Tuesday 13 July 2010

Holocaust 'Denialism' - a new university discipline


The following arrived in my E-mail this morning. I am omitting the identity of the author but the very concept intrigued me and, to be honest, with the things being taught in school these days, it is not impossible to imagine such a course being taught. Indeed, it seems to be being worked upon already.

The author seems to have a ball with creation of exciting new words such as "Holocaustianity" and
"Irvingism" and, if you can get past the twisted newspeak rhetoric, you might even find a slyer wit than you would with just a quick glance.

I THINK this is humour, but then again, maybe not.

Editor's note: Questioning any aspect of the gigantic corpus of accusations against the Germans grouped under the Newspeak generic of "Holocaust denialism" is emerging as a new university subject.

Presumably we will see, in the not too distant future, a doctorate conferred in "Denialism." One can envision the future curriculum: Bishop Williamsonism 101 and David Irvingism 202.
Can anyone imagine anything so absurd?

What if Catholic university theology departments created studies in "Immaculate Conception Denialism" and linked these to their law schools, as the University of Leicester is doing in England?


This is all about treating the natural human right of skepticism as an entymological pathology, as if it were an anomaly ~ when the authentic anomaly is the imposition of the dogma of Holocaustianity itself, the last truly believed religion in the otherwise agnostic West.


And what of the denial of the holocausts in Dresden, Nagasaki and Gaza? Will these be included or excluded from consideration in the study of "genocide denial"? If I were a betting man, I'd wager they will be excluded.

Certain types of "denial" are perpetrated by the very people seeking to establish an exclusive "Holocaust" mythos limited solely or mainly to the sufferings, both real and imagined, of Judaic persons during World War II, an exceptionalism familiar to students of the Talmud and its supremacist culture.



Here's the phantasmagoriac press release:

Workshop: 23 ~ 24 September 2010,

University of Leicester

Call for Abstracts/Papers Proposals are sought for an interdisciplinary research workshop entitled:

A Contextual View of Holocaust and Genocide Denial

Holocaust and genocide denial are phenomena whose consequences reach far beyond the expression of individual opinions. The views of David Irving, Nick Griffin or Bishop Richard Williamson tend to reach audiences that benefit from denialist arguments for specific political purposes, and the consequences of denialism are not confined to the immediate discourse.

Denialism also carries significance for more than one academic discipline. Historians are directly affected, as deniers frequently claim to carry out "revisionist" historical research against "orthodox" interpretations and thereby pose the question whether their conclusions merit or indeed require a reaction in serious academic debate.

To lawyers, denialism raises questions about the limits of freedom of speech ~ particularly when domestic laws are taken into account which prohibit certain forms of denialism.


To political scientists, sociologists or psychologists the motives of deniers and the repercussions of their statements are of particular importance.
There is therefore need for a contextual perspective of holocaust denial which fosters a better understanding of the perspectives of these disciplines.

The School of Historical Studies (Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust Studies) and the School of Law at Leicester University have established an interdisciplinary initiative to investigate denialism, but also other aspects relating to the Holocaust and to genocide.

This workshop is intended to be an initial meeting and appraisal of this field of research, but it will also facilitate the creation of a network of scholars and expert commentators who are interested in this field.

It will focus on questions such as:

How do we define Holocaust denial?

How can it be proven?

What are the intentions behind Holocaust denial?


What is the impact of laws against Holocaust denial?


What are the potentials financial benefits of Holocaust denial for victims?

Abstracts are invited from all disciplines and to all aspects of this field of research, to be submitted to Dr Olaf Jensen (
oj6@le.ac.uk) or Dr Paul Behrens (pk124@le.ac.uk).

Abstracts should be no longer than 1 A4 page.

Closing date for submission: 1 August 2010

8 comments:

  1. These fellows obviously cannot vacation in Germany or they would face six years in the slammer by the not too well disguised dictarorship there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It’s now official – there’s no actual shortage of Holocaust Survivors:

    Quote from The Holocaust Industry by Norman G. Finkelstein of the City University of New York, published by Verso in the year 2000:
    'The Israeli Prime Minister's office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million.' (page 83)

    ReplyDelete
  3. It’s now official – there’s no actual shortage of Holocaust Survivors:

    Quote from The Holocaust Industry by Norman G. Finkelstein of the City University of New York, published by Verso in the year 2000:
    'The Israeli Prime Minister's office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million.' (page 83)

    ReplyDelete
  4. I've checked out the six volumes of Churchill's Second World War and the statement is quite correct - not a single mention of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war.
    Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; Churchill's Second World War totals 4,448 pages; and De Gaulle's three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages.
    In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi 'gas chambers,' a 'genocide' of the Jews, or of 'six million' Jewish victims of the war.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Elie Wiesel vs Encyclopaedia Britannica

    Wiesel has been one of the most prominent spokesman for the very sizeable group of people known as Holocaust survivors. Wiesel has chaired the US Holocaust Memorial Council and has been the recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal and Nobel Peace Prize..

    Time Magazine, March 18 1985:

    ‘How had he survived two of the most notorious killing fields [Auschwitz and Buchenwald] of the century? "I will never know" Wiesel says. "I was always weak. I never ate. The slightest wind would turn me over. In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 to their deaths every day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?"

    Compare this with Encyclopaedia Britannica (1993), under ‘Buchenwald’:

    "In World War II it held about 20,000 prisoners.. Although there were no gas chambers, hundreds perished monthly through disease, malnutrition, exhaustion, beatings and executions."

    ReplyDelete
  6. THE 'INCORRECT’ SIX MILLION
    Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a speech in Washington in 1975 had this to say of the Soviet system which was deemed worthy of recognition as one of 'our' Allies fighting 'for Democracy' against the 'Dictators' in WW2:
    "This was a system which, in peace time, artificially created a famine causing SIX MILLION PERSONS to die in the Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. They died on the very threshold of Europe. And Europe and the world didn't even notice it. SIX MILLION PERSONS!" (Solzhenitsyn Speaks to the West (1978) p 16)

    Why are these people and their fate generally unknown in western countries?
    Roosevelt’s ally Joseph Stalin was supreme dictator of Russia for almost a quarter of a century, from 1929 until his death in 1953. Soviet Russia under Stalin was a despotic police state that relied on internal espionage and terror.
    Stalin's first Five-Year Plan sought to bring about the 'collectivization of agriculture' in accordance with Marx's Communist Manifesto. When Communism was imposed on Russia, the small farmers known as kulaks, as private property owners, stood in the way. In 1929 Stalin called for 'the liquidation of the kulaks', and their small family farms, animals, implements and crops were declared to belong to the state. "Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev (all Jews) had always argued that the peasant would never surrender enough food voluntarily and must, if need be, crushed" (Paul Johnson History of the Modern World p268). The army and secret police were used to enforce the policy. All peasants who resisted were killed or sent to exile in remote areas in the frozen north or the desert steppes. Rather than give up their animals, many peasants killed and ate them. As a result, the number of farm animals in the Soviet Union was catastrophically reduced. The peasants stopped farming.

    After a while, the cities started running out of food. Orders were given for grain to be confiscated from the peasants. Those caught trying to reserve food for their families were ‘severely dealt with’. By the winter of 1932-3, virtually no food was left in the countryside. By early March 1933, 'death on a mass scale really began'. The main farming areas - particularly in the Ukraine - were devastated. It was a time of great and terrible hunger, a catastrophic man-made famine.

    Eugene Lyons was sent to Russia in 1928 as United Press chief correspondent. Arriving as an enthusiastic communist, he experienced the catastrophe at first hand. He described the ‘famine’ in his book Assignment in Utopia (1937):
    "Hell broke loose in seventy thousand Russian villages.. A population as large as all of Switzerland's was stripped clean of all their belongings.. They were herded with bayonets at railroad stations, packed indiscriminately into cattle cars and freight cars and dumped weeks later in the lumber regions of the frozen North, the deserts of central Asia, wherever labor was needed, there to live or die..".
    The famine alone is estimated conservatively to have caused 6 million deaths, almost half of them children. Other millions died from the killings and sickness as a result of the deportations.
    Lyons, himself Jewish, credits the Jewish commissar Lazar Kaganovich with the major portion of responsibility for this major crime against humanity:
    "Lazar Kaganovich… it was his iron hand that applied Bolshevik mercilessness." (Lyons, p 578). The Encyclopaedia Britannica says tersely, "(Kaganovich) was one of the small group of Stalin's top advisors pushing for very high rates of collectivization after 1929.. Kaganovich.. led the opposition to Kirov's proposed concessions to the peasantry and to his attempts to relax the harshness of Stalin's control..”

    Kaganovich died at the ripe old age of 98 in 1991 (Encl. Brit.), ethnically safe from pursuit by the Israeli secret service, the Simon Wiesenthal organization and the New York media-intelligentsia. Shhhh!!!

    ReplyDelete
  7. THE 'INCORRECT’ SIX MILLION
    Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a speech in Washington in 1975 had this to say of the Soviet system which was deemed worthy of recognition as one of 'our' Allies fighting 'for Democracy' against the 'Dictators' in WW2:
    "This was a system which, in peace time, artificially created a famine causing SIX MILLION PERSONS to die in the Ukraine between 1932 and 1933. They died on the very threshold of Europe. And Europe and the world didn't even notice it. SIX MILLION PERSONS!" (Solzhenitsyn Speaks to the West (1978) p 16)

    Why are these people and their fate generally unknown in western countries?
    Roosevelt’s ally Joseph Stalin was supreme dictator of Russia for almost a quarter of a century, from 1929 until his death in 1953. Soviet Russia under Stalin was a despotic police state that relied on internal espionage and terror.
    Stalin's first Five-Year Plan sought to bring about the 'collectivization of agriculture' in accordance with Marx's Communist Manifesto. When Communism was imposed on Russia, the small farmers known as kulaks, as private property owners, stood in the way. In 1929 Stalin called for 'the liquidation of the kulaks', and their small family farms, animals, implements and crops were declared to belong to the state. "Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev (all Jews) had always argued that the peasant would never surrender enough food voluntarily and must, if need be, crushed" (Paul Johnson History of the Modern World p268). The army and secret police were used to enforce the policy. All peasants who resisted were killed or sent to exile in remote areas in the frozen north or the desert steppes. Rather than give up their animals, many peasants killed and ate them. As a result, the number of farm animals in the Soviet Union was catastrophically reduced. The peasants stopped farming.

    After a while, the cities started running out of food. Orders were given for grain to be confiscated from the peasants. Those caught trying to reserve food for their families were ‘severely dealt with’. By the winter of 1932-3, virtually no food was left in the countryside. By early March 1933, 'death on a mass scale really began'. The main farming areas - particularly in the Ukraine - were devastated. It was a time of great and terrible hunger, a catastrophic man-made famine.

    Eugene Lyons was sent to Russia in 1928 as United Press chief correspondent. Arriving as an enthusiastic communist, he experienced the catastrophe at first hand. He described the ‘famine’ in his book Assignment in Utopia (1937):
    "Hell broke loose in seventy thousand Russian villages.. A population as large as all of Switzerland's was stripped clean of all their belongings.. They were herded with bayonets at railroad stations, packed indiscriminately into cattle cars and freight cars and dumped weeks later in the lumber regions of the frozen North, the deserts of central Asia, wherever labor was needed, there to live or die..".
    The famine alone is estimated conservatively to have caused 6 million deaths, almost half of them children. Other millions died from the killings and sickness as a result of the deportations.
    Lyons, himself Jewish, credits the Jewish commissar Lazar Kaganovich with the major portion of responsibility for this major crime against humanity:
    "Lazar Kaganovich… it was his iron hand that applied Bolshevik mercilessness." (Lyons, p 578). The Encyclopaedia Britannica says tersely, "(Kaganovich) was one of the small group of Stalin's top advisors pushing for very high rates of collectivization after 1929.. Kaganovich.. led the opposition to Kirov's proposed concessions to the peasantry and to his attempts to relax the harshness of Stalin's control..”

    Kaganovich died at the ripe old age of 98 in 1991 (Encl. Brit.), ethnically safe from pursuit by the Israeli secret service, the Simon Wiesenthal organization and the New York media-intelligentsia. Shhhh!!!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thank you for alllll that extra information Anonymous! Very much.

    ReplyDelete

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