>>36
Reading failure or something?
No, my reading comprehension is fine.
Tl;dr: I don't like straw-man arguing.
It's not "straw-man arguing"; I'm trying to figure out exactly what you mean because you're being vague.
When I hear two sides out, and one side is consistently full of BS, while the other side at least makes some sense, then guess which side I'll end up listening to?
Care to cite any examples of this supposed "BS"?
Isn't that obvious by now?- Failure to Believe, is, to this date, the only jailable thought-crime in any of Europe's self-declared democracies. What for, really, if the evidence really is that solid?
I mentioned in
>>19
I'm all for repeal of these laws in Europe
Of course, that's from strictly being a freedom of speech issue not from a zOMG! THOUGHT CRIME! crankish perspective. I've said for a while now (not specifically in /newpol/) that Europe should adopt a more American approach to free speech, which is near absolutist in constitutional scope and law, and the US should adopt some European things, like multi-party democracy, stronger labor rights, and better funding of sciencey related things and long-term R&D development of things that doesn't immediately care about short-term profit from such endeavors. I'm going a little off-topic here, but that puts some of my views into context on this issue.
- By pigheadedly nazifying Unbelievers, thereby dictating that only Hitler-lovers can possibly ever fail to Believe, we effectively end up declaring that the Holocaust was somehow the only evil thing that the Nazis ever did.
It does put into question your motivations, so the assumption that a Holocaust denier is a possible Nazi sympathizer isn't an absurd one. I'm not saying you
are a Nazi sympathizer, there's been cases of even leftists and anti-fascists that have delved into the crankery that is Holocaust denial (an example being Paul Rassinier, ironically a camp internee himself!). Even in the unlikely possibility that the Holocaust is a complete hoax, Neo-Nazis would still have a lot to answer for National Socialism's other many documented atrocities.
That last point is actually the biggest problem, as it inexorably leads us to conclude
- that the Chrystal Night was somehow not evil,
- that the SS, SA and Gestapo were somehow not evil,
- that the Entartede Kunst thingy was somehow not evil,
- that book-burning sessions are somehow not evil,
- that having all those concentration camps lying around in the first place, was somehow not evil…
…not to mention stuffing people into those camps, for felonies such as having the wrong skin tone, or some thought-crime, etc.
This leads me to believe that you've never read any mainstream historian's writings on the Holocaust. In all the time I've cared to dedicate to the subject of the Holocaust, I've never read from any historian or heard in any documentary
anyone saying that all these other things you mentioned are irrelevant or of absolutely no importance. I've read many things about the SA thugs that would beat minorities or political dissidents in the streets, or reading about the horrors of
Kristallnacht. I've never read or heard once that the Holocaust was of more importance than anything that Nazis did previously. What I do often hear, though, is that these events lead up to the Holocaust and Final Solution.
The debate amongst established historians is whether or not the Holocaust came about from Hitler's intention himself, or that it was from the lower but still high ranking officials in the Nazi Party that eventually set in motion the Final Solution. This is more commonly known as the "Functionalism versus intentionalism" debate.
Revisionism, in the Holocaust denial sense, is a misnomer, because it implies that revisionism is not happening within the mainstream Holocaust historian community. For example, there were widespread rumors that the Nazis made lampshades and shrunken heads of their victims' remains, this has long now proven to be false; actual, historical revisionism in action.
And all of them were crimes against humanity. In their own right. No need for another crime topping that off, for it to be evil.
The Holocaust wasn't just "one crime", it was a perpetuated series of crimes spread over a wide area in labor, holding and extermination camps, shootings right on the open fields and in dug out pits, etc.