Historians irked by C-Span program (Holocaust)

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http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/breaking_news/11171945.htm

WASHINGTON - Historians piqued at C-Span's plans to air a speech by a British historian who has challenged the extent of the Holocaust have petitioned the network to cancel the project.

The petition, sent to Connie Doebele, the executive producer of C-Span who slated the coverage, disputed the notion that showing David Irving's speech would add "balance" to a program that featured a lecture by Deborah Lipstadt, professor of Holocaust Studies at Emory University.

"Falsifiers of history cannot 'balance' historians," said the petition signed by more than 200 historians in the United States and other countries and sent to C-Span this week. "Falsehoods cannot 'balance' the truth."

Irving, the author of nearly 30 books, including "Hitler's War," took Lipstadt to court, suing her for libel for calling him a Holocaust denier. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2000 by the British court, which said that Irving was anti-Semitic and racist and he misrepresented historical information.

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where have i heard that before... other than the shouting in my brain whenever i watch fox news...

crap those people spout. The job of the news media is to report factual information, not everybody's opinion. When I check the guide on TV and see crap like O'Lielley and Spinsannity listed as "news and information" I want to spew.
Fake news, propaganda, disinformation, misinformation, and outright lies is more like it.

"It's not a personal issue against (Irving). You just don't debate whether the Holocaust happened. That's like debating whether the Earth is flat."

Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which circulated the petition, said concern about Irving's appearance on C-Span spread like wildfire among historians and social scientists. More than 200 of them had signed the petition within 48 hours.

"Holocaust denials are being treated by C-Span as a legitimate alternative viewpoint when in fact it is a falsification of history," he said. "When you're speaking about indisputable historical facts, there is no other side. There's no alternative."

"It is nothing more than bigotry disguised as an interpretation of history,," he said.

When did our media become so useless?

"Falsehoods cannot 'balance' the truth."

Wonderful! I'm going to use that at every opportunity.

I have a particular favorite, and can't really remember where it came from, though I'd love to take credit.

"Your perception of the truth cannot change it." ;-)

i hear something about the holocaust it seems every day of my life---personally i think its time to start hearing from german citizens who lived through this experience and let them give us their reason for all the bad things that happened----i keep thinking how could a 17 or 18 year old person who was serving their country have the foggiest idea as to why he was doing what he was doing----at some other point in time will people be hunting us 70 years after the fact if by chance we lose the battle next-----color me curious---THE TRUTH WILL SET US ALL FREE

was sent to the Russian front, where we was shot down and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp. His wife Jean, my man's mother, spent the war in the environs of Kassel. They had many siblings but I'm only close to Madeleine, Jean's older sister, because the rest live in Germany.

I don't think they know what they think about the Holocaust. Madeleine is mostly mad because "killing too many Jews caused us to lose the war." She doesn't deny being antisemitic but thinks "Jews are smart and we needed them to win." Hans and Jean are more diplomatic but occasionally, the mask slips. For example they are so mad at Bush they are now accusing him of being part Jewish.

As to the war in general, they're still baffled as to why the attack on Germany was so ferocious. Dresden haunts them, the firebombing. Of course in hindsight I'm sure many Brits wonder if killing 50,000 people in one night was really necessary. At the time, given the horror and totality of the struggle, I guess it seemed like a good idea.

An aside: we look at our war in Iraq and it's so horrible - but compared to WWII - it's something to think about. Tens of millions of people in Europe alone - following something horrendous only a generation before - WWI - the sheer numbers numb the mind. Truly, a reason never to have a war again - but there have been several - worldwide -

Similarly, they are haunted, Jean in particular, by the barbarity and rage of the Russians when they entered Germany from the East. The fact the 20 million Russians died, maybe over a million at Stalingrad alone, doesn't seem to register.

Did they participate in the Holocaust? Not directly - but they do, unfortunately, share the attitudes that made it - and the war - possible.

as my father was on the other side of the equation and only survived because a Polish family hid him and his family.

Jewish. You can imagine how wierd some of those conversations can be although Madeleine in particular doesn't really seem bothered at all by simply expressing her attitudes. As far as she is concerned she's right and the Reich was essentially correct.

Their main problem is they lost the war, not so much what they did.

Curiously, they are all good Democrats, although a lapse in the eighties caused a vote for Reagan, which is now regretted.

For two reasons:

1. She lumps in with the deniers those who question the uniqueness of the Holocaust. This is wrong. The conclusion that there have been other genocides comparable to the Holocaust is not denial. Indeed, I would say that those who hold that it is unique are themselves engaging in a form of denial.

2. Alan Dershowitz -- proven fraud, advocate of grave human rights violations and all-around sleazeball -- writes the afterword.

All of the above said, Irving certainly doesn't deserve a place as "balance" to Lipstadt.

I have engaged MANY who lived through WWII, their children and grandchildren to understand their views about how it CONTINUES to affect them PERSONALLY. A shift in my vie occurred when a dear friend 20 years my junior, visual artist extaordinaire and Englisch teacher, explained to me what he'd learned as a German child and WHY he felt there was no current parallel. We were talking about the Industrial Revolution, technology u.s.w. and he made the point that the pinnacle of HUMAN DEGRADATION was the use of HUMAN BODIES for "industrial/consumer oriented" purposes.

David Duke on Martin Luther King Jr.'s Birthday to give us a "Fair and Balanced" version of the Civil Rights struggle.

...the U.S. artillery crews gain good hands-on experience? Jeez.

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"if there isn't a holocaust but many books are written and articles are written that report that it happened when it didn't then is there a holocaust or not?" Is there a holocaust out there that has been written about, but didn't actually exist?

If there is a holocaust but no one writes about it or talks about it or acknowledges it then was there really a holocaust?
Conversely, if there isn't a holocaust but many books are written and articles are written that report that it happened when it didn't then is there a holocaust or not?

Several million people were murdered and a distinctive society and culture- that of Eastern European Jewry- was physically destroyed utterly in a three or four year span. That is the basic set of facts. All the fun Pascal-ian querying and semantics of the term holocaust doesn't change that it was an extreme event for Western societies and their thinking.

The analysis from the p.o.v. of anthropology is that European societies, the northern and eastern ones more so than southern and western ones, beyond simple stupid xenophobic racism, found Jews unbearable because they were a people (or confederation of people) that conserved and adapted the ways of their desert culture ancestors and Middle Eastern ways of thinking. Rather than give these up and assimilate culturally to the wet woodland agrarian theist/materialist cultures that tolerated them as long as they provided unique services and extreme subordination, that is.

A lot of the mourning in the present is still for particular people killed from 1935 to 1947 in Europe. Still, the cornucopia of monument building- of rock and concrete and in print- seem more and more to be for the lost Eastern European Jewish aka 'Ashkenzi' (which is something of a misnomer) culture and society in general, the shtetl and the defined way of life. The mourning for German Jewry is more diffuse, in part because a far larger proportion of the community escaped and did so more intact. The shtetl endured into the 1970s in New York, perhaps is still truly alive in respects in the Bathurst/Spadina district in Toronto, and exists in fragments all over globe...but it's hard not to see the way the remnants are in decline. It's the root of the current revival of Yiddish and struggle to argue its relevance- Zionism has fallen short in many things, but its great success is that it has put Hebrew language and its forms at the center of Jewish thought and literature. And a fair amount of Israeli culture and politics is some effort to also preserve chunks of the Eastern European ways- a nasty paradox, really, and sabotaging agent to the society's greater need to assimilate into the Semitic world. The Palestinian claim that Israelis are Slavicized Semites has a certain amount of accuracy to it- and in some sense, Ariel Sharon's Israel is defined by this struggle to both indulge in and purify itself of this residue of Jewish history. The Bush Jewish neocon contingent arguably represents exactly this paradox- personal loyalties that are Jewish, political methods and beliefs befitting Ivan the Terrible and Vladimir Lenin.

If there were 15 million Native Americans in North America one day and then 150 years later there are 1.5 million Native Americans in North America then what's up with that?

A fairer estimate would be in the 5-8 million range between the Arctic and the isthmus of Ixtapan in 1500. 3 million or so of them in the present U.S. and Canada.

Today there are ~3 million people in the U.S. and Canada who consider themselves Native Americans to the extent of having some amount of tribal identity and racial identification. Many are not pure blood, so that's perhaps an equivalent of 1-2 million full descendents.

Your great factual screwup is Mexico. Molecular genetics says Mexicans have at least 70% Native American ancestry on average, upper limit in the 85% range. For a population of ~120 million, that's the equivalent of 90-100 million full descendants, conservatively estimated. U.S. Latinos are ~40 million, which means at least another 25 million equivalents.

Voila, we can see at least a 15x increase. And while they are outnumbered by the even faster expanding whites, despite the ravages of history, the ratios are not 100:1 but around in the 2-3:1 range. And white population expansion has just about stopped.

If there were Palestinians living in Palestine but then the name is changed to Israel in 1948 then how many pickle peppers did the woodchuck chuck?

It wasn't even called Palestine under the Ottoman Empire, as I seem to recall.

This one is obviously part of the reich wing's infiltration of 'lihbrul' CSPAN.

To all the high and mighty historians - why don't you guys speak up about Bush and his ties to the Nazis? Irving rewrites history, well so does Karl Rove.

where approximately 1.5 million men, women and children were murdered. Even the Nazis recognized that it had taken place.

http://www.anca.org/press_releases/press_releases.php?prid=567

...denies the extent of it. Thus, Washington doesn't want to piss off a NATO ally, or a much needed powerful military ally in the Middle East. If Turkey would recognize it, Washington would. Its all about politics and alliances. And the world turns....

And lies do not balance truth.

D. Irving is not a historian; he's a fruitloop.