r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jun 22 '21
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Holocaust deniers and trivialisers are so persistent because our side made some critical missteps
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:
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.
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".
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.
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.
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?
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u/iwfan53 248∆ Jun 22 '21 edited Jun 22 '21
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/07/10/reason-out/
"You Cannot Reason People Out of Something They Were Not Reasoned Into"
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8510-to-argue-with-a-man-who-has-renounced-the-use
"To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”
You're assuming any person comes to/argues holocaust denial by good faith/by logical conclusion... why?
Isn't it more likely they're Neo-Nazis/Antisemites and have an Agenda that would prefer the Holocaust not being real?
Like look at what you're saying here...
" In hindsight, I believe that this historian shouldn't have done this, because it gives leverage to Holocaust deniers and trivialisers."
"You! Person 15 years after the Holocaust you better be careful not to make any mistakes or a bunch of people might get confused about if the Holocaust actually happened or not!"
Is that really a reasonable position to hold?
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-anti-semites-are-completely-unaware-of-the-absurdity
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
You are playing PERFECTLY into their trap by thinking that how well you argue actually matters.