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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

Senate Time Heals All Wounds

Discussion in 'Community' started by Jabbadabbado, May 16, 2014.

  1. Jabbadabbado

    Jabbadabbado Manager Emeritus star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Mar 19, 1999
    mostly through denial and forgetting.

    It seems weird that I knew people, close relatives, who were born in the 19th century. I knew a World War I veteran!

    John Kenneth Galbraith believed that as finance industry professionals who remembered the 29 crash retired and died off, institutional memory, which acted as a kind of barrier to new bubbles and crashes, would also fade, potentially opening the door to another major market crash. And so, for example, institutions and professionals without a working memory of the Great Depression would no longer be able to understand why something like the Glass-Steagall Act was a sound idea.

    Today, similarly, the world is rapidly filling up with Holocaust deniers and people who've never heard of the Holocaust at all.

    The Holocaust stigmatized antisemitism in the western world for 70 years. The youngest of the remaining people with working memories of the Holocaust are all in their 70s now. In a few more generations, there will be no one left alive who knew anyone who experienced the Holocaust. Before World War 2, antisemitism was routine and socially acceptable. After living memory of the Holocaust is extinct, it may again become a perfectly acceptable form of prejudice among certain social groups.

    Maybe worse than antisemitism losing its stigma is the possibility that genocide itself will lose its stigma. The Holocaust remains an irksome drag on all the evil people in the world who would otherwise feel completely comfortable riding identity hatred all the way to its most extreme endpoint possible. But that only continues to work while people have heard about the Holocaust or believe that it happened.
     
  2. Oissan

    Oissan Chosen One star 7

    Registered:
    Mar 9, 2001
    People who experienced it dying out is indeed a problem, a lot of knowledge gets lost that way and people simply lose contact to such a part of history, which increases the chance of something similar happening again. First-hand experience is always the best way to remember something. I'd say the countries which have been directly involved will do fine. The issue is more prevalent in areas which have no direct connection to the Holocaust.

    That being said, the survey that gets mentioned is from the ADL, which is more or less a joke when it comes to this stuff. They love to ask questions that are loaded and draw bad conclusions to inflate numbers. Many questions are completely harmless and do not hint in any way at the person being an anti-semite, yet somehow the ADL manages to turn them into one. Groups like this actually hurt their own cause. Their kind of "surveys" directly contradict data that comes from actually reputable sources that actually ask precise questions instead of dodging around the issue and then accusing people of being anti-semites over what amounts to nothing.
     
  3. I Are The Internets

    I Are The Internets Shelf of Shame Host star 9 VIP - Game Host

    Registered:
    Nov 20, 2012
    I never understood the concept of Holocaust denial. There are still remnants of concentration camps!
     
  4. Jabbadabbado

    Jabbadabbado Manager Emeritus star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Mar 19, 1999
    I think the reasoning goes like this:

    "if the Holocaust didn't happen or wasn't as bad as everybody's making it out to be, then the Nazis weren't so bad after all. And if the Nazis weren't so bad after all, then it must be ok to hate Jews. And Thank God for that, because I really hate Jews."
     
  5. DantheJedi

    DantheJedi Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Aug 23, 2009
    The concept of Holocaust denial is :confused: to me, because we have newsreel footage of them, not to mention first-hand accounts of Allied troops who liberated the camps.
     
  6. Darth Guy

    Darth Guy Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Aug 16, 2002
    I think it's understandable for East Asian people to not know about the Holocaust. It was an exclusively Western crime with mostly Western sentiments behind it. That said, even if, say, China wasn't culpable, it's obviously a good idea to teach them that killing off a whole ethnicity is bad.

    What I find interesting is a more prevalent, widely accepted, subtler form of Holocaust denial not held exclusively by anti-Semites: the insistence that regular German soldiers did not participate. Thus absolving "normal Germans" in general and allowing others to delude themselves into "keeping faith in humanity." "It wasn't everyone! Just some bad apples." The problem is the Wehrmacht was absolutely integral to the Final Solution. The SS ran the death camps, but millions of Holocaust victims died at the ends of Wehrmacht rifles. Especially on the Eastern Front, soldiers often didn't wait until they were done conquering an area to round up the local Jewish population.

    There's a documentary about the denial of regular German army participation in the Holocaust streaming on Netflix-- focusing on Germany. You're welcome.
     
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  7. duende

    duende Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Apr 28, 2006
    time wounds all heels
     
  8. Violent Violet Menace

    Violent Violet Menace Manager Emeritus star 5 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Aug 11, 2004
    That is also true.
     
  9. VadersLaMent

    VadersLaMent Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Apr 3, 2002
    So, when can white folks use the N word?
     
  10. KnightWriter

    KnightWriter Administrator Emeritus star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 6, 2001

    Never.
     
  11. VadersLaMent

    VadersLaMent Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Apr 3, 2002
    So like, if I get biological immortality, survive for trillions of years and escape the heat detah of the universe and like Galactus see the birth of a new universe and traverse through to it...
     
  12. Ender Sai

    Ender Sai Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2001

    Yeah, there's a whole debate among genocide historians at least (correct me if I'm wrong about its wider applications) about bystander guilt. That is, to what extent are people culpable for (in this case) the Holocaust by simply doing nothing to prevent it? Ordinary Germans, ordinary Wehrmacht, even Allied powers, knew of the systematic destruction of the Jewish people by the Nazi regime; they simply did not take steps to stop it. That, genocide academics argue, is effectively as guilty as active participation. They back this up with examples of individual Catholic bishops (the Vatican, as a whole, supported fascist regimes) resisting the National Socialists but not being reprimanded by the SS etc.
     
  13. timmoishere

    timmoishere Force Ghost star 6

    Registered:
    Jun 2, 2007
    Nincompoop. There, I said it.
     
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  14. Jabbadabbado

    Jabbadabbado Manager Emeritus star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Mar 19, 1999
    Not to excuse ordinary Germans, but resisting Gleichschaltung was no easy task. In the Garden of Beasts includes some anecdotes about what that was like for American tourists and expatriates living in Gemany in the pre-war years after Hitler had taken power.
     
  15. TheChosenSolo

    TheChosenSolo Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Dec 9, 2011
    Let me just say that history is ALWAYS written by the victors, and propaganda can become "fact" to make the victors seem like the ultimate good guys, and the losers seem like the ultimate bad guys. This is part of how they make war justifiable. For instance, the history books will always say that Hitler ordered the extermination of 6 million Jews, but VERY few will tell you that the United States instigated Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor, and left those soldiers to die knowing an attack was on the way, so that Roosevelt could go to Congress to ask for a declaration of war.

    I'm on the fence about the Holocaust for this reason, and I'm not certain I'll ever learn the full truth about it. If it did, then the people who committed the atrocities by now have received their recompense.
     
  16. dp4m

    dp4m Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Nov 8, 2001
    Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait...

    Geocentrist, autism via vaccine proponent and a Holocaust denier.

    I'm beginning to think this dude's either really an epic performance artist or Mel Gibson, I'm not sure yet...
     
  17. LostOnHoth

    LostOnHoth Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Feb 15, 2000
    The film industry will never let anyone forget about the Holocaust.

    Schindler's List
    The Pianist
    Life is Beautiful
    The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
    The Round Up
    Defiance

    To name a few. Not to mention the History Channel and the various documentaries and mini-series (like Band of Brothers).
     
  18. LostOnHoth

    LostOnHoth Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Feb 15, 2000
    Home schooled.
     
  19. The Loyal Imperial

    The Loyal Imperial Manager Emeritus star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 19, 2007
    That doesn't even come close to explaining it all. This is a clearly a whole other level of dissonance. The 1% of conspiracy theorists, if you will.
     
  20. LostOnHoth

    LostOnHoth Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Feb 15, 2000
    I guess it depends on the quality and sanity of the home school teachers and curriculum. Who checks this stuff?
     
  21. The Loyal Imperial

    The Loyal Imperial Manager Emeritus star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Nov 19, 2007
    One would think that access to the internet would at least bring into question the educational shortcomings and inconsistencies. Willfully clinging to blatant falsehoods despite being freely (and frequently) provided with all available, credible evidence to the contrary takes a very special kind of tinfoil. It's not like we're talking about indoctrination bunkers, completely cut off from the outside world.

    And now, back to our regularly scheduled regular Holocaust deniers.
     
  22. Penguinator

    Penguinator Former Mod star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    May 23, 2005

    They probably won't ever say Roosevelt did that because there's no concrete evidence, unlike the SIX MILLION DEAD JEWS.
     
  23. Ender Sai

    Ender Sai Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Feb 18, 2001
    You mean, victors like the all conquering Christians and their lies?

    Listen, learning about the Holocaust is easy. There's overwhelming evidence out there. Literally nothing about it is up for debate.
     
  24. Darth Guy

    Darth Guy Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Aug 16, 2002
    The Allies were pretty horrible too, therefore the Holocaust-- arguably one of the few crimes unique to the Axis-- didn't happen... ?
     
  25. Ramza

    Ramza Administrator Emeritus star 9 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Jul 13, 2008
    Holocaust denial, in addition to being highly offensive, is a very serious crime in numerous countries our boards are accessible in and could be construed as a violation of TOS Term 2. I would strongly recommend not doing so on our boards.