The Holocaust

[robbo203]

Hi All,

 

Not quite sure what to make of this. Came across this item on my local discussion forum.  The guy who posted this link to his blog is not exactly a "holocaust denier" – or at least not a full blooded one – but is merely stating that the numbers cited – 6 million Jews – is way over the top and that there is – or was – a politically driven agenda behind this gross exaggeration.  Some of the evidence he presents is interesting but I have never really looked into the subject so have no way of telling whether it is authentic or not..  Also I'm not quite sure  whether he is crossing the line between "anti-zionism" and "Jewish conspiracy theory".

 

Anyway, check it out for yourselves, here:

 

http://www.waykiwayki.com/2014/10/the-emporer-of-all-lies-part-1.html

 

Of course even if the number is only about 1 million or less, as he seems to suggest, it is still pretty obscene and that applies also – obviously – to the countless non-Jews who were likewise exterminated.  Not to mention German workers too.  War itself is obscene and what lies behind it in the modern world – the obscenity that is capitalism.

 

Any observations? Incidentally, I believe that it is  "Holocaust memorial week," this week and that Channel 4 will be showing Alfred's Hitchcocks censored documentary. Holocaust: Night will fall –  tonight (I think) That is, if you live in the UK unlike me – we poor sods don't fall within the satellite's footprint that beams these kinds of programmes to the masses below…

[ALB]

I think that researchers even in Israel accept that "six million" is not to be taken literally.  Seehttp://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/.premium-1.540880But, as you say, even one million would be bad enough.But even six million is low compared to the total of probably well over over 60 million (60,000,000) who died as a result of the Second World Slaughter.

Quote:

The overall death and destruction that took place during World War II may well be beyond human comprehension. Historians estimate that military casualties on all sides, in both the European and Pacific theaters, reached up to 25 million, and that civilian casualties ranged from 38 million to as high a figure as 55 million – meaning that somewhere between 3 and 4 percent of the world’s total population died in the conflict.

Personally I don't like the word "holocaust" because of its religious connotations and don't think much of "Holocaust Day" either as that leaves out the much greater number of others who got killed.  What would be more appropriate would be a World Slaughter Day.

[alanjjohnstone]

Much of the media will forget the 'Devouring' of the Roma and when it came to any real compensation after the war they were truly forgotten. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PorajmosAnd the Independent recently ran a story on the Ravensbruck concentration camp where most victims were non-Jewish females of which 50,000 were murdered, many gassed.http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/hitlers-war-on-women-the-story-of-ravensbrck-concentration-camp-9991206.htmlThe American Norman Finkelstein gained a reputation as a self-hating Jew for his book 'The Holocaust Industry' when he exposed the politicalisation of the Holocaust by zionismhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_IndustryThe current controversy is that the Polish government want to underplay that it was the Russians who liberated many of the camps and give the credit to Ukrainian troops.http://rt.com/news/224891-poland-ukraine-liberated-auschwitz/Israel now discriminates between a Holocaust survivor and a Holocaust refugeehttp://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/holocaust-claims-a-foolish-hierarchy-of-suffering-1.227760

[alanjjohnstone]

[james19]

Robb0203Have you tried http://www.filmon.com? 

[ALB]

The Israeli govt policy of collective punishment is not derived from the Nazis but from the preceding British colonial administration which used to use it against the Jewish nationalists who used terrorism to try to establish a Jewish State in Palestine.

[sarda karaniwan]

"Remember The Holocaust!", Kinda like the same sound as The Alamo, Pearl Harbor, or 9-11, or even the latest, "Jes Suis Charlie!". I think it is being use as moral justification for any action to be guilt-free.sardaan Ordinarian

[alanjjohnstone]

Call for Mein Kampf to be banned in the uk.http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/26/uk-consider-ban-mein-kampf-holocaust-memorial-dayi had a copy, picked up second hand from a pub library/book exchange which just happened to be Mick Mcgahey's regular local, the NUM and CP leader…no evidence it was his, though.Strange how some books are referred to in their original language such as Das Kapital 

[robbo203]

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.

[SocialistPunk]

ALB wrote:

Personally I don't like the word "holocaust" because of its religious connotations and don't think much of "Holocaust Day" either as that leaves out the much greater number of others who got killed.  What would be more appropriate would be a World Slaughter Day.

Hi Adam,Was wondering what you mean by the religious connotations of the word holocaust? 

[ALB]

SocialistPunk wrote:

Hi Adam,Was wondering what you mean by the religious connotations of the word holocaust? 

Some orthox Jewish theologians regard it as a term that only applies to Jews, that The Holocaust (which a capital T) was some sort of punishment their god gave them for some reason. It was originally a Greek translation of a Hebrew word in the old testament for "burnt offering". Since we reject Judaism along with all other religions as a load of superstitious nonsense best to avoid using one of their concepts.

[SocialistPunk]

Cheers Adam,I get it now. I was probably being a bit pedantic, as you referred to the word by itself and not with a "The" in front of it.I guess as a young lad growing up in the nineteen eighties the word holocaust was synonomous with the threat of nuclear war, so I never saw the horrors the Nazis inflicted on Jewish people as well as others unlucky enough to be seen as inferior, as having an exclusive religious association with the word itself. I saw and still see it as mass slaughter of people by people, whether by fire or any other means.As to the punishment thing, I remember seeing a documentary a few years back in which a concentration camp surviver said that his experience made him lose his faith, as he couldn't accept god allowing such horror to take place. I guess it made the idea of being one of gods chosen people seem a little hollow. Though he still continued to practice the religion to honour the memory of those who died.

[ALB]

This is what happens if you put a foot wrong when mentioning the H word::http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-2929834/Trident-base-compared-Auschwitz.htmlBut what was actually wrong in itself with what he said?

Quote:

Speaking the day after the world marked 70 years since the end of the Holocaust, the peer made clear that Plaid would be "tremendously opposed" to shifting the base from Faslane naval base to Pembrokeshire.Asked whether the move would have some positive benefits, such as bringing jobs to the area, Lord Wigley – a former leader of the party – replied: "Look, this week we have been remembering what happened in Germany before the war, no doubt there were many jobs provided in Auschwitz and places like that but that didn't justify their existence and neither does nuclear weapons justify having them in Pembrokeshire." Challenged as to why he was comparing a Trident base to the notorious death camp, he replied: "The number of people that will be killed by Trident will be infinitely more."

[DJP]

ALB wrote:

But what was actually wrong in itself with what he said?

Nothing and anyhow the above is an analogy not a comparison..

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