust?

by comforter 71 Replies latest jw friends

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  pomegranate

  I thought the purpose of neo-Nazis was to take credit for the Holocaust?!

  Exactly.
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  pomegranate

  It is how they were murdered. It is why they were murdered.

  I have the exact same questions with all the Japanese civilians that were annilated unneccessarily with the A-Bombs...
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  roybatty

  While I agree 100% that people should be allowed to believe whatever they choose, not matter how stupid it is, I'm not certain if the situation regarding the Holocaust is same in Germany as it is here in the USA. I believe that Germany wants to make sure that this never happens again. One of the first steps that groups such as the Nazis or the KKK take is to dispense misinformation. Infringing on the freedom of speech on this issue verses the seeds of facistism again being planted....hmmm...is choosing the lesser of two evils.

  And while I acknowledge Jim's opinion on the holocaust and believe he has the right to express it, I personally find it insulting. The evidence is so clear, the documents left by the Germans, the witnesses who survived, the camps that were left behind. Hell, what else do you want, Hitler to be reincarnated and 'fess up? The Germans have and continue to pay the price for what they did. We Americans can learn from their example and what our country did to the native americans.
• 

  pettygrudger

  What about all of us who did read both sides & still feel you are wrong?
• 

  Valis

  jj, one needs to make the distinction between those who deny the holocaust happened and those who are merely seeking to revise facts about the holocaust. I agree that it isn't in any way moral to bring harm to someone who disagrees w/you about the issue. That's a simple rule of thumb when debating any issue. I do think however that those who wish to deny outright it ever happened are siding with certain factions on this planet that would most assuredly see the holocaust happen all over again and then proceed to deny it happened at all. Those are the ones that deserve the very treatment the Nazis chose to perpetrate on all an untold number of victimes, whether they were Jewish, JWs, gays, whatever...Bad people and bad ideas have no place in my world at least. As far as the number killed/exterminated, well there is no telling and the number may not be six million, or five million, or any rock soild number that can be verified, but surely many millions did die and even after being liberated from the camps, and we won't even talk about all the people Stalin eradicated, who IMO was far worse than Hitler...I know this from anecdotal evidence provided by my grandfather who spoke of the unbearable sight of the hundresd of thousands of walking dead, who had no hope of recovering from starvation and mistreatment at the hands of their captors. He was a medic and helped liberate several camps near the end of the war, very sad accounts.

  So sorry you didn't like that article jj, but I think you missed the point in me posting it. It was in specific response to comforter's question..(OH GOD! What am I doing posting to comfy's threads?), not a vehicle by which you keep harping on the fact that some get slammed for being dicks about the holocaust and outright denying it. Nor a vehicle for you to continually complain that you get slammed for rehashing this fucking topic for what seems to be weeks now. You run out of other stuff to talk about or is it perhaps you just like the appearance of being a pariah?

  I urge all of you to rent, watch on cable (I think the last time it was shown was on the Independent Film Channel in the US), or buy, a movie called Mr. Death. The story of yet another holocaust denier and the consequences he incurred as a result of his ludicrous notion that there were no exterminations using gas chambers. He is also good buddies w/the IHR, which is of no suprise. A pathetic little man indeed. It should also be noted that many of the revisionists who subscribe to the notion that the holocaust didn't happen rely on his work to support their rediculous claims.

  Sincerely,

  District Overbeer
• 

  cellomould

  the skeptical ethic can do no better than to follow the counsel given by Thomas Jefferson: "If a sect arises, whose tenets would subvert morals, good sense has fair play, and reasons and laughs it out of doors, without suffering the state to be troubled by it" (Jefferson, 1964, p.154). He noted that when "reason and experiment" are employed, "error" flees before them. "It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself" (p. 153).

  Thanks for posting that article, Valis. I particularly like the above quotes.

  cellmould
• 

  ThiChi

  I Pass this on to the Fourm:

  History denied is history repeated

  There will always be among us those who listen to their own hatred, those who are slaves to ignorance and intolerance, and those who choose to ignore history and its implications. Such is the case with the Holocaust - there are individuals and organizations determined to downplay or simply ignore what happened in Nazi Germany and occupied Europe preceding and during World War II.

  Catholic bishops in Germany, Poland and France have issued formal apologies to Jews for the Church's silence in the face of the "Final Solution." Survivors of that "solution" have told their stories, detailing the horrors of what happened. Allied troops who liberated the Nazi camps near the end of the war have described what they found, and miles of film was shot so that the world could at least see, though not experience, what happened.

  At the Nuremberg trials surviving Nazi war criminals did not defend themselves by claiming that the Holocaust did not happen - their defense was that they were only "following orders." There exist records of German railroads transporting millions of people to concentrations camps. Those records were found by Allied troops after the war, and contrary to popular opinion and the official name of the Nazi party, Nazi Germany was not socialist. Railroads were private enterprises that billed and were paid for shipping human beings in cattle cars - they were listed as freight, not passengers, and the trips were one way.

  German industry developed more and more efficient crematoria for disposing of the millions of bodies that were the result of German policy. Zyklon B was developed to make gassing human beings cheaper and more efficient. Swiss banks collaborated with German officials to loot Jews and other victims of what happened, and to profiteer from German atrocities. Only recently have Swiss banks begun to be held accountable for their actions and admit their participation in the Holocaust. They will never be able to atone for what they did, just as private companies around the world will not be held adequately responsible. Some of those companies were American.

  With all the above proof there is no rational reason to doubt that the Holocaust occurred, or that it was vastly more horrible than the worst accounts could ever portray. I've long been aware of the proof that exists about the Holocaust, about international cooperation or at least acceptance of it at the time, and of world powers hiding Nazis after the war, in some instances because governments agreed with much if not all of what happened, in other instances to gain political advantage against Cold War enemies. The United States was certainly one of the primary beneficiaries of what Nazi war criminals had to offer, in intelligence operations against the Soviet Union and in its rocket and space programs. But long before I know of all the proof, long before I'd seen any film footage about the camps or read the accounts of survivors or liberators, I knew the Holocaust happened. I knew so because of a conversation I had with a young woman when I was still a teenager more than thirty years ago.

  My family lived in a suburb of Los Angeles, California, and my mother was and remains a friendly, outgoing person. She had several friends in the neighborhood, and seeing her sitting in the kitchen talking to friends was a common thing. One of those neighbors stands out in my mind. She was ten or twelve years my senior, married and had children. I had noticed she had a pronounced and unusual limp, and I wondered about it. One warm summer day she was sitting at the kitchen table with my mom, and I sat down and joined in the conversation. Before long I asked her how she had come to have the limp.

  My mother was aghast at my asking the question, but something I learned that day and have remembered ever since is that people are not generally offended or angry when asked an open, honest question, so long as the questioner is willing to listen to the answer. I was not prepared for the answer I got that day, but I did listen - I was mesmerized. It's something that has remained with me ever since, though I don't remember the neighbor's name nor do I know what happened to her or her family.

  She was born in Europe, though I don't know if she told me what country. She had an accent, though I don't remember, or maybe I couldn't recognize, what kind of accent it was. It could have been German, Polish, French or from another of the countries the Nazis conquered and occupied. She was Jewish, and that's what mattered most in those dark, horrible times. She was born in the mid-30's, and her family was eventually sent to a concentration camp. She was the only survivor from her family, something not uncommon because of the murderous efficiency of the Nazis.

  Maybe her government found her family and condemned them, maybe her neighbors reported them to the Nazis. What happened in Europe was not done without the knowledge and complicity of countless people who betrayed their neighbors and tolerated the actions of the murderous psychotics to whom they surrendered control of their lives. What mattered was that her family was killed and she found herself the victim of "medical" experiments carried out on countless children in many of the camps.

  She may well have been one of Mengele's victims - if she knew specifically who did such terrible things to her, she didn't tell me. But she did tell me that her legs were repeatedly broken in an effort to find out how many times bones could be fractured before they would no longer heal. Both of her femurs were broken again and again, and finally they could not heal properly - that was the cause of her limp. She was to be murdered by her captors - "disposed of" or other euphemisms are inappropriate descriptions - but the camp was liberated shortly before the action could be carried out. Ultimately, the Nazis were so overwhelmed by victims that they could not hide the evidence.

  When our neighbor told me what had happened to her, she didn't have anger in her voice or even in her heart. She had an aura of amazement, still unable to understand how it could have happened. She didn't hate Germans or anyone else - she was primarily concerned about her children and her husband and her new life. Until the day I die I will always be able to see her eyes while she talked to me and described what had been done to her and to her family.

  She didn't lie, she didn't exaggerate. She told me the honest, simple truth - the truth that makes the Holocaust real. When a government commits such atrocities, when people permit a government to do such things to one child or to millions of people and the rest of the world stands silently and watches, there is no defense, no refutation that will stand up. When people accept hatred and put it into practice, when neighbor betrays neighbor, when the slight differences among people are punishable by death, torture or even denial of equal dignity or rights, it happens again and again.

  The genocide committed by the Nazis was not the first example of genocide, nor was it the last. It was, however, the most efficient and determined example in human history. Spare me the "revision" of that history, I know enough of history. And I know that as long as hatred and bigotry are tolerated and used to rationalize cruelty and violence against Jews or anyone else, it will happen again.
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  roybatty

  No Jim, youre wrong. Very wrong. Cant you even see the events that lead up to the Holocaust? As early as 1933 anti-Semitic laws were passed. The concentration camps were the end result of this hatred building up. How do you explain what the American 7 th . Army found when it liberated Dachau? Or when the Americans liberated Buchendwald? Or when the Soviets liberated Maidanek? Or when the British liberated Bergen-Belsen? They found camps set up for the purpose to kill Jews. Did this "Jewish conspiracy" that you speak of work in fooling the American, British and the Soviets? Wow, thats amazing!!! And all of those mass graves, piles and piles of people, that all of these soldiers saw. Yeah, that must have been special effects that the Jews conjured up. Oh, what about the "einsatzgruppen." Yeah, those lovely mobile killing squads who would follow the German army into areas that they conquered and then round up and exterminate "undesirable" people. Must have been another Jewish conspiracy. Oh, one last thing. How do you explain the old man who I knew when I was a JW and his story of growing up as a Witness in Nazi Germany and what he saw. Oh yeah, he must be part of the "Jewish conspiracy."
• 

  pomegranate

  The article Valis posted I thought was interesting and I think the author walked a reasonably decent line of TRYING to be neutral, though his slant is obvious. I believe the BEST point of the article is HERE:

  If the Holocaust is to be treated as a historical event, rather than an article of religious faith, it must be subjected to continued, critical revision, and treated no differently than the Battle of Waterloo or any other historical event. As Eatwell (1992) points out, the defining characteristic of serious revisionism, as opposed to propagandistic denial, is that the former serves to broaden debate, the latter to narrow it.
• 

  Crazy151drinker

  I have the exact same questions with all the Japanese civilians that were annilated unneccessarily with the A-Bombs...

  Prom,

  Be very carefull with your assumptions.

  1) MORE Japanese would have died if we had invaded Japan.

  2) The Japanese had already annilated 250,000 Chinese civilians with germ warfare. The Japanese germ warfare program was funded like our own Manhatten project. It was HUGE!!!

  3) The Japanese had perfected special ceramic bombs to deliver plague infected fleas.

  4) The Japanese were developing an intercontinental bomber to bomb the West Coast of the U.S. with GERM WARFARE.

  5) The Japanese jet technology was more advanced that the Germans. They had already developed Jet prototypes that were 200mph faster than our fighters and would have been capable of reaching the altitudes of our B-29s.

  6) It would have taken the Japanese at most another year to fully implement their Jet Fighter and Bomber programs and WE would have gotten our ASSES rocked.

  So in retrospect, the 200,000 civilians that died were a drop in the Bucket compared the the # of people who would have died if we didnt drop them. Lets not forget that the Japanese could have surrendered after Hiroshima but refused. On a sick note, the head of the Japanese germ warfare unit and the man responsible for 250,000+ deaths became a top advisor to the U.S. germ warfare program after the war in exchange for immunity.