Why do people deny the holocaust happened

At the time, this seemed to be just another example of the mainstreaming of climate change denialism on the American right. After all, the second Bush administration had done as little as possible to combat climate change, and many leading Republicans are prominent crusaders against mainstream climate science. Yet something else was happening here, too; the tweet was a harbinger of a new kind of post-denialist discourse. It may have been a garbled version of the common argument on the US right that global climate treaties will unfairly weaken the US economy to the benefit of China.

This is not how denialism usually works. Denialists usually labour for decades to produce, often against overwhelming odds, carefully crafted simulacra of scholarship that, to non-experts at least, are indistinguishable from the real thing. They have refined alternative scholarly techniques that can cast doubt on even the most solid of truths. Whereas denialism explains — at great length — post-denialism asserts.

Whereas denialism is painstakingly thought-through, post-denialism is instinctive. Whereas denialism is disciplined, post-denialism is anarchic. The internet has been an important factor in this weakening of denialist self-discipline. The intemperance of the online world is pushing denialism so far that it is beginning to fall apart. The collective, institutional work of building a substantial bulwark against scholarly consensus gives way to a kind of free-for-all.

Because the attacks occurred in an already wired world, the denialism it spawned has never managed to institutionalise and develop an orthodoxy in the way that pre-internet denialisms did.

They can believe that the towers were brought down by controlled demolition, or that no planes hit the towers, or that there were no floors in the towers, or that there were no passengers in the planes. Post-denialism represents a freeing of the repressed desires that drive denialism. What matters in post-denialism is not the establishment of an alternative scholarly credibility, so much as giving yourself blanket permission to see the world however you like.

W hile post-denialism has not yet supplanted its predecessor, old-style denialism is beginning to be questioned by some of its practitioners as they take tentative steps towards a new age.

This is particularly evident on the racist far right, where the dominance of Holocaust denial is beginning to erode. Mark Weber, director of the denialist Institute for Historical Review, glumly concluded in an article in that Holocaust denial had become irrelevant in a world that continues to memorialise the genocide.

Some Holocaust deniers have even recanted, expressing their frustration with the movement and acknowledging that many of its claims are simply untenable, as Eric Hunt, previously a producer of widely circulated online videos denying the Holocaust, did in Yet such admissions of defeat are certainly not accompanied by a retreat from antisemitism. The impact on Jewish-Zionist power would surely be minimal.

The heightened scrutiny of far-right movements in the last couple of years has unearthed statements that might once have remained unspoken, or only spoken behind closed doors.

Eleven million [immigrants] is nothing. Final stop: Auschwitz. Indeed, the Daily Stormer, one of the most prominent online publications of the resurgent far-right, demonstrates an exuberant agility in balancing denialism, post-denialism and open hatred simultaneously, using humour as a method of floating between them all.

But there is no doubt what the ultimate destination is. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. Not all denialists are taking these steps towards open acknowledgment of their desires.

In some fields, the commitment to repressing desire remains strong. Still, over time it is likely that traditional denialists will be increasingly influenced by the emerging post-denialist milieu. T he possibility of an epochal shift away from denialism means that there is now no avoiding a reckoning with some discomfiting issues: how do we respond to people who have radically different desires and morals from our own? How do we respond to people who delight in or are indifferent to genocide, to the suffering of millions, to venality and greed?

Denialism, and the multitude of other ways that modern humans have obfuscated their desires, prevent a true reckoning with the unsettling fact that some of us might desire things that most of us regard as morally reprehensible. It is hard to tell whether global warming denialists are secretly longing for the chaos and pain that global warming will bring, are simply indifferent to it, or would desperately like it not to be the case but are overwhelmed with the desire to keep things as they are.

It is hard to tell whether Holocaust deniers are preparing the ground for another genocide, or want to keep a pristine image of the goodness of the Nazis and the evil of the Jews. It is hard to tell whether an Aids denialist who works to prevent Africans from having access to anti-retrovirals is getting a kick out of their power over life and death, or is on a mission to save them from the evils of the west.

If the new realm of unrestrained online discourse, and the example set by Trump, tempts more and more denialists to transition towards post-denialism and beyond, we will finally know where we stand. Instead of chasing shadows, we will be able to contemplate the stark moral choices we humans face.

Maybe we have been putting this test off for too long. Karski spoke with both Roosevelt and Churchill. History records, however, that Karski's pleas were largely dismissed. One need only check the major newspapers of the period to realize how little attention was paid to Nazi atrocities. If the Holocaust was merely "propaganda," why did the Allies go to such lengths to downplay it? There is no proof that the Holocaust occurred. No crime in history has been as well-documented as the Holocaust.

Proof of the Holocaust is multi-faceted. It is demonstrated by a myriad of documents, the majority of them Nazi-authored, captured by Allied troops before the Germans had a chance to destroy them. Included are detailed reports of mass shootings and gassings. Some 3, documents on the destruction of Europe's Jewish community by the Nazis were, in fact, presented by the prosecution before war crimes tribunals at Nuremberg.

The first-hand testimony of survivors who lived through the horrors of the death camps as well as the reports and confessions by the perpetrators leave little doubt as to the nature of Hitler's "Final Solution.

Allied officers and troops were sickened by what they saw at sites of slaughter they had just liberated. It is important to note, that no Nazi war crimes suspect who stood trial in the post- war years for their misdeeds ever claimed that the crimes of which they were accused were fictional.

They instead argued that they were "only following orders. Johnson of the California Superior Court, took judicial notice of the Holocaust ruling that, "The Holocaust is not reasonably subject to dispute. It is capable of immediate and accurate determination by resort to resources of reasonable indisputable accuracy. It is simply a fact. It is true that Germany had fewer than , Jews when Hitler came to power in The majority of Jews murdered by the Nazis, however, did not live in Germany.

They resided in the countries which Germany invaded during the war, especially Poland and areas of the former Soviet Union, where millions of Jews once made their homes. In fact, the Protocol of the Wannsee Conference Jan. The 6 million figure can be demonstrated by comparing Europe's Jewish population before and after the war.

Even after making allowances for those who fled Europe and others who could be expected to die due to natural causes, there are nearly 6,, people who cannot be accounted for. Authentic German documents confirm the slaughter of Jews in the millions.

The famous "Korherr Report" named after Richard Korherr, chief statistician for the SS puts the number of Jewish losses at more than 2,, by the end of alone. The war in Europe would not end until May, On the basis of wartime statistical reports on ghettos, concentration camps and mass murder operations carried out by the Nazis, historian and international jurist, Jacob Robinson, arrived at a figure of 5,, German historian, Helmut Krausnick, put the number of Jewish losses nearer to seven million.

While the exact figure will never be known, scholars of the Holocaust find the rounded-off figure of six million to be in line with all the evidence. The Red Cross never issued such a statistic, nor has it offered any estimate of the number of victims who perished in the camps. In its bulletin of February 1, , the Red Cross declared that it had never compiled, much less published such statistics.

The , figure was actually taken from the Swiss paper, "Die Tat", in This estimate, however, was only a figure for the number of Germans who perished in the concentration camps. No mention of any Red Cross figures, however, was ever made by the paper. Despite the obvious deception, Holocaust deniers continue to peddle it, hoping that few people will actually check the sources.

Nazi policy towards the Jews was emigration, not extermination. From the beginning, the Nazis made no secret of their goal of creating a "Jew-free" Germany and Europe. One of the earliest methods was, indeed, forced emigration. But on November 10, , precise instructions from Berlin to kill the Jews in his area were received by Higher SS and police leader, Friedrich Jeckeln from Berlin, stating, that pursuant to the Fuehrer's order, Jews would no longer be allowed "to emigrate", instead they would be "evacuated".

In the Spring of , 1, mental patients had been transferred from sanitoriums in Eastern Prussia for "evacuation" near the Soldau concentration camp. Although Jews were the Nazis' main target, a wide range of other groups were persecuted during the Holocaust, including gay people, minority races, political opponents like communists and trade unionists, and Jehovah's Witnesses. A quarter of a million mentally ill and disabled people and half a million Roma also known as gypsies were killed.

Holocaust survivor Steven Frank, who was one of 93 children to survive the Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia along with his two brothers, said the survey's findings were "terribly worrying".

His father, who helped hide Jews as part of the Dutch resistance, was arrested in Amsterdam and gassed at Auschwitz, in Nazi-occupied Poland, in January Mr Frank, who now lives in Hertfordshire, said he was "surprised" by the number of people who do not believe the Holocaust took place.

The year-old said: "In my experience, people don't have a solid understanding of what happened during the Holocaust and that's one of the reasons I am so committed to sharing what happened to me. He added: "Education is so important. If we ignore the past, I fear history will repeat itself.

She added that the rise in reported hate crime in the UK and the risk of genocide in ongoing international conflicts meant "we cannot be complacent". They destroyed not only documents. They also destroyed the mass killing apparatus and liquidated the witnesses. Images from www. Their use must not tarnish the good reputation of the victims of KL Auschwitz. Any interference in the integrity of the images — including cropping or graphic processing — is prohibited.