Rushdoony - a final clarification
December 22, 2006
Oh, my. I seem to be being struck off all manner of Xmas card lists which, thankfully, I was probably never on in the first place. Two clarifications (at the risk of repeating myself) and a further comment:
1. I did not say Rushdoony and Holocaust Deniers are necessarily racists. I said they were necessarily either incompetent historians or racists or mentally ill or some combination of the three. Never having met the man, I would not presume to say which of these four options motivated him to write as he did.
2. Some correspondents seem not to understand the nature of Holocaust Denial and the literary culture which has grown up around it. The lowering of numbers in HD literature is not simply a matter of statistics. It is, in the world of Rassinier and co, inextricably linked with arguments over the very nature of the Holocaust as an intentional act of genocide. The difference between 6 million and 1 million is not the difference between overestimating and underestimating the dead; it is the difference believing that Auschwitz existed as a death camp with gas chambers and believing it was just a prison camp with communal shower units where people happened to die of cold and disaease. In other words, scaling the numbers down dramtically is, technically, Holocaust denial. If Rushdoony was not sharp enough to see the connection, if he really did think the difference between Rassinier and the mainstream was one of exaggeration, he was seriously historically incompetent; if he did see it and chose to ignore it, he was -- well, either a racist or a loon. I see no other option.
3. I can't tell you what it means to me to know that Holocaust deniers find advocates among good Christian folk. Now it seems that voting Democrat is the only unforgivable sin.
Enough of this! The church of Christ should give no quarter to such evil tripe.
1. I did not say Rushdoony and Holocaust Deniers are necessarily racists. I said they were necessarily either incompetent historians or racists or mentally ill or some combination of the three. Never having met the man, I would not presume to say which of these four options motivated him to write as he did.
2. Some correspondents seem not to understand the nature of Holocaust Denial and the literary culture which has grown up around it. The lowering of numbers in HD literature is not simply a matter of statistics. It is, in the world of Rassinier and co, inextricably linked with arguments over the very nature of the Holocaust as an intentional act of genocide. The difference between 6 million and 1 million is not the difference between overestimating and underestimating the dead; it is the difference believing that Auschwitz existed as a death camp with gas chambers and believing it was just a prison camp with communal shower units where people happened to die of cold and disaease. In other words, scaling the numbers down dramtically is, technically, Holocaust denial. If Rushdoony was not sharp enough to see the connection, if he really did think the difference between Rassinier and the mainstream was one of exaggeration, he was seriously historically incompetent; if he did see it and chose to ignore it, he was -- well, either a racist or a loon. I see no other option.
3. I can't tell you what it means to me to know that Holocaust deniers find advocates among good Christian folk. Now it seems that voting Democrat is the only unforgivable sin.
Enough of this! The church of Christ should give no quarter to such evil tripe.
