This is indeed a good part of the whole picture, something some people are apparently too far out of the mainstream* or have such a lacking of the basics of politics and human interaction that they don't understand it.
The "mainstream" is then the arbiter of truth and falsehood? I know you don't mean that, but that is what you are saying.
As I said earlier, the people who *meaningfully* deny the Holocaust - not just a dispute of numbers on a relatively minor scale, but belief the event has been grossly inflated - are out of touch with reality in a serious way.
That's nothing more than polite "trash talk" It is used for no purpose other than to avoid debate. Al Gore uses it on Global Warming, Dawkins uses it on Evolution, Lutherans especially use it when the topic is the Inquisition.
Unlike, say, the Inquisition, the Holocaust is a recent event: recent enough that a large number of people who were witness to it are still alive (when denial first came out of the woodwork there were many thousands of witnesses alive indeed).
Yeah. Strangely some of them were "witnesses" themselves that said, "It didn't happen that way." For that matter we have multiple conflicting witnesses to 9/11 and the Kennedy Assassination. Maybe laws should be passed to inhibit questioning of those events.
The fact that it is on the scale of millions of deaths is apparent to anyone who has studied the issue honestly at all.
That's just a prejudice on your part. You've set arbitrary boundaries on what you're comfortable with, not with what the evidence shows.
Like you, I am, or more properly way, a World War II buff. (Frankly, learning the facts behind the scenes regarding the financing and other things kind of soured me on the idea that there were really any "good guys" at all and made me largely lose interest.) The fact that there were many death camps that were, in the later years of the war at least, processing hundreds or thousands per day is beyond dispute. I could go on very easily.
You could very easily be refuted, but you seem determined to get yourself banned for discussing numbers. If you think that's unfair, then you will concede my point in the larger context.
As already acknowledged, Germany's collective guilt as well as the real danger of neo-Nazi whack jobs are clearly enough to explain the stifling of debate the issue.
Or like in the global warming scam, there's money to be had. in the "green industry" and "holocaust industry."
But it is indeed deeper than that: we don't have debates on *anything* that is simply well-established.
Because something is entrenched it must be true in other words.
We don't debate whether or not the civil war occurred, or whether, perhaps, it was actually simply a minor skirmish with a few hundreds deaths.
But we do debate the causes and motivations for the Civil War and people are free to speculate about whether or not Lincoln was just or the South should have been allowed to secede.
To openly a debate a question that really is a plain fact of history is to behave like morons.
To call something a plain fact of history when it's clearly debatable is the behavior of morons.
Or like people with a clear agenda that would prefer that the Holocaust had *not* occurred (or, even better, that it had but that we can pretend it didn't).
As opposed to those making money off the consensus that it did happen, or those who gain political power or power over the Church based on the most outlandish stories and exaggerations they can get away with. And if legislation is passed, they have the good that laid the golden egg. (That's a fairy tale by the way.)
* Of course there isn't anything intrinsically wrong with being out of the mainstream.
No. You're argument is there is something that is intrinsically wrong with being out of the mainstream. You can't contradicts yourself on this.
The Church has been out of the mainstream since the beginning and always will be. But, actually, there are a few things that even non-Catholics can understand easily.
Notice how the Church falters and stumbles when the Churchmen try to be mainstream. Even non-Catholics see that. Unfortunately they don't understand why.
