Historical Ignorance is a Crime: A Reply to Fr. Gabriel Rochelle

Fr. Gabriel Rochelle is the Orthodox priest who runs the St Anthony of the Desert Orthodox Mission in Las Cruces, New Mexico and he recently wrote an opinion piece in the ‘Las Cruces Sun News’ that came to my attention via a reader in which he showed a typically myopic conception of history.

By way of a nod to the reader who requested that I do so I thought I’d reply to Rochelle:

‘Recent local and national newspaper articles have shown a gap in our historical understanding. Some facts not previouslydisputed are called into question.’

This is a typical nonsensical statement as even a wet-behind-the-ears history major knows that there are no ‘historical facts’ per se, but rather things we are pretty sure happened based upon the evidence that we have and which can sometimes be discovered to have probably not happened after all.

A great example of which is the debate over whether the Cathar sect – allegedly widespread in south-western France and north-eastern Spain during the 12th to the 14th centuries – existing at all and was in fact just a figment of the ‘persecuting mind-set’ of the new monastic-run universities in France. When it has been taken as read for centuries that such a sect not only existed but could still exist.

‘These reports have to do with either denial or ignorance of the Holocaust. This is not a good sign, as the philosopher George Santayana famously said, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”’

Ah yes cue the inspirational quote from a slightly obscure philosopher to try and sound more learned than you are.

I can do that to:

‘An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.’ – Hegel

In other words; people should generalize more and not try to get out of generalizing by claiming a permanent state of exception from the critical judgement of history for the jews. And if you are clever you’ll have got the Carl Schmitt reference.

‘Holocaust denial is one problem; there are those who, in direct denial of the historical record, teach that very few Jews — or none at all — were massacred in an act of genocide by the Nazis during the second World War.’

To be honest this is the sort of tragically ignorant statement that I love, because it is just so ridiculous and demonstrate that Rochelle has read any substantive work from a major ‘Holocaust Denier’ nor is he apparently aware that many of said ‘Holocaust Deniers’ are more knowledgeable about said event than the orthodox ‘scholars’.

It isn’t hard to validate the truth of so-called ‘Holocaust Denial’ either.

One merely has to do what many so-called ‘Holocaust Deniers’– like myself - originally did and go back and read some of the original ‘Holocaust’ accounts on which the conspiracy theory – and yes it is a classic conspiracy theory – called the ‘Holocaust’ is based and you’ll quickly come to realize that the ‘Holocaust’ is truly a ‘Giant with Feet of Clay’ as Jurgen Graf famously described it.

If you can believe that the Germans killed jews in vacuum chambers and with Soviet-made submarine (or tank depending who you believe) diesel engines, masturbation machines, defied the laws of physics by burning corpses to ash in a few minutes, that different nationalities of jews burnt different colours as well as that the ground spurted geezers of blood when you walked on it.

Then I can only suggest that you are not only extremely gullible but you are suffering from delusions and need to see a psychiatrist post haste.

‘This is equivalent to ongoing denial of the genocide of Armenians during the early decades of the 20th century, or to the denial of the Holodomor, the enforced starvation of Ukrainians and others at the hands of Stalin in the early 1930's; the last one has finally become public knowledge.’

Indeed, but like the ‘Holocaust’ the debate around whether the Armenian Genocide and the Holodomor were real events or not should be encouraged not criminalized because it is ‘politically incorrect’.

‘The Holocaust was real; the documents are there to demonstrate “the final solution” to the “Jewish problem”’

Well that is typically clueless reasoning given that the ‘Final Solution’ referred to literally dozens of German plans (from 1940 to early 1945) about what to do with the jews and none of them that anyone has ever shown in documents had anything to do with murdering them in homicidal gas chambers in Poland.

If Rochelle had bothered to check the documents he is citing then he’d know they suggest the opposite of his claim but then we can’t all be rational individuals: can we?

‘And many people have visited the ghastly remains of the camps, especially the infamous Auschwitz’

As have I and like me they’ve seen a lot of shoes, piles of hair and an assortment of ‘exhibits’ that don’t have much to do with evidence other than as emotion-stirring attempt to make people believe without actual evidence and overlook the obvious bits of nonsense on the site such as the wooden ‘gas chamber’ door and the reconstructed crematorium chimney that museum officials like to suggest is original.

The difference is that where-as I know what I am looking at Rochelle does not and simply believes because he is told that he should believe.

‘and Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died.’

Of typhus and as an aside Bergen-Belsen had no gas chamber despite the various and nefarious attempts to imply that it did.

‘This is not only psychological denial, but a historical denial politically motivated to favor extreme right-wing posturing. We must continue to speak against such denials.’

Ah yes as we know to disagree with the jewish version of history means that you are automatically part of an international Nazi conspiracy to create the Fourth Reich.

‘Holocaust ignorance can be more easily overcome.’

Yes: it can.

It can be done by allowing free debate on whether the ‘Holocaust’ actually occurred or not.

After all why do you fear even having the debate?

‘I was involved for a dozen years in the Youth and Prejudice Conferences of Muhlenberg College in Allentown Pennsylvania, where students from middle schools would meet with Holocaust survivors and learn about prejudice under adult supervision in small groups. Hundreds of middle school pupils participated. In our community we can honor the idea by setting aside time in churches and schools for education about prejudice and about the holocausts which occurred in that ironically so-called “modern century,” the 20th.’

Sorry but can I snort with laughter at the idea that introducing people who regularly contradict the entire official ‘Holocaust’ narrative as ‘witnesses’ is somehow not sheer ‘Holocaust ignorance’?

‘One player in these ongoing denials and historical lacks is the internet itself.’

You mean you don’t like the free debate without boundaries that the internet affords and the resulting true Socratic dialogue that follows?

‘I have no axe to grind here; the internet is a tool, and like all tools it is capable of being used for good or for ill. But the sheer amount of “information” now available is an issue; if you post something that is clearly inane or false, odds are you can find enough people to follow you who will accept your postings as (forgive the maxim) “gospel truth.”

These postings proliferate like rabbits and it is exhausting trying to counter them. Once there were filters in society, including ordinary common sense, to counter wild and crazy claims. News media would vet nonsense and refuse it an airing. Those filters are gone. In the internet world everyone has a megaphone; you can now say virtually anything, no matter how absurd, and countering such proposals becomes difficult.

Those of us who fashion ourselves as watchdogs — about Holocaust denial or anything — are confronted with an inexhaustible stream of countervailing material. It’s like trying to extinguish a forest fire by stamping out only the grass burning at your feet.’

So I was right then: you don’t like free speech and true Socratic dialogue and are instead desirous of establishing a ‘Ministry of Truth’.

‘Truth and spirituality are companions. False information leads to misguided spirituality.’

You mean false information like claiming that you can gas hundreds of thousands of people in gas chambers powered by diesel engines stolen from Soviet submarines in Sobibor and Treblinka or that tens of thousands were killed by electric floors in Belzec?

Oh whoops: didn’t know about those little footnotes in the official ‘Holocaust History’ books did you?

‘The Deutsche Christen movement in Nazi Germany taught people that Jesus was not a Jew and the church has been Aryan throughout history. Most of us consider this pure nonsense but it was sold as an official position and many people bought ithook, line and sinker.’

What I love about Rochelle’s comment here is the sheer historical ignorance of it given that Rochelle is completely unaware that the ‘Deutsche Christen’ (‘German Christians’) movement preceded the creation of the NSDAP by circa forty years and had as its leading lights some of the leading Protestant churches in the Germanophone world such as the theologian Paul de Lagarde, Court Preacher Adolf Stoecker and the literary critic and novelist Adolf Bartels.

Instead he pretends it was created by ‘the Nazis’ ex nihilo as some kind of attempt to ‘corrupt Christianity’, which is not only ignorant but – in his words– ‘pure nonsense’.

‘The relative handful of people who opposed this view were few and silenced by the government. The government was wrong.’

This is also false since as Rochelle would know if he’d bothered to read a decent history of German Christianity before and during the Third Reich that the ‘German Christians’ (extremely pro-NSDAP Protestant Christians) and the ‘Confessing Church’ (often pro-NSDAP but more conventional Protestant Christians).

So no people were able to oppose the ‘German Christians’ movement in the Third Reich and did but they weren’t allowed to do was to undermine the state much as in our so-called ‘democracies’ today you have political crimes and forbidden ideologies like National Socialism.

Not very ‘democratic’: huh?

‘Eternal vigilance is the price of truth, not only the price of freedom.’

‘Recognized rights are, of course, often violated by political action. But these, as we have already shown, are never absolute rights; they are of human origin, and therefore imperfect and variable.’ – Friedrich von Bernhardi

See I can quote people too Fr. Rochelle.

References

(1) https://eu.lcsun-news.com/story/life/sunlife/2019/02/17/holocaust-denial-among-problems-we-didnt-deal-past/2866352002/