Denial: psychology, a defense mechanism in which confrontation with a personal problem or with reality is avoided by denying the existence of the problem or reality
Much like Soviet psychiatry was used as a political weapon, the psychiatric term denial is applied by many against their political opponents to shut off debate. That is, to be tarred a denier is to be silenced, and in some extreme cases imprisoned. Here I will explore three prime examples of the use of the denier concept: global warming, vaccines, and the quintessential paradigm of denial, the Holocaust.
This exploration is very limited, each topic demands book length treatment, but I will simply give a very narrow particular point from my own investigations that make the case for open discussion because the case of the deniers has some merit. It is my small contribution in support of those freedom lovers at the barricades trying to hold back the barbarians who want to control speech. And also I submit this to take your mind off of the current virus scare.
Global Warming
I had done some study of anthropogenic global warming (or whatever the issue is called today) in the late 90s for a class I was teaching on Energy and Society. I have not been able to find the source of the following figure of the earth’s carbon cycle from my old notes, but I am sure it was from one of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.
It is complicated to read, so here is the IPCC 2001 report that includes a version with the natural and human parts separated, or the figure provided here that resembles the one one I examined years ago. Note the thick lines representing fluxes into the atmosphere of 90 from surface water, 60 from short lived biota, and 54-60 from detritus decomposition. Taken together this is about 200×1015 g C/yr compared to a thin line from fossil fuels representing 5×1015 g C/yr. The key sentence in the caption reads: “Although single numbers usually are given, there is considerable uncertainty about both reservoir sizes and fluxes.” Thus, my supposition then was that human sources were about 3% of the total flux; a value within the uncertainty for this difficult to determine value that was key to the theory. In other words, it was negligible, not the main driver of the phenomenon. Thus, this was just one particular piece of data that made the whole case for a Gore inspired totalitarian bureaucracy that covers the world to save us (as William Buckley called for a US totalitarian bureaucracy to protect the US from communism) seem preposterous, or at a minimum worth questioning, to me.
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Now looking back over the years I imagine these data are better understood. And perhaps they are not so central to the warmest argument. But there is so much more information that is readily available over the internet to at least discuss. For an excellent recapitulation of the deniers’ views of the debate see this presentation by Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore. Also this recent conversation with him where he specifically discusses the topic of the term denial (min 32). For the reasons why this movement has developed I learned much from the indispensable James Corbett and his Corbett Report, the one-man counterintelligence agency for the people. In particular his reporting on Maurice Strong and the New World Order crowd who are always looking to centralize power. Others worth mentioning are Martin Armstong, Mish Shedlock, Noble winner in physics Ivar Giaever, and MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen.
Vaccines
Vaccine denial does not follow the psychiatric model defined above. The vaccine denier is someone who would like to limit (for their own children) the use of vaccines because they have potentially negative side effects. It is the main stream, vaccine supporters who deny that they have any negative effects; and thus are the actual deniers.
At the recent World Health Organization (WHO) sponsored Global Vaccine Summit participants were recorded as saying that:
- Vaccines can be fatal.
- The design of safety studies makes it difficult to spot problems.
- Safety monitoring is inadequate.
- Vaccine adjuvants increase risk.
Using the WHO vaccine-preventable diseases: monitoring system 2019 global summary, I find required vaccinations consist of 27 individual injections by 6 months in the US compared to 6 individual injections by 6 months in France. Thus, with the admissions made at the summit and these numbers it is not too surprising that there is an anti-vaccine sentiment in the US. The idea that vaccines have none, and never have had any, side effects for anyone is ridiculous on its face. Heck, even eating too many carrots can have side effects;
A minor observation I have noticed is that it is often the same person who eats only organic food to avoid chemicals who insists on stringent vaccine programs.
The Holocaust
Holocaust denial, the archetypal prototype for denial argumentation, refers to the genocidal program of the Nazi government during WWII. I believe that the Nazi inspired German government horribly persecuted Jews during WWII to the point of killing great numbers of them is, well, undeniable. But there is much more that could be discussed about this complicated topic which is what the accusers of denial wish to suppress. I will comment on just one excerpt of the long Ron Unz article on Holocaust denial given below.
Similarly, for decades I had always read the undeniable fact that the Nazis had exterminated 4 million inmates at Auschwitz, with most of the victims being Jews, and Lipstadt certainly treated that number as absolutely rock-solid historical reality. But in the early 1990s after the fall of Communism, the official total was quietly revised downwards to as little as 1.1 million. The fact that a sudden reduction in the official Holocaust body-count by 3 million has had so little impact upon our public Holocaust media narrative hardly seems to inspire great confidence in either the total figures or the media reporting of them.
Over the last couple of generations, our media has engraved that figure of Six Million so deeply onto the minds of every Western citizen that the meaning of the iconic number is universally understood, and those who question it risk a prison sentence in many European countries. Yet its actual origin is somewhat obscure. According to some accounts, Jewish groups lobbied President Truman into casually inserting it into one of his speeches, and thereafter it has endlessly echoed in the media down to the present day. Some angry Internet activist has put together a graphic displaying extracts from dozens of New York Times stories between 1869 and 1941 all citing the figure of 6 million Eastern European Jews as being threatened with death, suggesting that our official Holocaust body-count actually predated World War II by as much as three generations. I really wouldn’t be surprised if that might be the original source of the number.
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To summarize, just after the war it was believed that about 4 million people were killed at Auschwitz and 6 million were killed in total. Now it is estimated that 1.1 million were killed at Auschwitz while the 6 million total has not been revised. This particular point was something that could be reasonably checked so I proceeded to do so.
My source for the common understanding just after the war is the Nuremberg trials transcripts that are published in various formats online. For the number of victims at Auschwitz I found the Nuremberg Trial Transcripts of Indictments, Case no. 4 (pg 111 of 323 of the pdf file), against the I G Farben chemical company (reorganized as BASF after the war). In the passage below I have added emphasis to the key sentence.
C.FARBEN at Auschwitz.
132. The Auschwitz concentration camp was established for the main purpose of exterminating human beings. Life or death of the inmates depended solely upon their fitness for work. All who were considered fit to work were used as slave laborers; all who were not considered fit to work were exterminated in gas chambers and their bodies burned. When the remainder of dead exceeded the capacity of the specially constructed crematoria, the “overflow” of human beings was burned in huge open bonfires. Here many victims were also burned alive. In Auschwitz alone, three to four millions persons were exterminated, and another’ one-half million died from disease and starvation.
From the Harvard Law School Nuremberg Project, a site search for “six million” found this Q and A of Viktor Brack.
Regarding the current consensus for deaths at Auschwitz, the online Holocaust Encyclopedia provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states that “more than 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz, including nearly one million Jews. Those who were not sent directly to gas chambers were sentenced to forced labor.” Furthermore, “The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies and collaborators.”
Wikipedia has a page on the death toll of Jews from the Holocaust that includes a table by country and the total, given as 5,896,577. The text provides a sense of the technical challenges involved in making this calculation.
The Jews killed represented around one third of world Jewry[385] and about two-thirds of European Jewry, based on an estimate of 9.7 million Jews in Europe at the start of the war.[386] According to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, “[a]ll the serious research” confirms that between five and six million Jews died.[387] Early postwar calculations were 4.2 to 4.5 million from Gerald Reitlinger;[388] 5.1 million from Raul Hilberg; and 5.95 million from Jacob Lestschinsky.[389] In 1990 Yehuda Bauer and Robert Rozett estimated 5.59–5.86 million,[390] and in 1991 Wolfgang Benz suggested 5.29 to just over 6 million.[391][ad] The figures include over one million children.[392] Much of the uncertainty stems from the lack of a reliable figure for the number of Jews in Europe in 1939, border changes that make double-counting of victims difficult to avoid, lack of accurate records from the perpetrators, and uncertainty about whether to include post-liberation deaths caused by the persecution.[388]
Does this confirmation of Ron Unz’s point mean that almost 6 million Jews were not killed? No, my only modest goal is to support the sentiment that Linh Dinh wrote about Dien Bien Phu, “Historical events should always be reexamined, new evidence dug up and debates encouraged. It is not just absurd, but a cowardly crime, to criminalize historical investigations.”
