How to Deal with Holocaust Deniers

There's a long-held truth on the internet that meeting fire with fire merely causes a flame war inferno.  That's generally expressed as 'don't feed the trolls'.

Some Holocaust deniers simply are trolls.  The best way to make them go away is to ignore them. If they're not igniting the requisite outrage (which was the object), then they'll get bored and go to bother some other forum instead.

It's passing on the problem, but hopefully every other forum's mods and members know the same rules as you do.

In the world of academia, every Holocaust revisionist and denier is considered to be a troll.  Most historians quietly roll their eyes, but walk on by without comment. You doing the same would mean that you're in very good, scholarly and professional company.

There are several reasons why the majority of historians do this. 

• It's a waste of time. Those denying the Holocaust are either trolling - thus looking for a fight - or else they're not the sort of people capable of listening to reason. They certainly won't look at the evidence, unless it's to find out what 'sort' of proof it is, in order to produce some pat and unconvincing argument as to why it doesn't count.
• It's distracting.  Would you expect an advanced mathematician to pause in their contemplation of Pythagoras's unsolved theorems to explain to a grown adult why 1 + 1 really isn't 3?  Or NASA scientists to halt their work in analyzing the data from Mars, so they could respond to assertions that the moon really is made of cheese? Nope, and addressing Holocaust deniers is on precisely the same level for historians.
• It dignifies the ugly fiction with undue importance. This is by far the most commonly cited reason for not engaging. Casual observers might assume that there really is a controversy surrounding the Holocaust, if known historians are rushing in to silence those spouting it.  The Shakespearian 'methinks the lady doth protest too much' trap in action.

If you encounter a Holocaust denier, then a quick quip of ridicule; a blunt and to the point 'no'; or resounding silence, before you extract yourself from the conversation completely is an appropriate response.

It's certainly the most often employed, and very possibly the most sensible, way of dealing with Holocaust denying trolls.

Yes, I have paraphrased the quotation in the title, in order that females don't think that they can just sit back and watch.

In my defense, everyone else misquotes it too. What Irish political philosopher Edward Burke actually wrote was: 'When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.'

The sentiment remains the same and it's one often deployed in the mission to combat Holocaust deniers. Or, to put it another way, 'silence means approval'.

Option two, in dealing with those who say that the Holocaust never happened, is confronting with evidence to counteract every dodgy 'fact' they peddle or bizarre premise they suppose.

For the majority of those spouting such ideas, this is a ridiculously easy thing to do. You certainly don't need a degree in History to pull it off. Half a second in an internet search engine will provide a wealth of historically verified evidence to throw into the mire. It's hardly likely the doubtful theories are that in-depth.

There are even websites and pages devoted to providing ready-made answers or evidence for you, for all of the most popularly deployed revisionist claims:

• Those who prefer a quick read will enjoy this Wikipedia page: Criticism of the Holocaust Denial (though remember that deniers can also access that).
• People who like their information wrapped up in a bit of social networking might opt for Reddit's Holocaust Conspiracy subreddit.
• Seeking scholarly rebuttals and in-depth analyses of Holocaust revisionism? Then check out The Nizkor Project. More about that in a minute.

Deciding to take on deniers of the Holocaust can be a long drawn out and thankless task. It will definitely ensure that the troll is hanging around your forum for much longer, and might even prompt them to bring in some friends.

Moreover, you will elicit horrified responses from those watching from the sidelines, accusing you of feeding the trolls and probably demanding (if it's in your power to do so) that you delete the hateful comments left by revisionists.

But there are benefits too, which might just make it worth the endeavor.

People like Ken McVay are motivated by considering who would be most likely to read the information on show. 

That is people casually browsing the internet, who may or may not have any prior knowledge about the Holocaust. It could not be assumed that they had the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff in the historical evidence placed before them.

It's all well and good historians refusing to address deniers in their books and papers. But the kind of people reading those are likely to already know about the period. They would be less susceptible to believing what deniers have to say.

But the casual browser hasn't the context.

They would be encountering unchallenged tidbits like, 'Oy! Did you know that there weren't any gas chambers in Auschwitz? The supposed genocide was really Russian/Zionist/American/British propaganda to justify WWII to their people!' or 'Did you know that there was a scientific experiment which proved that there was no trace of Zyklon B in the bricks of the gas chambers? Don't tell you THAT when they're pretending six million people died, so they can have Israel, do they?!'

It might be that people reading glance over the assertion without really taking all of it on board. But the seed of doubt has been planted. The implication is inherent that there is something controversial about the facts of the Holocaust.

Nobody likes to think that they've been gullible. That spark of suspicion could all too easily grow into an investigation of the broader picture, but only through those links provided, and they lead to revisionist websites.

As any educator, media mogul or government official can tell you, those who control the sources of information control everything. And the Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, was particularly good at it.

That's how Hitler's National Socialist party and policies garnered so much support in the first place!

By confronting Holocaust deniers on forums, or in person, you are inviting them to prolong the conversation. That means that more dodgy facts are pouring out, more links are being shared, more vitriol dripped into the discussion.

You may well be there answering each point with proof as to its fallacy or farcical nature. But are you more convincing than them?

Not every Holocaust revisionist and denier is stupid. I've got a Master's degree in History, and even I've clashed with one or two which made me have to up my game. (Though granted, I'd come in pitched at idiot level, so there was much leeway for moving upwards.)

If you rush in to answer one of the clever ones half-cocked, then you could easily be the one looking tongue-tied and inadequate.

In short, the denier not only just 'won', but the debate was left looking like the revisionist evidence held up to scrutiny.  The confrontation inadvertently 'confirmed' the apparent 'truths' in pseudo-histories (or real history, presented selectively and without context).

It all leaves the casual reader with even more reason to suppose that there's real doubt at the heart of Holocaust inquiry.

If you think that you've just entered an intellectual minefield, in considering ways to combat Holocaust denialists, then you'd be right.

The temptation is therefore to simply make the issue go away, especially if you're not a trained historian.

Often it's not even a discussion about the Holocaust which prompts the arrival of such a troll. It wasn't on Wizzley, when we were visited by one. He subverted a debate about Suffragettes and the Titanic into denying the Holocaust. He didn't even attempt to demonstrate the relevance.

In those situations, there's even more impetus on moderators to delete revisionist comments. It's the equivalent of a chairperson intervening to keep the discussion on topic, so can neatly side-step any criticism of the action with reference to that.

Deleting the denier comments from your forum has the following advantages:

• Avoids providing a forum for Holocaust revisionism
• Doesn't leave the pseudo-science, twisted histories and dodgy 'facts' in a public place for casual readers to find
• Nips potential flame wars in the bud
• Keeps everything on topic, if the denier had diverted the discussion away from its true roots

It may appear to be the neatest solution of all, but this does open up a whole new can of worms. You open yourselves (and your whole website) up to accusations of stifling freedom of speech, disrupting the flow of information and promoting censorship. 

As these are three of the hottest no-nos on the internet, enshrined in everything from the Hacker Ethic through the Cypherpunk movement, into the netiquette of most social networking forums, to underlying the ethos of cyber activist groups like Anonymous or whistle-blowers like WikiLeaks.

The notion that 'information wants to be free' has been so pervasive on-line for such a long time, that whole generations have grown up expecting it.

Deleting single-issue comments, like those perpetuated by Holocaust deniers, might seem like the sensible solution. But it risks eliciting a (probably silently expressed) black mark against your site and forum. People who couldn't care less about history, and all attendant factual debates, will now have your bit of the internet pegged as somewhere not acting within the spirit of the internet.

And that could be the most damaging aspect of all.