The CODOH Revisionist Forum

Some will resort to base charges: The Jews lied about the Holocaust. They lied for reasons of revenge, profit and fame. They lied to protect their power, and to cover their own misdeeds. If the traditional view turns out to be wrong, we will hear it over and over: The Jews lied.

But is this fair? It is difficult to say, given that the whole notion of lying is quite ambiguous. In most manifestations, a lie involves someone knowing the truth of something and then saying otherwise. But there are many grey areas here. Is a half-truth a lie? Is an exaggeration a lie? Is a dissembler a liar? And then there is the question of intent. Is a ‘noble’ lie any less pernicious than an ‘ordinary’ lie? And how are we to judge intention?

Apart from all these issues is the question of what is sometimes called a lie by negligence: of someone who honestly believes they are stating the truth, but in fact are wrong, yet should have been able to recognize their error if they had done their homework. I suspect that many academics and media persons fall into this category. Being generally lazy thinkers and unwilling to undertake a critical examination of things, they simply accept the standard view and repeat it verbatim.

The problem here is that, in the context of the great Holocaust debate, very few people know the truth. Those few are the people whom I cited in Chapter 1, along with a small number of others. For all the rest, there is mass reliance on this handful of individuals, and on a small set of standard reference works. Academics cite each other incessantly in a circular parade of fallacious reasoning. They either cannot be troubled to investigate the truth or are afraid of what they might find. And so they simply fall in line.

But let me be clear: There are Holocaust liars out there. They fall into two main categories. Many survivors are outright liars; they know what actually happened, and they consciously and willfully state facts to the contrary. They may have benign or ‘noble’ motives, but liars they are. Other survivors are less to blame: those who simply make unwarranted inferences — about homicidal gas chambers, for instance — or who suffer from false memories. They are weak-minded dupes, perhaps, or manipulated simpletons, but not liars per se. The lying survivors, though, are the most dangerous and are fully to blame for their distortions of the truth.

The second group of liars is the clique of Holocaust specialists — those academics and researchers who are directly and intimately acquainted with the issues. Many of these men and women are intelligent individuals. They surely understand the revisionist charges, and yet they ignore or falsely disparage them. In this category I place all those mentioned in Chapter 1: Arad and Lipstadt, Shermer and Zimmerman, van Pelt and Kershaw, Browning, Evans and Longerich. I have to assume they know the truth, but choose to say otherwise. In my opinion, they are outright liars.

Their only conceivable excuse — to claim ignorance — is to surrender their entire claim to expertise. For the experts to somehow claim that they ‘did not know’ about these issues is to admit gross incompetency, if not sheer idiocy. Thus our experts are caught in a terrible bind: either they are outright, malicious liars, or they are gross incompetents. Needless to say, the future does not bode well for their reputations.

As to the witnesses, there is no need to presuppose that they were all deliberate liars; indeed the number of deliberate liars is numerically insignificant. The overwhelming majority of witnesses simply repeated and embellished what they had heard elsewhere, in a process which historian David Irving has called “cross-pollination.”

Revision wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2025 7:10 pm "The Holocaust is a lie!"

Yay! The revisionist movement is bigger than it seems! Those liars know the truth and are secretly denying the Holocaust!

Really?


Thomas Dalton:

Some will resort to base charges: The Jews lied about the Holocaust. They lied for reasons of revenge, profit and fame. They lied to protect their power, and to cover their own misdeeds. If the traditional view turns out to be wrong, we will hear it over and over: The Jews lied.

But is this fair? It is difficult to say, given that the whole notion of lying is quite ambiguous. In most manifestations, a lie involves someone knowing the truth of something and then saying otherwise. But there are many grey areas here. Is a half-truth a lie? Is an exaggeration a lie? Is a dissembler a liar? And then there is the question of intent. Is a ‘noble’ lie any less pernicious than an ‘ordinary’ lie? And how are we to judge intention?

Apart from all these issues is the question of what is sometimes called a lie by negligence: of someone who honestly believes they are stating the truth, but in fact are wrong, yet should have been able to recognize their error if they had done their homework. I suspect that many academics and media persons fall into this category. Being generally lazy thinkers and unwilling to undertake a critical examination of things, they simply accept the standard view and repeat it verbatim.

The problem here is that, in the context of the great Holocaust debate, very few people know the truth. Those few are the people whom I cited in Chapter 1, along with a small number of others. For all the rest, there is mass reliance on this handful of individuals, and on a small set of standard reference works. Academics cite each other incessantly in a circular parade of fallacious reasoning. They either cannot be troubled to investigate the truth or are afraid of what they might find. And so they simply fall in line.

But let me be clear: There are Holocaust liars out there. They fall into two main categories. Many survivors are outright liars; they know what actually happened, and they consciously and willfully state facts to the contrary. They may have benign or ‘noble’ motives, but liars they are. Other survivors are less to blame: those who simply make unwarranted inferences — about homicidal gas chambers, for instance — or who suffer from false memories. They are weak-minded dupes, perhaps, or manipulated simpletons, but not liars per se. The lying survivors, though, are the most dangerous and are fully to blame for their distortions of the truth.

The second group of liars is the clique of Holocaust specialists — those academics and researchers who are directly and intimately acquainted with the issues. Many of these men and women are intelligent individuals. They surely understand the revisionist charges, and yet they ignore or falsely disparage them. In this category I place all those mentioned in Chapter 1: Arad and Lipstadt, Shermer and Zimmerman, van Pelt and Kershaw, Browning, Evans and Longerich. I have to assume they know the truth, but choose to say otherwise. In my opinion, they are outright liars.

Their only conceivable excuse — to claim ignorance — is to surrender their entire claim to expertise. For the experts to somehow claim that they ‘did not know’ about these issues is to admit gross incompetency, if not sheer idiocy. Thus our experts are caught in a terrible bind: either they are outright, malicious liars, or they are gross incompetents. Needless to say, the future does not bode well for their reputations.

- Debating the Holocaust: A New Look at Both Sides. (Chapter 12: Hoax? Fraud? Conspiracy?)


Carlo Mattogno:

As to the witnesses, there is no need to presuppose that they were all deliberate liars; indeed the number of deliberate liars is numerically insignificant. The overwhelming majority of witnesses simply repeated and embellished what they had heard elsewhere, in a process which historian David Irving has called “cross-pollination.”

- The “Extermination Camps” of “Aktion Reinhardt” (Chapter: Genesis of Holocaust Historiography and the Revisionist Method)


Furthermore those stories about "shrunken heads", "human soap" and stuff like that presented in that video for example were never the main part of the mainstream Holocaust story like the gas chambers and the Einsatzgruppen were. And even many mainstream authors have disowned many of those previously mentioned atrocity stories too. Focusing just on those atrocity propaganda stories is pointless by itself.

Revision wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2025 7:10 pm "The Holocaust is a lie!"

Yay! The revisionist movement is bigger than it seems! Those liars know the truth and are secretly denying the Holocaust!

Really?

[...]

Furthermore those stories about "shrunken heads", "human soap" and stuff like that presented in that video for example were never the main part of the mainstream Holocaust story like the gas chambers and the Einsatzgruppen were. And even many mainstream authors have disowned many of those previously mentioned atrocity stories too. Focusing just on those atrocity propaganda stories is pointless by itself.