(no subject)

[elfs]

As if life couldn't get any uglier today, James P. Hogan, the science fiction author who I enjoyed most as a teenager, announced today that he supports Holocaust Revionism. Not just David Irving's right to speak (Irving was recently sentenced to three years in prison for his Holocaust Revisionist historical writings), but support for the actual "research program" that questions whether or not the Holocaust ever happened and purports to refute the claim that the actual death toll was in "the millions."

Not even the German soldiers on trial at Nuremburg tried to claim that.

Comments

[fallenpegasus]

Hogan has slowly been going insane.

I personally suspect it was this royalties enabled him to quit his dayjob, but he hasn't been going out into the "real world" to refresh his well or to reorient his socialization.

[polydad.livejournal.com]

>Hogan has slowly been going insane.

More data, please? I'm saddened if this is true; I liked his earlier work.

best,

Joel

[fallenpegasus]

Hogan is the canonical currently living example of the the Brain Eater syndrom. The Giants trilogy is the illustrative work of it.

He actaully believes in the Velovsky garbage...

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I've thought of Hogan as a writer of PSF: pseudoscience fiction.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Hogan has showed a remarkable ability over the past two decades to latch onto any idea that's "contrary to the mainstream" and champion in just because it's contrary, not necessarily because it's true. He's a Velikofsky fan, as well as a conspiracy theorist convinced that Someone Runs The World because the world is just too damned complex to be running itself successfully. Now he's a Holocaust revisionist. Intelligent Design is next, I'm sure.

FallenPegasus mentioned that in rec.arts.sf.written he's the current canonical example of the Brain Eater. In talk.origins he's the canonical example of Salem's Hypothesis: scratch any "intelligent design" theorist or Velikofsky fanatic who claims to have an advanced degree in science, and you'll find almost inevitably that his degree is in engineering.

Hogan also does a poor job of reviewing "mainstream" sources once he's found the alternative explanation that seems to get his juices going. He's willing to read Velikovsky and Butz (and in a complete vaccuum, if you didn't know better, they actually seem to have some empirical evidence, but like Von Danken, ID, and Julian Jaynes, it's selectively chosen and deceptively presented, and knowledge of the facts usually bears this out), but is unwilling to read the reviewers who point out, with facts to back them up, that the "alternatives" are full of nonsense.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

Intelligent Design is next, I'm sure.

Too late. (http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/browse_frm/thread/d4087ae3a301523d/ae8a6f72d1bdc1f6?q=hogan+intelligent+design&rnum=1#ae8a6f72d1bdc1f6)

[auroramama]

Are there people out there who doubt that other groups of WWII dead numbered in the millions, like the Russian soldiers? Are there overall WWII revisionists who claim that the whole thing was exaggerated and it was basically just a few lads having a tiff? How about Stalin? I've heard estimates that he had thirty to forty million people killed; is there anyone seriously claiming these days that it was more like a few thousand, or what?

Even weirder, I guess, would be someone who doesn't deny the Holocaust, but still believes that the Jews control everything.

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

I was curious about this subject in college. Did a chunk of personal research on it. Anyone who really doubts what happened in the Holocaust is invited to look up the Stroop Report, which documents in loving detail the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto. If that document is not enough to chill the blood, go to any government documents library and pull up World War II original source materials on microfilm. I think a chunk of this is on the Internet now as well . . .

As for the Eastern front, it's hard to come up with exact numbers because the Russians did such a good job of cooking their population statistics for so long. Millions of deaths is sadly beyond question.

The deliberate extermination of the Jewish populations of Europe is fairly massively documented. Even during World War II, some US newspapers carried articles about what was happening (typically buried, as it was not really "newsworthy" or was reported through secondary sources.) Many US Army officers wrote detailed reports which are in the National Archives.

At some of the camps after the war, German officials were forced by US soldiers to tour the camps and bear witness to what had happened there. We now even have aerial photos of loaded trains coming into extermination camps and leaving empty. Over and over and over again. (Most of the imagery in question, taken by recon aircraft during the war, was not even looked at until the 1970s, and only analyzed fairly recently.)

At this point, people who deny the Holocaust (the deliberate destruction and wholesale murder of undesirable populations by the Nazi regime) have pretty much failed the laugh test with me. They are either very, very stupid or quite evil, and I have tolerance for neither.