Take it from Snee: Denying denials of Holocaust-deniers

Man, World War II. It seems like it ended just yesterday, you know? Between every movie using the Nazis as villains to every moral argument reducing to the Nazis, it’s almost like we’re still fighting them today.

Of course, there aren’t any real Nazis anymore. Sure, there are skinheads and neo-Nazis, but these are not your great-grandfather’s Wehrmacht.

No, there’s only one type of actual Nazi left: the one trapped in our brains that we just won’t let die.

Americans were one of the last countries to enter World War II, so maybe we just didn’t get our fill of killing them. Or perhaps the post-war Holocaust footage was so horrible that we feel like we didn’t kill them enough. Either way, without any actual Nazis left, we continue to fight the idea of the Nazi and anyone who considers them almost human is now a Nazi by proxy.

The Internet is a goofy place where memes are repeated endlessly until they’re not funny anymore. And then they’re ironically funny for a week, and then entirely not funny again. In essence, the only thing this collection of tubes has been good for is repeating everything we already know.

Among this repeated information are emotional arguments. Every time a child is killed by its parents, the entire Internet reposts the same idea: “Killing your child is wrong, and I hope she gets the worst punishment possible.”

Well, yeah. It’s not a tough stance to argue against killing children. Does it really bear repeating 11 times on this Web site alone? (According to CNN’s dumber readers, yes.)

This is the same method that leads to public outcry over the last of the Nazis: Holocaust deniers.

Are Holocaust deniers responsible for the Holocaust? No, because if they were, they wouldn’t be able to deny it. Do they support the Holocaust? It’s a strange leap in logic to do so, but so is denying one of the most documented genocides in human history. I’m going to bet, though, that most people who deny the Holocaust wouldn’t necessarily support a “real” one.

And, yet, what was one of the big to-dos over the Internet last week? A Holocaust-denying Catholic bishop, Richard Williamson, was un-excommunicated (recommunicated?) by the Pope. Out comes every Internet “expert” out there to denounce the Pope’s decision and say that denying the Holocaust is wrong.

Well, I’m not taking that easy path because

1. Why exactly is it morally wrong to believe the Holocaust didn’t happen?
2. Who cares if you don’t?

Holocaust deniers aren’t morally wrong (maybe), just factually wrong. To put it bluntly, they’re stupid. They’re denying the evidence that convinced the rest of the world that human beings are capable of terrible things if left unchallenged. They’d rather believe the school system is perpetuating a lie by assigning Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl.

This makes them as stupid as people denying the moon landings or heliocentrism. How much does either of those schools of thought influence us? Not at all unless we willfully elect a moron to public office.

I’m already ahead of you: “Isn’t a bishop a public office?” Yeah, it sure is. But he didn’t just get fired from his job: he got fired from his religion. He was sentenced to Hell because he didn’t believe in the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews and other Reich-undesirables.

As I’ve pointed out, the Internet regularly proves we’re all ignorant about something. For some of us, punctuation is our ignorance. For others, the humanity of rival political parties. And let’s not forget those who claim 9/11 was a hoax. We’re all stupidly ignorant about something, but we don’t expect to lose our jobs over it (unless you’re a Holocaust Museum curator).

Some of you will argue that to deny the Holocaust is a direct slap in the face to the Jews (and the barely mentioned Catholics, gypsies, homosexuals, communists and other “mongrels”) who survived it, that it is anti-Semitism.

It’s not anti-Semitic to deny the Holocaust. It’s anti-Semitic to support the Holocaust. If we as a society fail to recognize that difference, then what hope do we really have to negotiate tricky situations like peace in the Middle East? (Now there’s an anti-Semitic mindset!)

So, now that I’ve alienated most of our readership, I’ll end this post with a final thought: good luck, your Holiness. Anyone who thinks he can rehabilitate stupidity of Williamson’s degree needs it.

UPDATE (2/12/2009):
At the time of writing this, I did not realize that Richard Williamson has been temporarily reinstated as a Bishop. He has about a week to recognize that the Holocaust is real before he loses his job again. As I said above, he probably shouldn’t be a Catholic bishop if he can’t interpret historical data, but even the stupid should have a shot at heaven.