did the holocaust actually happen?

well, i might be a product of it. my paternal grandmother just kind of shows up as an orphan in the 30s, without much of any documented history. she was raised in an italian family, and one would no doubt make many errors if forced to differentiate between italians and jews out of a line-up, but i think most people would assume she looks pretty jewish. there's pictures of my dad from the 70s, full bearded, where he actually looks flat out arab, although he aged in a way that made him look not dissimilar to chomsky, in that eastern european jew kind of way - although he aged terribly. his physical appearance was described almost perfectly in the term 'italian jew'. although, when i say he aged in a way that made him look not dissimilar to chomsky, what i mean is that, at 50, he looked not dissimilar to chomsky at 70. i got my mom's genes, on that one; i remember bringing her to a field trip in the fourth grade, when she was almost 30. and having the entire school think she was my teenaged sister. this deduction, though, is ultimately not phenotypical - the two rumours on that side of the family are that she is in some unknown way a product of the holocaust (smuggled in, maybe?) and that she's the product of a mob hit, and sometimes these stories intersect in a tale of starcrossed lovers and racist slaughter by catholic mob bosses that couldn't deal with the interracial, and interreligious, eloping. my grandmother is a catholic. my aunt claims she found them in a newspaper clipping of young lovers tied to railroad tracks (and subsequently annihilated) in ottawa in the 30s, but the evidence is circumstantial, at best. my grandmother doesn't know.

between the time of her adoption and the time she was married, my paternal grandmother's last name was zito. and, ottawa was known to have an international mob presence, at the time. you can find pictures of the big bosses, i think including capone, existing in ottawa. it actually does add up. the fact that she seems to have no known history has led to the speculation that her adopted parents probably knew what happened - perhaps even knew the killers - and just didn't tell her. there is literally no trail. her adopted mother could have been her mother's sister, or something.

or maybe her parents managed to get her out, despite the attempts of north american governments to prevent jews from arriving. certainly, if you wanted to get your jewish infant or toddler child out of germany in 1937, you'd have had to have done something like smuggle it out. and, you wouldn't want a paper trail, because if it's found then the kid will get sent back.

maybe i'll look into it one day...

anyways, whether i'm the result of it or not, did the holocaust actually happen?

i run across this question from time-to-time, and i'm going to provide somewhat of a dodgy response: the holocaust is as well, or better, documented and convincingly demonstrated as any other event in accepted mainstream history. so, i can be as sure that the holocaust happened as i can be about any other event in history.

but, look at the words i'm using, the language, the context: event in history. history.

that is not the argument that my grandparents would provide. they may have been born as it was happening, and not remember it, but it was a part of their lives. this is not even the argument that my parents would provide, as they lived with people that lived it. three of my grandparents are even still alive, and all three of them could very well outlive my mother, between the heroin and the alcohol and the cigarettes, not to mention the half of a dozen duis.

but, the boomers are passing, and this is going to be the new reality around the holocaust: we are approaching the point where no living people have any connection to this any more, and it exists purely as history.

this is the situation that the holocaust memorial people have been preparing us for for the last 60 years, the point where the question is no longer about forgetting, because we don't have memories to forget. you can't forget what you never knew. instead, you need to ask the question: can you trust history?

well, can you?

punk?

it's exceedingly well documented. i understand this. but, so is the life of jesus.

a part of the problem is how central the holocaust story is to the western founding myth, at this point. it's intrinsically interconnected with the ascent of american hegemony, so it is consistently intertwined with narratives that are otherwise blatantly false. turning on cnn, you could very well have a holocaust memorial set sandwiched between a fraudulent expose on the syrian government gassing children and a jaw-droppingly bad interview with kellyanne conway that goes on for twenty minutes without managing to say a single true statement at all. association doesn't produce guilt, but it's a little unsatisfying to come to the conclusion that the only accurate information provided by the media is related to a historical event, even as they misrepresent every other kind of history on a hourly basis. the importance that the media places around it really does make the whole thing seem kind of fishy.

it's exceedingly well documented. i understand this. but, i think there will come a time when nobody really thinks this happened - or that the scale was exaggerated.

"6 million is an exaggeration. maybe it's an error by a scribe. i mean, look at the way that herodotus exaggerated the size of the persian army, for example. they probably added a few zeroes."

so, it's as well documented, or better documented, as any other event in history, sure.

but, analysing history is fundamentally different than analysing the present. this is something that's changing.

if german becomes a dead language, for example, we're going to lose incredible amounts of our scientific and broadly intellectual history, reliant on summaries in english and translations into russian. that is inevitable, though. we will forget this. we eventually won't be able to read it.

your precious hegel will eventually be illegible to even the most sophisticated idle bourgeoisie in berlin. perhaps this is when history implodes upon itself - it just swallows itself whole, and disappears into a wormhole, yelling taunts at humanity as it flees.

it reminds me a little of my argument that all history becomes poetry in the end, and that this relationship is determined by the co-efficient of poeticity, which is naturally pi. i'm not sure i've explored this here. that is for another time.

is human progress, civilization, inherently forgetful?

well, certainly a lot of humans are inherently forgetful. we forget to do things, and forget lessons taught to us, all of the time. maybe the idea that i'm really expressing is that many of us are stupid, but the way this manifests itself is largely as forgetfulness.

now, the individualist will point out that while many, perhaps most, people are forgetful, there are some people that are not and these people will carry on the thrust of human progress, no matter how forgetful we may collectively be. but, their argument relies on the ideological construct of independence, and this is an empirical question with little evidence supporting it. individualism, at best, seems to be rare. so, these individuals are really left with a curatorial task to remind people of what they've forgotten - they're really just the cleared registers in the collective, trying to avoid the garbage collection from clearing them away, urging for a second chance to exist in memory - and failing. it's like a broken system of error-correction; we can remember and forget at the same time. so, this question of the inherent forgetfulness of human progress does not reduce to a question around independent variables.

it's just a different intellectual conception of progress - not as a linear curve tilting off towards some windmill at infinity, but as this messy, chaotic step-function, full of unpredictable fragments.

there is, of course, a hierarchy of seriousness attached to the consequences of forgetting what is being forgotten. geography can be found easily. a lesson can be relearned. but, forgetting science can be devastating.

this is a potentially unrealized consequence of globalization - when the global culture falls, there will be nobody left to remember what was forgotten.