Aslaug's Axe Shed

I’ve written about historical revisionism before, but it -has- been a while by now. Tonight, however, I came across a link to a Danish homepage, listing famous holocaust deniers and debunking their claims systematically. The site, Holocaust.dk, was well worth the visit, even though it’s mainly targeted at school-children.

I read through their list of Danish deniers first, then their list of international deniers, and then finally a rather well constructed explanation of why holocaust deniers’ statements are patently false, and how easy it is to disprove their METHOD of argumentation. Now this was a new angle, and one I hadn’t seen before. Instead of trying to disprove their argument … something which is largely impossible with hardheads like that, because regardless of your evidence, they’ll simply go on denying everything, flying hard in the face of facts … you disprove their method of argumentation. That was a brilliant angle, and one that actually got me thinking.

You know … I love to exercise my critical thinking muscle.

Some people call it a brain, whaddya know?

Anyway, here’s what I ended up with:

Take one holocaust denier, and add one holocaust believer. Stir slightly, but not too violently or you’ll end up with bloodshed. Add a setting conducive to debate and allow to simmer.

Ahem, okay, cooking references aside, what I thought of was this:

The majority of holocaust deniers out there WILL, specifically, deny everything and anything. They’ll claim all documents pertaining to the mass slaughter of millions of people are forgeries. They’ll claim that no document has ever been found with an order from Hitler to kill Europe’s jews, and consequently, it can’t have happened. They’ll ignore the tens of thousands of pieces of hard, admissable evidence as fraudulent and fake, and no amount of reasoning or good sense will EVER get through to them. An example from Denmark comes from two years back, when a young Danish Neo-nazi had been interviewed for a newspaper, about his life and his choices and his beliefs. The guy was so bonkers that the newspaper volunteered to pay for a return ticket for him to go to Auschwitz with a then-84-year-old survivor from the camp. The nazi’s reaction to everything the old man told him was flat-out, in-your-face denial and rejection.

According to the young nazi, since the man hadn’t seen the actual gassing, it hadn’t happened. Since he hadn’t worked in the crematoria, they hadn’t existed. And so on. Classic denier strategy.

By the end of the visit, which was followed by a camera-crew, the old man shook his head as the young nazi pranced off, seemingly content in his rejections of facts. When the camera-crew asked him how he felt … the old man that is … his reaction was simple.

“I feel sorry for him,” he said. “Maybe with age, he will actually become intelligent.”

The thing is, he almost certainly won’t. But that same young man, who openly disputes that Hitler ever wanted to kill off all the Jews of Europe, is on record on the teeny tiny, minute, itsy-bitsy and easily-overlooked Danish Nazi Party’s homepage, for saying: “I have accomplished much. My first jew-kill is something I still have coming, however.”

Way to go, boy. Undermine your own ludicrous arguments a BIT more effectively, will ya?

However, that got me thinking …

And I think I’ve figured this out.

Holocaust deniers do not dispute that the Holocaust took place. They know it did. Their only objection is that it didn’t succeed fully, and that there were any survivors at all … be they Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Jehova’s Witnesses, mentally disabled, or one of the other numerous groups targeted for extermination by the Nazi state.

In reality, they would have loved to be there, and they would have loved to take part.

Most of them are only denying that it happened out of a perverse desire to provoke those people they consider the enemy. Which is why no amount of argumentation will ever work against them. Which is why trying to rationally argue with them is a lost cause. What needs doing is to laugh them down. Laugh down their idiotic, unscientific attempts at argumentation, so easily accomplished by the Logos-Ethos-Pathos-method that a third-grader could probably figure it out.

They want to see people’s reaction to their denials.

So here’s a thought. Meet their denial with something other than rage. Meet it with amusement. Like “Oh my, I had no idea you were a practical joker,” or “Dear me, I thought we were having a serious conversation here, but if you want to tell silly anecdotes, then please, I can always use a good laugh.”

Make THEM angry. That’s what they want to do with those of us who stand for reason, logic and who believe in the vast, overwhelming burden of evidence in this case.

Why give them the satisfaction of what they want? I myself have met holocaust deniers, and I’ve fallen into the same trap most other people do. I was offended and angered, and I was goaded into an argument that I now know I couldn’t win, because the objective for my opponent was never to have an argument, but simply to MAKE me angry.

I’ll be able to inform such people, in the future, of how vile and loathesome I think they are without giving them that satisfaction. The entirety of their argumentation is so flawed that all one really has to do is look at them and go “Do you know what the words Logos, Ethos and Pathos mean? And no, they’re not three musketeers.”

I think the next time it happens … if it ever does … I will reply to it with something along the lines of “look, we both know it happened. I don’t believe for one second that you doubt it took place. This is simple psychology. You’re trying to get your rocks off by pissing me off. So why don’t we cut the abject bullshit here, and agree that you’d have loved nothing better than to get your hands covered in blood, yourself. Go on … admit it. I won’t respect you for it, and I will never, ever agree with you, but at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve been honest and not a lying swine just this once in your miserable, useless life!”

*tip of imaginary hat*

*exit, stage left*