Smokey wrote:Res Ipsa makes the point that much of what you believe about Anne Frank’s Diary is faith based, and it’s good to remember that this is a belief system.
It is the Cult of Holocaustism. Observe:
The Devil = Hitler
Devil worshipers = neo-Nazis, fascists, racists, eugenicists, Christians/Trump supporters, etc.
Cursed people = Germans and Whites generally
Blasphemy/heresy = Holocaust denial
Blasphemy/heresy laws = Holocaust denial laws
Pilgrimages to holy places = mass travels to Holocaust concentration camps and other places connected with the Holocaust
Places of worship elsewhere = museums, Yad Vashem, and so on. See also: List of Holocaust memorials and museums.
Holy days = Holocaust Memorial Days
The Blessed Virgin = Anne Frank
Holy scriptures = the Posen speeches, the Wannsee Protocol, the Hossbach Memorandum, Anne Frank's diary, and so on
Relics = Holocaust memorabilia displayed in the places of worship and traded on, for example, Ebay
Icons = Holocaust photographs, holograms of Holocaust survivors, and so on
Morality plays = Holocaust movies and television series
Martyrs = Holocaust victims
Saints = Holocaust survivors
Apostles = notable Holocaust witnesses
Holy Warriors = Nazi hunters, anti-racists, social justice warriors, and so on
The Cross = the gas chamber
Resurrection = creation of Israel
Offerings, penances, and indulgences = payments and privileges to various groups and Israel
Prophets = alarmists alarming of a new a Holocaust if not obeyed such as when lobbying for starting wars on various perceived enemies of Israel
The Jew is over-represented in all places except Arlington Cemetery
Once again, Smokey flat out lies about what I've posted. He starts out by creating an enormous straw man out of Anne Frank's diary -- insisting that people think about it in ways that most people don't actually think about it. He essentially claims that popular beliefs about the diary are the sole basis for people accepting the reality of the holocaust. He claims, somehow, that if he can debunk the diary, he's debunked the holocaust.
Next, he goes about brutally attacking his own straw man. But he can't even do that without telling lie after lie after lie after lie. Will he ever own up to the fact that he lied about the ball point pen, even going to the point of trying to fake evidence? Nope.
I'm the perfect counterexample to Smokey's straw man. When this discussion started, I knew there was a girl named Anne Frank, that she hid from the Nazis and kept a diary. I assumed she'd died, but had no idea how or when. All of Smokey's straw man claims about what everyone believes about Anne Frank's diary were completely alien to me. When I mentioned to my wife that I had never read Anne Frank's diary, her reaction was: don't bother -- it's not that great a book. Yet neither she nor I were holocaust deniers -- our thinking about the events of the holocaust itself had nothing whatsoever to do with Anne Frank.
Every historical figure of any perceived importance gets mythologized to some degree or other. Think about Otto Frank for a minute. The last time he saw his wife and daughters was on the selection ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He returns to the Netherlands after the war, but they simply never come back. Imagine how that feels. From the reading I've done, I think he tried to do two things with his daughter's papers: fulfill her dream of becoming a published author, and promote her as a symbol of all holocaust victims.
Looking at the Anne's original diary, the revised version she intended to publish, and the first published version based on Otto's combining of the two original manuscripts, I think that fulfilling his daughter's dream was his primary motivation. Promoting her as a universal symbol came later, and was done through the vehicle of a play that was eventually produced. I haven't read the script, and probably never will. But in reading about it, I can see how it mythologized her into more of a universal symbol. In my opinion, the cost of doing that was watering down meaningful parts of her story. It deemphasized her Jewishness, and it overemphasized her faith in humanity. And, to me, that blunts what makes her story so tragic: she was an ordinary teenager with all of the faults and warts that human teenagers have who did not in any way, shape or form deserve what the Nazi's did to her.
That's all interesting, but none of it matters. Because I can read her original diary. I can read how she wanted to take that material and transform it from a private diary into a public diary that told her story. And I can read how her father tried to combine those two to tell her story and convince a publisher to publish it. And there is nothing in the differences in details of those versions that changes the story of what happened to a teenager named Anne Frank.
One additional note: Smokey's post here is a classic example of projection. He is a religious cultist. So he thinks everyone else thinks in terms of cult-like, religious symbology. His attempt to analogize his own cultic symbology to people's evidence-based beliefs about the holocaust just shows how screwed up his own thought processes are.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
