Skip to main content

Holocaust Denying Asshats I

Image result for holocaust museum

 The history section of Yahoo!Answers has been overrun by holocaust deniers. Once in awhile I rise to their bait, but I've tried to limit those occasions. 

 A recent example: some genius asked, "Was Hitler really that bad?" Below this, his graf of explanation for the question starts thus: "Sure he supposedly killed 6 million jews (the number keeps going up) but...." you get the idea so I'll stop there!

 I'll also reproduce my answer here, because it's easier than writing something new for today, and because these holocaust-denying asshats often say crap like the bit in that parenthesis.

Yes. That monosyllable answers your headline question adequately. As to the other stuff, I'll comment on the number 6 million and your statement that the number "keeps going up." It doesn't. Scholarly consensus had formed at 6 million by about the mid seventies and has stayed there. 

 You are discussing a large and complicated historical event taking place over a lot of terrain, so it isn't surprising that the consensus number took as long as it did to gel.  What is important is that it hasn't "gone" anywhere since the mid 1970s. It has stayed at 6 million. Why? Well, perhaps for the same reason that the consensus number for the average distance between earth and moon stays at 384 million meters. Although it took the human race awhile to figure that out, once it was figured out, the number has stayed the same because the reality has.

----

I alluded to the mid 1970s there because I had in mind Lucy Dawidowicz' book on the subject, THE WAR AGAINST THE JEWS (1975). She offers the precise figure of 5,933,900. The rounding-up was natural. The figure of 6 million had remained canonical among non-asshats ever since.

Yes, there is also some talk of an "11 million" in some circles. That is employed by scholars who include the mass murder of certain non-Jews under the broad heading "Holocaust." The death of 6 million Jews is then included in that broader figure -- it isn't evidence that "the number keeps going up." Saying so is just a wilful confusion of two different numbers.

And yes, before Dawidowicz' publication date there was some uncertainty over how many millions were involved.  For example, in THE DESTRUCTION OF THE EUROPEAN JEWS (1961) Raul Hilberg gives the figure was 5.1 million. Arendt repeats that number in her book on the Eichmann trial. But this simply confirms the earth-to-moon analogy in my Yahoo answer.

Thanks for listening!  I expect to say something more about this sort of asshattery tomorrow.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more