Postby Barrington James » 1 decade 5 years ago (Sun Jun 17, 2007 7:57 am)
The making of a Youtube type video might be a good idea.
I have never tried making a video but I have been discussing the holocaust with my high school History teaching friends for some time now and I have found that it is not an easy job to convince even them or anyone that most of what they have been taught about the holocaust since childhood by their teachers, professors, priests, friends and relatives, that most of what they read in the papers two or three times a week or that almost all of what they have seen in the movies, magazines or on TV about the holocaust is actually propaganda, fables, myths and lies. It's like going to school and telling your little friends there is no Santa Claus, or telling your adult friends there is no God or Gods -only worse. It's like telling the world, as Galileo did, the earth goes around the sun and not the other way around. In most countries in the world, as we all know, to deny the holocaust publicly could be dangerous for you, your family and friends. Beside very few will thank you for it. They would rather not know.
Nevertheless here's what I would do, based on my discussions with my friends, if I were to make a presentation- although I never will.
First of all tell your audience that no one denies the Jews suffered horribly during the war and that tens of thousands of them, if not hundreds of thousands of them, died during the war along with, by the way, another fifty million human beings. Tell them that a denier simply means a person does not believe the six -million- gas story. That's all. Most people today, whether they know it or not, are deniers.
Secondly do not begin your debate with too many facts, mathematical, scientific or logical. Your audience just won't believe you, first of all, and secondly, it will only put them asleep or have them call you names. If you try convince your audience of the impossibility of the gassing by using technical concepts or by explaining the impossibility, for example, of gassing 2, 000 people an hour, of cremating their bodies without fuel, or of finding any mass graves and so on, you will simply leave your audience cold, or worse, very angry.
Although at this point it would be a good idea to explain to your audience that up until WW2 more people , soldiers or civilians, in any war, died of disease than of bullets or bombs. For example, you might tell them that two thirds of the 650, 000 Americans soldiers, North and South, who died during the American civil war died of disease, or you might give them a brief history on Andersonville, where 20, 000 Yanks died of disease in that American civil war prison camp, or of the British camps in South Africa during the Boer war, where tens of thousands of Boer children died. It might get them to think a little.
However my only argument that got them really thinking, that made them at least consider my argument, that didn't cause them to think of me as a crazy Jew hating denier, was when I told them the fact that during the war and immediately after the war the “story” we were are told about the holocaust was that millions of Jews had been gassed in the camps in Germany. Yet, eventually , it was finally admitted even by Simon Wiesenthal the Nazi hunter, that despite the fact that hundreds of camp guards were hanged for their roles in the gassing and had been beaten to a pulp to confess to such crimes, no person, Jew or otherwise, had ever been gassed to death in Germany.
You could also tell them that the gassing stories were in fact British, American, Zionist and communist lies and hysterical camp rumors created to justify the war and the terror bombing of German and Japanese cities, to make us forget the horrors of the Jewish led Bolshevik reign of terror in Russian and Eastern Europe that killed tens of millions, to destroy German pride as a people after the war, and to justify the creation of Israel and other such crimes against humanity that we can talk about at some other time. Burt keep your presentation simple as possible.
Don't confuse or shock them with too many ideas. Try to keep them focused on your simple equation: no gassing in Germany=no gassing in Poland.
So, I have told my friends that despite the fact that we have all seen pictures of hundreds of dead in the German camps, all holocaust experts now agree, deniers and believers both, that there had been no lethal gassing in Germany, that most of these people died of disease. The truth is that we have never found a single victim who had actually died of gassing , and we have never found mass graves, tons of ashes, any way of getting the gas either into or out of the gas rooms, a single functioning gas room, any fuel for cremation, and any crematorium that could handle more than a couple of hundred bodies a day, let alone thousands every hour day after day, month after month.
I then explain that even though these German camps became household words for all of us who lived through the 40's 50' and 60's, names such as Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and Buchenwald and even though today many people still believe these stories, and ask to see the gas chambers when they visit these tourist spots in Germany, there were no gas lethal gas chambers in Germany. None.
I then proceed to tell them that the only reason we did not disprove the gassing myths of Auschwitz, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek, and Treblinka when we exploded the myths of the German camps, is that these so called death camps were in Poland behind the Iron curtain, and consequently we couldn't get investigate them at that time.
In any case I strongly suggest that you keep it simple, and repeat the simple message: they lied to us about the German camps and they lied to us about the ones in Poland. How many lies to you have to hear before you stop believing? Then stop and ask them for questions. Good luck.
You can fool too many of the people most of the time.
