The last RJR one -- for real

Forgot to point out one other obvious matter (implicit in my earlier blog but, on the basis of recent correspondence, I take nothing for granted as being obvious): RJR's point in citing other atrocities in World War Two relates directly to the other side of Holocaust Denial -- the relativisation of the whole thing.  Yes, the British bombed Hamburg; yes, the Allies betrayed the Poles; yes, the Russians had gulags -- but none of these involved the kind of systematic technology of intentional genocide which we find in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and which was so central to the post-Wannsee Final Solution.  The death toll was appalling (in the gulags it far exceeded the Nazi death camps -- but no gulag was designed specifically as a factory of death; they were slave labour camps) and the atrocities should not be excused; but to equate these with the Holocaust is to indulge in that other aspect of Holocaust Denial -- the downplaying of the role of anti-Semitic, racist  intention combined with the technological delivery of death, factory-production-line style; and, of course, it is basic to advocates of the kind of figures paraded by Rassinier, Irving and co that the gas chambers did not exist; indeed, the point is frequently explicit.

I will write no more on this.