On Sunday I checked William M. Briggs's blog, which I haven't been reading much these days, to get some birdemic statistics I needed for an argument. I found a post (posted on December 10 but not read by me until the 20th) called Four Million Dead In The Raging Pandemic! Of course no one is claiming that anywhere near that many have been killed by the birdemic. This is one of Briggs's old tricks: running a headline that would seem to justify the birdemic panic, and then revealing that it is actually about another pandemic from a few decades back, one that you've never heard of because, despite being much more serious than the current unpleasantness, it didn't cause a panic and a worldwide totalitarian coup. The post begins thus:
The WHO itself, the unquestionable unimpeachable unerring medical authority, tells us that as many as four million died in the pandemic.
Not one million. Not two million. No, sir, not even three million. But four full million souls perished from the earth in the pandemic!
This happened not just once. This happened, dear readers, but it happened twice since 1957. . . .
The first reader comment, left by someone called Dean Ericson, reads, "Four million?! It’s six million, heretic!" This is of course a humorous reference to one of the shibboleths of Holocaust orthodoxy. Everyone is required to say that the Nazis killed six million Jews, and messing with that number is a thoughtcrime of the highest order. So much as suggest that perhaps the Nazis only killed, say, five and a half million Jews, and you will immediately be branded a "Holocaust denier," anti-Semite, neo-Nazi, and all the rest. Them's fightin' words.
Because saying the Nazis "only" killed four or five million Jews is brushing off the Holocaust like it's no big deal, saying the National Socialists really weren't all that bad. In order to be Literally Hitler, you just have to kill six million; no lesser number is sufficiently heinous.
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A few hours after reading the post and comment quoted above, I read this in Unsong:
He gave the example of all the Jewish scholars who lost their faith during the Holocaust. How, they asked, could God allow six million of their countrymen to perish like that?
But read the Bible! Somebody counted up all the people God killed in the Bible, and they got 2.8 million. It wasn't even for good reasons! [. . .] What right do we have to lose faith when we see the Holocaust? "Oh, sure, God killed 2.8 million people, that makes perfect sense, but surely He would never let SIX million die, that would just be too awful to contemplate?" It's like -- what?
Another reference to the silliness of insisting that only killing a full six million is sufficiently shocking.
3 comments:
It goes the other way too. “X number total died in concentration camps” is also wrong, one must say the exact number with correct group marker.
Yes. It's increasingly acceptable to mention that homosexuals and other designated victim groups were also targeted, but any mention of the total number of victims must include an explicit acknowledgment that precisely six million of them were Jews.
Did you see $600 is the figure promised to Americans? The reaction so far has just been anger. I think it’s more than just the low amount of the figure, but we must associate being given “6” as bad.
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