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The problem is Jews don't share your ambivalence to motives or means. If you deny an explicit plan for extermination, or six million, or "those absurd shower contraptions" then you are a Holocaust denier by definition. They do not take the position of "the number doesn't really matter, the existence of the gas chambers do not matter." Those things are sacred objects. If they are exposed as false, they cannot tolerate it and say "gas chambers or typhus, extermination camps or starvation due to catastrophic war conditions, who cares." They are all-in on a specific mythology and symbology.
It would be like saying Christ wasn't crucified, he died of dysentery in Roman custody. No Christian would accept that and say "who cares", because we aren't talking about historiography, we are talking about Mythology. Someone like you would just be mildly intrigued that Jesus died in prison rather than via crucifixion. But a Christian could not accept that update into his mythological worldview. "Jesus suffered a lot and died for our sins, but he wasn't hung on a cross." That's heresy.
Simply denying the gas chambers, even if you pay every other sort of homage to Jewish suffering in WWII, still puts you squarely in hell according to Dennis Prager.
The Holocaust mythology is a big reason for this. Perhaps the largest, in explaining European racial sensibilities in 2020 compared to 1920.
I thought that the line you responded to here was more about European passivity and submission to authority--they don't have the reputation for it quite like the British do (what with their surveillance cameras and the ever-memetic loicense), but Continentals lived under hierarchical monarchies for centuries and didn't much question being killed in wars started by their higher-ups for the longest time. Upon re-reading it, maybe your angle is more the frame to take, but I feel like one of the missed/forgotten lessons of the Holocaust is/was/could be/should be "it's okay to stand up for yourself and others sometimes, you know--it can even save lives."
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