134 Comments

This just adds fuel to the whole 'lizard people' thing, you know.

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Not at all, and VDE is prety much the standard shortening of my nom de nette here and over at Balloon Juice and Eschaton, where I first started using it.

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The fact that the Nazis felt the need to hide that the Final Solution was actually mass murder shows that even they knew they were doing a Bad Bad Thing. I've read a theory that it was all a massive game of emotional blackmail on their own people: make them complicit in a crime so hideous that they would have no option but to fight to the death for Hitler, or else be hanged as war cirminals.

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Let's just agree to disagree.

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The Nazis kept good records

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Was that David Irving, the one who sued for being called a fraud? Because David Irving was and is a fraud.

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The case was Irving (himself!) vs Penguin Books and (Deborah) Lipstadt, but I made a mistake. At the trial there was Sir Richard J. Evans (from Cambridge) who crunched every single work of Irving after doing some cross-reference (he proved that Irving used forged documents in his 'works'), and there was Robert Jan van Pelt, an architectural historian, who proved without a doubt what was the sole purpose of building 'those structures' at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the way they were built (in a 770 pages report!)... and I mixed those two guys in one.My bad.

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"...promoting rightwing get-togethers with a company called 'Republican Party Animals'".

In other words, a grifter.

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They did have a plan to destroy all the incriminating records, but as the war drew to a close, so many plans got lost in the confusion. To include all those receipts, train timetables, architectural drawings, work orders, Jew transfer from one camp to another orders, etc.

The fact that all this shit was so meticulously documented removed to any reasonable mind any doubt of what they were up to. As Eisenhower noted, in years in the future, attempts would be made to dismiss all the events that so many saw as "propaganda". That's what Holocaust denial is all about, to this day.

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That would be David Irving's ill-considered libel suit against Deborah Lipstadt's English publisher, Penguin. PBS's Nova did a pretty decent reenactment of key moments from the transcript in a show called "The Holocaust on Trial", and Hillary Swank is going to play Lipstadt in an upcoming film adaptation of Lipstadt's book about the case.

I'm the proud owner of an autographed copy of the book that Irving sued over, Lipstadt's 1994 Denying The Holocaust, which is a must-read for anyone interested in how Holocaust denial ever became a thing. Saw her speak in Tucson shortly after it came out, and she's a heck of a historian.

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Ever watched Fatherland (the HBO movie) or read the book?I know that they went separate ways in the end (the book's end, while very good, was the kind of ending no director would ever put in his movie), but that's the whole premise of the story. Do it, and then destroy all proofs.

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I found the book to have a far more satisfying, yet realistic, ending than the movie, and your comment about no director would use that ending is right on.

The needs of cinema vs. what you can do with books has undone more than one book adapted to a movie.

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For sale: Brain cells, never used.

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On behalf of my client, Dr. Fronkensteen, I have to ask: 'Are they normal or abnormal?'

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I can't unsee that. Damn you to hell.

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