Barbelith Underground > Conversation > Things that should be discussed on Barbelith but won't because....

blah blah blah.

Helpful.

Fetch or Fletch or whoever

Nice to see that you bothered referring back to the thread.

...listed a shitload of "historical events" which he reported as to have happened according/resulting in/to his views. The fact is that it was a list of things in a well documented period of history that I'd never heard of, so if there was any fact of them happening at all, I was interested.

But not interested enough to do anything as whacky as, you know, follow up with a bit of research. How tragic that such questions can only be answered by starting a thread on Barbelith. Wouldn't it be great if there was some way to search the internet for websites on the topic? And books--man, if there were only a few books out there on the subject of the Holocaust!

Basically, the thing with the Holocaust is this: The evidence exists, and all you have to do is look for it. There is a metric fuckton of writing on the subject, including pages dedicated to addressing the claims made by Holocaust deniers and refuting them. It's not all tucked away on JSTOR or some academic journal somewhere, it's freely available to anyone who wants to type a few search words into Google or shell out a few quid for a book or two. There is no Earthly reason why the data has to be sifted through Zoemancer's digestive system before we can access it.

Now, what this means in practice is that this periodic "hey, maybe these Holocaust deniers have a point, let's look at their claims calmly and rationally!" thing is coming from one of two places. The first is a place of pure ignorance. The poster has not troubled to do the most minimal work to inform themselves on the issue. It may be that there's a genuine desire on the part of the poster to broaden hir knowledge, but more usually it's rooted in a need to look contentious and nawtee.

The second place is uglier. The reason we don't go a bundle on Holocaust denial threads here is that all one really needs to do is just think about the idea for a second. Just think about it. Reflect upon what it means to say "the Holocaust never happened." The only possible place this line of thinking goes is off to the International Jewish Conspiracy and tinfoil-hat land. It's less "I shagged your dog" and more "let's calmly evaluate the evidence that this group of people right here are all a bunch of dog-shaggers. Yes, I know it's a contentious subject, but we're all rational people here--surely we can discuss the possiblity of a mass dog-shagging conspiracy without getting all uptight about it?"

So yeah, that's the place a lot of these threds come from. I don't like it. It's a dark, ugly region of the human psyche. It's a place where there's this monolithic entity, "the Jews," rather than a sprawling mass of human individuals. It's a place where all those people have got together to create a vast hoax motivated by the deisre to fuck over everyone else on the planet. Can't imagine why you'd want to visit.