Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Holocaust denial

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Today the Iranian president was harshly criticized for calling the Nazi Holocaust a "myth" used as a pretext for carving out a Jewish state in the heart of the Muslim world. He has been denounced by European and American government officials but the rest of the world has been noticably silent concerning his remarks.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/12/14/D8EG922O0.html

Now if he is to censured for such a statement, how come the Russians are still able to deny the 10 million who perished from deliberately planned government starvation of peasants in the Ukraine in the early 1930's? Is Turkey ready to officially acknowledge that from 1900 to 1923, various Turkish regimes killed from 3.5 to over 4.3 million Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians, and other assorted Christians? Will the United States federal government ever officially acknowledge the planned and systematic genocide and gulaging of the native tribes of the American West or the deliberate poisoning of the populace with 126 above ground nuclear tests from 1951-62, which blew across the entire country on the prevailing wind patterns? What about the use of torture this very day in some secret CIA camp abroad?
The murderous crimes perpetrated by Chairman Mao will never ever be openly proclaimed by the current rulers in China, whose bloody toll is estimated in the multi-tens of millions! The Japanese have just recently gotten around to saying they were sorry for the Rape of Nanjing, human scientific experiments on Chinese civilians and the 40,000 comfort girls (sex slaves) kidnapped from Korea, for the use of the military, during their brutal occupation of that country. Nice of them to admit it now wasn't it? I feel so much better now Dr. Phil.

Why get so worked up about Holocaust denial when known genocide has still not been fessed up to by supposedly legitimate and respectable governments? Are the Germans and Japanese the only ones who have to atone for their crimes?

We've all seen the pictures of Dachau. I believe there was a Holocaust. So now let's talk about the other 194 million people killed by central governments in the 20th-century!

While we're at it let's also cut President Ahmadinejad some slack. He's entititled to his own opinions about the truth as long the rest of the world's central governments continue to remain silent about thier own crimes against humanity.

6 comments:

LBBP said...

You would have us cut Ahmadinejad some slack? I think it is often valuable in cases like this to apply an elementary school playground litmus test. Let's see what we get. 10 kids do something bad on the playground, when confronted, 9 of them lie about it. Is it therefore OK for the 10th to lie? Of course not. Ahmadinejad's comments were reprehensible. The lack of honesty of others is irrelevant.

This post was included in Skeptic Rant's 5 Random Links for Dec 15th.

Anonymous said...

Hey, David, I think you need to check the tubes in your analogy machine. Ahmadinejad made a stupid statement. We don't need to hold a Genociders Anonymous meeting over it. Let's just call stupid stupid. Steve D.

beamis said...

Well if the Russians can be left off the hook why not the Nazis?

beamis said...

It sort of reminds me of Saddam Hussien being tried as a war criminal by American puppets, for the execution of 140 people, when these very same folks who now admit that they have killed 30,000 innocent civilians through waging a savage war in their country. That the trial is being held in the same city that they tortured civilians in, is rightly perceived as the arrogant height of hubris by everybody else in the world. It would be like Hitler trying Stalin for genocide.

If we let 9 liars off the hook what is so edifying about persecuting the 10th?

Devastatin' Dave said...

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

- Josef Stalin

The Cat said...

"We've all seen the pictures of Dachau. I believe there was a Holocaust"
The pictures taken at Dachau, however terrible, are not proof of a Holocaust, i.e. an official policy to exterminate every living Jew. None of the dead there were killed in a gas chamber, because no homicidal gas chamber, if any existed before the end of the war, was used at Dachau.
Most of the dead shown in those "end of war" pictures were victims of disease, and malnutrition.