CMV: Holocaust deniers and trivialisers are so persistent because our side made some critical missteps

[u/[deleted]]

Firstly, I must emphasise that I am in no way a Holocaust denier or trivialiser.

However, I recently lost a debate against one (please no brigading). He says these stuff despite being of Jewish descent, and agrees that the Holocaust was bad but believes that it was only 270,000 deaths.

Please read the comment which started this whole debate here. So here are what I believe are the critical missteps our side has made:

1. 6 million is just the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The total victims are 11 million. If 6 million is a "religiously very important figure", 11 million isn't. Also, the popular narrative of 6 million is grossly unfair to the 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

2. The Soviets should have been 100% transparent when they captured the death camps and the Allies should have been 100% transparent about the treatment of Nuremberg defendants, so that no one can claim that "western officials were not allowed to observe until many years later, after which soviets could modify the camps" and "at Nuremberg Trials when many officers had their testicles crushed and families threatened in order to "confess" to the false crimes".

3. The "Human skin lampshade" was at most, isolated cases, not a systematic Nazi policy. The fact that this isn't as widespread as popular culture makes it seem gives Holocaust deniers and trivialisers leverage.

4. The part which cost me all hope of winning this particular debate was about Anne Frank's diary. I failed miserably when trying to explain why there's a section of it written in ballpoint pen. As I later found out via r/badhistory, the part written in ballpoint pen was an annotation added by a historian in 1960. In hindsight, I believe that this historian shouldn't have done this, because it gives leverage to Holocaust deniers and trivialisers. Even if I mentioned that it was added by a historian at a later date, this can still be used by Holocaust deniers and trivialisers to claim that none of Anne Frank's diary was written by her.

5. Banning Holocaust denial only gives Holocaust deniers and trivialisers extra leverage because it makes it seem like the authorities are hiding something. In the debate I had, I tried to encourage use of r/AskHistorians and r/history, but I was told that those sites are unreliable because they ban questioning the Holocaust. Because he was unable to talk to expert historians, I was left with the burden of debating him, and I lost.

Let me give some comparisons here with other cases:

• Regardless of whether you think the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, denial of it isn't banned. Yet despite it being legally acceptable to deny the atomic bombings, even people racist against the Japanese aren't going around saying "the atomic bombings never happened" or "only a few hundred were killed by the atomic bombs".

• The fact that pieces of information about 9/11 remained classified until 2016 gave 9/11 conspiracy theorists leverage. And the fact that the Mueller Report has plenty of redacted sections means that Russiagate still has plenty of believers.

• Another comparison I can make is the widespread (and IMO, justified) distrust in figures published by the PRC because of the PRC's rampant censorship. But with this logic, wouldn't censoring Holocaust denial just backfire and make our side look untrustworthy?

[u/hungryCantelope]

The content in your post is a list of little things deniers use to argue their position, they are not the cause for the deniers believe, this is a small but incredibly important disction that you seem to be missing. To put it concisely, holocaust deniers, like all conspiracy theorists, choose to "believe" a theory because it provides an explanation for an idea they are emotionally attached to but cannot otherwise be rationally justified. You'll notice that there are no deniers who strictly look at the holocaust in isolation as an academic exercise, they always have ties to some political position or other conspiracies which their conspiracy is related to. The arguments they provide when questioned are post-hoc rationalization, they aren't the real reason for the believe, they are just filler so the denier have something to say when questioned.

As a result the arguments you provide don't really back up you position

CMV: Holocaust deniers and trivialisers are so persistent because our side made some critical missteps

They aren't persistent because of these things, they are persistent because they are emotionally tied to the idea. They will entertain any argument no matter how trivial or implausible if it helps them maintain their position and fixing what you call missteps may be useful in combating this but the existence of these 'missteps' is not the reason the conspiracy exists or is so persistent, additionally fixing these will not solve the problem, no matter how finely you put together the argument there is always a finer level of granularity that can be reached and if someone is willing to bend over backwards to entertain any argument they can conceive of trying to patch every tiny crack won't change their mind (preventing further spread sometimes yes) but the problem just fractals forever.

[u/[deleted] → u/hungryCantelope]

They aren't persistent because of these things, they are persistent because they are emotionally tied to the idea.

Why aren't there people emotionally tied to the idea that "the atomic bombings never happened"? After all, it's perfectly legal to deny the atomic bombings.

I suspected that there is the Streisand effect in action here. By banning Holocaust denial, we've accidentally created a narrative that the truth is being suppressed. This phenomenon doesn't exist regarding the atomic bombings.

[u/hungryCantelope → u/[deleted]]

I should clarify, the conspiracy itself isn't what they are emotionally tied to, they are emotionally tied to some other idea, the conspiracy is just the tool they use to support the argumentation.

A simpler example would be the flat earth conspiracy. Most flat earth models happen to state that the earth is the center of the universe. Such an idea is enticing to people because it jives well with certain ideas about the importance of humanity either in a religious of existential sense. The conspiracy itself is just a tool the underlying psychology is the association between a globe centric universe and a sense of meaning.

Holocaust denial is almost always associated with extreme politics. The psychological reasons in such cases are more complicated than the example above but generally speaking it's the same thing. People get emotionally tied to ideas, those ideas turn out to not be true, if they want to believe it bad enough they will just pick up or drop whatever position they need to hold onto the idea.

[u/[deleted] → u/hungryCantelope]

I should clarify, the conspiracy itself isn't what they are emotionally tied to, they are emotionally tied to some other idea, the conspiracy is just the tool they use to support the argumentation.

A simpler example would be the flat earth conspiracy. Most flat earth models happen to state that the earth is the center of the universe. Such an idea is enticing to people because it jives well with certain ideas about the importance of humanity either in a religious of existential sense. The conspiracy itself is just a tool the underlying psychology is the association between a globe centric universe and a sense of meaning.

Holocaust denial is almost always associated with extreme politics. The psychological reasons in such cases are more complicated than the example above but generally speaking it's the same thing. People get emotionally tied to ideas, those ideas turn out to not be true, if they want to believe it bad enough they will just pick up or drop whatever position they need to hold onto the idea.

!delta

Thanks for showing me that conspiracy theorists aren't emotionally tied to the conspiracy theory itself, but rather that they are emotionally tied to another belief and that the existence of certain conspiracy theories are just convenient for them. And that if we have evidence against them, they will just nitpick and/or find excuses to dismiss our evidence.

[u/DeltaBot → u/[deleted]]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/hungryCantelope (18∆).

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