Holocaust Denial on Breitbart
Breitbart uses IntenseDebate for its comments administration. On a news item regarding the Pope’s lifting of the excommunication of a Holocaust denier the ‘revisionists’ are hijacking the thread. IntenseDebate uses a ‘reputation’ system where registered users vote on each post’s relative worth, the idea being to stigmatize trolls and irresponsible / illiterate commenters, and reward the best ones. Yet in this thread, some of thos posters who have mainstream views towards the Holocaust are being ‘reputation-bombed’. It’s funny how the Holocaust deniers allege a vast Zionist conspiracy that muzzles free speech, and yet they blacken the name of anyone who disagrees with them. Clearly the ‘reputation’ score that IntenstDebate uses is only as good as the community that bestows it.
I can understand the desire to put the Holocaust into a historical perspective, and assert that its victims were no more deserving of a voice than those of the Bolshieviks. But there are legitimate reasons that the Holocaust has been so emphasized in our historical consciousness, and they have little to do with some all-powerful hidden Jewish cabal. Because of where and how the Holocaust happened: with widespread Western eyewitnesses (as opposed to the Stalinist gulag), and the methods it used, it caused some major artistic and intellectual responses in the West that proliferated cultural disorientation and self-doubt. Since Jews were the Holocaust’s most numerous and emphasized victims, it is only natural that many of these responses were indeed from Jews themselves.
One can make the case that we have overreacted to the Holocaust, in misapplying its lessons: a good example would be the taboo of the concept of Eugenics. I’m all for critical thinking being applied mercilessly to any issue. But the notion of vast consipracies that fundamentally direct peoples’ worldview is in itself antithetical to critical thinking.
