The Latest Anti-Obama Talking Point: Holocaust Denial

Barack Obama has, on more than one occasion now, expressed his support for acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide, which is more than most mainstream Jewish organizations have done. He's smart and he has balls....don't you think it's time for orgs like the ADL or even AIPAC, to speak up regarding the blueprint for the Holocaust?  It's long overdue. Before anyone throws stones, look both ways - including at yourself. It's time for the double standards and hypocrisy to end, and it seems that Obama is ready to cut thru the crap and get to the truth.

Anon...I'm guessing you're a new reader. Please, search the site a bit. We've been attacking Foxman and the ADL relentlessly for their denials of the Armenian genocide.

The fact that Buchenwald was a concentration camp hardly changes the fact that he frequently says things that aren't true, like that he read in Life about a black man injured trying to turn his skin white (no such article existed), or the thousands dead from tornados, (less than a dozen died) or here where he confused buchenwald and aushwitz.

 Obama the Transcendant made his latest in a long line of...(how to put this? "historical inaccuracies"?"blithering idiocies"?, why not be generous?)..."misstatements" by confusing Buchenwald for Auschwitz. Reynolds and Simberg likewise err in diminishng Buchenwald's wickedness. Their greater sin, to DK's mind, is trying to smear Obama the Magnificent in the process. Why, they're all but accusing him of cynicism in his confusion of Buchenwald for Auschwitz, when it's plain the man is a fool.

Their greater sin, to DK's mind, is trying to smear Obama the Magnificent in the process.

No, the greater sin is Holocaust denial. It's plain someone is a fool. 

DK is correct to call Simberg on his, generosity seems again in order, apparent callousness. But "holocaust denial" is a large accusation. The evidence is Simberg's contention that Buchenwald was a forced labor camp, which more often than not resulted in death for its inmates, rather than an extermination camp, ala Auschwitz. 

From this distinction the ever scrupulous DK extracts a further contention from Simberg that all Nazi concentration camps but for Aushwitz were Buchenwald-ian forced labor camps, and thus the Nazis did not in fact plan to exterminate European Jewry. Quite a leap by DK, but apparently he was not alone.

Simberberg has since clarified:

"I wasn't excusing it in any way. I was simply pointing out that in the historical context of war, in which civilians were generally enslaved or killed, and disposed of when they could no longer work, it was hardly abnormal. Auschwitz (and Treblinka, and Sobibor, and Chelmo, and Betzec, and Majdenek) were in a separate class, previously unknown, which gave rise to the term "genocide," in which the intent was to wipe out an entire people. I'm sorry that some don't get the point."

A more interesting question might be: even if Simberg meant precisely what DK contended would that merit the charge of holocaust denial? The question of intent would be alive in that case, but even DK's miserly reading of Simberg cannot conclude that he denied mass death. 

"Not that many died" is the traditional criteria for holocaust denial crackpottery. The ever original DK has created something new: questioning of intent as denial of event.

At common law, murder requires intent. Homicide does not. Someone who questions whether the Nazis murdered six million Jews, or merely allowed them to die through neglect is, at best, a poor reader of the historical record. But, unless he contends the deaths did not occur, he's not a holocaust denier. 

DK should look around for a better mentor than Obama the Teacher. Simberg was quite right that Auschwitz's emotional punch is such that its invocation should be handled very carefully. So too "holocaust denial". 

Kid Blast is up to his usual standards of cogency.

Here is the crucial line:

The people who died there [Buchenwald] did so under the stress of work and disease, rather than as a deliberate attempt to wipe them off the planet.

That is not merely minimizing what happened at Buchenwald, but denying that the labor camps were part of a premeditated and systematic plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe, a claim we know to be false from the extensive records the Nazis kept, including, especially, the minutes of the Wannsee Conference. That, in other words, is not simply Holocaust revisionism, it is denialism. It's quite clear --- indeed, I say as much --- that it's Holocaust denialism not prompted by the usual motive behind Holocaust denialism, but by farcical hackery.

Kid Blast, being a farcical hack, doesn't realize the joke's on him.

I'll admit the level of "cogency" required to conclude "holocaust denial" from, in the first instance, a statement that Buchenwald was qualitatively different from Auschwitz, and in the second, a flat statement that Auschwitz was not unique but rather part of a concerted effort to commit genocide, is not at my disposal.

" Simberg is claiming that the Nazi concentration camp system, with the exception of Auschwitz, was not the mechanism of a premeditated plan to murder the Jewish people, and that whatever deaths occurred there were not historical outliers. "

-DK

"I wasn't excusing it in any way. I was simply pointing out that in the historical context of war, in which civilians were generally enslaved or killed, and disposed of when they could no longer work, it was hardly abnormal. Auschwitz (and Treblinka, and Sobibor, and Chelmo, and Betzec, and Majdenek) were in a separate class, previously unknown, which gave rise to the term "genocide," in which the intent was to wipe out an entire people. I'm sorry that some don't get the point."

- Simberg

Kid Blast still can't read, consistent with his demonstrated intellectual candlepower. Simberg made two distinct points.

Point 1: Buchenwald was not historically abnormal b/c "civilians were generally enslaved or killed, and disposed of when they could no longer work." This is false both because even if Simberg's characterization of Buchenwald were correct, it wouldn't be historically normal, and moreover, many of the prisoners at Buchenwald died through secret experiments with poison, chemical burns and incendiary bombs, spotted fever virus, yellow fever, smallpox, typhus, paratyphus A and B, cholera, and diphtheria. Hence Simberg's point is false Holocaust revisionism.

(Sub-point 1A: In his non-clarification, Simberg adds that camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka "gave rise to the term 'genocide.'" This is also false. The term was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1933 to describe what the Ottomans had done to the Armenians, which, incidentally, resembles Buchenwald/Dachau more closely than Auschwitz/Treblinka.)

Point 2: The camps that were not explicitly extermination camps were not part of a systematic, premeditated effort to exterminate the Jews. This is false, and not merely revisionism, since Holocaust denialism is the denial of a systematic, premeditated effort to exterminate the Jews.

Being a preposterous hack, Kid Blast adduces Simberg's non-clarification on point 1 to excuse point 2. But no non-preposterous non-hack could see Kid Blast as an object of anything other than pity or scorn at this point; in particular, no one could take him seriously.

Conclusions and assertions come very easily to DK. Must be nice.

He may have noticed that I haven't expressed much sympathy for Simberg's distinction between Buchenwald, et al and Auschwitz, et al. If he noticed, he certainly doesn't care. He'd rather insult. Ah, kids...

I'm intrigued by this assertion:

"Holocaust denialism is the denial of a systematic, premeditated effort to exterminate the Jews."

This is what we're actually arguing about, since I'm not sure I agree with the assertion. I thought "holocaust denial" entailed denying that millions on millions of Jews died at the hands of the Nazis during WWII. DK adds an intent element. Not only did the Nazis kill all those people, they also intended to kill all those people. I happen to agree with the proposition, but unlike DK, I would not extend the accusation of "holcaust denier" to someone who granted the deaths at Nazi hands, but questioneded the Nazis' intent. I might call him a poor student of history, and might, just might, wonder about his motives. But asserting that he's a "holocaust denier" would be irresponsible.

DK likes adverbs such as "plainly" and "clearly" and "certainly", but I don't. So, I'll no more than note a reasonable conclusion might be that DK is crafting post facto definitions to redeem ad hoc assertions.

I haven't expressed much sympathy for Simberg's distinction between Buchenwald, et al and Auschwitz, et al.

As demonstrated by Kid Blast's repeated citation of Simberg's non-clarification which itself is factually mistaken in all its particulars and merely reiterates an appalling revisionism about the nature of Buchenwald. As further demonstrated by Kid Blast's repeated failure to read and/or comprehend Simberg's most significant endorsement of a tenet of Holocaust denialism, an endorsement for which Simberg never even proffered a non-clarification. As further still demonstrated by Kid Blast's repeated citation of Simberg's non-clarification on one point to excuse a distinct point of Simberg's. Kid Blast's sympathies are of course not with any argument germane to Simberg's points, but with any and all preposterous hackery on behalf of his political agenda. 

DK likes adverbs such as "plainly" and "clearly" and "certainly", but I don't.

it's plain the man is a fool --- Kid Blast

first occurrence of the adverb 'plainly':

DK likes adverbs such as "plainly"

Not only is Kid Blast unable to read what others write, he doesn't read his own writing.

I thought "holocaust denial" entailed denying that millions on millions of Jews died at the hands of the Nazis during WWII.

No, that's only the most extreme form of Holocaust denialism. Most Holocaust deniers acknowledge large numbers of Jews died at the hands of the Nazis; they deny either a) that there was a premeditated plan, or b) that Jewish deaths were exceptional compared with the deaths of other groups, or c) both; a) is the most important principle in Holocaust denialism.

Kid Blast, consistent with his demonstrated level of education, entertains himself misunderstanding well-defined concepts.

Consistent with his demonstrated level of honesty, Kid Blast will countenance any distortion or excuse-making to bolster his hackery.

Now, is Simberg a "Holocaust denier"? Kid Blast is the only one to have used the term, because Kid Blast a) can't read, b) doesn't know the meanings of the terms he uses, and c) is a preposterous hack. "Holocaust denier" connotes a commitment to an agenda of obscuring the historical record in order to deny that the Nazis carried out a premeditated, systematic plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The charitable reading of Simberg is that he merely endorsed the core tenets of Holocaust denialism because in this one case doing so facilitated his preposterous hackery, rather than out of a commitment to the agenda of Holocaust denialism per se.

Why does Kid Blast persist in informing us that there is no line of hackery so preposterous or embarrassing that he will not indulge in it? That became clear months ago.

"Kid Blast's sympathies are of course not with any argument germane to Simberg's points, but with any and all preposterous hackery on behalf of his political agenda. "

Rich stuff from the poor man's Andrew Sullivan.

plain/plainly---

Did DK miss the day at Ivy League U when they explained the difference between adjectives and adverbs?

Re- "holocaust denialism", DK typically adopts the latest in conventional wisdom about a given intellectual proposition. Just because Wikipedia and Professor Grayhair in Philosophy 301 say there are lesser and greater degrees of holocaust denial does not in fact make it so.

Those who intimate that maybe the Nazis didn't precisely mean to kill all those Jews they killed can fairly be described as lousy thinkers. Charging them with the much greater transgression of holocaust denial reveals far more about the accuser than the accused.

Did DK miss the day at Ivy League U when they explained the difference between adjectives and adverbs?

No, I made that day in kindergarten. I also never used "plainly." Kid Blast was the first to use it. He was also first to use "plain." And first and only to let flow snark on the word "plainly." His point might have been to object to the connotations of certainty in "plain/ly" rather than adverbial usage; but Kid Blast is neither an honest nor competent user of English so his point is opaque to ordinary methods of analysis.

Rich stuff from the poor man's Andrew Sullivan.

Spoken precisely like a preposterous hack for whom all and only what's important about an argument is how it relates to Barack Obama; bonus points for using a line so ham-handed it's not even change you could xerox. What's the over/under on how long ago it was concocted? I say March 15.

Re- "holocaust denialism", DK typically adopts the latest in conventional wisdom about a given intellectual proposition.

Translated out of hack-ese: Kid Blast doesn't have a clue what Holocaust denialism is, hence...

Those who intimate that maybe the Nazis didn't precisely mean to kill all those Jews they killed

He is incapable of accurately stating what it is denialism denies (because he doesn't know). 

What blast is next for the poor man's Kevin James?

True enough re "plainly".

DK's comfort and facility w/ unsubstantiated assertion led me to see a "plainly" where none existed. Lesser talents rely on such things. DK, on the other hand, is just that good.

As for "holocaust denialism", an admittedly self-serving restatement might be that kid blast, upon responsible inquiry into the matter, decided for himself what"holocaust denialism" is, rather than regurgitate what campus-for-lifers told him it was.

Notice also that Kid Blast concedes every single point and attempts either to change the subject or shift the goal posts. Which is appropriate; Kid Blast is a preposterous hack and that's what preposterous hacks do.

True enough re "plainly".

DK's comfort and facility w/ unsubstantiated assertion led me to see a "plainly" where none existed. Lesser talents rely on such things. DK, on the other hand, is just that good.

I read what I write and read what I respond to. Kid Blast reads whatever he wants to see.

As for unsubstantiated assertion:

As for "holocaust denialism", an admittedly self-serving restatement might be that kid blast, upon responsible inquiry into the matter, decided for himself what"holocaust denialism" is,

Yes, that's a self-serving restatement. A minimally accurate and honest restatement is that Kid Blast doesn't like the clearly defined and understood concept of Holocaust denialism because he it doesn't support his agenda, so he'll assert without the slightest substantiation that the term means something other than what it does. Understandably, because Kid Blast is a caricature of a hack.

rather than regurgitate what campus-for-lifers told him it was

I mean, what the fuck would people who study movements know about the movements they study, right? What could you possibly learn about Holocaust denialism from reading the primary sources of Holocaust denial?

Next up: Kid Blast walks off a cliff because he's an independent thinker who won't "regurgitate what campus-for-lifers told him" about the definition of gravity.

Ever notice how the lousy, uninspired, and oft-repeated "shift the goal posts" cliche is mouthed by those who, in all likelihood, never had the misfortune to run up against one of those very solid things? If one had actually laid out for a pass at the back of the endzone, he'd know any effort to shift is futile.

It's adoption here is but further evidence that DK is a clever parrot. "Holocaust denial has three essential elements, the most egregious of which is denial of Nazi intent" "Hacks shift the goalposts" "Obama will be a great president"...these lines, and many others like them, have been well learned by the smartest kids in class.

Ever notice how the lousy, uninspired, and oft-repeated "shift the goal posts" cliche is mouthed by those who, in all likelihood, never had the misfortune to run up against one of those very solid things?

I was a Div. I rugby player, and have moved goalposts in my time. It's certainly (how about plainly?) true that most efforts to shift goalposts, esp. single-handedly are futile. That's why every sentence Kid Blast writes is so pitiful and would embarrass him if he had any capacity to be embarrassed.

Re: metaphorical goal-post shifting, "shifting the goal line" would be a better metaphor. Either way, hacks like Kid Blast, in keeping with their hackery, try to change the rules of an argument rather than concede when they've lost.

On reflection I was much too easy on Kid Blast on the plain/plainly thing. It's not just that he's a careless and incompetent writer capable of forgetting his own remarks from one moment to the next (though he is); it's that a preposterous hack like Kid Blast with no intellectual standards apart from his own hackery is bound to express explicit contradictions and so he can't --- at the cost of jeopardizing his entire system of hackery --- keep track of his own statements, let alone those of others. The necessity of not knowing or having any ability to keep track of what he says in sustaining his hackery leads Kid Blast to abortions like this:

the lousy, uninspired, and oft-repeated "shift the goal posts" cliche

Shall we review the full corpus of Kid Blast cliches preserved in Jewcy's archives? I can promise they are so lousy and uninspired that there is little chance they'll be repeated as oft as "shift the goal posts." 

Total lack of intellectual standards/basic reading skills also explains:

denial of Nazi intent

I.e., Kid Blast still doesn't know and can't accurately state the central tenet of Holocaust denialism.

But at least we finally get to the root of the matter:

well learned by the smartest kids in class

I.e. the ressentiment of the dumbest kid (blast) in class.

Seven (7) distinct attempts by Kid Blast to change the subject after he's been shown to be embarrassingly wrong, in this thread alone.

Fearing no adverb, DK likes "embarrassingly" too.

My explicit point throughout this little exercise has been to highlight that DK's accusations of holocaust denial were overheated. I'll plead guilty to implying that his aggressive j'accuse is politically motivated as well. If his eventual and predictable accusation of partisan hackery on my part does not entirely justify the implication (DK-ian assertion alert: furious "no you are"'s are a guilty conscience's calling card), a brief review of his Jewcy career ought to.

Rugby (D-1 no less!) is a fine sport, and I'm sure all the fellas in their sporty pullovers struggled mightily to get those movable posts out of the way before the big guys began practice between two immovable certainties, but I'm not sure how that justifies DK's embrace of talking-head inanity.

I suppose I should be ashamed that, in DK the Rugger's estimation, I can't state the central tenant of holocaust denialism. Many have denied, and continue to deny, so many Jews died at Nazi hands during WWII. That's an odious enough definition for me, and well worth arguing against. So too is it worth demonstrating the error to those who,for whatever reason, contend that the Nazis killed millions of Jews but might not have intended to kill that many. Conflating the two categories diminishes the opprobrium properly attaching to the first.

And attempt #8 to change the subject.

Kid Blast makes false assertions about goal posts. Not quite prepared to stop digging, he asserts that rugby and football are played on the same field; they can't be, because rugby pitches are bigger than football fields and marked completely differently. So "the big guys" like Kid Blast wouldn't have gotten close enough to know whether our goal posts were designed to be moved or not. In Kid Blast's own case, his ignorance might be explained by repeatedly bashing his head against an immovable certainty (or plainly-ness)?

My explicit point throughout this little exercise has been to highlight that DK's accusations of holocaust denial were overheated. I'll plead guilty to implying that his aggressive j'accuse is politically motivated as well. If his eventual and predictable accusation of partisan hackery on my part does not entirely justify the implication (DK-ian assertion alert: furious "no you are"'s are a guilty conscience's calling card), a brief review of his Jewcy career ought to.

Shorter and sans verbal onanism: "No you are." My Jewcy career, as Kid Blast would know if he were an honest and competent reader of English and had reviewed it, includes a more thorough and substantive criticism of the object of his partisan hackery than anything he has produced. But Kid Blast is a preposterous partisan hack, hence the confusion. And indeed, construing an objection to Holocaust denialism as an expression of partisanship is a particularly extreme calling card for a preposterous hack to leave behind.

As is an ongoing furious effort to deny that "Holocaust denialism" denotes Holocaust denialism, the only proffered evidence for which is that know-it-all egghead jerks who flunked Kid Blast disagree with him, but what do those know-it-all eggheads know anyway? As is an instantaneous reflex to make absolutely every discussion under the sun a discussion about the alleged faults of an object of partisan hackery, even when they are not minimally germane.

I can't state the central tenant of holocaust denialism.

Indeed, Kid Blast cannot. This is now the 8th occasion in this thread on which he has misstated it.

I never flunked.

See, how easy that was, DK?  When your interlocutor insults you based on assumption and caricature, 100 pedantic words isn't necessary.

re holocaust denialism, hark this eleveth attempt:

for such a free thinking libertarian, DK sure is wedded to accepted habits of thought. 

I never flunked.

Well that speaks poorly of Kid Blast's teachers.

re holocaust denialism, hark this eleveth attempt:

for such a free thinking libertarian, DK sure is wedded to accepted habits of thought.

And now Kid Blast confesses he doesn't know what "libertarian" means, can't add 8+1, and believes changing the subject to his misunderstanding of "libertarian" constitutes an additional misstatement of another misunderstanding.

So I hark: had Kid Blast been properly flunked and spent a few years in remedial drills, he might have learned how to write a sentence without embarrassing himself or portraying himself as a caricature.

wedded to accepted habits of thought

Will credentialed "big guy" Kid Blast prove his freethinking bona fides, divorce accepted habits of thought, and settle scores with the egghead know-it-alls who evidently traumatized him one way or another, by walking off a cliff without falling? Or will his peasant revolt against knowledge splatter against an immovable certainty?

(Running Kid Blast totals: 9 attempts to change the subject/shift the goal line rather than admit what's plain for all to see; still only 8 misstatements of the central tenet of Holocaust denialism though (my 9th attempt to parry his subject-changing))  

Not only can one find arguments in the literature about whether Auschwitz was a normal labor camp, a destructive labor camp or a death camp, but if we look at Soviet concentration camps, US concentration camps in the Phillipines, and British concentration camps in South Africa, it is often quite difficult to distinguish among the various forms of associated brutality.

Outside of the historian's context most of the arguments are simply a distraction from ongoing Zionist Jewish genocidalism, which is a much more important topic of current legal, historical, and political inquiry.

Buchenwald unlike Auschwitz incarcerated a large number German Christian (i.e. Aryan) communists and socialists.

The following text discusses the difficulty of ascertaining some aspects of the mass murder of Jews during WW2.

Israel's Holocaust memorial launches website in Arabic

By Aron Heller, Associated Press  |  January 25, 2008

JERUSALEM - Israel's Holocaust memorial launched an Arabic version of its website yesterday, including vivid photos of Nazi atrocities and video of survivors' testimony, to combat Holocaust denial in the Arab and Muslim world.

Among those featured on the Yad Vashem site is Dina Beitler, 73, a survivor of the Nazi genocide that killed 6 million Jews in World War II. Beitler, who was shot and left for dead in a pit of bodies in 1941, recalls her story on the site, with Arabic subtitles.

Last year, Yad Vashem presented a similar version of its website in Farsi, aimed at Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called the Holocaust a "myth" and said Israel should be "wiped off the map." He has also hosted a conference that questioned whether the Holocaust took place.

A range of sentiments toward the Holocaust exists across the Arab world, from simple ignorance about its details to outright denial, to a more complicated belief - often expressed by many Arabs - that the Holocaust did happen but does not justify what is viewed as Israeli persecution of Palestinians.

Nazi literature is accessible in many Arab cities and some of the media engage in anti-Semitic incitement. 

© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

For the fact of the matter is, as Holocaust scholar Christopher Browning notes:

There are no written records of what took place among Hitler, Himmler, and Heydrich concerning the Final Solution, and none of them survived to testify after the war. Therefore, the decision-making process at the center must be reconstructed by the historian, who extrapolates from events, documents, and testimony originating outside the inner circle. Like the man in Plato's cave, he sees only the reflection and shadows, but not the reality. [Fateful Months, pp. 13-14.]

Thus Vladimir Dubnow, in 1882: "The ultimate goal is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years ... The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland." [p. 45.]

Thorsprovoni, exactly what are you referencing as an "orgy of rape"? Since we are talking about ethnic cleansing, which did occur on some level, I am assuming you mean systematic rape of Arab women by Jews. Well, give some sources. These are serious assertions, and better not be just literary expressions, or it becomes clear that you are a troll, albeit a smart troll.

Additionally, please explain how Israel is committing genocide. Keep in mind, many of us who have a retro-understanding of genocide where the population actually dramatically decreases, not increases. Sorry to get all 20th century on you. I'm an alterkacker like that. Koffler, please excuse the Yiddish, I bust out with it sometimes, just let it go.

You quote from Dubnow doesn't add dick.

You are an alterkacker! Man, you don't argue with nutbars like ThorsProvoni. You point at them and laugh. Why even dignify this mishegass with a response? You know this dude is like, mental, has no real job and lots and lots of time to write and launch an avalanche of blather in response to anything you ask and any contentious point you make. Now pardon me whilst I return to my regularly scheduled program of anti-Palestinian genocide and orgies of rape.

---------------------------------

I blog at Jewlicious.com

Since I'm risking an "F", I'll have to withdraw from Prof Koffler's "Introduction to Holocaust Denialism".

The course catalog description promised a survey of the field. But, as so often in the humanities these days, much more was on offer- namely, instruction in how to turn sloppy scholarship into thought crime. 

I'd rather not master that skill. 

The course catalog description promised a survey of the field. But, as so often in the humanities these days, much more was on offer- namely, instruction in how to turn sloppy scholarship into thought crime.

And in addition to his other confusions, Kid Blast doesn't know what "thought crime" means.

So having no cogent argument that the view Simberg expressed isn't a paradigm expression of Holocaust denialism, what's a pseudo-freethinking anti-PC hack to do? Whinge, bitch, sob, and play the victim card of course. Accurately describing the  view Simberg expressed constitutes criminalizing his thought, sez Kid Blast, because hey, when you've dug yourself this deep a ditch, why quit? What says "I, for one, am free of the tethers of fashionable lousy egghead know-it-all trends" more convincingly than refusing to concede a lost argument and denying the truth ostensibly because some precious flower might have his feelings hurt, but actually (obviously) because it's the only way to sustain partisan hackery? Why, self-righteously casting reverse-PC distortions of fact as a matter of standing up for freedom of thought, of course.

(QX: Can any Kid Blast sentence containing the phrase "as so often in the humanities these days" turn out true (except by pure accident)? Maybe in Blastoff-ese, in which the meaning of "humanities" is anything but what the egghead know-it-alls say it is.)

Yes folks, in addition to being every bit as dumb, ignorant, and dishonest as he comes off, Kid Blast throws pity parties when he doesn't get his way. That'll show the egghead know-it-alls! Oh believe you me, one day they'll regret laughing hysterically at his every approach!

" Simberg is claiming that the Nazi concentration camp system, with the exception of Auschwitz, was not the mechanism of a premeditated plan to murder the Jewish people, and that whatever deaths occurred there were not historical outliers.  Those are the fundamental premises of Holocaust denial, endorsed by a popular right-wing blogger and passed along to anyone who might be interested by a tenured law professor at the University of Tennessee."

-DK

Noting that DK took a rather large leap in asserting that Simberg regarded Auschwitz as unique (Simberg is of course now on record saying that Auschwitz was not in fact unique--- no correction/apology yet from DK, unless "So what?" counts as a correction/apology), I mentioned that DK's accusation here might be ill-founded. He's responded in two ways. On the one hand, he's accused me of "shifting goal posts". He's asserted time and again that I'm no brainiac, so it's no surprise I've had a difficult time puzzling out precisely what DK means by this silly cliche. I never quite get what Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews, and Keith Olbermann mean when they say it either, but I used to blame them. 

Best I can make out, DK takes issue with my refusal to endorse  his unsubstantiated assertion in italics above. Since I offered an as breezy definition of "holocaust denial" in response, I figured the always erudite and competitive  DK would offer evidence for his assertion, particularly after I goaded him with reliance on Wikipedia and the tenured nincompoops who credited his matriculation. But none has been forthcoming. Unless one counts his reference to "primary sources" in holocaust denial. He put that assertion in bold italics. Next time it'll be in caps with a lot of exclamation points.

His second response was somewhat briefer, but more revealing. He noted that I, not he, used the term "holocaust denier", and attempted to parse the difference between "holocaust denier" and someone who "endorses...(and/or)...passes along the fundamental premises of fundamental denial" thusly:

"Holocaust denier" connotes a commitment to an agenda of obscuring the historical record in order to deny that the Nazis carried out a premeditated, systematic plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. The charitable reading of Simberg is that he merely endorsed the core tenets of Holocaust denialism because in this one case doing so facilitated his preposterous hackery, rather than out of a commitment to the agenda of Holocaust denialism per se."

So, DK never accused anybody of anything so awful as being a "holocuast denier". No, no. He simply accused two people of "endorsing/passing along holocaust denial."  As I've mentioned before, DK is ever scrupulous.

 Returning to the first response, the address below might help this discussion along. It has practical, rather than academic, consequences, so DK might have to hold his nose while reading it. But he's a tough Rugger. He can handle it.

http://bundesrecht.juris.de/stgb/__130.html 

Does implying, ala Simberg,  that mass killing via stress, beatings, starvation and overwork in camps like Buchenwald is qualitatively different from mass killing via direct gassing in camps like Auschwitz rise to the level of "verharmlost"?

For DK's sake anyway, it better. 

Kid Blast quotes remarks of mine back at me that he can't read. An ordinary adult illiterate so gamely tangling with written words would exemplify some considerable courage, but Kid Blast is an extraordinary exemplar of craven dishonesty, which is no way to become the "big guy" he'd like to be.

Prior to Rand Simberg's desperate, grasping, empty non-clarifications, I wrote, and Kid Blast misread:

Simberg is claiming that the Nazi concentration camp system, with the exception of Auschwitz, was not the mechanism of a premeditated plan to murder the Jewish people, and that whatever deaths occurred there were not historical outliers. Those are the fundamental premises of Holocaust denial, endorsed by a popular right-wing blogger and passed along to anyone who might be interested by a tenured law professor at the University of Tennessee.

Since then, in the course of several non-clarifications that Kid Blast cut and pasted, Simberg argued that Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmo, Betzec, Majdenek were in a class with Auschwitz; so the foregoing sentence should read "Simberg is claiming that the Nazi concentration camp system, with the exception of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmo, Betzec, and Majdenek...."; were I inclined to expand the post to incorporate all the revelations of Simberg's non-clarification, I would highlight Simberg's compounding errors of falsely claiming that Auschwitz,..., Majdenek "gave rise to the term 'genocide'," re-endorsing, in the midst of his non-clarification, the paradigmatic claim of Holocaust denialism that the labor camps were not part of a deliberate effort "to wipe out an entire people," and reiterating the paradigmatic claim of Holocaust denialism that the treatment of prisoners at camps like Buchenwald was not historically abnormal, when in fact that treatment included secret experiments with poison, chemical burns, incendiary bombs, and a dozen or so strains of lethal typhus.

In other words, Simberg denies that, with the exception of, Auschwitz,..., Majdenek, the Nazi concentration camp system was part of a systematic, deliberate effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe conventionally known as "the Holocaust," and further denies that, with the exception of Auschwitz,..., Majdenek, the Nazi concentration camp system was historically abnormal. Those denials are core tenets of Holocaust denialism.

Let's review:

Kid Blast missed the point 11 different times (and counting!) through that combo of incompetent and dishonest reading that is Kid Blast's Blast. Seeing his position embarrassed each time, Kid Blast did what insecure hacks do, and attempted to shift the terms of the argument. Kid Blast excused and defended the plausibility of Simberg's claim that Buchenwald and Auschwitz were categorically distinct and the former normal for wartime strictly (and circularly) by reference to Simberg's observations about Buchenwald being a labor camp, while ignoring the evidence laid amply before him of the hideous experiments conducted at Buchenwald that instantly make nonsense of Simberg's claim that Buchenwald was a run of the mill labor camp. Kid Blast might have ignored that because he is subliterate, or he might have ignored it because he's a craven liar; I won't guess.

Furthermore, Kid Blast at first totally ignored Simberg's clear endorsement of the core tenet of Holocaust denialism that the concentration camps (except for Auschwitz,..., Majdenek) were not part of a systematic, pre-meditated campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe, which Simberg reiterated in the non-clarifications Kid Blast reproduced in the course of his shilling. His position crippled when I alerted him of his staggering omissions, Kid Blast then willfully misinterpreted the meaning of that tenet of Holocaust denialism as some minute, lawyerly point about intent, because Kid Blast is relentless in advancing his agenda through shilling and hackery, and has no standards of rigor or decency to restrain that shilling.

Which is why Kid Blast's next move was to define "Holocaust denialism" nearly out of existence, thereby excusing the overwhelming majority of the Holocaust denialism that actually exists. And though it's always possible when dealing with Kid Blast that his ignorance of any particular matter is so profound that he doesn't have a clue, for example, what the actual views of Holocaust deniers are, the more parsimonious explanation of Kid Blast's introduction of the term "Holocaust denialism" in the Blastoff-ese language to English was simply self-serving obfuscation, to whose side-effect of excusing and giving cover to Holocaust denialism writ large Kid Blast is indifferent.

Called out for having invented a concept in sheer ignorance in order to bolster his hackery, Kid Blast changed the subject yet again, this time falling back on his tried and true chestnut of identifying the facts of a particular matter with the academic consensus on them, letting loose some buffoonish resentment at the educational system that failed him so miserably, and arguing without a hint of self-awareness that the existence of an academic consensus on a particular set of facts warrants his denial of those facts. (This is how one can tell that Kid Blast is a coward in addition to being an uneducated, dimwitted prevaricator: if he actually had the courage of his convictions, he'd show the eggheads they're not bettern'him and walk off a cliff without falling, thereby proving the eggheads who refer to gravity are making it up as they go along just like he is, and just like, he figures, the rest of the world is.)

From that position of ignorance perversely lionized as a virtue, Kid Blast tried to pivot towards another element of his very limited range of argumentative techniques, which is to change the subject of an argument he is losing from his losing argument to his scorn for fashionable academic egghead know-it-all trends of belief without having the slightest notion what those trends are and utterly unaware of his caricaturish exemplifications of the worst habits of the academy. This is a very comfortable crouch of mendacity for Kid Blast to remain in, since it is virtually guaranteed not to be minimally germane to the matter at hand, and by defining the altered debate in terms of his prejudices, Kid Blast can go on discussing the one thing he knows something about indefinitely. And as a bonus, warping an argument unconnected to Kid Blast's resentment of his intellectual superiors into a platform for Kid Blast to entertain himself (and no one else) brainstorming new, cutesy expressions of his resentment, Kid Blast also provides himself a bridge from any subject at all to his explicitly partisan agenda.

And so it went on, which prompted me to employ a useful and informative metaphor for the mendacious procedure by which Kid Blast replenishes his geyser of bullshit, namely "shifting goal-posts," though I later noted that "shifting goal-posts," while adequate as an isomorphism for the variety of dishonesty Kid Blast indulges more than any other, isn't quite as descriptively precise as "shifting goal-lines." Though not before Kid Blast proffered some unsolicited, unwelcome, and rather strange confessions of his insecurity with his masculinity (though they do help fill in the picture). And even now, Kid Blast doesn't get that the joke's on him: the reason he "had a difficult time puzzling out precisely what DK means by this silly cliche" and "never quite get what Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews, and Keith Olbermann mean when they say it" is of course that Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and I are all competent users of the English language, and Kid Blast is not. Nor does Kid Blast display the slightest recognition of the irony in his complaining about "silly cliches" --- 'silly' in Blastoff-ese means "expression beyond Kid Blast's limited cognitive abilities to comprehend" --- when there would be almost nothing left of Blastoff-ese if it were stripped of all its wrong-turns of phrase that have no chance of becoming cliches b/c of their witlessness, yet still manage to feel, upon hearing or seeing them for the first time, more grating and irritating than the most washed-up of proper cliches.

Now the second most entertaining of Kid Blast's subject changes is his newfound unwitting commitment to shilling for a fairly extreme form of political correctness that's unpopular even among the egghead know-it-alls. Watch Kid Blast the Freethinking "Big Guy" according to Kid Blast and Kid Blast's mother whine and bitch that you can't accurately describe a core belief of Holocaust denial as "a core belief of Holocaust denial," let alone accurately attribute an endorsement of that core belief of Holocaust denial to someone who endorsed it because people as hopeless at inferential reasoning as Kid Blast (but really, Kid Blast needs to stick to simple remedial exercises before trying anything advanced) could make the logically invalid leap from "x endorsed a core belief of Holocaust denial" to "x is a Holocaust denier" --- a leap requiring Kid Blastian levels of dishonesty and stupidity when competent and charitable users of the language like me explicitly delineate the more parsimonious explanation that Simberg is not a Holocaust denier, but rather an ignorant scruple-free hack who unwittingly endorsed a core belief of Holocaust denial in the service of his hackery. Which is similar to Kid Blast's own ignorant scruple-free hackery in the service of excusing and distorting the meaning of "Holocaust denial" to advance his agenda.

That's only the second most entertaining of Kid Blast's mendacious, self-unaware contortions because it now seems Kid Blast thinks he is scoring points by baiting a Wikipedia check of "Holocaust denial" and/or consultation with people who study the Holocaust denial movement whom Kid Blast calls "tenured nincompoops" because of his evident self-esteem issues. Now I must confess, although it's difficult to lose taking the under in an over/under bet on Kid Blast's cognitive competency, even I'm surprised to learn that Kid Blast is so thoroughly developmentally stunted that he would offer the bait without bothering to look at it. Since, if he did check the Wikipedia page on Holocaust denial, let alone bothered to consult any scholarly review of Holocaust denial, let alone consulted the literature of Holocaust denialism itself, he'd quickly find my position completely vindicated and his dust-binned; or rather,