A couple of months ago I attended a Holocaust conference in Dallas and heard a survivor speak for the first time in my life. She dabbed her eyes as she spoke about scenes of unfathomable cruelty she had witnessed 65 years earlier. These were unspeakable things, but she spoke anyway. Nazi soldiers throwing babies out the third floor of an orphanage, while more below shot at them just for the fun of it. Babies thrown into bonfires in front of their mothers at the entrance to concentration camps. She and her husband have a new book out, called William and Rosalie.

I think I must have been thinking of Rosalie when I decided, late Saturday night, to call a halt to the debate about whether the Holocaust occurred. That debate was originally about whether Julian should debate Holocaust denier David Irving. Gradually it morphed into a debate between a number of TP regulars and several Holocaust deniers. Over 135 comments, there must have been 50 links to denier websites.

For the TP regulars it was an amazing education in the distortions and twisted rhetoric that keep the Holocaust-denier crowd in business. What concerned me was the education others might be getting. The thread was drawing quite a crowd. At the beginning of the thread, many good reasons were given for Julian not to debate a Holocaust denier. Those were the same reasons that made me think the ensuing debate really didn’t belong at TP. Such debates give the deniers credibility, they plant doubts, they turn the Holocaust into just a theory, they dishonor the six million, they dishonor Rosalie and her husband.

I suppose you could say a public debate with a well-known author is “different.” But I really think not. The internet is actually the primary avenue used by deniers to propagate their distortions. It matters what we do here. It certainly matters to me. I finally did figure out how to close comments without losing old comments, and we could do some radical pruning, but the consensus here at TP (and I’m glad we all agreed!)  is—that’s enough of that.

For fear that a thread on this post would attract the same characters, I’m afraid it’s going to be “comments closed”. Lucky you, there’s a great opportunity for debate just below. As a resident of Texas, the death penalty capital of the world, I’m finding it interesting!