How to Understand And Confront Holocaust Denial

[jakell]

One of the recurring themes amongst Holocaust deniers was that the amount of attention given to it, and that the amount of fine tuning of the teaching of it was suspiciously (their perspective) intense, and the further we go from the incident in time, the odder it looks.

Sometimes they seemed to have a point, and sometimes it was the usual rhetoric and posturing about 'Jewish influence'
Stuff like this doesn't help though:

...Too few teachers - particularly history teachers - are being trained to teach the Holocaust in England, the Education Select Committee says.

Although good Holocaust teaching material is available, the majority of teachers are "self-taught" with little professional development, MPs say.

They also call for steps to be taken to preserve the words of Holocaust survivors for future generations.

Ministers say all pupils must study the Holocaust and what it teaches us today.

This is why it is unique in being the only subject named as a compulsory part of the history curriculum, a spokesman for the Department for Education said....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35384417

So, apparently, history teachers are not equipped to deal with this particular bit of history and need some extra professional development (being 'self taught').

Another aspect is that this event is naturally fading. We have a society full of South East Asians, Africans of all stripes, West Indians and Middle Easteners, and this is not really a part of their history. It was hard enough keeping white British youth engaged with this, but they are on their way out. To push this so artificially can make a mockery of it.

[jakell]

Haven't viewed this yet, but the title alone made me laugh (granted, it doesn't take much to make me laugh):



If the contents are naughty, please form an orderly queue to bite me.

[jakell]

I pretty much knew that Ramzpaul isn't a holocaust denier, so I felt fairly safe in posting the above

I was surprised that he doesn't know of Stefan Molyneux because they seem to have similar views. Stefan has done a fairly good video where he talks very patiently for ages to a Flat Earther guy and I think this is the one that RamZ refers to. Anyway to the thread connection...

RamZ quite correctly connects the ridiculousness of Flat Earthing with that of holocaust denial and that they both seem to rely upon an extreme and forced version of scepticism where absolutely nothing is believed until some unattainable level of proof is offered. The trick being to make this scepticism seem reasonable.
Earlier in this thread I remarked that talking to holocaust deniers is like talking to fundamentalist Christians (I've done both a fair bit), and it seems that the former, rather than being a historical investigation, is ultimately a tenet of belief in White Nationalism, the core of which remains impervious to argument and facts. One can nibble pretty successfully at the edges though, with good results.

[American Dream]

https://www.irehr.org/2018/10/26/intern ... nier-dead/

INTERNATIONALLY ACTIVE HOLOCAUST DENIER DEAD

By Leonard Zeskind October 26, 2018

Robert Faurisson was born in 1929 of a French father and Scottish mother in the suburban village on Shepperton, about 15 miles southwest of London. He studied in France at the University of Lyon, and became a teacher in Vichy. He became a public Holocaust denier in the 1970s, writing an article for Le Monde in 1978 that claimed that the gas houses at Auschwitz did not exist. Faurisson called Anne Frank’s diary a fraud, and engaged in other anti-Semitic efforts to discredit Holocaust memory.



He traveled widely peddling his patently false ideas. When he went to Sweden in 1992, hundreds of protesting students met him at the airport and 200 elderly Jews protested outside Parliament. He traveled regularly to attend and speak at conferences of the Institute for Historical Review, then the Number One Hothouse for mis-remembering the Holocaust. IHR’s executive director Mark Weber, translated Faurisson as he spoke in the streets of Munich in 1991, at a much diminished Kongress.

Faurisson persuaded Noam Chomsky to write in defense of his free speech rights. And Chomsky later wrote that he thought Faurisson was “a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort.”

When Faurisson came to England this month, the anti-fascist anti-racist magazine Searchlight tracked his activities: “An audience of 60 like-minded historical revisionists had made their way to a secretive reception on Saturday 20 October at a hotel in Shepperton, arranged by Peter Rushton, assistant editor of the intellectual Nazi publication Heritage and Destiny. … After an opening speech by Vincent Reynouard, who is hiding out in the UK in the face of a European arrest warrant, the audience …were regaled by Faurisson boasting about his “research” which had “proved” that the Nazi gas chambers were faked. As he was coming to the end of his speech, the hotel management demanded that Rushton close the meeting. Rushton refused, and according to a report on the Heritage and Destiny website, the management “harassed the audience … turning out the lights, setting off the fire alarm and playing loud disco music …”.”

Faurisson went home to Vichy and on Sunday, October 22, died of a heart attack in the doorway of his house.