To feel despair about holocaust deniers

[bananaramaspyjamas]

How shocking that 1 in 20 denies the holocaust. I'm quite horrified by that figure and find it really troubling.

Surely this percentage of people are simply quite thick. Hopefully also too thick to bother voting. There’s not much you can do with stupid.

Maybe the idiots would rather not believe it.

But why deny the death toll? The Nazis were quite meticulous in their record keeping. It's all documented

Not quite ... it undoubtably was documented at the time, but the SS destroyed many records before they cleared out after realising the war was lost

Here's a piece about the Auschwitz records (and this probably isn't the best thread to be reading, considering I'm going there next Thursday )

auschwitz.org/en/museum/about-the-available-data/

YANBU.

This has been going on for years. Amazingly, there is a group of people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened. I can only imagine that they are driven by extreme racism.

U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower visited one of the camps in 1945 as it was being liberated. These quotes are attributed to him:

“The things I saw beggar description…The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering…I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations to propaganda.”

and

“Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.”

How prophetic.

1 in 20 of the sample of 2,000 Daily Mail readers is hardly representative of the population

Grow up.

It doesn't just come from the far right either.

As someone who is Jewish and lost family members I find it frightening. Just look at some of the comments on SM on posts from Holocaust memorial or Holocaust Education Trust, let alone prominent Jews.

It is an absolute disgrace.

Eisenhower was a wise man.

Eisenhower was a wise man.

Yes he was.

Years ago as a nurse I cared for an elderly man who had been a soldier involved in liberating the camps.

He told me that what he saw was profoundly horrific he would never forget it.

He started taking photographs because he said "People HAD to see what had happened".

In the camps he came across small numbers of children who by surviving on nothing more than their wits and stolen food had survived the gas chambers.

One photo showed a little girl of 8/9 washing her face from a bucket of water. Behind her were piled up corpses. It was so everyday for her that she could do something as mundane as wash her face right by it.

Thank you for the Eisenhower quote. Very prophetic and moving.

No matter where the sample of people questioned was, the statistics are shocking. If asked how many people might think that I'd have guessed more like 1 in a thousand at most.

I thought it was generally taught at school in history lessons, but even so as pp said, it should be spoken about at home etc.
Ditto slavery.

It’s not just the far right, although they drive this despicable BS.

There are a whole lot of ‘illuminati’ believing crackpots out there who wouldn’t see themselves as right wing, yet believe in all this conspiracy theory bullshit on the internet that is ladened with holocaust denial propaganda.

Are we getting more stupid as a species?! Beggars belief.

U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower visited one of the camps in 1945 as it was being liberated....

Better still, Richard Dimbleby was with the first British troops to enter Belsen. You can listen to his radio broadcast on www.bbc.co.uk/archive/holocaust. I believe it's also on youtube.

It is indeed shocking but somewhat shortsighted to attribute it to the far right.

There are sadly many other far more mainstream groups for whom anti semitism is commonplace and largely unchallenged by the rest of society for fear of being labelled bigoted. Ironically.

I read the BBC article and was a bit annoyed that the poll only asked how many Jewish people were slaughtered, there were of course Gypsies and others I understand.

I think conspiracy theories are on the rise. One thing the Internet has NOT helped with. People just Google in a bubble and only look at information that 'verifies' what they think they believe and it reinforces their views then they will get a lot of targeted groups suggested on facebook and think that everyone thinks like that. So social media had made it seem more mainstream.

I think it's a crime in some countries to deny the holocaust

It's disgusting ignorance and stupidity

Been reading some stories from survivors today unbelievably harrowing stuff depicting the worst of humanity but so I doubt it happened no way

Too many fuckwits walking the planet enabled by far right commentators. I seriously wonder how they manage to get through each day.

There are a whole lot of ‘illuminati’ believing crackpots out there who wouldn’t see themselves as right wing, yet believe in all this conspiracy theory bullshit on the internet that is ladened with holocaust denial propaganda.

^ this

It is indeed shocking but somewhat shortsighted to attribute it to the far right.

There are sadly many other far more mainstream groups for whom anti semitism is commonplace and largely unchallenged by the rest of society for fear of being labelled bigoted. Ironically.

Also this ^

How can anyone deny when there is so much evidence? i can't understand it.

To those of you questioning the poll size, ie 2000. Accuracy of polls barely increases after 1000 this is why poll size is normally just over 1000. This isn't something new it has been around since I was at school some 30 years ago.

5 percent deny it happened
9 percent think it's exaggerated
66 percent underestimate the numbers

The last one doesn't surprise me because it's so hard to comprehend.

And it's not just the far right it's the far left that deny it too

It is awful.

I am frequently shocked by how little dds friends know about history / current affairs. She is 16 and in year 11. We have always chatted to her about history and we have the news on - we’ve always discussed the holocaust and things like 9/11 etc.

However, from our discussions we were really shocked to discover that a lot of her friends don’t have a clue about any of these things. Their parents don’t really chat to them about it, their lives revolve around social media. They don’t watch the news or anything happening in the world. They all seem to live in a weird little bubble.

The school never covers anything like the holocaust or current affairs or politics. They seem to be scared of offending someone so they just don’t do it. Which I think is dreadful because it means these kids are not learning about it anywhere. No doubt some of them will go on to be the 1 in 20 this post is about.

We don’t even live in the kind of area where people would perhaps think that “fits” - we live in a really middle class ish area of south Norfolk. Why aren’t people talking to their kids more about this stuff!?

My XH was a denier about this. When it first came up In Conversation I was gob smacked when he said it.
I think with him tho it was a lot to do with his religion

we watched BlacKkKlansman last night. the ‘America First’ mantra of the KKK is so blatantly present in the MAGA and Britain First ‘movements’ that are so beloved by idiots, racists and far-right politicians.

and the proliferation of dangerous nonsense about Knights Templar and the Crusades that facebook racists frame as justification for anti-Islam hate speech should be held up for what it is. people who buy into this hatred should have the courage of their disgusting convictions and own up to themselves, instead of hiding behind notions of patriotism and good old White Christian values. utter scum.

but, humans. heh. we have this astonishing privilege, and are using it to destroy the planet and invent better ways of killing each other. same as it ever was.

sorry, i meant to also say that the Holocaust should never, ever be forgotten, and denying it is rightly a crime.

Oblomov19: with a sample of 2000, the margin for error is about 2 percent, and is rather larger than the standard of 1000 for national polls. The true figure in the British population is extremely unlikely to be much below that estimated.

5 percent is not a small number, especially given social desirability biases.

I'm deeply saddened but not surprised by the figure. I've come across holocaust minimisation and insidious critique (whataboutery, challenging of its memorialisation) as well as denial.