Is there a correlation between religious fundamentalism and holocaust denying?

@#$% the straight-jacket, I can type with my toes ('cause they took my shoelaces away).Doesn't it strike you as ironic that you get so much wrong in your short list of what "everybody otta know"? I'd "advice" you to spend more time on learning the English language and less time on Star Dreck/Wars.Any correlation between Holocaust denial and fundamentalism would likely be due to the militant ignorance of those groups. You might want to distance yourself from them by czeching yer spelling an' yer fax.

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“Faith moves mountains, but only knowledge moves them to the right place”
-- Joseph Goebbels
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riVeRraT responds to me:

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Let's not pretend that Christian fundamentalists are supportive of Israel because they like Jews. No, they're supportive of Israel because they need the Jews to die during Armageddon.

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I don't like to categorize people as fundamentalists, but I don't think I have ever got that feeling from any Christian about the Jews.

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You need to start paying attention more, then. Just listen to Robertson go on about it and the collected works of Falwell. In 2006, Robertson condemned Israel's cease-fire with Hezbollah, quoting Isaiah: "We were with child. We writhed in pain, but we gave birth to wind."And if you can stomach it, read the "Left Behind," series...Jewish characters in the books exist for one of two reasons: Convert or die...they're the "red shirts" of the series.It's called "dominionism" (though it has its tendrils in "dispensationalism" and "Christian Zionism"). 144,000 Jews will convert to Christianity and be saved while all the rest will die and be cast into hell.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Taz writes:

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-Pie is better than cake

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But cheesecake is better than pie.

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-Raymon Carver

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First: It's "Raymond Carver."Second: Who?I had to look him up: Short stories and poetry.Nobody reads that.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

riVeRraT writes:

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First off, I've never heard of the expression holocaust denier. wtf is that?

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Um, you do know that one of the main defenses of those before the Nuremberg trials was to deny that there was any Holocaust. Oh, there were concentration camps, yes, but we never killed any Jews deliberately, no ovens, no Zyklon-B, no "Final Solution."The denial of the Holocaust is as old as the Holocaust.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

Cheesecake is pie. Don't you watch "Good Eats"?

People that either dispute the amount of people killed or the reason why they were killed. Or people that just pretend it never happened.I've never met anyone that denied it, but they do exist. Like Taz said, Mel Gibson's father is a raging anti-semite, which obviously has spilled over to some extent in Mel's life.More currently, the president of Iran is an outspoken holocaust denier.

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

The problem with a genocide like the Holocaust is, imagine trying to try Hitler for the murder of just one of the victims of the Holocaust. If not only that person was killed, but everybody in the town where that person lived was killed, too, and then everybody who knew about that town was either killed or couldn't be found, how exactly would you legally prove that that one person had been alive in the first place? You might find a birth record somewhere, but that would just prove that they had been born. How would you prove that that one person had been in a concentration camp if the only people who could have identified that person were there in the camp with them, and then they were all killed together?This is similar to the problem they had prosecuting Milosevic for the Bosnian genocides.It's fairly difficult to establish the eventual disposition of the millions of Jews who were swept up in the Holocaust. For any given individual it's quite difficult to come to a positive determination about whether or not they died in a concentration camp, fled the country and took refuge somewhere else, potentially under an assumed name, or just disappeared somehow in the chaos of war.And, of course, you can always deny the existence of the gas chambers and mass executions. I mean who can contradict you? If you saw the inside of the chamber while it was being used to for a mass execution, you died in the execution. And the rooms were originally built to be showers. All the prisoners saw were people who went in one door, and never came out that door. Who's to say (so argue the deniers) that they weren't simply marched out the other door, clean and healthy, and then taken to some other facility?It's only in the convergence of evidence that the Holocaust is undeniable. There's no one, specific piece of evidence that can confirm it beyond all doubt. This situation is much like the situation with a scientific theory like evolution; deniers of evolution gain much apparent traction from the fact that evolution is supported by a convergence of evidence, not any one single experiment or observation that proves the entire theory.In both cases the situation is like a bridge held up by many pillars. You might dispute that the pillars hold up the bridge at all, and in doing so, you might ask "show me the pillar that holds up the bridge. If you remove it, and the bridge does not fall, then clearly that was not the pillar that held up the bridge. If there's not a single pillar you can take out where the bridge does not fall, then clearly the bridge is not being held up by any of the pillars."It's specious, but that's the kind of specious argument that Holocaust deniers and evolution deniers are both forced to make, because both propositions are supported not by one proof, but by a convergence of much evidence.

Evangelicals often express unconditional support for anything the modern state of Israel does, but not for this reason. The reason is that they think God requires this of them.Their Bible is full of passages that speak approvingly of individuals who, remarkably, are idolaters by that same Bible's definition of the term. The individuals earn praise in spite of their religious beliefs because they act in ways that support Israelites/Jews politically in some way. See Balaam, Rahab, Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus.Many passages in the same Bible also portray YHWH's own support for his people as conditional indeed. But when it comes the attitude other nations should adopt toward any nation called 'Israel', evangelicals regard blind support of it as the only option. Like all political decisions, it is not a matter of personal 'liking' but of protecting one's own national interest.The prooftext behind this approach is found in the Pentateuch's story of Balak and Balaam (Numbers 22.1-24.25). The complete narrative may be read online courtesy of Oremus. For the good of the order, here's a synopsis.

Balak, king of the Moabites (a Canaanite people), is greatly distressed to see hordes of Israelites, recently freed from Egypt, camping in the region. Balak engages a well-known seer, named Balaam, to pronounce curses on the Israelites so the Moabites can benefit from the spiritual edge. He promises to pay Balaam handsomely for providing this service.

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Balaam sets out to honor the contract. He has an epiphany en route, though, in the form of a miraculous talking donkey. He realizes he can only say of Israel what God wants him to say. It would be suicide to attempt otherwise.

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Balaam arrives and begins uttering oracles. Balak the Moabite ends up being one unhappy customer. The oracles lead him first to the realization that Israel cannot be cursed, then to the realization that neutrality is also out as an option. Israel cannot help but be blessed and all its enemies be cursed. Nothing remains but for all other peoples in the world to get with the program.

The upshot of the story is distilled in a terse statement (Numbers 24.9). Balaam, in the process of blowing his chance to earn a fat fee, looks upon the Israelite encampment and says:

Blessed is everyone who blesses you,
and cursed is everyone who curses you.

Fundies take such statements literally, as you know. And they are not much inclined to factor in those details more critical thinkers might find relevant. (Do conditions attach to this 'blessing' in the form of moral expectations of Israel? Are biblical Israelites to be identified with modern Israelis, who are often atheists? Is unconditional approval of any group of people a morally defensible position?) For these simple people the matter is simple. If you want God to like your country, like the country God likes. Enable it. Don't put yourself on the wrong side.Combine this position with the notoriously ill-informed ideas fundamentalists nurture and some unintentionally hilarious results emerge. My favorite appears in Left Behind, a recent fundy pulp novel. The story opens with alarm bells going off in Jerusalem: fighter jets from an unidentified Arab country are zooming into the city to bomb a target. The jets magically vanish in midair. Jerusalem, it seems, is protected by an unseen hand.One wonders if the anyone bothered to consult an encyclopedia before going to print. Where are Israel's jets? Why are Arabs attacking a city that is one of Islam's holy places and home to thousands of Muslims? What's the target? Would it be the Temple Mount? If so, why are Arabs so eager to destroy The Dome of the Rock?It's a stitch.Given this situation, I don't see a direct correlation between Christian fundamentalism and Holocaust denial. Many fundies actually view the Holocaust as confirming biblical portrayals of Israel as a martyr nation. It grants Israel a certain claim to moral superiority that may not otherwise show. It justifies their support.The direct correlation is not between Christian fundamentalism and Holocaust denial, but between both phenomena and ignorance. They arise from the same source as moon landing denials, conspiracy theories, and similar reactionary phenomena. Absent reliable information about the world outside one's community, people tend to assume outsiders are 'just like us' or, when it becomes plain this is not the case, cast them in idealized roles as angels or villains.Ancient peoples had their difficulties with this, too. Including Moabite rulers and Israelite storytellers.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

As a matter of fact, this is the very same reason how swiss banks got rediculously rich from the holocaust. Survivors of the holocaust couldn't prove that their families were dead. After all, the nazis never gave out death certificates. Well, there's a little difference. The nazis kept meticulous records of everything they did. When it was clear that they were going to lose the war, they tried to destroy all the evidence by burning the records and death marching the surviving holocaust victims away from the advancing allied forces. However, as much as they tried, enough evidence and witnesses remained to reveal the true horrors of what they accomplished.But you are right in that the holocaust cannot be proven with any single piece of proof, much like evolution. The nazis made sure of that. The only reason we know about it today is because their extermination campaign was on a scale that even the evil bastards couldn't perform without leaving traces of it behind.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

I don't care what other people believe, a cheesecake is a pie. Haha, it was a joke. Personally, I hate short stories. This hatred stemmed from repeatedly getting bad grades in high school on Raymond Carver's short story reports in English. Mrs. Morrison (we often called her Mrs. Morron behind... in front of her back) was in love with the guy. If Carver was still alive, I'd tell him to shove his metaphorical short story bullshit up his ass.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

Well, I guess it wasn't too much of a problem since the upper echelon of the Third Reich stood trial for war crimes. The only ones that didn't fled to places like Argentina and Australia. Some were hunted down and stood trials then. Others, like Hitler, decided to commit suicide because he knew the outcome was grim.If there was enough evidence to convict lesser officers within the SS, then Hitler would have been screwed. Obviously he was aware of that, which is why he chose to take his own life. If you are asking whether or not you can piece together the murder for each individual person, sure, that would be exceedingly difficult, and in some cases, impossible. But the Nazi's, for whatever reason, really didn't cover up their tracks very well. In fact, the images we have today of The Final Solution, mostly came from Nazi's themselves. They implicated themselves. I'm sure a few of them did manage to escape, though we know that the Nazi's took measures in making sure they didn't. The Nazi's controlled all of Germany, Austria, Belgium, etc, etc. That's a long walk through enemy fortified positions. Aside from which, all the people that received settlements were found by Russian, British, and US forces inside the concentrations camps when they were liberated. Not very convincingly since human remains were strewn all over the place, some fully decomposed, some with rigor mortis and dependent lividity, some in full blown putrefaction, the ovens were found, the Zyklon B was recovered, the showers converted for gas were discovered, the gallows, the incinerators, and, and, and, all found at Aushwitz and the other concentrations camps. About the most a Nazi soldier at the time could say, is that they didn't have any personal involvement. Because of the insurmountable evidence. Scroll down and read these documents. Well, you can't identify with complete certainty every single person that was killed in the Holocaust. Of course not. You can only find thousands and millions of remains, and deduce that they are in the rubble, just like how not everyone was recovered from 9/11. But they never came home. They worked there. Planes destroyed two buildings, damaged a third, and was incinerated in the four crashes. Its greatly implied that they died, as there is no other reasonable explanation as to their disappearance since there exists credible evidence that they did in fact die in the place they were supposed to be.

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“This life’s dim windows of the soul, distorts the heavens from pole to pole, and goads you to believe a lie, when you see with and not through the eye.” -William Blake

Sure, but that really doesn't address the issues I raised in my post. It's hard to determine precisely who died as a result of their actions. At Nuremburg, they knew that millions had; trying to prove beyond reasonable doubt that any specific individual died in the Holocaust is quite difficult.Look, it's a known problem with genocide. That's one of the reasons that the courts that try war criminals operate somewhat differently than criminal courts. Oh, I don't think he would have gone free, no. But, like the Saddam trial, I imagine that courtroom procedure and evidentiary requirements would have taken a backseat to a pre-ordained verdict.They would have strung him up for his actions, doubtless. And doubtless he would have deserved it. Would that justice have proceeded completely according to the rules of jurisprudence? It's a little ridiculous to talk about hypothetical trials but I imagine some corners would have been cut.All I'm saying is, these are the facts of the situation, and they're what give Holocaust deniers rhetorical purchase. They're wrong, of course; I'm just trying to explain the obstacles people who defend the historic consensus face when grappling with the deniers. Michael Shermer has a whole section on Holocaust denial in Why People Believe Weird Things. That's all I'm saying. That's why the demand by Holocaust deniers for their opponents to do just that - to wit, "name one person proved to have been killed in the Holocaust!" - is so disingenuous. Deniers have answers for all this, of course; "those people died of starvation, disease, and neglect, not execution"; "the ovens were for cremating the already dead", "Zyklon B is an insecticide, used even by the US", "the showers were used for delousing prisoners, as a hygiene measure", "how could gallows have been a means of mass execution", etc.I'm not arguing Holocaust denial, I'm just saying, for any individual point of evidence, the deniers have some rebuttal, usually specious or dishonest. They're much like creationists in that regard.It's in the weight of evidence, taken in total, that the Holocaust (like evolution) simply can't be refuted. I agree, and it's not by coincidence that 9/11 conspiracy theorists use the exact same arguments to deny that there were any passengers on the jets, etc. It's because you can appear to deny anything with the techniques the denialists use.But you can't escape the convergence of all the evidence. Agreed?

Not necessarily. 2 buildings fell, but the rest of the country stood. This is a completely different situation than WW2, where tens of millions of people were displaced. Anyone could make the argument that the victims of the holocaust didn't die in the death camps but were in fact simply displaced. Considering the fact that they found literally millions of remains, most of which were unrecognizable, in a post war environment where tens of millions of other people were displaced and cities in ruins, individual cases could always be denied.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!

Well. "Fortunately" for us, the Germans kept meticulous records.So it's likely that most of those killed in the Holocaust have a paper trail.The archive was opened to the public last year (only to survivors and academics, tho).

I pointed this out earlier. I also pointed out that the bastards tried to destroy as much records as they could once they realized that there was no way in hell they could win. I wouldn't say most, but likely a lot of those killed had a paper trail.Just remember that the people killed in the camps were only a portion of the victims of the holocaust. German officers and the SS were nortorious for killing people at random throughout the war. This is not to mention the extermination squads that followed the invasion forces into the Slavik countries and Russia. I highly doubt those victims had a paper trail.In many, if not most cases, the extermination squads would enter a town, kill everybody they could find, and burn the whole place down. In other instances, they made the people dig their own mass graves before executing them.In one of my major research projects, I did a report on the extent of attrocities did by the germans. I can't find it now so I can't give you any reference, but I do recall findings of official complaints made by the commanders of the german army about the seemingly random killings of the extermination squads. The complaints weren't about the inhumanity of the executions. They were complaining because the extermination squads made no attempt to hide their mass killings, and this was demoralizing the troops of the invasion force as well as detering people from surrendering.The most common misconception about the holocaust is that most victims were Jews and that the mass killings were confined to the camps. I'd really love to take a look at these records. But I guess for now I'll have to wait.

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Owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have occasionally used the academic jargon generator to produce phrases that even I don't fully understand. The jargons are not meant to offend anyone or to insult anyone's intelligence!