User talk:Falcon91Wolvrn03

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I was sad to see that you're going to be away for the next week, because as you're coming back, I will be leaving for the summer after that. I want you to know that despite our disagreements, I really appreciate what you're trying to do. It's difficult for most people to write a truly NPOV article, which is why what Wikipedia does is so great. By having hundreds of thousands of authors, almost every point of view is represented, and people are forced to compromise, usually resulting in pure truth.

Unfortunately, the Holocaust is one of the few subjects where this doesn't work. It is a subject which should be purely history. The Nazis kept spectacular notes on everything that they did, and it should be spectacularly easy to say "this here is exactly what happened. We know, because of the monthly reports written by Himmler." Unfortunately, Holocaust deniers continually show up, most of whom have no interest in truth or even compromise. They tend to wipe entire paragraphs, and replace them with their own propaganda. This is just who they are. They cannot provide evidence as convincing a page from Hitler's desk ordering the final solution to "The Jewish Problem" so they don't listen or compromise and eventually leave in a bad mood.

At the same time, I can't exactly claim to be NPOV either. It is fairly clear from what I have already written here that I hold Holocaust deniers in no high esteem. Quite frankly, I find their so called "beliefs" to be an attack against me and my people. It is, to me, like someone claiming there was never racial segregation in the United States, and that even if there was, the slave owners didn't know their slaves were being beaten. It would be an absolutely ridiculous claim, and yet people get away with it in reference to the Jews.

It is good, therefore, that someone has shown up who is interested in this issue, but who has no real stake in the argument. I would caution you, however, against being overly zealous in your changes. Holocaust deniers are, by and large, anti-Semitic. My personal favourite group believes that Jews are shape shifting lizards from Mars who are infiltrating the world governments in order to enslave humanity. And yes, this group has a following. The "Holocaust Revisionist" lines and the "Jewish persecution was wrong" lines are simply ways of attracting new followers who can then be trained to believe just about anything once they've got their foot in the door. The people running these groups are solely occupied with promoting anti-Semitism in the hopes that some day they can finish off what Hitler started. I encourage you to write carefully about what they believe, but please don't be fooled by them.

I wish you the best of luck. --Caliper 21:30, 28 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the nice words Caliper. My research into what holocaust deniers believe usually leads me to the VHO, CODAH, or IHR web website. These appear to be the "mainstream" denier websites. I haven't seen much (if anything) on the "Neo-Nazi" point of view, other than what the non-deniers point out. That's why I think when presenting denier viewpoints, we should primarily stick with their published views (such as those on the VHO/CODAH/IHR websites), rather than their views as expressed by non-deniers.

Let's continue working together with the Wiki community to ensure the views of both sides are presented as accurately as possible. Falcon91Wolvrn03 07:22, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] In response to your email...

It's been a couple days since you sent the email, since it somehow landed in my auto-junk folder, so I'm including the text in case you've forgotten

Hi Caliper, I agree with your views completely. Like I said, I came here to see how this site addressed the views of deniers/revisionists like the ones I read about on the VHO website. I personally am much less interested in the neo-nazi viewpoints, even though those must definitely be addressed as well.

What it appears like to me is that people here don't seem to believe VHO about their own viewpoints. Either that, or they consider VHO a "denier" organization, lump them together with the neo-nazis, and then focus their arguments against the neo-nazi viewpoint, which is much easier to debunk. What I'd like to do is find an acceptable way to separate the neo-nazi viewpoint from the VHO viewpoint, and address both individually. Do we call VHO a "revisionist" organization? I doubt anyone would buy into that (not even me). Do we mention the neo-nazis in an introductory paragraph, but then say this article focuses on the "more reasonable" VHO perspective? That'd be my personal preference.

But people don't seem to want to talk about the VHO viewpoint, even though from what I've seen on the Nizkor website, their viewpoints can be debunked as well, without making strawman arguments, as we're doing now. So I guess for the time being, my focus is to present the VHO viewpoint (that is my favorite denier site, even though CODAH and IHR present a very similar viewpoint). Hence, the reason I said something like "when we talk about what deniers think, let 'them' tell us their opinion, let's not have non-deniers write about what the denier position is.

I see what you're saying about letting deniers speak for themselves. My biggest concern is that in the past, when people put revisionist views on the site, they didn't present them as revisionist views but as absolute truths. If you can find a way around that, that would be great. The problem I'm personally having is that I want to write about all points of view, but I want to constantly prove the other "point of view" wrong.

As for separating revisionists and deniers, I think it's a good idea. We had a Holocaust revisionist page for a while, but it eventually got deleted and redirected to Holocaust denial. I think people would be open to putting it back if you started by drafting it on your User page. I'd certainly be in favour of it, since I feel that denial and revision are two different movements that are getting muddled together on the denail page. --Caliper 18:10, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)