When History Becomes Extinct

Today marks the 64th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz - the notorious Nazi death camp that has come to symbolise the 'final solution.'

It was in camps like Auschwitz that between 9 and 11 million 'undesirables' were exterminated during the Second World War, as part of Adolf Hitler's plan to 'cleanse' his Third Reich of 'inferior' human specimens.

Today is marked by the UN as a memorial for all the victims of this Holocaust.

Survivors of the camp are still alive, making the Holocaust living history - but the way that history's being treated sends a shiver down my spine. What happened during the Second World War was, quite simply, the most horrific moment in modern history and one that we, as human beings, deserve to have seared on our collective memory for centuries to come.

Yet, already, the 'history' of the Holocaust is becoming lost. As more of the survivors succumb to old age, the factual evidence of what transpired behind the gates of Auschwitz (emblazoned with the cynical logo ARBEIT MACHT FREI - Work Makes you Free) is being lost.

First, there's the common perception of the Holocaust in the Western World. Ask anybody about that period in history and nine times out of ten, you'll get this answer:

"The Holocaust was when Adolf Hitler exterminated 6 million Jews."

Which is absolutely true - except the death toll of the Holocaust could have been as much as double that. Although Jews were the foremost target of the 'final solution,' up to 5 million other people (intellectuals, homosexuals, Poles, Russians, Gypsies - even redheads) were put to death in the camps as well.

Yet their murders have largely been forgotten. In less than two generations, we've rendered insignificant the extermination of as many people as currently live in Los Angeles and Houston combined. That's unforgivable.

I understand that the Holocaust (or Shoah as it's referred to in Israel) has immense cultural and historical important for the Jewish people. It represents a concerted effort by a regime to wipe out their race in it's entirety. In many ways, it's entirely appropriate that the Holocaust is considered a part of Jewish history above all else.

However, I think it's immensely disrespectful that we choose to forget millions of other victims. Their callous extermination has become a by-line in the history books. That is unacceptable. we should be ashamed of ourselves for letting that happen. The next time somebody tells you that the death toll of the Holocaust was 6 million - for God's sake correct them!

But even more terrifying, there's a populist movement across the middle east to deny the Holocaust entirely.

Islamic nations are teaching their youth that the Holocaust was a conspiracy - a made-up event created in order to give Jewish people the 'moral authority' to occupy Israel.

Islamic 'scholars' (an oxymoron) are creating a swath of misleading and false 'evidence' to suggest that the number of people murdered during the Holocaust was vastly exaggerated. Some even claim that the holocaust didn't occur at all.

This is considered 'standard teaching' in many Islamic schools. A whole generation of children are being taught that the Holocaust was a great Jewish conspiracy - brainwashed into believing a lie for the sake of murderous political expediency.

It's even occurring in the West. Islamic schools in France and Britain have already been criticized for leaving out the Holocaust during history class, because mention of this 'Zionist conspiracy' might offend parents.

This is mind boggling; wretched and totally unacceptable. Rewriting history is a crime many religions and regimes have been guilty of (the foundation of the Catholic church was based on such activity) but to so while the victims of the Holocaust are still alive is just disgusting.

The mentality that history is open to 'creative revision' is shocking to me (I'm a historian, after all.) I understand that facts can be interpreted in different ways, but the whole concept of Holocaust Denial is absent of facts. It's filled with lies and half-truths. The fact that they're appearing in Middle Eastern textbooks merely gives them the appearance of authenticity.

Revisionist history is something we are having to tackle with in the West, as well. Thirty years ago, 'creation study' and 'intelligent design' would have been unthinkable areas of 'study,' yet such religious propaganda is finding its way into the classroom thanks to the efforts of hard-core religious fanatics. It's this mentality - that history is malleable - that terrifies me.

So do your bit to honor the memory and significance of this date. Remember how many people really died during the holocaust - and make sure that you pass on an accurate account to your children. As their generation grows up, it'll be their responsibility to make sure the facts and details of the most infamous event in modern human history is never forgotten.

Dog with a Bone? Theories that didn't pan out...

I think went too far comparing New Earth Creationists with Holocaust Deniers. [British tabloid journalism strikes again? - Editorial Bear.]

Although the similarities I pointed out were awkwardly accurate, perhaps it was shotgun journalism... I apologise.

But it DID get me thinking...

I'll admit it... Recently I've been like a dog with a bone (a dinosaur bone) when it comes to creationism and intelligent design and all this other religious babble trying to muscle in on rationality, science and history.

Maybe I should take a deep breath, sit down and relax.... Chill out, as they say.

I mean, what does it matter if somebody believes that the world is 6,000 years old? By the same logic, what does it matter if somebody believes the holocaust didn't take place? I find the first suggestion stupid, the second suggestion offensive - but neither of them really affect my life in the slightest way.

This is America. We have the First Amendment, which says (short of shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre) that you have a constitutionally protected right to claim whatever you want, no matter how stupid or offensive the rest of us find it.

And the First Amendment is an important one. If people didn't have the freedom of speech, what sort of nation would this be? I'm already sick to death of our 'moral superiors' trying to tell us what we can and can't watch on television, or banning sex toys and naughty DVDs in the deep south.

Freedom of speech is a two way street. If we argue that the moral majority have to respect our freedom of speech, we must respect theirs in return. So consider my wrist smacked.

Besides, some open minded discussion is always good.

I mean, look at the theory of the creation of the Earth... Sure, it's a proven scientific fact that creation doctrine isn't correct. The world wasn't created in six days...

On the other hand, despite a mountain of evidence supporting it, the jigsaw puzzle of evolution isn't totally complete. There are still some missing pieces and it's entirely possible that newly discovered evidence might drastically change the way we view the early history of our planet.

That's why it's such a good theory. More important than being provable, the theory of evolution is unprovable. It is possible to imagine evidence that disproves it.

The ability to disprove a theory is what makes it scientific and open to discussion. The problem with doctrine like Intelligent Design is that it's a theory that cannot be proven wrong, because you can't prove it right, either. Therefore it's not a scientific theory at all (and that's why it belongs in a theology or philosophy classroom, not a science lab.)

All that being said, it's always important to keep an open mind. Look at other theories we've seen in the past that have been blown apart by later discoveries:

Spontaneous Generation

Look back at the early days of science, back in the 17th century when people were first seeing the living organisms we'd later describe as bacteria. Scientists observed little squirmy creatures in people's wounds and came up with the theory of 'Spontaneous Generation.'

This theory claimed that living organisms were spontaneously generated by decaying matter - it matched something Aristotle himself had said over a thousand years earlier: "It was a readily observable truth that aphids arise from the dew which falls on plants, fleas from putrid matter, mice from dirty hay, crocodiles from rotting logs at the bottom of bodies of water, and so forth."

So mainstream was the theory that bacteria (and fleas and mice) spontaneously arose from rotting matter that when Sir Thomas Browne published his contradictory theory in 1646, "Enquiries into Very many Received Tenets, and Commonly Presumed Truths," he was universally mocked.

His contemporary, Alexander Ross scoffed: "To question spontaneous generation is to question reason, sense and experience itself."

It wasn't until 1861 that Louis Pasteur finally proved conclusively that the theory of spontaneous generation was complete rubbish, through a series of complex experiments.

The Solar System

When I was a kid, we studied the planets in school - and there were nine of them.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Today, kids are being taught that there are eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

So what happened? Did one go missing?

Far from it - in fact, scientists discovered another four planets in the last five years, or so. Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. But they're small planets - roughly the size of the 'ninth planet' Pluto, so scientists reclassified them all as 'dwarf planets.'

It's another example of how established fact gets superseded by a different established fact. Knowledge isn't black or white (like some Creationists believe) but a constantly moving roller-coaster ride where nothing is to be taken for granted.

Creationism

Just like Spontaneous Generation and the nine-planet Solar System, the idea of Biblical creation is also a theory that's been discredited by further scientific discoveries - the age of the Earth and fossils tracing the evolution of life on this planet.

Does that mean that our current theory is infallible? No, of course not. But the fact that the modern theory isn't infallible doesn't give the discredited theory any sudden legitimacy.

It's like one of the other widely discredited theories of our time - The Flat Earth.

The Flat Earth

It's a popular myth that people believed the Earth to be flat right up until Columbus crossed the Atlantic and discovered the Americas. In fact, that was just a story popularised by Washington Irving's 1828 book "The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus."

The idea of a spherical Earth is as old as civilization itself. Pythagoras believed that heavenly bodies were spherical as far back as the 6th Century BC. Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the Earth's spherical circumference in 240 BC.

In fact, even Biblical scholars from the early Middle Ages believed that the Earth was a sphere, contrary to popular belief.

When Bishop Vergilius of Salzburg was persecuted by Pope Zachary for his theory of a spherical Earth, the shape of the planet wasn't the origin of the heresy - it was actually his suggestion that other men existed beneath the Earth who weren't descended from Adam (and therefore were free of Original Sin.)

Observational evidence had always discredited 'Flat Earth Theory' - but that didn't stop people believing in it. In fact, an organisation called the Flat Earth Society still promotes their belief in a 'flat earth' today.

They have, astonishingly, thousands of members (and, unsurprisingly, strong historical links with a fundamentalist "Christian Catholic Apostolic Church," which later gave birth to the pentecostal movement. )

The BBC recently ran an article about how many 'flat-Earthers' still stick by their beliefs today.

New Earth Creationists and Flat Earthers

Perhaps a more politically correct version of my New Earth Creationists/Holocaust Deniers article would have been to compare them to modern Flat Earthers.

They're both preposterous, discredited beliefs - but unlike Holocaust Denial, they don't really do anybody harm if dumb people want to stick with them.

Is New Earth Creationism as bad as Holocaust Denial?

DID THIS POST GO TOO FAR?: Maybe 'alternative theories' aren't so bad after all. If you get your knickers in a twist because of this post, read this follow up.

Two revisionist movements have been gaining alarming strength over the last few decades - and they share worrying similarities.

Their agendas are very different, but their origins, methodology and outlook run parallel to each other. New Earth Creationists and Holocaust Deniers.

Thirty or forty years ago, Creationism and Holocaust Denial were both fringe lunacy - the domain of idiots and fundamentalists who received well-deserved scorn and the contempt of mainstream society.

Flash forward four decades: A New Earth Creationist just ran in the Presidential Primaries, while representatives from 30 countries attended a two day conference in Tehran to "Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust."


What the hell is going on? When did the arena of whackjobs, nutcases, idiots and bigots start spreading into civilised society?

Crazy, crazy people...

Let me introduce you to the Holocaust Deniers - people who believe that the murder of 6 million Jews by Hitler's Nazi regime never took place.

They started out as rednecks and skinheads - 'white pride' idiots who made up conspiracies about how Jews controlled America. They denied that the holocaust ever taken place - and argued that it was all a 'Zionist conspiracy' to demonise Germany.

For the most part, these people were derided and ignored - as were their crackpot theories. However, over the course of the past couple of decades, a movement in the Middle East cropped up that mirrored and gave weight to their denial of the Holocaust.

The governments of fundamentalist Islamic countries like Iran and Syria started publishing statements denying the holocaust, arguing that "the so-called Holocaust is an alleged and invented story, with no basis."

With the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, this movement has grown. Recently, Iranian President Ahmadinejad declared:

"The Zionists have fabricated a legend under the name Massacre of the Jews, and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves...If somebody in their country questions God, nobody says anything, but if somebody denies the myth of the massacre of Jews, the Zionist loudspeakers and the governments in the pay of Zionism will start to scream!"

On December 11th 2006, Ahmadinejad hosted a conference for representatives from 30 countries, under the title "International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust."

What began as a disgusting delusion, maintained by only by the most contemptible of lunatics, has now become a 'legitimate' revisionist movement. So popular has the denial of the Holocaust become that some religious schools in Great Britain have even stopped teaching Holocaust History in class, for risk of 'offending' their Muslim students.

Creationist Cretins

Now let me introduce you to a similar group of crackpots - the New Earth Creationists. People who believe that the Earth was created in exact, literal accordance with the Bible: 6,000 or so years ago.

Like Holocaust Denial, modern society was largely free of New Earth Creationists thirty or forty years ago. New Earth Creationism had never been a particularly convincing theory - even Saint Augustine, the 4th century Bishop of Hippo, argued that the creation story was allegorical.

Yet towards the end of the 20th century, a revival movement started, with Christian fundamentalists across America uniting behind the idea that fossils, geology, history and astronomy were all wrong about the age of the Earth.

They argued that 'The Great Flood' (of Noah's Ark) swished around the geological strata and made it appear older than it was - leading creationist Henry Morris to declare "the last refuge of the case for evolution immediately vanishes away, and the record of the rocks becomes a tremendous witness... to the holiness and justice and power of the living God of Creation!"

The development of the Internet gave an even greater voice to these fundamentalist Christians, leading to the development of websites like Ken Ham's 'Answers in Genesis' and the popularity of homeschooling with a 'Christian curriculum' which neatly avoids theologically troubling (i.e. scientifically accurate) concepts like evolution.

The result? And entire generation of kids and young adults brainwashed into believing the fictional fantasy that is New Earth Creationism.

Similarities

On the surface of it, the similarities between New Earth Creationists and Holocaust Deniers might not seem obvious - but they're there. Consider:

Both movements step from religious fundamentalism.

It's no coincidence that the popularity of Holocaust Denial and New Earth Creationism match the explosion of fundamentalist religious movements - which seek 'wisdom' from religious documents like the Koran or the Bible.

Like it or not, fundamentalism Islam and evangelical Christianity share an alarming number of similarities - not least of which is a stubborn insistence of finding answers in old books, rather than science, history and fact.

Both theories are just wishful thinking.

The Islamic fundamentalists really want to believe the Holocaust never happened, because then residents of the state of Israel would stop having the moral authority to aggressively defend their existence. [How dare they! - Editorial Bear]

New Earth Creationists, on the other hand, really want to believe the Bible is true, so it gives them divine justification for hating gay people, shooting abortion doctors and banning people from having sex. Ever.

Both theories ignore mountains of evidence.

The reason Holocaust Denial was such a derided movement forty years ago was because there were thousands of concentration camp survivors around to tell them they were talking crap.

As they died out, it opened the window to 'suggest' that the genocide had never even occurred. After all, there was nobody left around to argue about it.

That still left thousands of documents, photos and the camps themselves to prove than the Holocaust was real (plus that fact that six million Jews mysteriously vanished between 1933/1945.) Nevertheless, Holocaust Deniers claim that the evidence was faked, the numbers made up and the eyewitness testimony is a lie.

As for New Earth Creationists? Well, they use similar methodology to defend their position in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Despite the fact that radiometric dating, ice-core data and even the rings on trees prove that the Earth is older than 6,000 years, they stubbornly refuse to accept it. As Creationist Henry Morris argued: "When science & the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data."

Both New Earth Creationism and Holocaust Denial rely on shameless, stubborn, stoic refusal to accept any and all evidence disproving their beliefs.

Both theories rely on disinformation, brainwashing, manipulation and outright lies to further their cause.

Holocaust Denial has graduated from lunacy to 'revisionist history' by misrepresenting evidence, denying the facts and brainwashing the ignorant.

Across the Middle East, for example, schools and television stations declare that the Holocaust was a hoax - so poor, ignorant children grow up believing that to be the truth. They simply don't know any better.

Likewise, New Earth Creationists rely on homeschooling to fatten their ranks - with unscrupulous hacks like Andrew Schlafly and Ken Ham creating misleading home school curriculums that teach theories like New Earth Creationism as if it was a scientific fact.

In scientific debates, Creationists lie, bully and manipulate in order to make their silly stance sound more believable. Interviews with notable skeptics like Richard Dawkins have to be brutally edited to discredit them, quotes have to be taken out of context to support the theory and in the absence of all other options, Creationists are more than willing to out-and-out make stuff up.

Both theories are just plain wrong. Holocaust Denial and New Earth Creationism share one overriding similarity - both 'theories' are complete rubbish.

The Holocaust did occur. During Hitler's reign, six million Jewish people - and an equal number of gypsies, homosexuals, communists and other 'social undesirables,' were taken off to camps in central Europe and exterminated in gas chambers.

We know this has happened because people survived to tell of it: Concentration camp inmates themselves, along with the American and Allied soldiers who 'liberated' those camps.

Likewise, a mountain of irrefutable evidence proves that the earth is four and a half billions years old - and that life evolved from single-celled organisms into the current menagerie of mammals, reptiles, birds, insects and bacteria.

The Bible is not an infallible, literal history of the world. It's just a book. Or, at a push, a reasonably effective paperweight.

Are New Earth Creationists as bad as Holocaust Deniers?

On the face of it, of course not.

Holocaust Deniers are trying to deny the systematic extermination of six million people.

Not only does that defame the memory of those who have died, it's a slap in the face for the people who survived - and their descendants.

Most terrifying of all, by trying to eliminate the Holocaust from society's collective memory, it leaves the world vulnerable to letting it happen all over again.

As for New Earth Creationists - all they want to do is believe their silly little fairy tale about the world being sixty centuries old.

On the surface, it doesn't do anybody any harm. In fact, I recently spoke to a brilliant, dynamic young lady who just happened to be a New Earth Creationist - and she said: "I don't care what others believe, so long as I'm allowed to believe what I want to."

Advocates of New Earth Creationism aren't really fighting for anything more than the right to believe what they want to - even if that believe is idiotic, irrational and founded in fantasy.

But nevertheless, I find the similarities between the two groups troubling. Advocates of Holocaust Denial and New Earth Creationism are fighting for different things using the same troubling methods.

d-Con 'No view, No Touch' Mouse Trap: Sterile Inhumanity

The plight of the Galgo dogs - tortured and abused by Spanish hunters - is a grisly insight into just how vile humanity can knowingly be.

But on the other end of the spectrum, it's remarkable how humanity can sanitise doing 'inhumane' things. Call me old fashioned, but I believe mankind should only be allowed to do the dirty jobs if they're willing to get their hands dirty.

Take, for example, the d-Con 'No View, No Touch' mouse trap.

It's a little black disk - about the size of a hockey puck - that you place in your home or garage. Delicious bait attracts a curious mouse and then 'snap!'

Off goes mouse to the heavenly hereafter and into the bin goes the 'No View, No Touch' mouse trap. The homeowner never needs to see or touch the victim of their trap.

Which to me, seems abhorrent.

Not the killing of the mouse - not by any means. Mice are pesky little things that spread disease and nibble through your grain sacks. If you've got a mouse-in-the-house, killing it is a lot more effective than sending it an eviction notice.

But if you're willing to muster up the courage to kill another living creature, for God's sake take responsibility for it. Be willing to look your crushed prey in the eye as you prise it's mangled corpse out of the mousetrap. Understand that you're responsible when your tomcat goes slinking past with a muffled 'mrrreeeeooow' and a length of tail hanging from between it's chops.


There's something intrinsically wrong about killing another living creature without ever having to see it or touch it. If the thought of a mouse-corpse makes you so squeamish, you've got no right killing them.

It's this 'sanitised' inhumanity that's behind a lot of life's problems at the moment.

Like how we all gaily munch our chicken nuggets, neatly ignoring the battery farming process that supplies us with our meat. Or how we feed our cows reconstituted beef-products, covering our eyes and pretending we're not really forcing herbivores into cannibalism.

Humanity has removed itself so far from the grisly realities of life that we can no longer truly accept responsibility for what we do. We can commit atrocities, but remain blissfully, deliberately detached from them so we don't have to deal with the moral consequences of our actions.

Which is totally, horribly wrong.

It's this kind of thinking that led the Nazi's to the 'final solution.' All those cheerful Germans wanted to end the 'Jewish problem,' so they handed it over to Adolf Hitler. He started the death camps and gas ovens and began the most horrific genocide in human history.

And the people of Germany, who knew nothing of the death camps and tactfully didn't ask what happened to their Jewish neighbours, reaped the benefits of their 'solution' without having to deal with the grisly fact that they were complicit in the greatest mass murder ever.

If every German civilian had been handed a shovel and a gas-mask and told to 'do their bit,' then the Holocaust would never have happened. The essential goodness of humanity would have won out and people would have been disgusted with what they were being asked to do.

But if you don't ask - and nobody tells you - it's remarkable how much inhumanity an essentially 'good' person can play their part in.

Maybe it's a long shot, trying to connect a 'No View, No Touch' mouse trap to the Holocaust - but it's the same mentality behind them both. Exercising control over life and death is a responsibility - and unless we're willing to get our hands dirty, we shouldn't have that right.

If you're going to go head-to-snout with an errant mouse - at least be a man about it. The 'No-View, No Touch' mousetrap is just cowardly.