[ the seemingly immutable laws of genocide and the dangers of taking sides ]
What does it mean to be a ‘holocaust denier’? Let me answer this unusual question that someone put forward on facebook the other day in the level-headed, soft-spoken way that I imagine a Rabbi would:
I’ll open my answer move in the unfailing Socrates way. What do you mean by ‘holocaust’? What do you mean by ‘denier’?
Holocaust means ‘burning a sacrificial animal alive’, according to traditional scripture, so if this term is used in connection with the deportation of people into forced-labour camps and the subsequent execution of these victims – well then I can’t see what ‘holocaust’ has anything to do with the topic. The term with its biblical overtone would make way more sense applied to the things to come for ‘herded’ mankind. Things that the bible describes as ‘consumed by eternal fire at the end of days’. They walk in there alive and willingly.
As far as I’m concerned, the term used in public at the time of the catastrophy – hoarding-off ‘unwanted citizens’ (intellectuals, pagans, astrologers, jews, gypsies, upright thinkers, system critics, etc) in Hitler’s fascist brownshirted regime into Soviet-style ‘gulags’ was the (also biblical) term ‘pogrom’. Pogrom means genocide, doesn’t it?
Now genocide, as the scholar knows, is the necessary ancient method of attaining power for the future to come according to thousands of years old lawbooks for power. No emotions come into play here. It’s simply a law that was followed through in history each and every time. If you want to change the rules, change the game, and bring your subjects over to your side, you have to kill everyone connected to the truth of passed-down tradition, everyone who knows what you’re really up to. Everyone who could possibly get in your way.
There have been book burnings of the works of traditional scholars and the death penalty on the ownership of any related materials thousands of years ago in China. The cruel genocide law goes so far as to not only kill all dissidents but all of their family, too, and everyone who’s ever listened to or sympathized with those ‘dangerous’ views. Stalin was pretty harsh killing all of his former friends as soon as he came to power. Mao was probably the most depraved power-player of all – killing 100 million of his own people during peace times only to come to power. And afterwards changed official history and killed the remaining rest of cultural heritage in order to thoroughly stay there. In this light, the Hitler geezer was probably puny in comparison. The story goes round that during Soviet regime former intelligentsia was carted-off into gulags, then fed to the pigs and the pigs were then brought back to the ‘believing followers’ who unknowinlgy feasted on them. Christian priests were cooked alive and their colleagues forced to eat the soup (Juri Lina recalls this). Who was behind the Bolshevik revolution and then the German Democratic Republic and the USSR governments – lurking as shadows? You do your homework. It’s certainly not safe to speak about this in the world that we now live.