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I don't really want to do this, but I had another family member confess to me that he denies aspects of the Holocaust, so I'm going to make another one of those threads. I'm sorry. At least it's on the last day of this particular thread.
Before I get into this: most Holocaust denial is kind of dumb. My dad had me listen to this podcast a year or so ago, and there were some really stupid theories in that. Namely, that Hitler did literally nothing wrong. Claims that those Jews actually did stab Germany in the back with rioting, that they actually were breaking Germans with their banking stuff and their horrible lending schemes, that Hitler was profoundly Christian, that Hitler actually really just wanted peace and tried desperately to make peace only for the war-loving British to decline because they hate Christians, that Poland was extremely necessary both for farmland and to stop the mistreatment of ethnic Germans, and then further claims that Jews comprised the USSR and put Christians into gulags. Also Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were all destroyed for being true holy places for Christianity. Also Jews are genetically evil because they killed Christ and called down a blood curse upon themselves. Many Holocaust deniers are similarly terrible weakmen for the cause.
But I have to make this post because despite all sorts of bad argumentative tactics on that side, if they commit to a specific kind of Holocaust denial, I can't really refute it. It goes like this: Germans only forced Jews into work camps, there were no death camps. All the death camps were on the USSR side for a reason, and there were no Americans who investigated them. Hundreds of thousands of Jews died, but 6 million is far too much, and the Nuremberg Trials were show trials.
I know of a few things that refute this: the Posen speeches, a certain Nazi who fled to South America and wrote about the Holocaust without prompting, and the likely absence of a particularly large number of Jews. But I don't know why the death camps were all on the USSR side. Why were the death camps all on the USSR side? There are probably answers that don't involve anything too crazy.
I also am aware that it's pointless to contradict most Holocaust deniers, because they generally are willing to spend a lot more time than you on the subject, and they also are unwilling to accept any evidence I have, anyway. I once blindsided my dad with the Posen speeches, who had not heard of it. He actually didn't deny the veracity right away, but questioned what Himmler was really talking about, because the evidence just wasn't there for him that they could possibly kill that many Jews. I was pretty sad for getting so close, but not quite reaching the destination.
To remove myself from the object details of which I am sure others have debated fruitlessly for decades at this point, let me bring up the example of the conspiracy theory that the Americans faked the 1969 moon landings, and that Stanley Kubrick was involved in the sci fi performance of the century.
Suppose it is actually true, for the sake of argument. First of all, who would actually care?
The Soviets wouldn't care. (They wouldn't be around.) The Americans faking the moon landing didn't stop them from doing the MIR-Spacelab spacewalks, or the Russian Federation from participating in the ISS. The revelation wouldn't make the USSR un-collapse.
Would the Chinese care? Maybe a little. No one, since the Americans, have made a manned moon landing. In fact, the landing being revealed to be a fake might induce a second space race, which would be actually a good thing.
Would Elon (and the private sector as a whole) care? Would they stop trying to make rockets, because of a Kubrick landing? No.
In fact, the only people that would actually care about this, in terms of real-world impact, would be the conspiracy theorists themselves. And it would prove what..? That the US government lies? Uh, that might be a few decades behind the popular zeitgeist, with that one.
(~)
Even if you give Holocaust deniers their premise out of the gate, it doesn't change anything in the real world. The 1948 Arab-Israeli war was real. The 1967 Six-Day War was real. The Yom Kippur War was real. The 2nd Intifada was real. 10/7 was real. In short, the Israel national mythology no longer requires the Holocaust to be true in part or in whole. The fact that it is true is historical trivia now, only of interest to historians, autists, and racists of a certain kind.
There seems to be a persistent belief amongst anti-semites of every stripe that once the normies are awoken to the Jewish Question, there will be a spontaneous uprising of sentiment as all Jews everywhere are cast out for... what, exactly? Exaggerating war crimes inflicted upon them? Making them up, whole cloth? Isn't that what every people have done, in the modern period? If they could only present their case, then the Yahuds would be driven out, and Israel would spontaneously combust, or something.
Uh, no. That won't happen. Seriously, no gentile cares. (Well, the Jews and Arabs certainly would. But that's another question entirely.) Because debating the Holocaust is Fucking Pointless because, right or wrong, it is now an academic subject and is not worth your time or energy. The only people who care about revisionist history are weirdos in any case - hoteps with black beethoven, feminists with their omnicultural patriarchal conspiracy to suppress female achievement. It's all retarded and anyone with sense keeps away from it.
Yes, I think those people think that if everyone awakens to it being a lie, they'll be outraged to do what the denialists wanted all along, to kick out the Jews and to enact a Christian government and to either stop helping or actively destroy Israel. That's not what happens with other historical injustices. Did the youths, upon learning of the Trail of Tears, immediately start a wildly successful campaign to decolonize California? No, of course not, though it does seem like the anti-colonialists have been picking up some more steam lately on... something.
That makes me wonder: what is the future of Holocaust denial? And, what is the future of antisemitism in general? Does it die off in the new generation in America? I was surprised to find out recently that young people in China are actually okay with LGBTQ+ representation, and it's only the older generation that doesn't like gay people. I predict the same thing will happen with holocaust denial. I'd guess, if it's true that it only became mainstream in the 70s or the 80s or so, then it was specific to people who lived at that time, generally.
I am not convinced that Holocaust deniers want a Christian government or state. If nothing else, when I've talked to the Motte's own local Holocaust deniers, they tend to respond badly to professions of Christian faith - Christianity is perceived as just another head of the Jewish hydra, and believers are taken in by the racial mythology of a foreign group.
As a group of people, no, they don't want that. I'm talking about a very specific kind of Holocaust denier, the one that I have to deal with myself, and my example is the podcast I linked in the OP. That's two dudes called Corey J. Mahler and Treblewoe. Corey J. Mahler keeps getting banned off of Twitter, so my favorite posts about Adolf Hitler being the "last Christian king" are difficult to find. For how fringe they are, they still really like the LCMS, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and keep getting into fights with its leaders or something because they don't want it to become corrupted.
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