or perhaps…. “E-mail is a dangerous tool, grasshopper. Use it wisely.”
That would be because this story requires both a wackadoodle loon and an itchy keyboard finger suspended above the “send” button.
It seems that the Upper East Side harbors at least one person who really feels that the Nazi Party has had a raw deal. That it is long past time to air both sides of this genocide story. That really the Jews had coming to them what didn’t happen to them, or something.
That’s not really a surprise, actually — the left arm of the bell curve is always going to include a few outliers on the “dumb and dangerous” axis.
What was a shock, at least to fellow parents of kids at P.S. 290, was that one Michael Santomauro decided to share with the parent email list his views, suggesting that they check out a book he published (but did not author) titled Debating the Holocaust, along with the endorsement, “You should read this book! It is rocking my world!”
The New York Times reported that Santomauro said he was sorry, sort of:
He meant to send the message to another group he belongs to, where members debate whether accounts of the Holocaust are exaggerated, and he apologized to the parents for the “total confusion”…
…which makes it OK, I guess. He is just a guy who just hungers for open debate:
“There’s no reason if you question aspects of what may or may not happen or what murder weapon was used during the Holocaust that you should be called an anti-Semite.”
Well…we might have to differ on that, Mr. Santauro.
__
Which isn’t to say that I think this guy is a villain. IMHO, he’s more likely to be someone who’s sucked just a little too deep at two springs: the Jews-are-the-enemy corner of the old-fashioned hate machine (thank you Father Coughlin, Pat Buchanon, and all your nasty little friends) — and as deeply from the well filled by those whom Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have called the Merchants of Doubt. That’s the species, rhetorical-guns-for-hire, who infest the right and have provided cover to many: the cancer slaughterers of the tobacco industry; the climate change denialists and so on.
These doubt-mongerers don’t say that such-and-such is wrong, or didn’t happen. Rather, they say we’re not sure. There are gaps in the evidence. Let’s debate…just like Mr. Santomauro thinks we should wrangle over the Final Solution.
__
But like I said, I’m not mad.
I’m happy.
Santomauro did everyone a service when he hit the send key just a little too quickly. Because he’s transparent and the cause he advocates so hollow, his eager-puppy message casts the denialist tactic of malicious doubting into sharp relief:
There is no honest argument here, nor in climate change studies, nor was there in the tobacco-cancer link for decades, despite the organized campaign to suggest uncertainty. The point always is to delegitimize any claim of interest or attention or memory that flows from the actual history or science under scrutiny. The merchants of doubt spreading nonsense about climate change aren’t actually trying to advance the science; they are trying to make it impossible to attempt the real life and economic changes that would flow from taking that science seriously.
And in that context, while it’s easy to both laugh at and recoil from what seems like sympathy for Nazi viciousness, we should thank this guy, if only for making it easier to define what’s wrong with the “debate” on so much else right now.
Besides, I guess one shouldn’t take all this too seriously, as a sensible voice within the PS 290 parent body pointed out:
Melinda Battelli-Scopaz, the parent of a kindergartner, said when she read the e-mail that she “came to the conclusion that this guy is a moron.”
Image: Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne, Altogether Too Stupid, before 1662.
Yutsano
Well Mr Santomauro is more than welcome to identify what happened to more than one eight of my family after 1933, but since they were Jews in Germany I think I’m capable of putting two and two together and determining that maybe, just maybe, their government slaughtered them. My great-grandmother was supposedly very close with her sister, then the letters just stop. Explain that please.
Ed Marshall
I had a little crappy blog, long ago, and I was making a point about *something*, I can’t remember how this fit into it, but there was a sentence in there about how the Nazi’s didn’t actually make soap out of people and how that rumor had started (it was something else where people believed an acronym meant something it didn’t).
I had holocaust deniers fly into my blog in a swarm. My usual traffic was about 200 visits a day. It spiked up, and that comment had about 80 comments within a day. All of them crazy, nutty, anti-semites. My guess is that you just sucked a bunch of the nastier beings on the internet into balloon-juice by mentioning Debating the Holocaust
Alison
I am sure he’d be happy to know that it’s assholes like him who help make me proud to be a Jew.
Tom levenson
Ed — If they come they shall be dealt with appropriately, I’m sure. This commentariat will brook no nonsense, and, come the dawn, I’ll be back to hold their coats.
Violet
Would the school be better off if Mr. Santomauro’s son was expelled? Sins of the father and all. It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
trizzlor
small note, his son goes to school on the UES, but he lives on the Upper West … which is even more ironic.
stickler
Good can come of idiocy like this, I guess. I’ve been blessed to make the acquaintance of a married couple who survived the Holocaust. Very dapper, eloquent (and, obviously, they were pretty young in 1944, and met after the war), patient.
They go around to high schools and colleges now, maybe ten times a year, and just talk about what happened to them.
And they do it because in the early ’90s the husband just got fed up with people saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. He wanted to show American schoolkids that, yes, it did happen. He lived through it. (Him — Auschwitz, then slave labor near Munich; Her — family rounded up in Budapest, mother deported, heroic escape, most of family gone.)
Plus, there’s the wonderful fact that at least one person has come to the conclusion that a Holocaust denier is a “moron.” There is progress in human affairs.
Mnemosyne
I keep meaning to see Errol Morris’ documentary Mr. Death, but I think I would end up shouting at the TV one too many times. Anyone who doesn’t know that it actually takes more cyanide to kill lice than it does humans shouldn’t even open his goddamned mouth about the Holocaust.
jl
Perhaps, sadly, this passage from the link sums it up:
‘ Melinda Battelli-Scopaz, the parent of a kindergartner, said when she read the e-mail that she “came to the conclusion that this guy is a moron.” ‘
I have a comment for one of the writers at BJ about this bit here:
‘ The merchants of doubt spreading nonsense about climate change aren’t actually trying to advance the science; they are trying to make it impossible to attempt the real life and economic changes that would flow from taking that science seriously. ‘
I think T Levenson is not being aggressive enough in using the phrase ‘advance the science’. Any purported expert who is not trying to ‘advance the science’ in a constructive way, is not doing science, and their expertise should be seriously questioned.
Advancing the science, and doing science involves trying to put different pieces of the conceptual, technical theory, and evidence together to make some kind of prediction, retrodiction, or estimate. Something constructive.
I think a sure sign of lack of expertise, or bad faith, is someone who does nothing put nitpick around, criticize, and debunk without offering some positive evidence that they know what they are talking about.
Of course, that requires sticking one’s neck out in offering alternative explanations, or making some kind of prediction, which debunkers rarely bother to do.
My little recipe for spotting nogoodniks does not solve all the problems, since some debunkers do try to do rival analyses, as we have seen with some policy type economists who want to play at being a time series statistician and offer rival analyses of climate data that supposedly debunk some published result (so far the results have been an embarrassment to economists). But at least they have opened their mouths and removed all doubt, and if you can get anyone who can do HS math and think, and is open minded, to listen, you can walk them through the BS analysis and explain why it is a mess and does not work.
But anyway, I think term ‘do not advance the science’ is too mild a phrase, and I think the implications of a supposed expert who is always willing to critique but never actually do anything original or positive should be made clear to laymen.
You cannot claim to an be an expert at some things if you never do them. Being an expert at math, science or statistics is not a spectator sport. But if you are always merely critiquing then you are a spectator, not an expert.
Chris
@jl:
True, and it’s not just science. More and more, policy seems to be dominated by people who are recognized as experts in things they’ve never actually done. The Iraq war, for example, came to us courtesy of a class of national security “experts” who for the most part had never served in combat.
I personally am a big believer in listening to the professionals (I don’t see how the hell else any society can function). So it disturbs the hell out of me that with the rise of movement conservatism, so many professions (science, the media, various government departments) are being handed over to politicized drones whose only qualification is their ability to mindlessly repeat the party line.
djesno
Melinda Battelli-Scopaz for the next SCOTUS opening!
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
Not only had they never served in combat, they were never trained for combat. They didn’t even play Army under realistic conditions.
Heck, the Commander in Chief of that CharlieFoxtrot deserted from the damn Air National Guard, and his second was a five time exemption draft dodger who had “other priorities” than serving in his generation’s war. Contrast with Al Gore and John Kerry, who both served, in uniform, in country. While Al Gore wasn’t in combat, Kerry definitely was, and was decorated for it.
The response of the Rethugs is to mock Kerry’s Purple Heart.
THE
I think this might be a good place to link this cartoon strip.
jon
Holocaust Denial is very sensible when the Holocaust is looked at as a goal rather than as a historical event. Surely there was no Holocaust if the job isn’t done and the Jews and other subhumans are still alive.
That is the only way to look at those who deny the Holocaust: they see it as unfinished business.
kdaug
Wits sharpened, indeed.
SFAW
But then she said:
Not sure second statement follows from the first.
One of the commenters there wrote that “The Jews were not persecuted because of their religion but because they insist to be a people within other countries.” I guess we should thank him for reminding us that the Jews Control Everything.
SFAW
I guess I don’t see those as disqualifiers for “overseeing” national security. (No, I’m not defending those two traitors, I just don’t see that serving in combat means you’re any better/worse vis-a-vis national policy.)
1) It’s not as if he actually served. Didn’t Michelle Magalangadingdong show that he faked his wound?
2) As a Demoncrat, he’s not a Real Murrican, so any combat experiences he claimed to have had were actually stolen from Republicans who are the only ones to REALLY serve in the armed forces.
3) Swift Boats for Half-Truth
4) George Soros!
5) PROFIT! ! ! (Oops, wrong thread.)
debbie
Having lived on the Upper East Side for 17 years, I can attest to the fact that there is more than a little inbred anti-Semitism among the privileged WASPs. I don’t think it goes to the extent of Holocaust denial, but I’d bet more than a few harbor the belief that “they had it coming to them.”
Omnes Omnibus
@SFAW: I agree that combat experience or military service should not be a condition precedent for national leadership. The attribute that the military can give one that is useful in national leadership is an appreciation of how ugly and how complicated war can be. This should make people careful about the use of force. Some who serve (cough, John McCain, cough) never learn this. At the same time, it is possible to be aware of this without having military service on one’s resume. Studying history, for example, can teach this.
PTirebiter
As Tom points out, it’s an effective and dangerous strategy. Here in Texas, the creationists changed their argument to, “Teach The Controversy” and our media took the bait. Once they sold the false premise of there actually being a controversy, they were off to the races. What made it so insidious was how reasonable the whole “what’s the harm in a little honest debate” to the average person. 100,000 bumper stickers sealed the deal.
alwhite
I guess we have to teach the controversy. I really like the term “agents of doubt” They know they can’t win the debate on facts, ore really at all. Their goal is to plant seeds of doubt & pick off the slow and weak. for the holocaust the goal is to keep hate alive. For tobacco, climate, economics, war and so many other issues it is simply to keep money flowing to the masters of the universe.
SFAW
Agreed.
One wonders how many of the Red Stoat Trike Force (and similar) actually understand that war is not glorious, even if you obliterate your enemy. If they were students of history (or anything else, for that matter), they might come to that realization. But that’s about as likely as Mike Tomlin asking me to start in place of Roethloeisboergoer next Sunday. (He knows I’m still smarting over the Jets’ loss, and doesn’t want to rub it in.)
RalfW
Start with climate science obfuscation, plus pretending that Thomas Jefferson opposed slavery, add in denial of evolution because God said He did it all in a week, and presto, you have the platform of the Republican Party.
If these willful idiots gain any more power, we won’t bomb ourselves back to the stone age, we’ll walk there of our own national accord.
SFAW
As long as I get to ride a dinosaur, that’ll be OK.
asiangrrlMN
I’ve run out of patience with this asshats. I have concluded that “You’re wrong” repeated over and over is the only legitimate response. This asshat is not interested in a debate–he just wants to push his odious beliefs onto other people. And, under the guise of ‘debating’ the issue, he is covertly letting his anti-Semitic freak flag fly. I think questioning whether the Holocaust took place is the very definition of anti-Semitic.
Barry
@jon: One blogger said that there were two types of Holocaust deniers – those who thought that it didn’t happen, and should have, and those who thought that it didn’t happen, and should happen again.
adolphus
I started reading this post and had to take a break to visit the bathroom. I came back many minutes later to finish the post and realize that Tom was linking to Merchants of Doubt, which was the exact book I was reading in the, er, um “library.” Spooky.
I am only a little into it, but it is a great read co-authored by a respected historian of science. I am only up to the second chapter on SDI and the right’s campaign against Carl Sagan. It is amazing how many familiar faces appear even in the earlier chapters. Names like Pipes, Wolfowitz, and Perle, not to mention the first “more reasonable” President Bush while he was still CIA director.
The most recent Bush administration and right wing outlets like Fox news are not recent or an aberration. They are part of a long history and, dare I say it, evolution of right wing thought and tactics.
Karen
I never quite understood the whole point of hollocaust denial. Are they denying it happened because they don’t want to believe such a horror ever happened? Are they denying it but really cheering for it? Are they denying it because they feel Jewish people get too much sympathy for it? What the frak is their motivation?
jrosen
Jon #14: Your observation is accurate for a certain subset of deniers. I think there is another, probably overlapping explanation: Jew-hating (somewhat different than supporting actual genocide) has been popular for centuries, varying in intensity from time to time and place to place. But it has ever been the refuge of the embittered, the perpetually resentful, as well the resort of rulers who needed to distract their dissatisfied subjects (e. g. the Russian czars whose agents fomented pogroms). But Hitler and Himmler showed what the logical outcome of that path can be, and made Jew-hating somewhat unfashionable for some decades since it is not acceptable in polite company. But such a well-established strain of hate never dies out, it just goes underground, waiting for some hard times to emerge.
But mass murder still has a bad taste (at least for most). So what’s a confirmed Jew-hater to do? Why, deny the Holocaust…even better, make out its reality to be a product of a vast Jewish conspiracy (that aligns nicely with all the other Jewish conspiracy fantasies), adding yet another “rationale” for the Jew-hating.
I’ll paraphrase some lines given to a lawyer defending an anti-Semitic murderer on the ever-useful “Law and Order”; (This episode was rerun last week.) “People love a conspiracy theory, Mr. McCoy. It helps them to make sense of an irrational world.” Amen, and too bad.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Karen: There is a certain type of contrarian white guy who wants to feel like he “gets” what’s going on in the world but doesn’t want to invest the time and effort to try to figure stuff out. They are daunted by the dazzling complexity of the world and the grim truth that you really only have a shot at truly understanding, mastering a small subset of a narrowly defined discipline given the limitations of a human life and the vast amounts of information pouring forth from all quarters. Conspiracy theories simplify the world for a certain type of mind.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@jrosen:
Ha! Looks like you already said what I did @ 30.
What is intriguing to me is the mental gymnastics one would have to perform to believe the set of conditions that would make classic grand conspiracy theories possible.
jrosen
# 30. My counterpoint teachers never allowed parallel 5ths.
Actually, we see it mostly from white guys here in the US. But it hsppens among all groups. One example is the idea among certain blacks that AIDS was invented by whites to destroy the blacks. I’d think of some more examples but I have to go conduct an orchestra rehearsal.
SFAW
Whereas my bartender insists I have them.
(Yes, I know, but saying “parallel liters” doesn’t have the same joie de je-ne-sais-quoi.)
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@jrosen: As well he shouldn’t have what with the way they yank your ears this way and that.
But I think I recall examples where Bach did it. And got away with it. Such a show off.
SFAW
Yanking someone’s ears?
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@SFAW: with 13 children i’ll bet there was some yanking, yes. he was the original tiger dad.
Captain C
@Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel): This reminds me of an apocryphal story about Charlie Parker: during a setbreak at one of his concerts/club dates, the conversation turned to harmonic no-nos and someone said that one of the worst things one could do was to play the major third over a minor chord. Of course, during the next set, Bird blasted just such a major third over a minor chord (as in a nice loud long note, not a passing tone) and made it sound amazing.
Granted, very few people could get away with this.