Discussion: Disputed Assignment Used Source That Called Holocaust Gassings A 'Profitable Hoax'

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Discussion for article #222505

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The Anne Frank-ball point pen claim is weirdly tenacious. And easily disproved.

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There was no doubt whatsoever that whomever came up with this assignment has nazi tendencies. Fire the creep!

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Ok, lets use logic like they want. Before the war, there were x millions of Jews in Europe and Eastern Europe. After the war, there x - 6 million. The mendacity of that web site is truly monstrous. There is a reason why it is illegal to be a holocaust denier in Germany.

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Once you deconstruct science and history and economics in the minds of the people, you can pretty much lie as you please.

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The presentation of information from a holocaust denier website as “credible” is a joke.

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It’s amazing how these kinds of ideas can infect people and spread. Of course, there has to be some existing tendency to want to believe these lies in the first place, usually because of some deep-seated racial or ethnic animus.

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“Even The Diary of Anne Frank is a hoax. Portions of the diary were written with a ball point pen. These pens were not in use at the time Anne Frank lived.”

Hitler, himself, never existed either. He was played by an unemployed actor from Hoboken.

Also, Churchill was just a cigar company mascot invented by Madison Avenue.

And FDR? Disney automaton that got out of hand. (Walt loved to spring him on unsuspecting party guests. Always a crowd pleaser.)

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Here is a website that refutes the rest of this nonsense: http://www.holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/body-disposal/

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I don’t have any problem with someone not liking the fact that the US does provide a lot of aid to a lot of countries. I can understand folks being outraged by that, particularly when we’re not doing so hot back at home. However, to make up lies and fabrications to prove your point only results in undermining your point.

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Wow.
I guess there is no shortage of fools in the world willing to believe anything you shovel at them if it fits in with their existing bigotries (No Holocaust, Slaves were better off as slaves, Rich people are better than everyone else, poor people have it too easy, All accusations of racism are racist, etc.etc.)
As P.T. Barnum said: “'Nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public…”

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It isn’t a bigger piece of news because it can’t be easily pointed at some Democrat.

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A similar comment by H.L. Mencken was just as trenchant, if not a little misanthropic:

“No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.”
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Ballpoint pens were in use in Europe by 1941 and came to the US in 1945. Yes, Anne Frank could have used one.

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The first British patent was issued in 1938 and "Biro"s [after the Inventor] were routinely issued to RAF aircrew during the war.

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The prompt for the assignment breaks down at “credible sources.”

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I noticed the disingenuous use of the passive voice in the assignment: “merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain.” Created by whom? It doesn’t come out and say, “or did Jews just make it up,” but that is the only possible meaning of this alternative. Minimal cover for the obvious anti-Semites behind this creepy exercise.

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It is hard to explain this by resorting to Common Core, which is called that precisely because it’s used in every public school in America. Nobody else, best as we know, created a ‘thought exercise’ like this.

I don’t know exactly what materials the students were given, but Leuchter’s findings have been utterly discredited–and so has he. To present him as even a remotely credible expert–to students who lack the technical knowledge and expertise to know that he’s not qualified to make the determinations he did–is crazy.

Thankfully, students know how to use the internet, and the Wikipedia article on Leuchter makes it very clear that he was never a credible expert on any subject–though in fact his testimony was used to send people to their deaths in modern-day execution chambers. Which he provided equipment for!

He’d have fit right in back in the day of the actual Holocaust, that’s for damn sure.

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Umm – I believe that was H.L. Menken. Barnum said something to the effect of “There is a sucker born every minute.”

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It turns out, though (see the link above), that the body of the diary was written with a fountain pen. Ball point pen ink is found only in two notes inserted in the pages of the diary, written in an entirely different hand (probably that of Otto Frank), and in numbers on some pages – the page numbers were added by Otto Frank, some in ballpoint pen, and some in colored pencil, after the war in the process of compiling the diary for publication.

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