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When we talk about the denial of an event, it’s usually understood to mean the outright refusal to believe this event happened in any way, shape or form.
This very narrow understanding of what the word actually has come to mean — through its historical usage, academic use and prescription in places such as trials for Holocaust denial — is not the fault of those who were never taught the nuances of what denial actually is. I myself for a long time also thought that denial only rigidly applied to outright refusal, disbelief or negation of the Holocaust or other genocides. And that anything less than that, such as the downplaying of the number of victims, was certainly wrong and bad faith, but was not denial exactly.
But what brought me to write this piece was not the fascists who, flashing a despicable grin, will lie through their teeth to say “I’m not denying the Holocaust, I’m just asking questions!”
It was this video, featuring an 11-year-old “Israeli” girl who engages in Holocaust denial.
Originally posted on Twitter by @LizzySavetsky with the following tweet: “Stella had been asking me to take her to the site of the Nova Massacre for a while. I wasn’t sure if it would be too much for an 11-year-old, but she was insistent. I wasn’t planning to have Ira film, but what she said was so profound that it needed to be shared.”
Perhaps this girl is not aware of her words. That is certainly believable — to an extent. Any Jewish child certainly grows up hearing about the Holocaust and how it impacted their family. If she hasn’t been taught the nuance by then, then that is a failure on her parents. That she was not corrected for her statement is another failure. That they published this video after she said those words is a third failure on their part.
And that at no point did they realize that they were committing the egregious crime of Holocaust denial, which, for the record, I abhor, is an insult to every Jewish person in the world.
“Israelis”, mind you, don’t consider themselves to be survivors of the Holocaust. Their relationship to it is an adversarial one. After the war, survivors were treated as failures when they arrived to “Israel”. Zionists thought that they should have never let it happen to them. An easy thing to say when they were safely living in Muslim Palestine for the entirety of it.
Today, even government officials in the Zionist entity are using the Holocaust as a point of comparison for their genocide on Gaza. At times, they claim that they are preventing another one from happening (itself a form of denial too).
And as we’ve seen just now, even settlers in Occupied Palestine now casually engage in Holocaust denial to make an argument for the genocide of civilians in Gaza, all to further their occupation and settling of Palestine and even as Holocaust survivors have come up publicly to denounce the genocide in Gaza.[1][2]
It’s sick. It’s shameful.
It’s the essence of being a settler on foreign land. Nothing is sacred to the settler except the Manifest Destiny, and they will happily push their children to take part in the festivities.
We seek to rectify the record in this essay, which explains what Holocaust denial is, the forms it can take, and why it has to allow for a broad definition.
The meaning of denial
First, it’s important to start off with the simple fact that denial does not mean outright refusal to believe or rejection of all facts. Denial is more complex than that and needs to be more complex to actually be usable in the real world.
Nobody has ever said “None of that happened” when presented with evidence of the Holocaust or, really, any atrocity or genocide.
The comfort women atrocity for example, in which women from populations subjugated by the Japanese during World War 2 were forcibly sent to brothels on military bases to be abused by soldiers.
Today, Japan still denies that history. But they don’t deny that women existed as prostitutes in the military: what they deny is that they were forced into this situation, or that they were abused while on base.
They don’t say “Absolutely none of what you said happened” because that would be an absolutely ludicrous thing to say. They themselves can’t disprove every single point about a historical or ongoing event (whether that’s the Holocaust, comfort women, or something else), and so there is no goal that can be furthered by doing that.
“None of that ever happened” then slowly turns into “Okay, but what about…?” or, “Okay, but what if…?”
Holocaust denial is not an isolated free-thinker’s thought experiment. It’s a dangerous weapon.
The point of denying the Holocaust is twofold: it promotes antisemitic conspiracies which turn into actual pogroms, and it tries to keep Jews in a climate of fear by exercising power over them.
For Zionists, who are now appropriating Holocaust denial from the fascists (not much difference between the two, you might say), the power of denying the Holocaust lies in a similar übermensch theory. They grant themselves the permission to kill Palestinians indiscriminately (or, really, anyone else) alternatively to “defend” themselves or because they are “stronger” than the Holocaust.
But they are not “stronger” than the Holocaust because they have reflected on it and decided, either individually or collectively, that it should not define them and their identity as Jews. They feel they have surpassed the Holocaust only because they are now in a position to take revenge — against the completely wrong people.
I assure you Holocaust deniers spend a painstaking amount of time and effort trying to think of all possible counter-arguments, more than you do not thinking about it, and even fake their own “evidence” of the Holocaust.
Why would they fake pictures, though? Because when their fake photos get found out, they hope that you will start questioning other, actual photos of the Holocaust. And until they get found out, deniers can use those pictures to defend their arguments.
We start to see already that denial is not solely constrained to a very narrow definition of “it absolutely, categorically, 100% positively did not happen”.
Deniers thus attack tidbits of evidence. “There was no signed document by Hitler”. “The Red Cross visited Auschwitz”. “It was impossible to kill so many people in that span of time”. They attack individual, singular points until one penetrates through your arguments, and will then focus on that weak point.
Frankly, these arguments have already been debunked many times — no signed document doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened; the Red Cross did not visit Auschwitz-Birkenau but a ghetto that had been forcibly “beautified” for their visit; the scale of killing was absolutely possible because of methods pioneered exactly for this, etc.
But the point isn’t to be right or, as Holocaust deniers like to say, “just ask questions”. They already have their answer. When they “ask” you questions, they’re not trying to learn. They’re trying to get you to start doubting what you know so they can open a breach with more antisemitic drivel.
This is a form of denial because the end goal is to get you to deny the Holocaust too, and reach their level of denial, which they will then leverage to promote antisemitism. In that sense, they are “hiding their power level”, as they like to say.
For this reason, there is no point in entertaining anything Holocaust deniers say. Once you spot their tactic, refuse to argue with them — they are not arguing with you but the audience even if you don’t concede any point to them — and chase them out of your space.
So far though, I’ve mostly described fascist deniers.
It’s time to look at Zionist deniers more closely.
As we can see from the video earlier, the statement was a bit different. The girl in the video was not “asking questions” or directly talking about the facts of the Holocaust.
She was committing another form of denial, which is the comparison of the Holocaust.
This is a bit more complex than what we’ve seen so far.
Basically, the vast majority of Holocaust scholars (not all of them Zionists by far!) agree that the Holocaust is a unique event in that no other genocide in history has reached the scale, intent and sheer carnage of the Holocaust.
Certainly this point of view is largely accepted but not necessarily ubiquitous. Norman Finkelstein is a famous opponent, to name just one.
But that’s not the case for “Israeli” society, where the Holocaust is supposed to be incomparable, period.
In 6 years, half the Jewish population in Europe was completely wiped out.
There have been other odious genocides, absolutely — the genocide of Native Americans and the genocide in the Congo, for example — but the argument is that they did not reach the “industrial” capacity of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a methodical process carried out not just with intent but with precision. The Nazis sought out specific people — anyone they believed to be Jewish. The ovens to cremate the bodies were purposely designed so that they would use the first body as fuel to burn the next one. The Zyklon B gas used in the chambers (which deniers say was a “safe delouser”) was perfected by chemical company IG Farben (which still operates today) so as to be safe to handle while inflicting a maximal death rate; the gas came in the form of small pellets which, when exposed to air, evaporated into a gas. A feeding system was created for the gas chambers so as to make turnover as efficient as possible for the killers: the LD50 (the dose at which 50% of people die from it) of Zyklon B is 1 milligram per kilogram of bodyweight. Convoys — that’s the word the Nazis used themselves — of innocent people were driven every few hours to concentration and extermination camps, and the gas chambers were used all day long.
The Holocaust was systematic: a specific division of the SS travelled behind the Wehrmacht and moved from village to village, identifying (in the Western Front at least) specifically Jews and deporting them, while leaving anyone else alone. Communists, socialists, LGBT persons, the Romani were certainly also targeted but are not considered part of the Holocaust itself because the manners in which they were targeted were different. Communists were not always sent to camps directly, but to prisons where they would be tortured and questioned. Gay men were sent to concentration camps, not extermination camps — at least as gay men. If they were Jewish, they might have been sent to an extermination camp.
The process of killing other human beings, of exterminating them, was perfected by the Germans in the Holocaust.
From this point of view, the Holocaust was certainly a unique event. The genocide of Native Americans took place over centuries. The genocide in the Congo Free State did not employ such “industrial” methods: most of the deaths were caused en masse, through the introduction of disease and famine. An entire rationalization of categorizating human beings was put in place and into law to determine what should happen to them.
Again, this is the consensus of Holocaust scholars who have been studying it since after the war.
I’m sure that Belgium would have employed similar methods if they had been available to them. But we’re not here to say one genocide is worse than another; we’re here to say that the Holocaust can’t be compared. And that if it ever can be compared (which I certainly hope will not happen), that day hasn’t come yet.
Genocides stand on their own regardless, that much is clear. That the Holocaust was unique does not diminish the other genocides that happened, many of which are still unrecognized.
All it means is that the shortcut of comparing anything (genocide or not) to the Holocaust is… incorrect. It’s incorrect because nothing yet compares to the Holocaust, and doing so would diminish the actual scale and events of the Holocaust.
And diminishing, as we’ve seen, is a form of Holocaust denial. This is the basis on which our broadened definition of denial remains true and applicable.
In the video, Stella is engaging in Holocaust denial and her parent did not bat an eye.
She says that “The Nova Festival is like the Auschwitz of our time”. But it is incomparable in scale, scope and methods. To compare the Nova Festival indiscriminate helicopter fire (caused by the IOF on their own people) to the Holocaust diminishes the methods of the Holocaust, its machines, its system of categorization, the technological advancements that were made specifically to make it kill people even faster, etc.
It’s irresponsible for anyone who claims to be Jewish to not know this, and not teach this to their children. It’s irresponsible for them to think this makes them look good, and post it on the Internet for everyone to see.
It’s the nature of being a Zionist.
Too good for the legacy of the Holocaust to apply to you, but not sincere enough that you would not weaponize it when you commit a genocide only 2 kilometres away from where you film your video.
A complete denial of the Holocaust, a bastardization of it when we know for a fact that on October 7, most “festival-goers” were killed indiscriminately by their own purportedly Jewish Army.
To be direct, my firm belief is that the Holocaust is called "incomparable", because, horror upon horrors, white people were suffering dehumanising and industrial-scale mass murder for once. That's the reason.
White people are supposedly incomparable, therefor, so is a mass murder of them. White people refuse to be in the same class of victim as everyone else. There is something supposedly unfathomable about the mass killing of white people, it is all too fathomable to mass kill people of color.
A good read. thank you. As a Caribbean person, in your comparisons and claims about the Holocaust being a genocide worse than another, how come you dont see or recognise the genocidal aspect of chattel slavery in the Caribbean?
British slave ships brought 5.5 million enslaved Africans into their Caribbean colonies over 180 years. When slavery was abolished in 1838 there were 800,000 people remaining. That is a retention/survival rate of 15 per cent.
The regime of enslavement was crafted by policies and attitudes that were clearly genocidal.
Indigenous genocide, African chattel slavery and genocide, and Asian contract slavery were three acts of a single play, a single process by which the British state forcefully extracted wealth from the Caribbean resulting in its persistent, endemic poverty, that we still live today. No one has made amends for the genocide of Caribbean Chattel Slavery, yet here you are erasing it from the conversation.