Holocaust denial is something else, isn`t it?

The ability to blind oneself to the vast accumulation of documentary evidence, to deafen oneself to the testimonies of eye-witness after eye-witness, to disregard the trials, the confessions, the surviving physical structures.

Nor does it restrict itself to the death and torture camps at Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, etc but must, necessarily, extend to the mass murders, deportations and inhumanity suffered throughout Nazi controlled Europe (with the notable exception of Denmark)- in Warsaw, in Beaune-la-Rolande, in Eastern Russia where Himmler`s Einsatzgruppen extended the pogrom into the towns and villages behind the advance of Operation Barbarossa, in Budapest and elsewhere.

It must take a very special kind of ignorance, or bigotry, or worse - political expedience to take this mountainous wealth of evidence and corroboration and twist into a contrary argument.

But before we get too smug about our superiority over the bigots and hate-mongers let us remember that denial of genocide has solid precedent. For however great the evidence of the Jewish Holocaust there is another for which there is greater evidence still. A genocide that, unlike the Jewish, was fully reported as it was going on and yet is still denied.

The Armenian genocide arguably set the scene of the later Nazi atrocities. Certainly several officers from the German Army, that was to subsequently mimic the Turks with their own `Final Solution`, were present as observers. It was in Turkey where they discovered how many human beings can be stuffed into a cattletruck. Was it also from there that they realised the convenience of using proxy killers? Watching the Kurds do Turkey`s dirty work in the same way that the Nazi`s would later use Ukrainians for theirs?

The Armenian genocide is still not recognised by Israel, the US or the UK. Perhaps, before we complain too bitterly about Holocaust denial, we should stop our own.

"Who today speaks of the Armenians?"

Now who said that?

__________________
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
Marx (G.)