California School District Under Fire for Holocaust-Denial Assignment

[Scootaloo]

71. See my post, two prior

Seriously, look at what I say there.

Presenting the caricature of some skinhead doofus in an SS uniform yelling "NOTHING HAPPENED!" actually defeats the effort - there's very little of that, and such people are easily shut down and ignored.

Instead you get places that make "counter-arguments" - it was typhus. it was only because the allies bombed railroads. look what the soviets did. it was a delousing agent. There was a swimming pool. The Germans were ethnically cleaned too after the war. The numbers are inflated. It's used as propaganda. Etc., etc. There's very little denial that "something" happened - the denial comes in with what happened in particular, and what it means.

You are frankly arguing against a straw man, some clown running around with a placard saying "there was no Holocaust!" While such clowns probably exist, they aren't what's actually going on when talking of Holocaust denialism. Your comparison to some imaginary person denying that Abraham Lincoln was president is facetious.

Rather than an outright denial, Holocaust deniers seek to cast doubt on what they call 'the official story.' They have a suite of facts of their own, counter-arguments, positions, a lot of stuff. And to refute their claims, you have to actually know those claims. Not doing so, pretending they're not there... just lets them take root. You've got to drag them out into the light and beat the hell out of them with reality.