On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Tom Wheeler wrote:
> "Holocaust or Bust" was a phamplet written by Bradley R. Smith and it
> was given a negative review in Anarchy. How does this have anything to
> do with Jason McQuinn being smeared as a holocaust revisionist?
Well, if Jason wrote this review, I think it all comes down to one sentence, the second in the following couplet:
> It's undeniable that "The Holocaust" *has* been magnified into a larger
> than life tale of historical racial persecution--largely in order to
> justify the continuing atrocities by Zionists in the racist state of
> Israel. But what purpose is really served by a campaign to *completely*
> dismiss the actual suffering of hundreds of thousands of people at the
> hands of another of the most powerful and ruthless states the world has
> known?
And actually to one phrase: "hundreds of thousands." Of course this could result from several things. It could be simple innumeracy, an inability in the heat of the moment to distinguish between powers of 10. Or it could be an innocent speed error. Perhaps he was thinking of the number of Jews who died specifically of gas at a specific camp rather than the number of Jews who died overall, and how the majority of Jews died in more mundane ways common to many other massacres (malnourishment, inhumane treatment, disease, bullets, clubs), but when he got done editing it ended up looking like a claim about how many Jews died total. Or -- and this is the revisionist possibility -- he really does think that the sum total of Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis was in the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions. I'm perfectly willing to believe this isn't what he meant. But it's not hard to see how people might think that's what he meant, given the word "magnified" in the sentence that precedes it. Also given the sentence that follows:
> Unfortunately, the sappy writing in Confessions of a Holocaust
> Revisionist is not just sloppy revisionism . . .
Which seems to imply that there might be such a thing as high-grade holocaust revisionism.
Again, I'm perfectly willing to accept that these might all be innocent slips. But just out of curiousity, could you ask Jason how many Jews he thinks died in WWII? I'm sure that would surely settle it once and for all.
Michael