Sunday, October 28, 2007

On the Contrary

Another posting by Daniel McGowan makes his Holocaust denial more apparent. He says:
When Elie Wiesel took Oprah Winfrey to Auschwitz, the choreography was perfect. Jewish suffering was paramount; remember the six million, the gas chambers, the Zyklon B, the death marches, and "Arbeit Macht Frei."

Ignore the facts that none of Wiesel's family was gassed, that 50 million non-Jews were killed, that Wiesel chose to leave Auschwitz with the Nazis rather than be liberated by the Russians as was Anne Frank's father. And certainly ignore the ethnic cleansing and murder of perhaps two million Germans, mostly civilians, after the war.
Wiesel *chose* to leave Auschwitz with the Nazis?! Wiesel (and his father) were forced by the SS guards on the death march to Germany. No prisoner in Auschwitz had a "choice" about where to go as long as the Nazi guards were in control.

2 comments:

  1. Some of the recent Holocaust deniers seem to subscribe to the 'enemy of my enemy is my friend' school of ethics. That is, being ethically opposed to the modern state of Israel, and recognising (rightly) on factual grounds that the Holocaust gets a good deal of (especially) U.S. sympathy for Israel, they take sides with the type of right-wing nutjobs that they wouldn't otherwise be seen dead with. I don't know if this is the case with Daniel McGowan at all, or if he merely tends towards the right-wing nutjob category himself, but it seems to be a creeping disease.

    It is closely related to the prevalent tendency for arts reviewers to give positive reviews to crap work by politically left artists.

    * * * * *

    I read your 'Ritual Practices to Gain Power' last year, and greatly enjoyed its content and readability.

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  2. Dear Deane, Thank you for the kind words on my book.

    From what I can tell, it seems to me that McGowan began by getting involved in the cause of remembering the massacre at Deir Yassin (massacre of Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 war by members of the Irgun) and then in some fashion started to believe the Holocaust deniers, and then to champion them (like Zundel). It's a weird progression, in my opinion, because I don't see what the one thing has to do with the other.

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