I'd say it's the opposite. The large portion of the population who believes everything the authorities tell them has a mental illness that prevents them from thinking critically and for themselves.
If they can't do that, their "theory" isn't worth my time. Now if one of the crazies keeps bugging me with his theory, I might apply critical thinking to shut him up, if I don't lose patience and punch him in the face first.
Conspiracy theorists usually show a strong belief in something pretty improbable without a shred of tangible evidence. I think it's fair to label them as "crazies" because they tend to be very vocal about it and impervious to logical flaws in their own theories. And they're annoying, when you annoy people, you can expect some kind of negative feedback, like being mocked or called names.
Something that confuses a lot of conspiracy theorists is that global issues just aren't as important as local issues to people. Having a house, doing your job, raising your kids, spending time with loved ones, and anything that directly affects your ability to do so (e.g. your health, actions of people around you) are important and have a profound impact on your life.
Sometimes the actions of authorities have a direct impact on your life as well, but mostly at a much smaller scale and with less relevance.
Treating MH370 as something that's important to anyone other than people related to those involved leads to typical thinking errors like assuming Russia would care about this plane, or that people are being deluded. The horrible truth is that the whole thing just doesn't matter much.
As for conspiracy theorists these people generally have had atleast 1 experience in the past, where they had picked the right trail and were mislead. These guys generally tend to negate everything they get from mainstream sources and continue to advertise their version of events. I am not saying they are wrong or right, its just psychology. Most of these guys just need a single clue to say to themselves, "You see, i was right".
That's a reasonable stance. I tend to agree with you. It seems uncontroversial that it is important to look for supporting evidence and gather facts.
I wonder what do you make of this public statement, published by Le Monde and written by 34 French scholars, made in February of 1979:
"The question of how technically such a mass murder was possible should not be raised. It was technically possible because it occurred... There is not nor can there be a debate over the existence of the gas chambers."
Do historians get a pass? Do they not need to look for supporting evidence and gather facts?
I don't mean to be inflammatory so please don't vote me down. The point I'm making is that it's easy to dismiss "conspiracy theorists" for their silly ideas, and have these lofty goals of "evidence first", but when an extraordinary claim that is politically motivated stands on very shaky grounds, and "evidence first" is called into action as a modus operandi, then people are told they should not raise questions.
I'd like to remind everyone that it is not controversial to state that there is no documentary evidence for the use of gas chambers between 1942 and 1945. This much has been stated in public television by Tim Sebastian in a 2000 BBC "Hardtalk" interview with a WW2 historian, and stated under oath by the leading WW2 atrocities historian Raul Hilberg.
It's also important to talk about this because this places 99% of people firmly in the "conspiracy theorist" camp, as most people believe these unquestionable claims based on hearsay and not on any body of evidence. If someone disagrees and can show me wrong, please do so without naively assuming that I must have some racial agenda, which I can assure you - I don't.
This is bizarre, because you have written a confused set of paragraphs taken out of the playbook of Holocaust deniers. You have quoted a small piece of an article from Le Monde (out of context). The context was the need to debunk claims by Robert Faurisson, who was and is a notorious Holocaust denier.
You have also made truly outrageous claims about gas chambers, with justification, amazingly, from a television interview (unsourced) and a noted historian (unsourced). I am unconvinced.
The only way I can make sense of what you have written is as an ironic gesture -- an unhinged collage of junk from one of the oldest conspiracy theories, the one that believes in a Jewish cabal.
I have no problem sourcing the statements I made here. For the BBC interview, see here (timestamp: 3:33): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF4GFGMNm3g which I quote below:
David: "The judge says 'I always assumed that there was the evidence that Auschwitz had gas chambers, I was surprised to find that there wasn't until this case came along"
Tim: "There wasn't documentary evidence, is what he said, he doesn't say there wasn't any evidence, he said there wasn't documentary evidence"
David: "There were eyewitnesses and he relies on half a dozen eyewitnesses"
The transcripts for the trial are available for you to investigate for yourself, but the BBC acknowledging in public there's no documentary evidence for it, and quoting from the trial itself, should be enough for you to investigate for yourself from now on, and should be convincing enough.
I do not believe in the racial conspiracy theories you're trying to accuse me of. Nor do I need to. I do not need to believe in any conspiracy theory in order to be interested in the facts about WW2, and in order to understand that in the reality we live in, there is no documentary evidence for an event that is heavily glorified and propagandized in the mainstream education system and media.
The gap between the Le Monde excerpt you quote and your claim about what it shows is similarly large.
You are not arguing honestly, so I'm done.
Why are you not overly analytical like that with regards to the claims that there were gas chambers? If you are in possession of any documentary evidence for them, which seems to be the case since you dispute what two people on opposite sides of an interview take for granted, then you should just show it and the discussion would be over.
I'm giving you a shortcut into this. Look up the trial of Ernst Zundel and you can read the transcript of when Raul Hilberg declares that, from the (literally) tons of records that the Nazis left, there is no document that can serve as evidence for there being gas chambers, or for gas chambers being used as an extermination method. Also look into the work of David Cole who was responsible for unearthing the now mainstream fact that the supposed gas chambers in Auschwitz are post-war reconstructions.
If you want more information on the Le Monde publication, you can go and read or watch what Sylvia Stolz has to say. She is a lawyer who was arrested while doing her job of arguing for her client.
I am 100% arguing honestly. I have no agenda but to show people that everyone falls for conspiracy theories, and that they should get out of their high horses with all of this armchair psychiatry of judging other people's characters by what they believe in.
Please show me where I'm wrong.
> Gas chambers did exist
There were definitely delousing chambers that no mainstream historian denies were used to control the typhus epidemic. If you call those gas chambers, fine. Generally, when this topic is being discussed, "gas chambers" is a shorthand for homicidal gas chambers. IF you have evidence for those, please show.
I'm sorry if you think I am deliberately trying to twist things. I'm not. Yes, there were many camps. Out of all the concentration camps, only these camps in Poland are nowadays said to have housed homicidal gas chambers: Auschwitz, Majdanek, and Treblinka etc (etc being Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno). Also of notice is that only those camps liberated by the Soviets are said today to have housed gas chambers. Right after the war, and for quite some time, it was said there were gas chambers in Dachau and in all the 17 german camps. Today no mainstream historian argues that no german camp had ever housed gas chambers.
Indeed some camps were transit camps, like Treblinka, even though Arad himself (a prominent mainstream jewish holocaust historian) argues in his book that Treblinka was a death camp, and that all who arrived were killed within 15 minutes. This can be easily dismissed by listening to the testimonies themselves, many of which relate that they stopped at Treblinka, took a shower, re-entered the trains and headed to other camps; we also have tons of photos of train tickets showing Treblinka as a transit camp.
Yes, we have eyewitness testimony. Have you looked into them yourself? I have. We can talk about it after you do. The testimonies are entirely exaggerated and have no basis in reality. Dario Gabbai, a self-alleged Sonderkommando (the folks that allegedly operated the gas chambers), said he would cut the hair of the "gassed victims" after they were gassed. He said the victims would turn black and blue, and he'd walk inside the chamber, treading over the corpses, to cut their hair after the fact. I can link you the video to Dario Gabbai himself saying these things but it's on Youtube. This is in direct contradiction with what we know from pictures happened, namely that they had their hair cut as a life-saving measure to avoid typhus through hair lice, which was done, obviously, before they shwoered, and not after they were "gassed".
Regarding Prussic acid, it is a mainstream fact that 95% of all Zyklon-B was used for delousing purposes. The exterminationists have to try and explain the death of 6 million people with only 5% of the available Zyklon-B. Regarding engine exhaust, if you read Pressac, who was a "holocaust denier" (to use your terms) but converted to being an exterminationist, you will see the story about the engine exhaust is very hard to explain and has several technical problems. It is variedly told to be a submarine engine, a Soviet tank diesel engine (which doesn't work for gassing), etc, while no evidence of such engine has ever been found. Plus, it seems a rather ad hoc method for the exterminationists to tout, when usually they defend there was a policy of systematic killing.
I don't believe millions of Jews were killed, because no one has bothered to put together a cogent case for the logistics thereof. Pressac in his book about the operations of the gas chambers attempts to do just that and comes incredibly short of it. I'm definitely interested in that evidence so if you come across it, please send it my way. One of the reasons I got interested in this topic was precisely because the purported method of killing was so dehumanizing and so fantastical that I wanted to know the details. Then I found out there are no details being put forward by the exterminationists.
If there were a cogent case to be made about the holocaust, it would have been made during the trial where Sylvia Stolz worked. The person she was defending was being accused of "denying the holocaust" when no forensic definition for "holocaust" exists. There is no case that can be constructed to define what the holocaust was because it is based entirely on second-hand hearsay and dubious stories of supposed participants that do not match the reality of the events.