[Part one of this article can be read at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=4102.]
Holocaust deniers (whether they deny that it occurred, or that Jews were gassed, or that the numbers are accurate, etc.) do not do history. They seize upon any item they feel will convince others that the entire enterprise should be disbelieved, or at least minimized. You cannot bring down the whole edifice by removing one brick. Or two, or three, or four. Convergence of evidence. One could shoot great holes in the story of what happened to all those innocent human beings and the same tragic story remains. But in the interests of fairness and reason, I'll touch briefly on the numbers of the Holocaust.
Of the reputable historians I've come across, the lowest figure I've found of Jews killed in cold blood for the crime of being Jewish is Gerald Reitlinger's estimate of 4,578,800 (The Final Solution, New York: Beechhurst Press, 1953 [1978]). The highest I've encountered is the figure of 6,269,097 from Wolfgang Benz (Dimension des Volkermords: Die Zahl der J?dishen Opfer des Nationalsocialismus, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991). Most historians find the data and corresponding estimates of Benz - along with Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett, who came up with the figure of 5,859,622 (from "Estimated Jewish Losses in the Holocaust", Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 4, edited by Yisrael Gutman, New York: Macmillan,1990) - to be the most accurate. And if we average out the lowest and highest estimates, we arrive at the number 5,423,948. The estimate of six million is a reasonable one. And if it's any less - so what? Can we not agree that this is a monumental tragedy?
IHR's Mark Weber is an intelligent and outwardly affable man, but he's ultimately a hack because his Holocaust denial reveals his agenda. I don't care how many friends of yours are "Jews, but" or if you claim to be "just trying to get the truth out there in the open." When you sacrifice sound reasoning and objective methodology in the cause of racial ideology, your work becomes suspect, and you shouldn't expect to be taken very seriously outside of groups whose views are consonant with your own. There should be science in history, and that means that you must provide hard data that may be verified - or disproved - by independent parties.
Science is simply not done by taking a preconceived notion and then fabricating, excluding or embellishing evidence to support it. That's why creation "science" is bunk. It is absurd, as well as malicious, to decide that Jews are inflating claims about the Holocaust, and then try to prove this with selective facts, half-truths and lies. People are often drawn to ideologies simply because they are psychologically and emotionally gratifying, though. I personally feel that teaching our children, perhaps in high school, the merits of critical thinking would be a great idea.
Finally, you've got a lot of nerve - anyone - to try to pull just one dead Jew off that colossal mound of human suffering and death, no matter how you justify it. To deny one degree of the ghastly madness that resulted in the loss of 1/3 of the world's Jews within a few years is not only criminal, in my view, but it is also to kill them again. The people I've loved who are now dead may be gone, but no one denies that they were there in my life (a part of my very heart!), and then died. I wouldn't dream of denying the death of anyone. That's just base. To deny, in any way, the sheer magnitude of the dimensions that make the Holocaust the nightmarish hell that it was is almost to invite it back.
It saddens me to contemplate any human suffering - whether it be in Rwanda, Dresden, Cambodia or the Sudan - minimized for the sake of a hateful and dishonest agenda. It's one of the most ignoble and ugly sides of humanity there is. Man does awful and hurtful things to his fellow man. It's a sad reality that reminds us that civilization is sometimes only skin-deep. I like to think that we are slowly evolving together toward a time when things like the Jewish Holocaust will seem like an unbelievable, hellish hallucination (and it was Hitler's diabolical dream, no doubt). The point I look to make here, though, is that while such horrible deeds are committed, it is nothing short of obscene to deny to those who saw it and lived it and know it, that it happened.
I know that some Jews feel that to address the shameful claims of Holocaust deniers is to lend them a legitimacy they surely do not deserve. I do not like to step into these foul waters. However, I feel it is important to challenge these miscreants, if for no other reason, than to help prevent new generations from being misled about what happened to six million innocent people sixty short years ago. Aside from the legality of which Israel was reborn, aside from the blood, sweat and tears that Jews have shed in building a thriving democratic state, and aside from the three millennia of connection that Jews have to Eretz Yisrael - it must be known that in addition to these points, there are six million reasons why Israel exists.
Holocaust deniers want us to believe that there are "two sides" to the story. They want to lull us into an unthinking languor with their endless harping on minutiae. There are "two sides" here: those of us who are reasonable, just and compassionate - we who believe that the murder of one man based upon the vile precepts of racism is unacceptable; and then there are those who are so far gone in their abject phantasm of hatred and misery that such a prospect is banal.
As an epilogue: On September 4, 2003, three Israeli Air Force F-15 fighter planes, piloted by the offspring of Holocaust survivors, flew over Auschwitz-Birkenau to commemorate the victims' courage and to promise to be the "shield of the Jewish People in Israel."
"We got here sixty years too late," said Brigadier General Amir Eshel. The Holocaust is a story whose last chapter was written long ago. It is a book that I suppose every Jew must pick up and weigh in his or her hands from time to time. It is not a work in progress, open to bigots who are looking to write another people's history for them.
Notes
1. The author would like to cite the excellent Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, by Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman and to thank the authors for their superlative work in demolishing the myriad efforts of small and mean men who would deprive the Jewish people of their right to grieve, to heal and to flourish again. This work is an inspiration and invaluable resource.
2. Also, for anyone interested in reading an accurate, and superb, example of historical revisionism, try Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. It's a superb, and painful read.
Holocaust deniers (whether they deny that it occurred, or that Jews were gassed, or that the numbers are accurate, etc.) do not do history. They seize upon any item they feel will convince others that the entire enterprise should be disbelieved, or at least minimized. You cannot bring down the whole edifice by removing one brick. Or two, or three, or four. Convergence of evidence. One could shoot great holes in the story of what happened to all those innocent human beings and the same tragic story remains. But in the interests of fairness and reason, I'll touch briefly on the numbers of the Holocaust.
Of the reputable historians I've come across, the lowest figure I've found of Jews killed in cold blood for the crime of being Jewish is Gerald Reitlinger's estimate of 4,578,800 (The Final Solution, New York: Beechhurst Press, 1953 [1978]). The highest I've encountered is the figure of 6,269,097 from Wolfgang Benz (Dimension des Volkermords: Die Zahl der J?dishen Opfer des Nationalsocialismus, Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991). Most historians find the data and corresponding estimates of Benz - along with Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett, who came up with the figure of 5,859,622 (from "Estimated Jewish Losses in the Holocaust", Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, vol. 4, edited by Yisrael Gutman, New York: Macmillan,1990) - to be the most accurate. And if we average out the lowest and highest estimates, we arrive at the number 5,423,948. The estimate of six million is a reasonable one. And if it's any less - so what? Can we not agree that this is a monumental tragedy?
IHR's Mark Weber is an intelligent and outwardly affable man, but he's ultimately a hack because his Holocaust denial reveals his agenda. I don't care how many friends of yours are "Jews, but" or if you claim to be "just trying to get the truth out there in the open." When you sacrifice sound reasoning and objective methodology in the cause of racial ideology, your work becomes suspect, and you shouldn't expect to be taken very seriously outside of groups whose views are consonant with your own. There should be science in history, and that means that you must provide hard data that may be verified - or disproved - by independent parties.
Science is simply not done by taking a preconceived notion and then fabricating, excluding or embellishing evidence to support it. That's why creation "science" is bunk. It is absurd, as well as malicious, to decide that Jews are inflating claims about the Holocaust, and then try to prove this with selective facts, half-truths and lies. People are often drawn to ideologies simply because they are psychologically and emotionally gratifying, though. I personally feel that teaching our children, perhaps in high school, the merits of critical thinking would be a great idea.
Finally, you've got a lot of nerve - anyone - to try to pull just one dead Jew off that colossal mound of human suffering and death, no matter how you justify it. To deny one degree of the ghastly madness that resulted in the loss of 1/3 of the world's Jews within a few years is not only criminal, in my view, but it is also to kill them again. The people I've loved who are now dead may be gone, but no one denies that they were there in my life (a part of my very heart!), and then died. I wouldn't dream of denying the death of anyone. That's just base. To deny, in any way, the sheer magnitude of the dimensions that make the Holocaust the nightmarish hell that it was is almost to invite it back.
It saddens me to contemplate any human suffering - whether it be in Rwanda, Dresden, Cambodia or the Sudan - minimized for the sake of a hateful and dishonest agenda. It's one of the most ignoble and ugly sides of humanity there is. Man does awful and hurtful things to his fellow man. It's a sad reality that reminds us that civilization is sometimes only skin-deep. I like to think that we are slowly evolving together toward a time when things like the Jewish Holocaust will seem like an unbelievable, hellish hallucination (and it was Hitler's diabolical dream, no doubt). The point I look to make here, though, is that while such horrible deeds are committed, it is nothing short of obscene to deny to those who saw it and lived it and know it, that it happened.
I know that some Jews feel that to address the shameful claims of Holocaust deniers is to lend them a legitimacy they surely do not deserve. I do not like to step into these foul waters. However, I feel it is important to challenge these miscreants, if for no other reason, than to help prevent new generations from being misled about what happened to six million innocent people sixty short years ago. Aside from the legality of which Israel was reborn, aside from the blood, sweat and tears that Jews have shed in building a thriving democratic state, and aside from the three millennia of connection that Jews have to Eretz Yisrael - it must be known that in addition to these points, there are six million reasons why Israel exists.
Holocaust deniers want us to believe that there are "two sides" to the story. They want to lull us into an unthinking languor with their endless harping on minutiae. There are "two sides" here: those of us who are reasonable, just and compassionate - we who believe that the murder of one man based upon the vile precepts of racism is unacceptable; and then there are those who are so far gone in their abject phantasm of hatred and misery that such a prospect is banal.
As an epilogue: On September 4, 2003, three Israeli Air Force F-15 fighter planes, piloted by the offspring of Holocaust survivors, flew over Auschwitz-Birkenau to commemorate the victims' courage and to promise to be the "shield of the Jewish People in Israel."
"We got here sixty years too late," said Brigadier General Amir Eshel. The Holocaust is a story whose last chapter was written long ago. It is a book that I suppose every Jew must pick up and weigh in his or her hands from time to time. It is not a work in progress, open to bigots who are looking to write another people's history for them.
Notes
1. The author would like to cite the excellent Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?, by Michael Shermer & Alex Grobman and to thank the authors for their superlative work in demolishing the myriad efforts of small and mean men who would deprive the Jewish people of their right to grieve, to heal and to flourish again. This work is an inspiration and invaluable resource.
2. Also, for anyone interested in reading an accurate, and superb, example of historical revisionism, try Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. It's a superb, and painful read.