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**Tuberski** · October 21, 2009, 12:40

And you felt the need to share this because?

I didn't even know who he was until you mentioned him.

ACK!

**chequita guevara** · October 21, 2009, 13:00

If you want to show up and protest him, that would be good.

**BlackCat** · October 21, 2009, 13:04

Wonder if Irving are jewish like Ahmadinejad.

**Space05us** · October 21, 2009, 13:08

On a visit to Austria, Irving was apprehended, tried and convicted of "glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi Party", which is a crime in Austria under the Verbotsgesetz law. He served a prison sentence from February to December 2006 on the charges.

David Irving - Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving

What's with Germans and hating freedom?

**loinburger** · October 21, 2009, 13:08

"Somebody's protesting this guy? I guess the Holocaust really did happen!!!"

**chequita guevara** · October 21, 2009, 13:12

Sadly, loin, a lot of people have doubts about the Holocaust in the West. The number that's popping in to my head is 25% of Americans have doubts about the Holocaust. I think we had a Poly thread on this a few years ago. It doesn't mesh with my personal experience, but I have met people who thought that the Holocaust was made up.

**dannubis** · October 21, 2009, 13:25

Why peple would believe the holocaust is made up is beyond me.

**chequita guevara** · October 21, 2009, 13:56

They start by throwing facts at you which make you have doubts. For example, prussic blue is a compound that results from a combination of hydrogen cyanide combines with iron. It is claimed that there isn't enough prussic blue in the walls of the death chambers to prove that it was used. They claim that it wasn't a sufficient amount of hydrogen cyanide because it takes a certain amount of the chemical to kill lice, and at that level, there would be extensive prussic blue in the walls.

Well all that is actually true. So, a rational person, hearing scientific proof that there wasn't enough of the chemical to kill an insect would then wonder about whether or not what they had been told about the Holocaust was true. Of course, humans are 1600 times more sensitive to cyanide than insects (which is why it's not used as a insecticide).

Once you start doubting, once you believe you were lied to, you're much easier to manipulate.

**Kitschum** · October 21, 2009, 16:07

Holocaust denial can thrive (relatively) from the incomplete and somewhat distorted view of the Holocaust among regular people (rarely among history students). A regular person might say that 'during World War 2 the Nazis killed 6 million Jews in gas chambers at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau and other concentration camps'. This is obviously a very simplified and distorted view of what happened, and if a denier can show that it is incomplete or wrong on key facts it might lead somebody to doubt the whole 'narrative' of the Holocaust. Deniers tend to use postmodernist techniques and ideas of the relativity of truth or history a lot, and of course it's "the winners who write the history books"...

To a large degree, also, it comes down to the question of intent. Deniers question whether the Nazis attempted to "murder" (all) the Jews, or to "resettle" them. In the latter case they supposedly died from epidemics, starvation, war incidentally to the resettlement. The Nazis' own (purposefully, but obviously so) misleading terminology and contradictory policies (or at times indecisiveness as how to deal with the Jews and other 'undesirables') plays a part here. Alternatively they might claim that many Jews were murdered by the Soviets or deported (further) east by them. Reasonable suspicions toward official Soviet history writing and statistics has probably lent this a degree of 'plausibility' or at least 'reasonable doubt' to deniers. Because, we cannot know for sure if Stalin deported 2 million, or whatever number, Jews to Siberia and Kazakhstan and forced them all to assimilate so they don't show up in the census. Right. Exactly. The partial opening of the Soviet archives since Glasnost has made these pseudo-'arguments' more difficult.

For many years after the end of the war and the Nazi regime much of the 'hard' archival evidence was not openly available to most historians much less the public, whose perceptions of the events relied to a great degree on eyewitnesses and court testimony (as from the war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg). For "early" deniers it was trivial to poke a few holes in these stories, show how they were inconsistent with each other, and how they sometimes relayed rumors that were known to be false as fact. I.e. deniers would "zoom in" on a part of the evidence and poke holes in that. They love to discuss minute details - and, like the post above shows - they often get that wrong too. But as much as possible they want to avoid looking at the whole, aggregated picture. Alternatively when deniers themselves are found to be careless with evidence, or lie, distort, misconstrue and make stuff up they might just claim that the Jews deserved it anyway, of course.

Another thing that deniers exploit is the great uncertainty (and variability in the postwar literature) of exactly how many people were killed in this or that particular camp. For instance, after the war it was sometimes claimed in (semi-)'official' estimates that 4 million people had died at Auschwitz. A more recent careful and reasonably authoritative (non-denier) estimate (Hilberg) is 1 million. For a denier this means that the "6 million" number must be at least slashed in half. For an honest historian though it means that, since the total number of people killed in the Holocaust was not simply calculated by adding up how many died at all the particular sites, and we know of a lot more killing 'sites' nowadays, that more people were killed elsewhere. In contrast demographic records and calculations (i.e. from censuses and other official records in many countries, like births/deaths) are typically very troublesome for deniers to 'explain' (away).

Finally, prominent Holocaust deniers (outside of the Muslim world at least) seem almost to a man (rarely, woman) to be Nazi or far-right sympathizers.

**MrFun** · October 21, 2009, 16:50

Wow - the low deceptive techniques Holocaust deniers will stoop to using is unbelievable.

**Wezil** · October 21, 2009, 17:50

He's not worthy of a protest.

**Riesstiu IV** · October 21, 2009, 18:03

Counter-protest by denying the existence of Holocaust deniers.

**Darius871** · October 21, 2009, 18:05

Originally posted by chequita guevara View Post

The number that's popping in to my head is 25% of Americans have doubts about the Holocaust.

Obviously there's a huge difference between doubting its occurrence and doubting its extent. If the poll question you're talking about was really as vague as you suggest, then somebody who wonders whether it was 5.9 or 5.1 million Jews would be in the same boat as people who think the Allies rigged up the Auschwitz gas chambers after the war. People of Irving's ilk are so few that a poll wouldn't even register them as statistically significant.

**BlackCat** · October 21, 2009, 18:05

Originally posted by MrFun View Post

Wow - the low deceptive techniques Holocaust deniers will stoop to using is unbelievable.

Hah, you think that is low ? Just look at the holocaust supporters - they use the records the nazis made to prove their point - they even stoop to use the films they made about their camps efficiency *). I mean, how low can you go ?

*) I had a teacher back in the early 70'es that thought it was important to show what had happened - it included scenes such as bulldozers showeling dead bodies into massgraves etc. - I'm not sure it would be allowed to let children (14-15'ish) see such nowadays

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Scumbag Holocaust Denier David Irving's American Itinerary

Scumbag Holocaust Denier David Irving's American Itinerary

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