Culture

Gas Chambers Aren't Cheap

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In honor of the Arendt Centennial (which is being covered in a big way, in particular by A&L Daily), many books have been written and conferences convened.  But perhaps no symposium could be as laughably inappropriate to her memory as the meeting that gaveled into session today in Tehran:

Holocaust deniers and skeptics from around the world gathered at a government-sponsored conference here today to discuss their theories about whether six million Jews were indeed killed by the Nazis during World War II and whether gas chambers existed.

Featured speakers include "David Duke, the American white-supremacist politician and former Ku Klux Klan leader, and Georges Thiel, a French writer who has been prosecuted in France over his denials of the Holocaust." Duke is expected to argue that gas chambers weren't real, "on the ground that killing Jews that way would have been much too bothersome and expensive when the Nazis could have used much simpler methods."

Celebrate Hannah's birthday by reading Eichmann in Jerusalem, or better yet The Human Condition or The Origins of Totalitarianism. As a bonus, you'll piss off the conferees in Iran tremendously.