Mass Killings And Modern History

From March 2009

Twenty years ago, if you remember, the ‘winds of change’ were blowing across the world and communist governments were, as they say, ‘toppling like ninepins’. In April of the year of dog 1989, massive student protests – the sort of thing that had sent governments packing in Eastern Europe – jammed Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China. These protests, which, among other things, called for “democratisation” and an end to the Communist party’s rule, snowballed into a confrontation that led to a massive military crackdown on the “unarmed” protestors (who retaliated with Molotov cocktails and some firearms, somewhat oddly for unarmed people) in which several hundred to several thousand (depending on whom you believe) people died.


After a period of widely expressed “outrage”, the West and its allies returned to doing business with China, which is now stronger than ever and whose Communist government remains firmly in control today, and the average Chinese citizen (despite growing economic disparities) is better fed, better clothed, and has a longer lifespan than the average Chinese citizen then.

In August 1991, in what was then still the Soviet Union, a group of generals and apparatchiks launched a coup attempt to save, as they saw it, the country from the disastrous policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, who was taking it down the road to disintegration. The coup collapsed in only three days, not the least because massive protests against it were allowed to take place and not decisively crushed, as they could very easily have been. The aftermath included the dissolution of the USSR, which its citizens (but for five of the constituent republics) had only in March decided to preserve, in a general referendum. This collapse – social and economic as well as political – led to wiping out of savings, massive inflation, a complete collapse of healthcare and lifespans, and to this day none of the constituent states has fully recovered from it.


So, which was the right way out? The bloody crushing of (even if actually unarmed) demonstrations which enjoyed, at the time, a measure of popular support, or the tolerating of demonstrations that led to the destruction of the country and society? If Tiananmen hadn’t happened, would China had become a fractured entity like Russia today, impoverished and ruled over by thinly-disguised oligarchs and mafia dons? If the August 1991 protestors in Moscow had been wiped out, would the USSR have still survived as a great and strong nation today, its citizens still enjoying cradle to the grave welfare benefits?

Or take another example, that of Chechnya. In 1999, Chechnya was a “dagger drawn at the heart of Russia”; a centre of Islamic fanaticism and jihadi terror modules, on the one hand; and a potential source of further disintegration of Russia, a pale shadow of the USSR as it was, into small Bantustans, something which was and still is a dream of some armchair Cold Warriors you-know-where. The Second Chechen War, which began in August 1999, involved massive and brutal suppression of the Chechens, including civilians who had no direct role in the conflict, and destroyed Grozny; but it led to the virtually complete destruction of the Chechen rebellion and the end to any real possibility of further vivisection of the Russian state. 


Or, to take another of my favourite other examples, the much-maligned figure of Iosif Vissarionvich Dzhugashvilli, nicknamed “Stalin”; he took over one of the least developed countries in the world, and that after a disastrous military defeat and a ruinous civil war; he starved masses of people, he sent thousands to labour camps, he shot officers he even suspected of possibly conspiring against him in future (kind of like the neocon doctrine of “preventive war”), he did this, he did that – but he led the USSR to a virtually unimaginable victory in the Second World  War, and he took over a poor agrarian nation which still used wooden ploughs and left it with nuclear reactors and a vast industrial economy.

Can one, for instance, imagine any Soviet soldier fighting to the death for...Gorbachev, for instance? Or Yeltsin? Yes, Stalin killed an unknown number of his own people, although the estimates sometimes bandied around of sixty million are undoubtedly many times exaggerated; but he fought to a victory in a war that killed twenty million Soviet citizens. Under a more “liberal” and “democratic” regime, like Yeltsin’s, for instance, the population of the USSR would have been wiped out completely by the Nazi victors, except perhaps for a few thousand preserved as slaves. Hitler had said as much, many times.

Stalin is supposed to have said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. In that view of things, which is generally misunderstood, mass deaths are supposed to be not an end in themselves; they are a step designed to achieve a particular goal. Human history abounds in this.

The medieval conquerors, for instance, Chingis Khan or Timur-i-Leng, who slaughtered the entire populations of cities that resisted them, weren’t indulging only in bloodlust (though bloodlust was certainly one of the minor benefits) – what they did was to ease the path of conquest by terrifying other cities into capitulating without a fight. Over and over, history records “great rulers” who achieved their greatness by the wholesale destruction of peoples, or “failures” who failed precisely because they refused to subdue a rebellious province by a massive use of force. In fact, there’s more than enough evidence to assume that whether a particular act of mass killing is thought of as a great or at least acceptable deed or as a horrible crime depends entirely on one thing – who came out the victor at the end of it. The Turks lost the First World War, so their massacre of the Armenians is genocide. The British won, so their massacre of the Iraqis in the 1920s isn’t.

And this includes not just active killing but passive – by induced famine for instance.

In recent times, to give one example, the Holodomor in Ukraine in the 1930s was a mass famine that accelerated (as it may have beenmeant to) the collectivisation of agriculture, and which the Ukrainian state now says was a war crime. During the Soviet era, however, it was not so regarded.

And there is the example of the Bengal famine of 1943-44, when up to 4 million people (compare that with the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis in the much-celebrated "Holocaust") in the province of Bengal (today's Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal) in the British colony of India were killed by a famine the British both engineered and allowed to happen. The reason for this was the fact that the Japanese were in the act of invading Eastern India and a mass anti-British Indian rebellion could by no means be ruled out. If that had happened, there would have been no way the British could have held on to the Northern half of their Indian colony, at the very least. But people starving to death do not rebel – they’re too busy trying to scrape a meal together. Hence, the famine, which the British are yet to apologise for.

You’ll note that all these examples are directed mass killings, meant to achieve a particular goal, not killing for the sake of killing (although that goes on too, as I’ll mention in a moment). Often, the argument in their favour goes that a few hundred or thousand or million deaths are justified when the alternative would be many times the deaths and destruction. And it is by no means restricted to such "vile" regimes as the Red Under The Bed or brutal "Third World" dictatorships.

The liberal American who shudders in horror reading (perhaps somewhat overheated) accounts of the Gulag will be hypocritical if he doesn’t admit that his own nation, for instance, is founded on the extermination of virtually the entire native population and the confinement of the remainder in what amounted to open air concentration camps. He will be doubly hypocritical if he refuses to acknowledge the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, made in the name of saving lives; or the starvation deaths of half a million Iraqi children between 1991 and 2003 on the pretext of containing Saddam Hussein. He will also be forced to admit that his own country cannot, without being hypocritical, simultaneously condemn the Sudanese for the alleged complicity of the Sudanese government in attacks on refugee camps in Darfur and at the same time back the quite undoubted attacks by the Zionazi pseudostate on the refugee camps in Gaza. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

I mentioned killing for the sake of killing. The foremost examples of this I can think of are the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia which killed and displaced millions of people, the entire population of the country, in fact, for no reason except the “revolutionary mobilisation of the people”, whatever that may be when it’s at home; Hitler’s massacre of the Jews, utterly useless except as an expression of Nazi racial hatred; and the Hutu massacres of Tutsi civilians in Rwanda in 1994, which had no direct connection to that country’s civil war. But I suppose these could figure as the mass versions of the crimes of psychos who kill without any or sufficient motive, compared to killing for gain or revenge.


To get back to the point, then – killing (which doesn’t even have to be a mass killing to achieve certain goals, if they are  targeted carefully enough; a rotting corpse hanging in chains may deter more highwaymen, or corrupt bureaucrats, than any number of prison sentences) is not, and has never been, in every instance a historically negative process. One might even say that mass killings are one important way of moving history onwards, and certainly it hasn’t been the handiwork of any one side or ideology. Nobody’s hands are clean on this one.

Which still doesn’t mean that of those million statistical deaths, eachindividual one isn’t a tragedy.

The Holocaust and Modern Memory

Now this is a post that is – unless I’m much mistaken - going to get a lot of people hot under the collar.

Image: a grim, grassless square, surrounded by brick buildings and high fences surmounted by concertina wire. At several points in the fences stand high watchtowers, topped by platforms with mounted machine guns behind which stand men in black uniforms and squared off helmets. Somewhere in the background, smoke emerges from tall chimneys and drifts across the square. One knows, somehow, what that smoke is. One has read enough to know what it will smell like. One knows that somewhere there will be a gate with a legend : Arbeit Macht Frei, “Work will make you free”.

In the square stand thousands of emaciated men in striped uniforms, in rank upon terrified rank, while more of the black uniformed men stroll around selecting and beating them to pulp, apparently at random; while some striped uniformed figures twitch at the ends of ropes slung from makeshift gallows.

Familiar image, isn’t it? The concentration camps, with thousands of terrified Jewish captives at the mercy of brutal Nazi guards, beaten and hanged to death on a daily basis, liquidated by gassing if they were not fit to work, fed just enough to keep them from falling dead on the job. Isn’t it the image drilled into us by movies like Schindler’s List, novels-turned-TV series like Holocaust, and ceaseless repetition in the media? Isn’t it something deemed so self-evident, like the law of gravity, that to deny it happened is ipso facto perverse?

Well, time we took a look at the reality, folks.

Oh, don’t get me wrong; I am not denying it happened. In fact, it most certainly happened, and on a scale that is probably underestimated if anything. In fact, the underestimation is crucial and significant to what I’m saying.

When we read of the inmates of the concentration camps, we hear just one word: Jews. Most people think the only purpose of the concentration camps was the destruction of Jews. We keep hearing the figures; six million Jews perished in the concentration camps; the Holocaust, therefore, killed six million – and all of them Jews.

It just was not so.

Certainly Jews formed a very large and significant section of concentration camp inmates; but far from the only ones. Concentration camps took in everybody: common criminals, trade unionists, homosexuals, socialists, Communists, uncooperative journalists, social democrats – all of whom could be Jews as well, naturally – and others, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, Russian prisoners (of whom at least three million stayed back, dead, vide William Shirer’s The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich), and towards the end, opponents of the Hitler regime that included ex-officials like General Franz Halder (ex-chief of General Staff), Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (former head of military intelligence, Abwehr), and Dr Hjalmar Schacht (onetime Nazi Finance minister). They were also used to get rid of Nazis who knew too much, like the infamous medical experimenter Dr Sigmund Rascher, who ended in the same Dachau concentration camp where he had carried out his experiments (in another blog post I’m planning I’ll talk about the concentration camps themselves).

Now let’s make something absolutely clear: the concentration camps, and their cousins, the extermination camps, were not the only method used by the Nazis to finish off their prisoners, and between them were responsible for only a part of the total numbers exterminated by the Nazis. What that total number is will remain unknown, but according to one source (Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell), 7,125,000 out of 7,820,000 camp inmates were killed. Shirer calls this an exaggeration and it would undoubtedly seem to be so because it would leave rather few survivors to tell the tale. Despite the focus on the camps, a large proportion of the victims of the Holocaust died by other means.

The Nazis began by “euthanising” the “inferior” – the handicapped or mentally retarded, usually by injections – and then, in Eastern Europe, presided over mass exterminations of Jews and Communists, carried out by firing squads of Einsatzgruppen death squads. There were four Einsatzgruppen, A, B, C, and D, given charge of specific sectors to be “cleansed” of Jews and Communists. SS Gruppenfuehrer Otto Ohlendorf, commandant in 1942 of Einsatzgruppe D, admitted in Nuremberg that his group had shot around ninety thousand Jews and Communists, including women and children…and there were three other Einsatzgruppen.

Besides this was the behaviour of the conquering Nazis towards Soviet prisoners, who were routinely murdered by being starved to death, denied shelter, shot on the march, and made to stay out – without warm clothes or food – in midwinter snows, something which brought a protest even from Nazi minister Alfred Rosenberg. As I said, the death toll from the ranks of Soviet prisoners, alone, was three million.

And I’m not even mentioning the murder of Western Allied prisoners as in Malmedy or the destruction of entire villages as in Lidice, Czechoslovakia, or the murder of Italian troops captured by the Nazis after Italy’s surrender, as on the island of Cefalonia, Greece, or French civilians murdered as reprisals for Resistance raids, or the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. Those incidents each killed paltry hundreds, at the most a few thousands, after all.

How many Jews did the Holocaust actually kill? The figure bandied about is six million, so much so that it has been virtually put beyond discussion (of which more anon). But, since I am not trying to be politically correct here, let’s take a look anyway. Adolf Eichmann, chief of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo, who actually organised the Endloesung, the “Final Solution”, put the figure between “five and six million” – rather imprecise, a million human beings counts for something. According to the World Jewish Congress (hardly a disinterested party) the figure was 5,700,000, and this is also the figure given in the Nuremberg indictment. That again is three hundred thousand short of the “six million” figure; and if one thinks it makes little difference, imagine what would happen if one killed three hundred thousand citizens of any nation today. Unless one was Bush and the victims were Muslim Arabs, it would certainly raise an outcry. But we don’t even have to depend on that number. Gerald Reitlinger, in The Final Solution – The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945, puts the figure at between 4,194,200 and 4,581,200; which is over a million and a half less than the officially repeated figure. Of course it does not mean that a monstrous crime was not committed; it, however, means that there are differences between the accepted figures and what really happened.

Let me make clear that in all this I’m talking about the numbers of people murdered knowingly and directly by the Nazis – we’re not talking of the people killed in fighting or in bombardments or by the indirect effects of Nazi inflicted conflict, for example due to starvation.

Therefore, suddenly, the “exclusively Jewish” Holocaust becomes, not diluted, oh no, those Jews certainly suffered and died, but somewhat – shared – and the total death toll considerably exceeds the purported six million Jews killed in the Nazi Endloesung (“Final Solution”) of the “Jewish Question”.

What do we have, therefore? Unless one holds to the not uncommon theory that only Jewish deaths count, the Holocaust suddenly becomes a general human tragedy, not something monopolised by the Jews; also, the quantum of Jewish suffering, while extreme, is not as great as commonly perceived. However, every age has its shibboleths that may not be challenged. In the Middle Ages it was the theory that the earth lay at the centre of the universe; during the Victorian era it was the idea that the white race was born to rule darker skinned peoples everywhere; today, it is the idea that Jews have a monopoly on suffering and that this cannot be challenged or even seriously studied.

This is, though, a most inconvenient fact these days, and most certainly not to be bandied about. The reason is simple and instructive in how the world works: the Holocaust, now an exclusively Jewish property in public imagination, is the sole excuse and raison d’etre for the final establishment (Balfour Declaration or not, it wouldn’t have happened otherwise) and continued existence of the racist, apartheidist, imperialistic, murderous, pseudo-state of “Israel”. That “Israel” that apparently learned so much from the Nazis that it’s what can only be called Nazism reborn.

“Israel”, after all, was created in a campaign of ethnic cleansing of the native Arab population in Nazi Einsatzgruppen-style massacres like Deir Yassin; it, like the Nazis, has repeatedly invaded neighbouring countries on the excuse of “self-defence”; it has, like the Nazis, created a totally militarised society. Like the Nazis, it refuses to state and define its final borders and seeks “Greater Israel”. Like the Nazis, it encloses people whose territory it occupies in walled off ghettoes, imprisons them without trial, and conducts murderous “punitive raids” against them. Like the Nazis and their “Aryan race”, it says it is acting in defence of the Semitic race; and just as Nazi “Aryanism” was ridiculous and fictional, its idea of the Semitic race is fictional. Let me repeat what I have said before: Semitic races are both Jewish and Arab</a>, in fact, the latter would be a good deal more Semitic than the former, since they have stayed more or less in place in West Asia with a minimum of intermarriage with other races, unlike the Jews. (Dare I point out that when the Catholic regime in Spain expelled the Jews, it was the Ottoman Turks, Muslims, who had welcomed them to West Asia and helped them resettle there?) Also, Jews, both individually and as organisations, are very far from all supporters of “Israel,” as I have pointed out here.

Yet propaganda has been deliberately and repeatedly used to portray anti-“Israeli” actions, whether military or even plain verbal, as “anti-Jew”, the equivalent of hate crimes like fire bombing synagogues or desecrating Jewish cemeteries. Any and all opponents of the criminal and genocidal invasion of Lebanon last summer by “Israel,” for example, were labelled, indiscriminately, “anti-Semitic”. I wonder how many backers of “Israel” even know that Arabs are Semitic and that they – as recently as sixty years ago – inhabited the land on which “Israel” stands today?

And the excuse for “Israel’s” crimes? What is the shield it hides behind? You got it. The Holocaust, which was an exclusively Jewish tragedy and which “must never happen again”, even at the cost of becoming the same sort of oppressors who created the original Holocaust.

Last year, in the wake of the “cartoons controversy”, I had confronted pro-Danish flagwaggers with a simple question: why, if they were so strongly in favour of freedom of speech, were they, and their governments, also against any attempt to discuss the Holocaust in any way that differed from the “official” accounts? If the Danes could get away with portraying the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb as a turban, surely Iran could equally hold a conference on the Holocaust where Jewish rabbis could speak on the same platform as scholars? Why would President Ahmadinejad of Iran be labelled a “Holocaust Denier”? What is a “Holocaust Denier” anyway? The material I’ve written so far in this blog is quite enough to get me labelled a “Holocaust Denier” and “anti-Semite”…even though I do not deny the Holocaust happened and nor do I have anything at all against Arabs or non-“Israeli” Jews.

Then, of course, is the interesting fact that in many European countries one can not legally question the Holocaust; in those lands of “free speech”, where one can publish hate cartoons, one can’t say the Holocaust did not happen. Since saying the Holocaust did not happen is the equivalent of saying the world is flat, I wonder if those countries also have laws against propounding a flat earth hypothesis. Somehow, I doubt it, very, very much.

An even weirder aspect of this is the fact that these laws seem to be applicable retrospectively, as David Irving discovered. This man, a British right wing “scholar” and long term Nazi apologist, had made a speech in the eighties questioning the existence of the Holocaust. Although by the early nineties he had come round to the view that the Holocaust, as he admitted publicly, had happened, he was still locked up last summer for that sixteen year old speech.

(Let me make clear that Irving is no candidate for my sympathy. Apart from an ex-Holocaust denier/flat earther, he is a flaming racist who said once that he objected to black or Asian newsreaders on television because “it’s my news and they are reading it to me”. No one called him on the racism, though.)

The German SS Brigadefuehrer Walther Schellenberg, speaking about the “Final Solution”, had said “If we could have exterminated all of them (that is, Jews), it would have been unexceptional; but since we had not more than a third of them in our custody, it was worse than a folly; it was a stupidity (“es war eine Dummheit gewesen”).” In fact, in the context of today’s politics, the Holocaust (which as Schellenberg said never actually threatened the existence of Jews worldwide) was probably the single best thing that could possibly have happened to the Zionist cause. Zionism, the movement to set up a Jewish state in West Asia, did not come into existence because of the Holocaust; it began in the late nineteenth century with Theodor Herzl, and most likely would have died down but for the Holocaust and the use Zionists made of it. It enabled them to gain the legitimacy that allowed them to run a genocidal terrorist campaign that ended in the creation and maintenance of a state that’s Nazi in all but name (in fact I, and many others like me, prefer to call Zionists “Zionazis”).

“Israel” should really put up a statue in gratitude to Hitler. 

(April 2007)

Holocaust Denial: A Personal View

 

(From Oct 2009)

“Holocaust Denier.”

Do I have to claim that the concentration camps did not exist to be loaded down with that term? No. Should I proclaim that the gas chambers never had any material existence for me to be given that title? Of course not. Do I need to be of the viewpoint that the Nazi Endlösung (“Final Solution”) was a figment of someone’s diseased imagination? No.

All I need to do is to say, in effect, that the Holocaust was a detail in history, one that needs to be regarded as another historical event, and be subject to the same scrutiny.

Is that happening? Will it happen?

As I pointed out in a post I wrote over two and a half years ago on the subject, of course not.

Let me re-emphasise something I’ve said repeatedly over the years, but, to all appearances, not often enough: being against the state of “Israel”, (whose existence I don’t recognise; I admit to bias on that point), is not the same as being anti-Jew. There are many Jewish organisations that are against the existence of the state of “Israel”, and there are “Israelis” who have turned against their government. And as I’ve also pointed out, the Semitic peoples include Arabs as well as Jews, and – since the Jews have intermarried and converted very extensively over the last few thousand years, unlike the Arabs – the latter are far more Semitic today than the Jews themselves.

So, what is “anti-Semitism”? What does it mean?

I don’t have any problem with the idea that desecrating Jewish cemeteries and daubing swastikas on synagogues is a stupid and juvenile crime; it’s a crime just as bad as leaving a pig head outside a mosque, for instance. But as I said, the crime is just as bad. It’s not worse. It’s not different. It’s the same crime.

Why am I emphasising this, over and over again?

It’s because ever since the Second World War ended, the Holocaust has ceased to be what it was – an attempt by a spectacularly nasty regime to exterminate the Jewish population under its control, along with Gypsies, Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Social Democrats, trade unionists and just about anyone else whom the regime didn’t like – and become a blanket excuse for another spectacularly nasty regime to oppress a people who never did it any harm, to dispossess them of their ancestral lands, to impose mass punishments on them, to bomb and bulldoze them in the name of “security”, and to invade, occupy, and annex parts of other nations on the premise that at some vague time in the prehistoric past such lands were “promised” by a deity to its “chosen people.”

A pretty useful excuse, don’t you think?

As I said up above, the Holocaust – which, in case you’re wondering, I do not deny happened, and which in my opinion has been underestimated in scale if anything – was a historical event, and needs to be studied as such. But by placing it above and beyond historical discussion and scrutiny, the state of “Israel” and certain European governments have achieved the following:

1.    They have made it into the equivalent of a religious event. As I said in a post a while ago, a religious event demands blind faith and a complete refusal to discuss it in rational terms. Any claim made on behalf of the event becomes an article of faith and immune to discussion. While this can be tolerated in terms of obscure theological discussions – after the end of the Spanish Inquisition you can’t be burned at the stake for saying the sun doesn’t go round the earth, for example – here we’re discussing a religious event that is being used as a tool to subjugate and oppress millions of people.

2.    They have placed it, quite explicitly, beyond the purview of free speech. Now I have a theory: it says that if you explicitly prevent a certain thing from being discussed, you’re trying to hide something; that something almost certainly would tend to show that those who wish to discuss it may have ideas worth discussing, even if those ideas are erroneous. If, for instance, cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad can be published with a bomb for a turban and this be called free speech, why shouldn’t the Holocaust be open to the same sort of discussion? Is it because there’s something being hidden behind the official story? If there isn’t, why not simply allow free and open discussion of the event and have done with it?

3.    They have made an explicit claim: the sufferings of other peoples being open to discussion, but not the Holocaust, makes the latter event more significant, more important, more meaningful and more relevant than the sufferings of other people. The Holocaust, therefore, is more important than the Naqbah of the Palestinians, more important than the Nanjing Massacre or the Rwandan massacre, more important than the Congolese Civil War, more important than the Armenian genocide by Turkey or the killings by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, more important than the mass annihilation of the native peoples of Tasmania and the Americas, and so on. If this isn’t racism, then racism has to be redefined.
   
4.    They have made of the Holocaust a target for everyone opposed to the crimes of the state of “Israel”. If you make a shield of something, then the slings and arrows of outraged misfortunates will impact on your shield. This is only logical.

5.    By using the Holocaust as a shield and excuse for its crimes, the state of “Israel” is mocking and disrespecting the sufferings of the concentration camp inmates, Jews and non-Jews alike, at least some of whom are still alive to this day and many of whom, it would be safe to assert, would have been disgusted and horrified by the crimes being committed in their name; crimes which seem to bear an uncanny resemblance to those committed on them by the Nazis seventy years ago.

It could be asked – and has been asked – what is there to discuss about the Holocaust? Aren’t the basics known well enough? Isn’t Auschwitz still standing, and don’t thousands of people visit the gas chambers for themselves? So what is there to discuss?

I’m not a historian, of course; I’m just a blogger. But my humble brain can, quite on its own, think of several reasons why the Holocaust needs to be debated and studied in detail and not in an echo chamber.

1.    If the Holocaust is discussed openly, the doubts of those who deny it happened can either be laid to rest or be exposed for the sham they are, like the beliefs of Creationists and flat-earthers. In that case, anyone who still doubts it happened can be referred to the discussion and if they persist in their doubts, the reasons for so persisting will be clear to all.

2.    What were the actual numbers killed in the Holocaust? As I mentioned here, the numbers of Jews, alone, killed has been estimated to vary from, approximately, 4.1 million to 5.7 million (the latter the figure claimed by the World Jewish Congress). What were the numbers of others killed? It is known that at least 3 million Russian prisoners also died in the camps, along with Gypsies and others. Is the Holocaust a purely Jewish tragedy? If so, how was a Jewish camp inmate different from, let’s say, a Social Democrat? If not, why should the Jews be considered to have a monopoly on the term?

3.    What happened to the perpetrators of the Holocaust? How many of them were actually punished? How many others were, because of their knowledge or other reasons, sheltered and protected by the very same nations who now proclaim Holocaust denial to be a crime?

4.    If the Holocaust is the reason cited for the necessity of the existence of “Israel”, was that state created as a response to the Holocaust? If not, is the fact that Jewish immigration to Palestine had been going on in an organised manner and the Balfour Declaration had said that Jewish homeland would be set up there of any significance? In that case, does the Holocaust become a post facto justification?

5.    To what extent was the Holocaust responsible for the terrorist actions of Jewish militia like the Irgun and Stern Gang in the “war of independence” of “Israel”, including the massacre of Arab civilians in such places as Deir Yassin? Did the Holocaust justify the killing and expulsion of people who hadn’t the faintest thing to do with it?

6.    The state of “Israel” claims that everything it does is to ensure the Holocaust doesn’t happen again. This, substantially, is why it can invade other nations, turn Occupied Gaza and the West Bank into gigantic concentration camps, bomb schools and hospitals, and build an Apartheid Wall. Since it can do all this in the name of preventing another Holocaust, a study of the original event is required to answer these questions:

i.    The original Holocaust was conducted in Europe on Jewish populations that were dispersed, unarmed, hated by most of the people around them, and was carried out by a regime that was in complete military and political control of most of Europe. Are those – or similar – circumstances in existence now in West Asia?

ii.    If the answer is no, what circumstances are actually in existence? Can a united, very heavily armed Jewish state with a large nuclear arsenal, which in turn is backed by the world’s strongest military power in every way possible, be so damaged by guerrillas armed with crude home-made rockets and AK47s that another Holocaust is possible?

iii.    If the answer to that is no, is the so-called state of “Israel” justified in its policies in the name of preventing another Holocaust? Or would its policies be more correctly called a land-grab under the tutelage of a cabal of rabidly fundamentalist rabbis who deny that the native peoples of those lands are human beings?

iv.    Is a weak, isolated Iran, separated from the state of “Israel” by the territories of two nations, one a colony of “Israel’s” biggest backer and the other, Jordan, so lacking in independence that it’s a colony in all but name, such a major threat that it could cause another Holocaust, in whatever form? If no, are there other reasons for targeting Iran? What are they?

7.    Are the policies of the state of “Israel” a mirror-image of the policies of the Nazis in the earlier stages of the Holocaust, when the Jews had been driven into ghettoes and dispossessed of almost all they had? If not, then in what way are the policies of “Israel” better?

I know that none of these questions will be discussed, let alone answered, and if raising these questions makes me a Holocaust denier, well, I’ve travelled that road before.

Shalom.