The Holocaust IS Trivial: A Reply to Angela Epstein

An article recently appeared in the British 'Daily Telegraph' newspaper written by one Angela Epstein and entitled: 'Why are we trivialising the language of the Holocaust?' (1) The article was, as one might reasonably expect, filled with the sort of pseudo-intellectual special pleading that was suitably cringe-worthy to anyone with but one half of a brain.

As you might easily guess Epstein immediately identifies herself as being jewish, but before someone says she is a relative irrelevancy. She is an independent journalist and author who is regularly published by the 'Daily Mail', 'Daily Telegraph', 'Daily Express' and 'The Mirror'. In addition to other material of hers carried in mainstream women's magazines such as 'Cosmo' and 'Marie Claire'. (2)

Epstein is also into – you guessed it – 'Holocaust Education' in a big way (3) and immediately claims that she is not 'being oversensitive'. Making such a claim at the start of the article tends to provide the discerning reader with an unintentional trigger warning that the (usually jewish) writer is about to propose something utterly absurd dressed up like a dog's dinner.

Epstein begins by making a statement that is sheer chutzpah. She writes:

'But what remains unconditionally unacceptable is an enduring fashion to swiftly equate political, militant or historical acts with the brutal years of Nazi Germany.' (4)

The problem with this trite bit of nonsense is that it is jews, like Epstein, who brought this fashion into being and have continued to be the mainstay of those driving the utilization of such terminology.

A good example of this fact is the state of Israel (whom Epstein seems to unconditionally support to nobody's particular surprise) which regularly uses the term 'Nazi', or some allusion to it, to describe its critics and enemies. A case in point being recent and historic Israeli hasbara on Iran.

Take a prominent jewish individual like Alan Dershowitz: does he not routinely refer or allude to his critics and opponents being 'Nazis'?

Why yes he does.

Then we can look to the jewish communal organizations (both in the United Kingdom and abroad) who have declared their unconditional support for the mass immigration of Middle Eastern refugees into Europe and North America.

Guess what they referenced as the rationale for their statements and arguments?

You got it: the Nazis and the 'Holocaust'.

If we really wanted to get into I would also point out, as Epstein doesn't seem to realise, that the term 'anti-Semite' (or 'antisemite') is overused to the point of irrelevancy by jews just like herself. In another article – for the 'Manchester Evening News' this time - Epstein rants about 'racism' targeting jews (but I thought you were a minority religious group not a race Angela?) and adheres to the extraordinarily paranoid thesis that 'anti-Semites' are both completely irrational and everywhere. (5)

Pro-tip Angela: anti-Semitism is a very specific critique of jews. It is not the same thing as anti-Zionism or anti-Judaism let alone simple criticism.

Oh well... I guess only jews are allowed to complain about overused and irrationally used terms.

Epstein continues in a similar vein with the following random waffle:

'Only this week during an interview to promote his latest film, director Quentin Tarantino proclaimed that he considers the Confederate flag to be the "American swastika". It was an unpardonable comparison.

Of course it is vital that we remember the deaths of the 620,000 soldiers killed during the Civil War, and that we never forget the horrors of those shackled by slavery – the catalyst for the conflict. But then again, history is fouled with relentless examples of man's savagery and brutality.

What set the brutal acts committed in the name of the swastika apart was the Nazis' premeditated and systematic slaughter of millions of people. A slaughter carried out by a hitherto civilised and educated nation.' (6)

In summary what Epstein is saying here is that while have gentiles suffered. They can never know the suffering that the jews have suffered, which is effectively minimizing the suffering of gentiles while claiming only jews for some magical unstated reason 'know what suffering is' but gentiles don't.

Epstein also demonstrates her rather amusing lack of 'Holocaust' knowledge – ironic for some who is stridently interested in 'Holocaust Education' - by claiming that the 'Holocaust' was premeditated (virtually no academic historian today asserts this as there is no extant orders on this score [i.e., the 'Intentionalist' thesis of yesteryear] has been rejected) and systematic (which is clearly nonsense given how many jews survived and the claims regularly made by 'Holocaust Survivors' regarding the continual mistakes made by the Germans that allow them to survive).

Also one wonders how the 'Holocaust' is 'set apart' from other contemporaneous genocides given that Epstein is rather vague on why exactly this is so. The claim that it is because the 'Holocaust' was 'premeditated' and 'systematic' is absurd, because the atrocities of (for example) Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were premeditated, systematic and killed vastly more human beings than the 'Holocaust' ever could.

Epstein continues by nasally whining that:

'This wasn't about land or sovereignty (the war in Europe took care of that). This was about murder.' (7)

It was manifestly about 'land and sovereignty' Angela as you would know if you knew anything about the rise of the Third Reich and orthodox academic theory about the 'origins of the Holocaust'.

Remember that thing called the Wannsee Conference near Berlin on the 20th January 1942?

You know that meeting where the 'Holocaust' as a policy was allegedly mapped out in detail? What was happening at the time?

Well I don't know Angela; perhaps a global war which had caused the Third Reich to no longer be in a position to deport jews or force them to emigrate?

Hence the rather famous Madagascar scheme that was proposed in the mid-1930s as a 'Final Solution' to the jewish question.

If it was 'about murder' and not 'land and sovereignty' then that wouldn't have been the case Angela. Instead the new National Socialist government would have pulled a Lenin and just started murdering their opponents out of hand on an industrial scale in 1933/1934.

As to 'sovereignty' Angela; well if you had read anything about the Third Reich's view, and the basis of its critique, of jews (7) then you would know that jews were well known to be hugely over-represented in positions of influence and authority (be they social, economic, political or cultural) in the Weimar republic. (8)

Whatever you may think about the Third Reich's views on the matter; the 'Holocaust' was manifestly about both 'land' and 'sovereignty' as that was the basis of both German policy regarding the jews prior to the outbreak of the Second World War and National Socialism's critique of jews and Judaism prior to as well as during the Third Reich.

If you want to research a genocide that was demonstrably about murder for its own sake and not 'land and sovereignty' then I'd suggest reading Robert Conquest's famous book about Stalin's purges. (9)

That is murder for the sake of murder Angela: the 'Holocaust' wasn't.

She then stammers out the following ludicrously inaccurate sentence:

'The Nazi goal was to annihilate every single Jewish person on the planet – from war veterans who had fought for Germany in WW1 to new born babes – simply because they were Jews.' (10)

Really Angela? If the German goal was to 'annihilate every single jewish person on the planet' then why oh why did the Third Reich work with Zionists during the war years as was famously documented by Lenni Brenner. (11) It also begs the question why a great many jews fought for the Third Reich on Eastern Front as Bryan Rigg has demonstrated. (12)

Why also did the Germans carry out their well-known deportation/emigration policies from 1933 to 1941 if the desire was to 'annihilate every single jewish person on the planet'?

The simple answer is that it wasn't the desire of the German government to 'annihilate every single jewish person on the planet', but rather that it was their desire that the jews should go and live as an independent nation without attempting to hijack the nation states of other peoples like they had attempted to do to Germany during the Weimar era.

Epstein continues her poorly informed rant in a truly histrionic vein by claiming that:

'Had I been born across the channel, more than seventy years ago, I could easily have been pushed onto a cattle train to certain death. If you muttered a wrong word about the State, so could you.' (13)

I hate to break to break it you Angela, but if you had born across the channel more than seventy years you wouldn't have been you. Time travelling is generally not conceded to be a reality currently so lets skip the hypothetical 'I could have been killed' and recognize there was a huge war happening in which the amount of gentile casualties (even just among civilians) was many times that of the jewish casualties even if you believe the official 'Holocaust' narrative.

After all gentile lives really don't matter when compared to jewish ones: do they Angela?

As regards the claim that 'if you muttered a wrong word about the State, so could you': that is demonstrably untrue.

For the simple reason that Angela is suppressing the fact that there were many more concentration (i.e., work) camps than there were supposed 'death camps', but she is also more hilariously forgetting that the Third Reich also consigned prominent political opponents to its general prison system and most of these individuals were released unharmed after the war. (14)

Epstein also conveniently forgets to mention that the British, among others, interned people - including jews as it happens - in hideous conditions for the same reason that the Germans interned political opponents. (15)

At least be consistent if you want to proclaim yourself and your people to be eternal victims Angela.

Also one wonders if Epstein is telling us that Germans gassed non-jewish political opponents as well. If so then it is even more than a mere miracle that in a grand total of two and a half years of active genocidal operations during the largest war in history. The SS managed to kill not only the infamous 'six million', but also an undefined, undocumented quantity of political prisoners and social dissenters in the diesel or Zyklon B gas chambers of the 'death camps' in the East.

The thing is Angela that for someone who confesses themselves to be very active in the field of 'Holocaust Education'; you don't seem to know very much about your specialist subject. I am not even that interested in the history of 'Holocaust' such as it is, but yet I know a significant amount of the detail in and around the allegations made about the Third Reich's conduct and policies from 1941 to 1945.

Yet I doubt Epstein even knows that there are two different gasses and killing methods accepted by 'Holocaust' historians for the 'death camps' (carbon monoxide from Russian tank/submarine engines and the far more famous Zyklon B) or has even heard of major concentration camps like Stutthof near Danzig.

Well lets continue with Angela's uninformed waffle then shall we?

She continues her nonsensical rant by claiming:

'As perpetrators of industrialised, unilateral barbarism the Nazis stand alone as a reminder of the darkest depths to which man can plunge.' (16)

Right so Angela; why do the 'Nazis stand alone' as perpetrators of 'industrialized, unilateral barbarism'?

Firstly the 'Holocaust' is - according to the orthodox narrative anyway – one genocide among a great many larger ones that were frequently more savage and systematic. A good example of which is Stalin's outright extermination of the Kulaks and old guard Bolsheviks in the purges of the mid-late 1930s.

Secondly the brutal and almost satanic torture carried out by the NKVD and associated organizations in the Gulags is beyond anything that human experience has to my knowledge documented elsewhere as has been widely agreed on by specialist scholars on the Soviet Union.

The simple question that Epstein has to answer is: what makes the Holocaust unique?

She tries to propose 'industrialization' (a-la Anne Applebaum in the introduction to her book 'Gulag'), 'unilateral barbarism' and 'murder for murder's sake' as reasons, but these are all obviously hollow as I have demonstrated.

There is nothing special about the 'Holocaust' in that regard.

What is different about the 'Holocaust' is that it, according to Epstein anyway (although Polish historians would stridently disagree), targeted jews specifically.

In other words what makes the 'Holocaust' unique for Epstein is the fact that it specifically targeted jews and other contemporaneous genocides didn't.

So what Epstein is really telling us here is that genocides only really matter when they target jews, but if a genocide targets gentiles well then it is unfortunate but not that important really. A triviality or as Jean-Marie le Pen put it a detail in the passage of history.

The reality is though that unless you place the lives of jews ahead of gentiles, which I personally don't, then the 'Holocaust' is simply a detail of history.

It is as simple as that.

References

(1) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/society/12081134/Why-are-we-trivialising-the-language-of-the-Holocaust.html

(2) http://www.angelaepstein.co.uk/bio/

(3) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/society/12081134/Why-are-we-trivialising-the-language-of-the-Holocaust.html

(4) Ibid.

(5) http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/local-news/angela-epstein-when-did-racist-abuse-become-866459

(6) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/society/12081134/Why-are-we-trivialising-the-language-of-the-Holocaust.html

(7) For example Jeffrey Herf, 2006, 'The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust', 1st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge

(8) On the scale of this see: Howard Sachar, 2002, 'Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War', 1st Edition, Vintage: London and Bernard Wasserstein, 2012, 'On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War', 1st Edition, Profile: London

(9) Cf. Robert Conquest, 2008, 'The Great Terror: A Reassessment', 3rd Edition, Pimlico: London

(10) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/society/12081134/Why-are-we-trivialising-the-language-of-the-Holocaust.html

(11) Cf. Lenni Brenner (Ed.), 2002, '51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis', 2nd Edition, Barricade Books: Fort Lee; also see Lenni Brenner, 1983, 'Zionism in the Age of Dictators', 1st Edition, Croom Helm: Sydney

(12) Cf. Bryan Mark Rigg, 2002, 'Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military', 2nd Edition, University Press of Kansas: Lawrence

(13) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/society/12081134/Why-are-we-trivialising-the-language-of-the-Holocaust.html

(14) For numerous examples see Reinhard Rurup (Ed.), 1989, 'The Topography of Terror: Gestapo, SS and Reichssicherheitshauptamt on the "Prinz-Albrecht-Terrain": A Documentation', 1st Edition, Verlag Willmuth Arenhovel: Berlin

(15) Cf. A. W. Brian Simpson, 1995, 'In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention without Trial in Wartime Britain', 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press: New York

(16) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/society/12081134/Why-are-we-trivialising-the-language-of-the-Holocaust.html