The Holocaust

Came across this site  –  the US Holocaust Memorial Museum – which makes a distinction between "holocaust denial" and "holocaust distortion": http://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/holocaust-denial-and-distortion Amongst other things, it asserts that "Common distortions include, for example, assertions that: the figure of six million Jewish deaths is an exaggeration"  and that "Denial and distortion of the Holocaust almost always reflect antisemitism".  If that is the case then it would appear that a large number of historians, including Israeli historians, are guilty of distortion and are likely harbouring anti-Semitic sentiments. I cannot pretend to know much about historical details of the holocaust.. Like most people, I suspect, I simply took it for granted that 6 million was the correct figure. Now I discover that many historians themselves dispute this figure and that some put the true figure at around 1 million.  As I said,  even 1 million is bad enough. It is a grotesque obscenity that it should have happened at all that so many Jews (and, of course, many others too) should have died in this fashion.  But, apparently, to say this and to suggest that the numbers involved might have been only 1 million and not 6 million is highly likely to indicate "anti-Semitism".  I think the reasoning behind such a claim is utterly absurd and spurious.   Frankly I smell a rat. It is a way of silencing criticism through the manufacture of a taboo. Without going along with any particular figure as such – I simply don't have the knowledge yet to reach an informed decision – I would nevertheless assert that it is entirely possible to reject the official figure as a literal statement  of fact AND reject anti-Semitism as a repugnant and totally unacceptable standpoint. . The US HMM seems to presume from the outset that the matter has already been settled and that anyone who dares question the figure it bandies about is engaged in a "distortion".  This is actually a close-minded, dogmatic and arrogant approach to history.  Paradoxically, IF it so happens that the figure is a gross exaggeration then the effect would actually be to cheapen the memory of those Jews who lost their lives in this horrific fashion by feeling the need to embellish the historical record in such a fashion:  do we really need to artifically boost the numbers involved in order to find the whole thing morally repulsive? The link I referred to at the outset suggests that those who accuse others of distortion are themselves guilty of a gross distortion.  It suggests also reasons why they might want to engage in such a distortion. The Israeli capitalist state is no different from any other capitalist state in wanting to clothe itself in the mythology of nationalism. As in war, truth is often the first casualty.  "History" becomes just another propaganda tool.  And the holocaust, I think, plays a central role in the ideology of a state that seeks, as all states must do, to justify its own existence from some morally unassailable or impregnable high ground. Not just history but prehistory too .  I recall Steven Pinkers arguments in "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined"  (2011). According to him,  violent deaths have declined dramatically from about 15% in pre-state societies and  "today we may be living in the most peaceable era in the existence of our species" ("Violence Vanquished " , The Wall Street Journal, September 24, 2011).  The hidden agenda behind such thinking is to justify the existence of the Hobbesian state: we need the state to quell our "natural instinct" to inflict violence on each other at the slightest pretext. It is, of course, a junk theory that Pinker and others have been busily pushing . First off, he overlooks the distinction between band societies and tribal societies.  The former characterise the vast majority of humankinds existence on this planet and exhibited a built in mechanism of conflict avoidance through fissioning and nomadism. Tribal societies, though not  yet class societies, are much more recent and arguably did show signs of militarism and hierarchy.   Also as anthropologists like R. Brian Ferguson, considered to be the foremost expert on the early history of war, has pointed out Pinker and co have grossly misinterpreted the evidence of forensic archeology:  "Many hominid remains once thought to establish the most ancient evidence of homicide or cannibalism were actually gnawed by predators or just suffered postmortem breakage  ("The Birth of War" R. Brian Ferguson , Natural History  Jul/Aug 2003, Vol. 112, Issue 6).   This is to say nothing of  the findings of studies on contemporary hunter gather groups – like the one recently conducted by researchers from  the Abo Academy University in Finland looking into violence in early human communities. That study concluded that such violence  was "driven by personal conflicts rather than large-scale battles" and  that "war is not an innate part of human nature, but rather a behaviour that we have adopted more recently"   ( "Primitive human society 'not driven by war' ", BBC News: Science and Environment,  18 July 2013). The point that I'm making here is that there may well be parallels between the way prehistory has been rewritten to suit the ideological outlook and prejudices of establishment thinkers and the way in which recent history has also been presented.  The holocaust phenomenon is a case in point. Mass murder is an obscenity, however you look at it, but there is undeniably also something quite distasteful about the way in which states cynically and sanctimoniously employ the evidence of "history" for their own ulterior purposes.