[Newsfilter] In mid-November last year, David Irving, arguably the world's foremost holocaust-denier (
Mel Gibson's dad comes a close second), was
arrested in Austria for doing exactly that (previously discussed
here). Today he was
jailed for it. Should we (read; Austria) be jailing people for their views, however reprehensible or otherwise incorrect they might be? Or is it justifiable in some cases?
posted by Effigy2000
on Feb 20, 2006 -
315 comments
The
conference at
Wannsee occurred on January 20, 1942.
The Holocaust had been going on for at least one year; the camp at Dachau had been in operation for several years. The
Final Solution was already underway. At issue at Wannsee, in the relaxed and distinctively
upper middle-class atmosphere of that SS guest-house for the fifteen highly placed Nazis was the
best strategy for genocide.
Less than one year after the conference a little girl who had been hiding in Holland is sent to the Bergen camp in northern Germany. She spends more than six years looking for
four perfect pebbles
posted by Smedleyman
on Jan 18, 2006 -
16 comments
[NewsFilter]
Lipstadt: Let Irving Go. Infamous "historian" David Irving was
arrested in mid-November in Austria for Holocaust denial, violating section 3g of the
Verbotsgesetz [in german].
Deborah Lipstadt, whom Irving once
sued for libel, argues,
"I don't find these laws efficacious. I think they turn Holocaust denial into forbidden fruit, and make it more attractive to people who want to toy with the system or challenge the system." Perhaps Irving hasn't had time to update his
dossier on Lipstadt -- who is, in turn, keeping up with events on her
blog.
posted by milquetoast
on Jan 4, 2006 -
74 comments
"Expertise is a very good thing, but it is not the same thing as sound judgment regarding strategy and policy.
George W. Bush has more insight, because of his knowledge of human beings and his sense of history, about the motive force, the craving for freedom and participation in self-rule, than do many of the language experts and history experts and culture experts." -- From a fascinating profile of Douglas Feith, undersecretary of Defense, and one of the main architects of the
war in Iraq. From the
New Yorker.
posted by digaman
on May 8, 2005 -
64 comments
Hitler's "
fountain of life." In 1935, Heinrich Himmer and the SS launched a network of
Lebensborn maternity centers to increase birthrates among Aryans, where German soldiers were encouraged to mate with genetically desirable local women in occupied countries like Norway. These women were given the option of raising their kids themselves or turning them over to SS-run homes where they would be "Germanized." The lives of these kids was hell after the war, when they
were shunned and worse by the Nazis' previous victims. To those who are nostalgic for the Reich, like this veritable
eBay of Nazi memorabilia, the Lebensborn program represented "
wonderful social experimentation."
posted by digaman
on Mar 20, 2005 -
38 comments
Munich Bans Memorial Plaques Munich has decided to ban memorial plaques to Jewish, Sinti and German citizens deported and murdered during World War Two. Jewish leaders, fearful that the plaques would stir up anti-Semitic fervor, supported the ban.
These plaques are the work of a German artist,
Gunter Demnig.
”He first had the idea in the early 1990s when he was unveiling a memorial for the Sinti and Roma victims of the Holocaust.
“An elderly woman approached him and insisted that "no Gypsies ever lived here". "It is so easy for people to deny something. I wanted to ensure that this would not happen," he says. (BBC).”
This reminder of the holocaust brought to mind the
Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, as well as the
Viet Nam Memorial
and the
AIDS quilt -- monuments that really changed me.
posted by gesamtkunstwerk
on Aug 14, 2004 -
22 comments
How bad was the bombing of Dresden? It seems there is a veritable industry dedicated to debunking the various and sundry historical accounts different groups hold sacred. I was raised by pacifists and was made very familiar with the stories of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden, in particular. According to this man's
new book, the firebombing of Dresden wasn't quite as bad as it has been made out to be. In fact, much of the evidence for the numbers of dead come from an historian who has since been discredited as a
holocaust denier. Others would argue that a
war crime is
a war crime is
a war crime.
In the end, do the specific numbers really matter? How less evil is 25,000 dead than 135,000?
posted by piedrasyluz
on Mar 2, 2004 -
21 comments
I'd like to introduce you to Norman Finkelstein. A Jew whose parents were survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and various concentration camps, he is one of a handful of modern Jewish scholars who wants to "maintain the integrity of the history of the Nazi holocaust". I was introduced to him when I read his book
The Holocaust Industry, which reminds us that "its central dogmas sustain significant political and class interests. Indeed, The Holocaust has proven to be an indispensable ideological weapon." Indeed.
posted by taumeson
on Feb 16, 2004 -
30 comments
Man's inhumanity to Man Here is a project that young elementary school children are undertaking in order to visualize what 6 million dead humans would seem like. I and others are ciruclating this call for help so that the school, the kids, and you can all be involved in a worthwhile project. Read about the project and ask yourself what it would take of your time and effort to help these youngster learn.
posted by Postroad
on Feb 4, 2004 -
13 comments
Yad Vashem: Online Exhibitions. 'Yad Vashem's task is to perpetuate the legacy of the Holocaust to future generations so that the world never forgets the horrors and cruelty of the Holocaust. Its principal missions are commemoration and documentation of the events of the Holocaust, collection, examination, and publication of testimonies to the Holocaust, the collection and memorialization of the names of Holocaust victims, and research and education.'
No Child's Play;
Private Tolkatchev;
Photos from the
Warsaw Ghetto; and much more.
posted by plep
on Jun 19, 2003 -
7 comments
The moon does not exist! This is no lie. Until recently, I, too, believed in the traditional, establishment view of the moon. But any thinking person, untainted by the biases imposed on us by the controlled media, will have no choice but to reach the conclusion I did once faced with the facts described in this account.
posted by CrunchyFrog
on Jan 30, 2003 -
25 comments
Who owns the products of slave labour? Or, more broadly, how do we remember the Holocaust?
A unique dispute over ownership rights to artwork in the case of the Auschwitz Memorial Museum vs. former camp prisoner Dinah Gottliebova Babbitt illuminates underlying moral questions about the Holocaust and post-Holocaust culture. Babbitt, now living in southern California, is a university-trained Czechoslovak artist who has been fighting to reclaim her art from the Auschwitz Museum since 1973... [She] was a Jewish prisoner there in 1944 when Josef Mengele learned of her artistic skills and forced her to make watercolor portraits of dying Gypsies in order to get the kind of documentation he wanted on exact skin color and ear shapes. Gottliebova Babbitt made a dozen such portraits, seven of which are now tucked away in Room No. 11 of the Auschwitz Museum. [...] "Mengele ordered me to do it as slave labor. But it was my work, my paintings."
posted by jokeefe
on Mar 28, 2002 -
20 comments
Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge dead at 81. She just published her book and a documentary of her life premiered hours before her death. She was in his bunker when he committed suicide in 1945 and she took his last will and testament. She died still maintaining that she knew nothing of the holocaust or the depths of the Nazi horror.
posted by Dean_Paxton
on Feb 14, 2002 -
7 comments
Swiss Holocaust Cash Revealed To Be Myth. "The tribunal said that it had processed about 10,000 claims in response to the list of dormant account names published by the Swiss Bankers’ Association five years ago. Only 200 accounts — containing £6.9 million — could be traced to Holocaust victims."
posted by tpoh.org
on Oct 14, 2001 -
2 comments
We all have AIDS Yet another article on global AIDS, but it includes Nazi's and the holocaust.
The writer suggests that the CEO's of pharmaceutical companies that reduced the price of anti-viral medication should receive a Nobel Prize because they "save the lives of more human beings than died in the Holocaust."
posted by nonharmful
on Jun 26, 2001 -
8 comments
Armenian Holocaust - This was discussed
earlier this year. I ran across this very well done flash site and was amazed at how presentation can affect one's views on a subject. Although aware of the story, it seems more
real presented this way.
posted by revbrian
on Jun 4, 2001 -
4 comments
The Last Expression project is a forum to explore the roles, functions, meanings and making of art in the Nazi concentration camps of World War II, focusing on the notorious site of Auschwitz-Birkenau. ... It is neither widely recognized in the realm of Holocaust history, nor in the discipline of art history, that concentration camp prisoners -- victims of the Nazis -- produced works of art during their incarceration.
[from the Introduction.]
posted by tranquileye
on Feb 12, 2001 -
2 comments
And you thought Microsoft was evil. There appears to be pretty significant evidence that
IBM was involved in automating the persecution of Jews by the Nazis. Read more about it
here,
here and
here.
And since we haven't even settled the question of when a nation has atoned for its sins, what exactly
is the statute of limitations for a company's sins?
posted by anildash
on Feb 11, 2001 -
20 comments
Lots of posts lately about the election, about other strange things, (and especially about my favorite subject to not read: Nader) and we haven't had a knock-down drag-out argument about ethics for a while. So I thought I'd start one about
this. Using up humans to collect medical data is unquestionably immoral and those who do it should be hung, if not put to death by torture. The question is whether those of us who had nothing to do with the collection of that data and have not done anything immoral
become immoral by using data collected that way in order to save lives. I'm going to make three posts below, so be patient.
posted by Steven Den Beste
on Oct 22, 2000 -
30 comments
If
this doesn't get some arguments going, then I'd hate to think what would.
posted by Mocata
on Jul 12, 2000 -
8 comments
never acknowledged: evidently, reparations were never made to gay holocaust survivors in germany. never mind that's where the pink triangle came from...
posted by patricking
on Jun 16, 2000 -
2 comments
