International Holocaust Remembrance Day

[seemslikeadream]

Recounting the tragic story of the MS St. Louis on Twitter

Remembering the murdered, one tweet at a time


https://twitter.com/Stl_Manifest

St. Louis Manifest
‏@Stl_Manifest
My name is Selma Simon. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Sobibor

St. Louis Manifest
‏@Stl_Manifest
My name is Joachim Hirsch. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Auschwitz

http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/27/14413 ... nt-history

[seemslikeadream]

Donald Trump’s dance with the devil: Did White House mean to wink at Holocaust deniers?
Historian Deborah Lipstadt wonders whether Trump's troubling statement flirts with "softcore" Holocaust denialism
AMANDA MARCOTTE

Donald Trump's dance with the devil: Did White House mean to wink at Holocaust deniers?
Donald Trump; Deborah Lipstadt (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci/Gregorio Borgia)
President Donald Trump has barely been in office for a week and already he’s being accused, by prominent and credible people, of aiding and abetting Holocaust denial. Both Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and conservative commentator John Podhoretz have gone public with such criticisms.

This outcry resulted from the White House statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which omitted any mention that the Holocaust was an effort to get rid of the Jewish population of Europe. All previous presidents had made mention of the fact that while many non-Jewish people were killed in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, the machinery of the Holocaust was created and effectively used to kill more than 60 percent of Europe’s Jewish population.

This omission is especially troubling in light of the fact that Holocaust denialism — which is about either outright denying or aggressively downplaying the Jewish genocide at the hands of the Nazis — is a common feature of the specific variety of white nationalism that is being mainstreamed through Trump and his “alt-right” advisers, including former Breitbart head Steve Bannon. The fact that Trump’s Holocaust statement was issued at almost the same time as his ban on refugees and immigrants from certain countries, which reminded many of the efforts to turn away Jewish refugees during World War II, did not help matters.

In addition, Trump is known to be fond of conspiracy theories, including overtly racist ones like the “birtherism” he used to plague Barack Obama. Holocaust denial is the granddaddy of conspiracy theories, and many of the common tropes and strategies used by a wide range of conspiracy-mongers can be traced back to efforts to deny or explain away the Nazi campaign to murder Jews.

“The fact of the matter is that the Holocaust, as defined by historians, is not ‘all the bad things the Nazis did,'” explained historian Deborah Lipstadt over the phone. “The Nazis did lots and lots of bad things. But the Holocaust is the attempt to annihilate European Jewry.”

In 1993, Lipstadt wrote an important expose on Holocaust denialism, titled “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.” She was then sued in a British court by conspiracy theorist David Irving, because she correctly characterized many of Irving’s public statements as Holocaust denial. Lipstadt won the suit.

That famous court case was recently depicted in the feature film “Denial,” released last fall, in which Rachel Weisz plays Lipstadt.

In our conversation, Lipstadt laid out her theory that there are two kinds of Holocaust denial: “hardcore” and “softcore.”

“Hardcore denial,” she explained, is when someone seeks to deny the very existence of Nazi gas chambers, “deny Hitler wanted to kill the Jews [and] deny the facts of the Holocaust.”

Softcore denial, however, is subtler. That is less a matter of “denying the Holocaust outright” so much as “de-Judaizing it” or otherwise trying to downplay the historical importance of Hitler’s efforts to commit genocide against the Jews.

As Mark Hoofnagle of Denialism Blog, which tracks and exposes conspiracy theories, explained, softcore denialism has developed as a way for denialists to communicate their ideas while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability.

Such softcore “deniers have become more subtle in the decades since Paul Rassinier outright denied [the Holocaust’s] existence in the aftermath of WWII,” Hoofnagle writes. They often rely instead on “minimization and distraction” to push the notion that while the Holocaust was a tragic event, it was not a large-scale genocide against the Jewish people.

This form of denial is similar, in this limited sense, to climate-change denialism. In some circumstances, denialists will flat out suggest that climate change is a hoax. In more mainstream arenas, they will soften their rhetoric, claiming instead to be unsure whether climate change is real, or admitting that it’s happening while expressing skepticism that humans are causing it.

It is worth noting that Trump himself has this habit, sometimes calling climate change a hoax and sometimes softening his rhetoric to suggest he’s just uncertain about the science.

Was the White House Holocaust statement meant as a nod and a wink to denialists? Lipstadt isn’t sure. “It could have been a rookie mistake,” she said, “and that’s what I initially thought it was.”

But the fact that White House spokespeople such as Hope Hicks and Reince Priebus dug in their heels and refused to admit that it was an error at all made Lipstadt worry. Hicks even used rhetoric that echoes that of Holocaust denialists, saying, “We took into account all of those who suffered.”

Well, so did President Obama, in his presidential statements on this remembrance day. But he managed to do so while not erasing the intent and focus of the Holocaust.

“Today, with heavy hearts, we remember the six million Jews and the millions of other victims of Nazi brutality who were murdered during the Holocaust,” Obama wrote in his 2015 statement, which also identified “anti-Semitism” as the root cause of the Holocaust.

The shifty rhetoric coming from White House defenders like Hicks and Priebus makes interpreting the underlying meaning a problem. “Either this is an administration that can never admit it’s wrong, which is not a good thing,” Lipstadt saidd, “or there are people in the White House who think the Holocaust should be de-Judaized.”

In the former case, it’s still alarming. Trump has a huge fan base among neo-Nazis, anti-Semites, white supremacists and so on — the people Hillary Clinton famously called the “basket of deplorables.” If the White House doesn’t want to enable those deplorables and egg them on, it should hasten to assure the public that the president understands the historical facts of the Holocaust. Playing footsie with neo-Nazis isn’t something public officials should mess with.

As Lipstadt made clear, no one is denying that other historical genocides also deserve attention. But Holocaust denialism, whether it takes the form of denying that the Holocaust ever happened or simply minimizing or ignoring the fact that it was a genocidal attack on Jews, is about perpetuating anti-Semitism.

“Conspiracy theorists are not people who haven’t gotten enough information,” Lipstadt argued. “They’re people who come to it with a pre-existing idea, and usually underneath that idea is some sort of prejudicial notion. You know: Government is cheating us, Jews want power, Jews want money, blacks are lazy, they cheat.”

She flagged birtherism, a conspiracy theory much beloved by Trump, for its similarities to Holocaust denialism. Birthers, she suggested, cannot believe that a black man like Barack Obama got into the White House on merit and so cling to the idea that he must have cheated.

As with Holocaust denialism, birtherism took multiple forms, with believers carefully calibrating what they said depending on their audience and its level of skepticism. When around fellow true believers, birthers will often let loose with their belief that Obama faked his birth certificate. In more mainstream spaces, they get cagey and elusive, claiming they are just raising questions and painting themselves as earnest seekers of truth.

Trump himself frequently used this “just asking questions” strategy during his many years touting birther conspiracy theories.

“Well, I don’t know, was there a birth certificate? You tell me,” Trump said in an ABC News interview in 2013. “You know, some people say that was not his birth certificate. I’m saying, I don’t know. Nobody does.”

Trump has a history of using slippery rhetoric to push conspiracy theories, while also denying that’s what he’s doing. That’s why there’s room for suspicion around the slippery rhetoric being used to justify the erasure of the Jewish genocide in his Holocaust Remembrance statement. If the president really didn’t mean to wink at Holocaust deniers, he should apologize outright and issue a full-throated correction.
http://www.salon.com/2017/01/31/donald- ... t-deniers/

[MacCruiskeen]

Oh ffs, what a complete non-story and what a load of crap.

“Conspiracy theorists are not people who haven’t gotten enough information,” Lipstadt argued. “They’re people who come to it with a pre-existing idea, and usually underneath that idea is some sort of prejudicial notion. You know: Government is cheating us, Jews want power, Jews want money, blacks are lazy, they cheat.”

What a load of crap.

[seemslikeadream]

that's your boy trumpy dumbty...show him some more

he is in need of all the sympathy and love he can get

Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

[MacCruiskeen]

Donald Trump’s dance with the devil: Did White House mean to wink at Holocaust deniers?
Historian Deborah Lipstadt wonders whether Trump's troubling statement flirts with "softcore" Holocaust denialism
AMANDA MARCOTTE

[...]

Trump himself frequently used this “just asking questions” strategy during his many years touting birther conspiracy theories.

[...]

http://www.salon.com/2017/01/31/donald- ... t-deniers/

Genius.

[seemslikeadream]

that's your boy trumpy dumbty...show him some more

he is in need of all the sympathy and love he can get

Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

[MacCruiskeen]

that's your boy trumpy dumbty...show him some more

he is in need of all the sympathy and love he can get

Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

What a giant baby you are.

[seemslikeadream]

no babies are people that can't stop personal attacks..they are incapable of controlling themselves just like 2 year olds

oh my mistake these pics were meant for the thread where you have sympathy for a racist

MacCruiskeen » Tue Jan 31, 2017 7:57 am wrote:
It's hard not to feel some sympathy with a man who is opposed so vehemently by so many smugly murderous imperialist bastards.

[MacCruiskeen]

no babies are people that can't stop personal attacks..they are incapable of controlling themselves just like 2 year olds

oh my mistake these pics were meant for the thread where you have sympathy for a racist

MacCruiskeen » Tue Jan 31, 2017 7:57 am wrote:
It's hard not to feel some sympathy with a man who is opposed so vehemently by so many smugly murderous imperialist bastards.

that's your boy trumpy dumbty...show him some more

he is in need of all the sympathy and love he can get

Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

Using your baby-logic, I could easily have accused you of loving Madeleine Albright, Samantha Power, and the War on Terror. But that would hardly have been fair, would it? No doubt you'd whinge about it being a terrible and indefensible personal attack.

Can I accuse you of loving HuffPo, WaPo, Salon, Vice, et al? Certainly, you never stop recycling their garbage here for our delectation while persistently disclaiming all responsibility for any of it.

[seemslikeadream]

Using your baby-logic

no you're the baby ....no you're the baby ...no you're the baby ....no you're the baby ....no you're the baby ...no you're the baby