So isn’t it strange that Iranian President Ahmedinejad is convening a seminar to review the evidence for the Holocaust? Questioning the legitimacy of the Jewish nation is nothing new to the power-hungry leaders who sit on more oil than they know what to do with, and bullying their people into submission while spending all that money on the weaponry that rains on Israeli (and American) forces every day. The hardline President’s days are numbered, though, and he knows it.
In a sense Ahmedinejad is making a landmark deal. Denial of the Holocaust seems to be the latest sport, and jumping on the bandwagon are members of the Ku Klux Klan, Jews United Against Israel, et cetera. It’s clear rational discussion of the facts isn’t on the agenda… so what then? Why fight a battle you know in advance will be lost? Nobody convenes to deny the Nanking Massacre, or the smaller-scale but no less horrifying Sook Ching killings.
Ahmedinejad and his band of merry men have made it their personal passion to deny the Holocaust, and the claim of the Jewish people to the greatest single experience of suffering they have ever known.
I’m not pretending to be an expert. All I wish is that Nazi Germany’s crimes continue to be acknowledged, and that the world stand together and refute whatever comes down Ahmedinejad’s pipe. But remember: all the condemnation in the world, all the scholarly evidence… what they cannot do is change the minds of people so dedicated to believing what they want that they will go to any length to defend it. Add this to the not-so-disguised fact that Ahmedinejad hates the Jewish people, and wants the ‘shadow of World War II to disappear."
In short, what Hitler did to the Jews of Europe, he wants to excuse as a setup for similar action on his own part. At least that's what I think. I've never been privy to anyone's motives, and we all have to be careful what we read.
In his book The Outer Limits, philosopher Stephen Law takes a look at pseudoscience, or theories so out of line that when refutations emerge, a new modification is made to account for them… theoretically speaking. Modifications that can never be proven, and probably never will.
Law turns his sights on creationism, or more specifically the belief that the earth was created six thousand years ago by God as recorded in the Bible’s genealogies. Archbishop James Ussher, in the seventeenth century, had the bright idea of calculating the age of the earth by adding up the ages of every generation from Christ and working backward to Adam. He came up with a creation date of October 23, 4004 BC. (Don’t ask me how.)
Now creationism (this type, I mean) has a major problem. How do they account for the fact that stars millions and millions of light-years away can be seen? The common-sense explanation is that the light has been literally travelling for all that time, since even before the earth was any more than a barren piece of rock.
The creationist one is that the light was created en route to the earth, 6000 years ago.
Stretches of explanation like this are an example of how outlandish theories are defendable even to the death. Just for instance, if I truly believe all Singaporean public scholars are secretly engaged in the cults of the loathsome sea-god Cthulhu (created by H. P. Lovecraft), learning the arcane arts and selling their eternal souls to him in exchange for the power to rule our island, there wouldn’t be any way of directly disproving that. It could be they dance around fires, sacrifice Singaporeans and chant "I’a! I’a! Cthulhu fthagn!" for all we know.
If you were to tell me they spend all their time in the labs or analysing our demographic trends or whatever it is they do, I would reply it is because they are surveying our population for the best breeding stock for transformation into Deep Ones, the immortal minions of Great Cthulhu. Why do you think they’re sent overseas so often?
I’d also take pains to point out the Government’s plans concerning the ‘elite’ class and why they’re all of a sudden doing hip-hop and making plans to connect with the younger generation—they’re under pressure by their masters from Yar-nth’lei to protect their secret identity.
"But Lovecraft made all this up!" you may tell me. True, but what do you expect someone who has seen the truly horrible to do? He would’ve been locked up in an asylum if he ever said his Mythos was real; in fact, he had to disguise it as fiction so people wouldn’t be surprised when ‘fear and madness came upon the face of the earth’.
In short, we can go on with this forever. I’d never have to back down, and all I’d have to do was invent ways to account for all the inconsistencies with real life. Of course, there’s nothing directly contradicting the theory that public scholars are all Cthulhu cultists, so I’m free to make stuff up to my heart’s content.
Just like the Iranian President aims to do. This is the exact same game he’s playing!
So how should we respond to Ahmedinejad’s seminar, and the idea that the Holocaust was one big fake? I think Martin Luther provided the answer:
"The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn."
-- Luther, as quoted in C. S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters
I give you full permission to show your friends and relatives—Jew, Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim alike—just how ridiculous and absurd Ahmedinejad and his merry men are being. Show your children magazines, films and books about the enormity of more than six million deaths, and the fact hundreds of thousands of Americans, British, Poles, Canadians, and Soviets paid the ultimate price to stop them. An evil such as Nazism required great sacrifices on the part of the civilised world to defeat, and the scars still linger—for a good reason. As we remember the fallen, remember the cause for which they gave their lives.
And go ahead and direct the ultimate insult to Ahmedinejad’s conference. Laugh at the poor, misguided souls who delude themselves into thinking their actions will lead to any real change in mindsets, and make light of the cost our forefathers bore. Let their views and scholarship be aired on public media, with no censorship getting in the way of objective evaluation of the facts. Show everyone just how silly the facts end up making the participants look—the numbers, the media, the evidence against them.
Sometimes seriousness just doesn’t work. Not on these people.
Speaking of seriousness, there’s another side of the coin. As a gamer I feel German censorship has gone all the way in the opposite direction in banning Nazi symbols from even appearing in videogames; they may only be used for ‘art and educational’ purposes, both words of course meaning what the Censorship Board wants them to.
I think by disallowing any and all symbols of the Weirmacht, Sturmtruppe and their affiliated Socialist Worker’s Party, German censors are tearing down the very foundations of their country, an act of gross insult to their land and the whole of modern Europe, which was constituted to ward off a future rising of the Nazi monster. Medal of Honor against a generic ‘German army’? Call of Duty without the Nazi regalia on the map?
Which begs the question. Censors, listen up. If you’re the intellectuals who get to decide what your people see and what they don’t, kindly answer this simple question:
Why are we gamers fighting the German army of the 1940s?
The German-censored games, in cutting out all Nazi context, provide no answer except that the pixelated enemies us gamers gun down by the thousands every day are German soldiers—an admission that Germany as a country deserves to have foreigners fill its young men with lead. If an American studio made a game where Singaporeans are killed without very good reason I’d be outraged. In Germany, WW2 games simply don’t provide this reason, and all the more cause for them to be outright banned across the world, not just in Germany or even the EU.
One concept I’d like to highlight—and you readers have permission to repeat—is the distinction between recording and endorsement. Just because a medium mentions something doesn’t mean it approves of it. I think censors have the amazing ability to overlook even the most blatant derision and contempt of Nazism, simply cutting its symbols out of games in a shut-up-we-don’t-want-to-hear-about-it whine. Kinda like the 3 monkeys in the classic see, hear and speak no evil pose.
So censorship authorities, please, please show a little more brain with your work.
I’ll close with an illustration. By the standard German censors apply, even the Bible should be banned on the grounds it mentions occult rituals…
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