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Aylee -> RE: Forgotten Voices (11/12/2009 12:00:59 PM)
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From Straight Dope.
People who try to use history as a political tool rather than a search for the truth often don't care whether something is correct or not. The message is the important thing, not the facts.
Holocaust deniers use a wide variety of claims to try to back up their version of history. Their thinking seems to be that if they can poke a hole in one small area, historical support for the Holocaust will collapse (an attitude they have in common with creationists). But that's just not the way it works.
Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman describe the way proper historical study works in their recent book, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? Confirmation of the Holocaust, as with most things in history, comes not from a single fact or document, but through a convergence of many different lines of evidence, just as it does in science. They write, "The Holocaust was a myriad of events in a myriad of places and relies on myriad pieces of data that converge on one conclusion." So even if a denier can find fault with one small piece of information, or two historians differ in the way they interpret some data, that doesn't bring all of history crashing down.
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You can read the rest at the link above.
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