The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Deborah Taylor-Hollis

Holocaust-deniers surface in the Glen

I was sent a letter here to the paper from someone who didn't like that I described Nazis as butchers in a recent column. The letter-writer claimed that the Holocaust didn't happen and that those Third Reichers were actually just good old foot-stompin', glass-breakin', happy-camper fighting men.

To begin with, the letter really surprised me. It was a copy of some tract that rambled aimlessly, with poor syntax, bad grammar and lousy spelling. I was equally surprised that the sender reads our paper. I didn't think anyone that ignorant could read anything not printed by right-wing skinheads on the Internet.

It must be quite a feat to switch from reading that kind of trash to our well-organized, -researched and -balanced public forum. And to know that we have some of the people who believe these biased, backward views right here in the Glen--rather than heavily fortified compounds in the backwoods--is so unexpected. I didn't think anyone like this would choose to be in a well-educated, tolerant, heavily Jewish community. You never can tell.

I was getting mail from someone with a big reality problem. Thousands of eyewitness accounts, several major jury trials (beginning with Nuremberg), millions of books by reputable authors or the literally billions of hours of televised documentaries showing continuously on A&E or the Discovery Channel have not dissuaded him from this belief that all of history lies to him.

Yeah, there is some problem believing television (check out the Sci-Fi Channel). But it's easy to distinguish fiction from fact: Fiction usually has better production values than the reality captured by Brownie cameras held by troops crying as they viewed the dead and dying civilians at each camp they liberated.

I guess it's like walking on the moon--until you've done it yourself, there is some room for doubt. But in this case, you don't have to join NASA to go find out these facts for yourself. All you have to do is ask the survivors or go to the scenes of the crimes.

I have friends in Germany who lived through the war. They are not proud of their countrymen, not proud of the horrors, but they will admit what happened. They have the lost years, the destroyed families and the stories of starving and hiding Jews to bolster their memories.

They are not Jewish, and they do not pretend the truths away. They feel just as guilty as those who did the deeds. They do not follow idiots to bolster their egos or cover their own failures. They have more honor than any revisionist in America I have ever heard from. They can admit when they, or their families, were wrong.

If there is a gift of learning that every parent should pass on, it is teaching rational thinking. Every person should learn how to take any given set of facts and follow them back to their sources, where, through intelligent test and examination, the truth can be discerned from the fiction. This process is good for everything. Just because you get a note from Ed McMahon in the mail doesn't make you a winner--ask the 16 poor schlubs who've flown to Florida to collect on their bogus millions.

When Marshall McLuhan said "The medium is the message," he didn't see just how vast the media or the messages would become. You have to investigate the media through which your message comes before passing judgment. Great newspapers are called that because they can research a story and stand behind it. Tabloids will print that aliens pose as super models if it sells papers. Reliable sources are the first step in thinking something through.

The Internet muddies all this--any Web site could be reputable, just as any Web page could be the product of the mind of a sicko with a computer and a modem to go with the ax he's grinding. It makes it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff when looking for real facts and not fantasies.

But back to the person who denies the mass murders of World War II. I ask: Just what did happen to those six million people, their names and birth dates recorded facts, their homes left empty and their families broken?

Without being able to think critically and use facts, but by using twisted, paranoid mental moves, the letter-writer, I guess, thinks they all went with the aliens on an asteroid joyride. Or jumped into the ocean like lemmings. Or moved to Atlantis without leaving a forwarding address. Yeah, that's the ticket.

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