lol @ Yossarian

Yeah... what he ^ said.

omnae pretty much has it. most of freshman year classics has slipped out of my brain but if you recall the biblical stories depicted in exodus, they do have an actual historical context. not in the sense of any parting of the red sea bullshit, but a hebrew state did emerge in the region at roughly that time. a lot of it was ripped to shreds by babylonian/assyrian invasions and so forth, which resulted in a lot of jews being unceremoniously evicted from their homeland and shepherded off into isolated clusters throughout the world -- hence the reason there are small communities of jews in so many places.

so it's not as though the western world threw darts at a fucking map to pick the location of israel. or like they had no claim on the region at all.

and anyone who thinks the holocaust was something invented to create sympathy for the zionist agenda has been doing too much methcathinone. not because there is so much testimony supporting the notion that it happened, but because there is no testimony at all supporting the notion it was fictionalized by its victims. the idea that a conspiracy could take place on the kind of scale we're talking about and leave behind no trace, no written evidence, and no dissenters willing to blow the whistle on the scheme is pretty ludicrous.

and if you find yourself believing otherwise, you probably -- like mr ahmadinejad -- just plain hate jewish people.

That, or they just were too affected by The Matrix trilogy...

To say the Jewish Holocaust didn't happen, though, is sheer idiocy in my opinion. But even the truth nowadays does not matter. Now it's all about the media coverage.

If, for the next hundred years, people shout at the tops of the media that it didn't happen, pretty soon everyone will believe it didn't happen. If there are enough websites out there claiming it didn't happen, then soon, people won't investigate for themselves. They won't look for proof. They'll simply mark down a url site and stand behind it, the claim being, if it is on the internet, it must be true or it must be fact. People generally follow the path of least resistance or the path requiring the least effort.

What I am more curious about is the purpose behind such statements. I mean, at first I believe it is simply to gain attention. It is the kind of slap in the face opinion that does tend to get attention. But if, over time, they truly want to bend public opinion to acknowledge that an event that did happen, didn't... I would very much like to know why.

Again, I'm not saying that I believe all of these revisionist claims to be irrefutable fact. I'm certainly no expert, but I came across these webpages recently and found them interesting -- and in any case, I don't think any of you can say with absolute conviction that all of the arguments put forth by the "holocaust denial" theorists are beyond the realms of possibility. Even if a mass persecution of Jews and other minorities did in fact occur, how can you be completely sure that the statistics weren't blown out of proportion ? It's not so much about whether or not it actually happened, but rather, the true extent of the alleged crimes. Those are two separate issues.

It's up to you if you choose to believe or even consider the following articles, but they're worth reading anyway, in my opinion at least.

Auschwitz - Myths and Facts
What is Holocaust Denial ?
'Gas Chamber' Hoax

I don't, honestly, see the point of this topic. Anyone who claims the holocaust didn't happen is either grossly misniformed (usually by lies) or is a liar themselves. Arguing about the specific forms of torture and execution or exact statistics of those murdered is in my opinion a complete waste of time. The holocaust is history; what happened, and to who, and how many, are questions that have been muddled and greyed by time. There are a few tantimount facts that everyone should know; what happened was horrible, and it should never, ever happen again. Numbers, names, revisionism and analysis... it was a human tragedy on a massive scale. Narrowing down how tragic or how massive is nitpicking about a sensitive subject.

No one here is suggesting that it didn't happen. And no one here is suggesting that it was for the betterment of humanity, and nor will they.

It is not the most wide scale loss of human life in history... the religious crusades as well as the spread of the roman and british empire featured massive death and persecution on scales that are, fortunatly, likely impossible to replicate today. The purges of the Soviet Union and China, the ethnic cleansings repeated throughout eurasia, the numberous bloody regimes in Africa that went unchecked for decades... we are talking about undocumented and impossible to analyze atrocities with casualty numbers easily totalling in the combined billions. The USSR may alone acount for several hundred million deaths. But the ultimate tragedy about the holocaust is not how many people were enslaved or killed but merely the fact that it was preventable. The western governments had been recieving reports, from before the war offically began, that Germany had begun to relocate and coagulate in ghettos German Jews, and had reports long before the US entered world war two of the death camps and executions, and only after soldiers actually physically came upon the camps did word begin to spread and people begin to believe. If claims made and reports recieved had been believed earlier, Hitler's march across Europe more then likely would have been intervened against more seriously long before he reached France.

So yeah.

i like it when people say they don't see the point of a topic then proceed to post their own diatribe on the matter.

People are hypocrites: News at 11.

well how can i argue with that snappy one liner.

You can't.

Try.

You'll fail.