Some people genuinely believe the world is flat despite all the evidence against it. That some deny historical events shouldn’t be too shocking.
Some folks just have a hard time believing something so horrible could’ve happened.
Other folks believe it happened but are spreading disinformation and pretending like they don’t. The “just asking questions” type. They’re Nazis, plain and simple.
Don’t take fascists at their word. They’re lying to you, they don’t believe it was fake, they want you to doubt it and cede ground. Don’t engage with them, they’re operating in bad faith
It’s also a tactic to control the conversation. Even if you don’t doubt it, even just engaging to prove it gives their bullshit undeserved credibility. Every response is a losing proposition; your best option at that point is “fuck off, clown.”
100% this is the answer. They deny reality, hoping you will too. The whole goal is collective dismissal of past horrors, so they can do them again, or pretend they aren’t that bad. See what Israel is doing to Gaza for a literal playbook for what they want to do to minorities. They can’t fucking wait to pave over their bodies and pretend they’re victors of a holy war.
These aren’t people with a normal sense of empathy.
Right. They understand it puts them in a bad light, and people they hate in a sympathetic one, so they deny it happened.
“It never happened, but if it did it was a good thing and I hope we do it again!”
If something disagrees with someone’s world view, they can either update their world view or find a way to not believe it. Someone whose world view has become their identity will struggle a lot to update that world view, so it’s cognitively easier for them to believe a conspiracy theory instead.
So basically, motivated reasoning.
And often the only thing that could convince such a person would be to see it happening firsthand.
See: YouTuber Jeranism and his recent trip to Antarctica. Seeing a 24 hour winter sun was the catalyst to pulling him out of that particular rabbit hole.
That said, if the person in question is American and doesn’t know how it happens, just sit tight because I’m sure the ICE will be along sooner or later to inform you of your free flight to El Salvador.
Failing that, we could always send said person to Western China to show them what’s going on there.
Hate and an inherent distrust of ‘the experts,’ or as they may see it, ‘the establishment/system’
But mostly hate and stupidity
This is the same core issue with flat earthers, moon landing deniers, and the anti-vaxxers. There’s just a core element of their minds that has flipped and now denies established and accepted truths simply because they are otherwise accepted.
Fear. It starts with fear. As Matter Yoda taught us.
Want an even better question? How can they deny it and celebrate it at the same time?
That’s racism. It’s always double standards, double speak, and cognitive dissonance.
Oh a good black man with a law degree from Harvard, who is also a civil rights attorney, who lectures at Harvard Law in constitutional law, who’s deeply qualified ran and got a senate seat? He’s now a meteoric success, now he’s president? Well… he’s not REALLY black! He’s only HALF black! It hardly counts.
A black man robbed a store? SEE! SEE! THEY’RE ALL LIKE THAT! ALL OF THEM!! He’s only 1/4 black? Well obviously he got enough of the black genes to be a born criminal! They’re all like that!!!
There was a show almost ten years ago were a black comedian went to racist groups to live with them for a day or a week or so. It actually had surprisingly little drama, maybe helped change some minds. Obviously it wasn’t very successful as a show.
In one episode he was living with a couple who absolutely denied the Holocaust. Towards the end the guy and his girlfriend were going back and forth agreeing on how much they didn’t believe it happened, until the girl said something like “I don’t think it happened but you know… It should have”. The man seemed a little shocked by that. It ended with the comedian and the racist talking things out and it at least seemed the guy was in thought.
Never underestimate how absolutely fucking stupid people are
It’s a very dark part of conspiracism in general. The same tactics, both conscious and unconscious, are used to evangelise these ideas - and defend them despite being indefensible - as are used in all conspiracy theories and “alternative” views of established fact.
So, it has less to do with the available evidence, and more to do with personality flaws. It’s not even about reasoning skills or intelligence - the more intelligent you are, the less likely you’ll be to change your views because you’re so good at generating narratives that support your position. It’s a deep flaw in human psychology that can’t be reasoned away, and trying to combat these ideas with facts just reinforces them and gives them credibility (which is why no one with any sense debates Holocaust deniers anymore). It’s like when a schizophrenic person hallucinates; you don’t want to do or say anything that makes the hallucination seem real, you don’t want to say “where is the creature? Here? I’m stamping on it, is it gone? I don’t see it!” you simply accept that they’re hallucinating and don’t engage with it beyond that. Extreme example, but the logic is the same.
You can’t assume they are arguing with a genuine belief. They don’t care whether or not those people died. They want to debate you over the validity of their claims.
You are assuming they argue in good faith, I consider any holocaust denier to argue in bad faith and I will not engage with them.
If you see someone starting to accept their arguments, you can absolutely start questioning them and try and reason with them to get away from that scene, but a die hard holocaust denier is simply not worth your time or energy.
Just disengage and move on.
Conspiratorial thinking.
Many people are motivated by a need to feel superior to others, have a strong distrust of authority, and/or feel that acceptance of a belief system is a requirement of their internalized group identity.
I think it’s a bit more nuanced than that. Conspiracies are real, they happen constantly. They’re often right there out in the open, with paper trails and direct confirmation in interviews. They’re just nuanced and not fun to think about
And here’s one of my favorite: the government intentionally boosts dumb conspiracy theories so people will dismiss real ones
True - I think it’s a combination of those personality traits, social pressures, and a desire to believe that leads to irrational conspiratorial/superstitious thinking.
They’re afraid of a simple truth: they don’t matter.
In the grand scheme of things, none of us do. Not even those “remembered” by history. A person is so much more than a name or the deeds they accomplished, but none of that will last beyond your death. Not for any of us.
Because people like that don’t believe in the evidence or think it is faked.
People are emotional creatures. They feel a thing, and then pick evidence that supports it and discard evidence that doesn’t.
We all do this to some extent- like when people root for a local sports team that’s kind of bad, or when someone likes a movie that’s unpopular. They’ll ignore stuff like a 10 game losing streak or a large plot hole, and focus on the one time they hit a grand slam, or that one quotable scene.
It’s mostly harmless when we’re talking about small stuff, but when it’s about history or social policy it’s a problem.
The same way the same kind of people are managing to deny history’s first livestreamed genocide: hate.
There’s two types of holocaust deniers, as described to me by a holocaust studies professor:
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The stupid ones. People who dismiss it as fake because numbers don’t add up, it just didn’t happen, there was a coverup, whatever bullshit.
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The scary ones. The holocaust didn’t happen because they didn’t finish the job.
It used to be mostly the former, but as time goes on, the line is less distinct as we see a resurgence in hate groups more extreme than the last. So imagine the two combining into a version of “it didn’t happen because some got away.”
Side note: if you want an extraordinarily dark and depressing read, Klee, Dressen, and Riess’s The Good Old Days pulls together reports, correspondence, postcards etc from Nazis detailing some of the worst atrocities, and they just wrote some of this shit back to their families. That book haunts me.
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Many reasons, but people who lack critical thinking skills will generally only need one other person to agree with them, for confirmation bias to entrench itself.
But the situation is even worse than that, because these days, the “other person” doesn’t even have to be real. A bot spreading disinformation can have the same effect as a person spouting nonsense.
And social media gives the tiniest minority the appearance of having a massive voice. Someone who is on the fence might see other Holocaust deniers online and think that there are millions of like-minded people like them.
When this spreads beyond Holocaust denial and into social and human rights causes, you have a disaster in the making. Those same people will make real decisions off their manipulated beliefs, and that hurts everyone.
