> > > >> The argument of Frank Scott's prisoner of conscience, Ernest
>Zundel,
> > > Once again, I don't think people should be jailed for this crap. But
> > > I think having a kind word to say about any of them is grounds for
> > > social shunning.
Where this gets really messed up is where real holocaust denialists seize onto and use to their advantage a semantics argument over the definition of the word genocide, that some people emphasize for their own reasons.
Basically, most people within the U.S. hear the number '6 million' most often, and a few might say "wait, I thought there were 13 million holocaust victims', the number associated with the top 4-5 demographic groups targeted for camps. And, there is a good reason to distinguish camp victims as separate from outside warfare deaths in Poland and Germany because soldiers have always been classified as more legitimate deaths that society doesn't mourn as much, and there is a need to distinguish against the mass deaths from conversion to state agriculture in the Ukraine and China. However, imagine that you are a holocaust denier who is drawing less public interest than the alien abduction crowd, or even David Icke's political theory. Some of them realized that they can greatly benefit from advertising the claim "Elie Wiesel calls people holocaust revisionists who classify the groups extra to 6 million jewish, i.e. the gypsies, leftists, gays & others as also being holocaust victims, because the other groups don't met the genocide definition". So once this meme gets out, it spreads the thought that there is a bunch of unreasonable 'holocaust denier' accusers out there who are going around accusing the people of revisionism who are merely using the different colloquial definition of holocaust as pertaining to 'victims of the death camps' rather than 'camp victims whose whole race was targeted"... and just think about it, people *will* be more likely to click on their holocaust denial website link to read further about their weird ideas. So, it would seem that no one except antisemites are really benefitting from the small fight over whether gay and communist and gypsy victims were equally or less impacted. One idea I do hear commonly is that there were substantial numbers of persecuted catholics, and from my mother, I really don't believe this is the case. Religious leaders were really gung ho in her town, and this is why she hasn't attended church in decades. Also, coming to the US, she had the experience of slightly closeted antisemites learning that she was german and not swiss and feeling they could open up about their feelings.
A couple weeks ago, there were announcements that neo-nazis would appear both by the space needle and in Olympia. This sounded so absurd, that there were joke notices that they were seen at Burger King, no wait, Taco Bell. But sure enough, a couple showed up. I linked the photos to german.indymedia because they were taking the old german style rather than the recent german style, not to mention american style of clothes. A few left notes saying "don't joke about this. we've had a big resurgence here in the past couple of years". I don't have enough understanding of why there is such an upswing in the last couple years, because unemployment has been high for awhile. One thing the neonazis did do is drop the Auslanderraus theme, and as a group, picked up on the palestinian cause- which is a total mess of course. The website overthrow.com has announcements that the people in the pictures will march again in July - but take a look at their forums. They have a chemical weapons forum (um, do you remember a man named Sherman Austin who just got out of a year of jail for merely owning a site where another person put up bomb info), and they also clearly consider themselves anarchists, what with their anarchist forum. But what can anarchists do about that. A couple years ago, people were angry that the ADL had a @ on its list of sometimes used neo-nazi symbols, and were writing telling them they were uninformed. http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/01/332413.shtml
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