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I wish there were more shades of difference between the binary of "Holocaust Denier" and "Holocaust Believer(?)". I don't think I'm a "Denier," I believe that some holocausting surely did happen, I don't know/care what the exact numbers are, because 6,000,000 or 300,000 is still an incredible tragedy either way. But I've come to care much less about it because AFAICT Holocaust remembrance is almost exclusively used as a heavy rhetorical cudgel for character assassination and silencing dissent, and it really seems to lend credence to the idea that a lot of Jews are Jewish first and second. I don't even necessarily think that's a terrible thing, I'd say I'm Catholic first and American second (sorry pre-JFK Catholics). But more people realizing/admitting that would prevent Jews from having their political cake and eating it too.
I guess I'm "Holocaust Indifferent" in the same way that I'm indifferent to the Armenian Genocide. I weakly hope a second Armenian Genocide never happens again, because genociding people is bad. But I'm not Armenian, so I don't think I'd be willing to spend much of my country's blood and treasure to prevent it (sorry). And if someone tried to tar an author or political opponent as an "Armenian Genocide Denier" or "Anti-Armenian" I would probably find that mildly interesting but it wouldn't stop me from voting for that person or buying their books. I wonder how manynother millennials feel this way. It really seems like it's mostly the boomers who are completely steeped in the Holocaust mythos.
Like I said in another comment, I'm not a mind killed Jew hater so I'm open to hearing other perspectives.
Simply put after years of a certain sort "just asking questions" people are quite correctly suspicious.
This may be unfortunate for the occasional sincere autist only interested in truth-seeking that gets caught in the crossfire but it is healthier for society at large.
How? I just don’t see why putting barbed wire and guard dogs around a certain fact makes people better off.
First of all, it tends to elevate one event and one set of victims above all others. There are lots of genocides in history. I’ll recommend reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Our policy in the USA denied native Americans rights, forced them onto reservations and underfed them. Armenian genocide was a very deliberate decision. The Cathars were slaughtered with the explicit approval of the Pope. Even African slavery in the new world was pretty bad. But there’s only one genocide that we must not question and must never belittle. Which puts that people above in some sense. I can call the Trail of Tears an exaggeration all day long. I can say slavery wasn’t that bad. But touch the Grand Mythos and I’m a bad person.
Second, I believe, as I said earlier, that such a cartoon version of history with a cartoon villain making comically evil angry sounding speeches, crowd shouting slogans, Hugo Boss uniforms and red and black flags give people a very skewed idea of what authoritarian regimes look like. It’s become a visual shortcut for evil and if you want to make a bad guy regime for your movies, tapping into the aesthetic of Nazi Germany is the way to do it. But if someone else comes along and wants to use the state to silence and arrest enemies, as long as they can avoid looking like those people and don’t talk like the Nazis talked, and don’t want to go after that one ethnic group, it’s fine.
Third, I think it undercut any sober analysis of whether or not our own democratic system works. Neoliberalism has faults as well, but it’s hard to get people to think about it because of the free world propaganda which the Grand Mythos and the idea the human rights are the best way to secure human flourishing. It’s actually been used quite effectively to justify going to war with our political enemies. All that needs to be said is that a country is violating human rights and we are ready to bomb those countries, destroy their infrastructure, kill people, or maybe if they’re lucky we’ll just kill their economy with sanctions.
Its not about "facts" its about topics and certain topics are just massive red-flags.
Maybe this is uncharitable of me but if it were up to me I would not allow anyone with strong opinions on how age of consent laws are unjust anywhere near children unattended. It's the same principal.
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I think that's totally fair and reasonable, since for some reason Jew-haters seem uniquely dedicated and patient in carefully drawing people into "JQ" discussions and barraging them with an endless supply of factoids. I can't prove I'm not a troll, but FWIW I don't believe in any kind of global conspiracy to control non-Jews or suppress The Truth or anything. Jews just seem to me like an exceptionally powerful ethnic group who are very effective at leveraging their economic and political success, like Indians or Chinese. If Chinese could get American children to learn about and feel bad for the Century of Humiliation, I'm sure they would.
If the Chinese acquired the representation across institutions of cultural influence that Jews currently have in media, politics, and academia, and made the Century of Humiliation equivalent to what is now the Holocaust in public consciousness, then wouldn't the "Chinese Question (CQ)" be justified as well?
The JQ doesn't claim that the behavior of Jews, or the Chinese in this counterfactual, is hard to understand. But that it's a hostile foreign influence. That same criticism would apply if the Chinese forced the elevation of their identity so prominently in the cultural consciousness.
And wouldn't it be weird to call someone a "Chinese-hater" for correctly pointing out that influence and identifying it as hostile, in this counterfactual?
Especially if many of those lobbing the accusation of "Chinese-hater" in this counterfactual were Chinese themselves, you would be correct to view that epithet, and its cultural weight, as being yet another validation of the initial critique.
I guess this hinges on whether the Chinese got to those positions through merit by being legitimately better at them, or through corruption (there is a lot of gray area in between of course, but my point should be obvious).
If it turns out that the world’s greatest physicists, philosophers, writers, comedians, investors, and entrepreneurs were languishing in poverty for a century as a result of imperial subjugation, that would in fact be one of the pivotal events in world history!
It would be especially weird if the people most upset about this had some weird historical hangup like, “the Opium Wars were actually about tea, no one was trying to smuggle drugs into China.”
This is completely wrong. If the Chinese acquired and used that level of influence in academia, Hollywood, and news media to perpetuate systematic hostility towards White American identity, and used that same influence to elevate Chinese identity above all others, it would not matter whether they acquired those positions by merit or by crook.
If I were to say, "hey the Chinese are being very ethnocentric and hostile" then the merit of that accusation has no bearing whatsoever on how the Chinese acquired that influence which is the subject of my accusation.
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Exactly. Few people are denying that there was Holocausting present, but in a historical period in which random historical revisionism runs rampant it seems insane that there is only one singular line in the sand allowed for by the culture that is untouchable. Aztec apologia flies, but not this case.
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