The most interesting views are often the views that take courage to express. This is because the people who express them are likely to have questioning minds, serious interest, feel that what they have to say is important, and most notably they are expressing a view that, for all we may know, could be representative of a far more broad albeit hidden opinion.
Virtually by definition, an opinion that takes courage to express is a suppressed opinion. In principle, no honest viewpoint that is objective and constructive should take courage to express. It should be honoured on the grounds of its intent alone, regardless of whether or not it is technically right of wrong.
But we have yet to reach that perfect world, of course. Academia used to provide a safe place for free speech, but that is no more. Money and politics has the final say in nearly every modern institution.
In today's world, you can (and will) be slandered or even imprisoned for expressing certain opinions. And apparently, people's feelings can count for more than the truth, or more specifically the truth of someone's argument.
It is very sad - and wrong. If for example a Jewish man is offended by someone like David Irving's (a prior celebrated English historian, on German history) claim that the holocaust was grossly exaggerated, then all that the Jewish man should need to do is turn down the invitation to hear David Irving out. But of course it's no longer that simple.
If being offended is good enough to shut someone down, then that of course is a dangerous standard. We may go to our polling booths with no idea of what we don't know, because we weren't allowed to be told, because someone was too offended to let us hear about it.
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Okay. In the name of declaring my right to express an interesting view, without some dickhead calling me a Nazi, I would like to suggest a hypothesis on what could be closer to the real holocaust story. If you feel you might somehow be offended then please do not read on. As follows:
Adolf Hitler and his friends came to the conclusion that the rich Jewish elite were to blame for Germany losing the first world war, due to the Jews strategic financing of both sides of the war (or something like that). Due to deep psychological war trauma from the horrors of world war one, this spilled over to a general contempt for Jews (emotional scapegoating), which was in turn promoted to the German people via the ruling Nazi party.
Because the German people, and Nazi's, were not actually psychotic they did not believe in killing Jews indiscriminately, as a genocide. They simply wanted to kick the "trouble makers" out of Germany.
Hence, rather than putting Jews on trains, and then filling those trains with carbon monoxide so as to kill them efficiently, and then dispose of them in mass graves beside the railway line, they instead chose to put them in holding pens called concentration camps - to be relocated later, when possible. That was the "final solution".
Concentration camps were (and are) terrible places for contagious disease as you have many people living very close, and the typhus mite in particular was a major threat at the time. So on immediate arrival to the camps, the Jews were stripped, shaved, and showered. Their old clothes were burnt. The typhus mite had to be removed - totally. For later political reasons, this act of obvious compassion was presented as degradation.
But alas, in world war 2 there was siege warfare. Supply lines of food were being constantly devastated, and there were starvations happening on both the allied and German sides of the war. Naturally the Jews, then living in concentration camps, were the least respected so were the last to receive the limited food rations. The Jews starved first. Starving them was not Germany's first intent, but someone had to go without and so it was the Jews. The Germans also operated periodic cullings of the Jews via gas chambers, as it was ultimately more humane than having them painfully starve.
Ends.
Is that true? To a degree it might be. Many researchers have spoken roughly along these lines, including obviously objective, educated people whose intent was just to get to the truth (as we can respectfully presume). They have pointed out what they see as contradictions to the official holocaust story, which has driven independent investigations and some differing conclusions.
Yet, to even ask these question and make controversial assertions to test the official story, when it does not appear entirely plausible, is to make you a Nazi sympathiser and in turn a bad person in the public eye. Pathetic. It's more realistically an evil to not let the critics be heard, by those who might wish to hear them.
We do not know if they are right or wrong - and I don't. But we have the right to know if we have slandered an entire generation of Germans, making them look like monsters, to create a possibly disingenuous moral high-ground for the victors of the war. And a war whose real objective, as some have suggested, was (basically) the installation of the Berlin wall to ensure that no third reich could become powerful enough to challenge the supremacy of the British empire.
All of that could be wrong. It doesn't matter though - it's not my real point. Personally I don't care less about the holocaust (far worse has happened to humanity). However, we have every right to ask uncomfortable questions. All honest criticism is healthy, because even if it's wrong it allows us to test what we think is right, and what is right should never be accepted on dogmatic faith.
In my view, the best reason to open the file and question the holocaust, lies in the fact that it takes so much courage to do so. And it should not. So long as the intent is clean, there is no evil or dishonour in asking sincere questions - no matter what those questions might be.
Andrew Atkin
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