Basket.

Racism, hate and ignorance are a potent mix indeed, and the product is not pretty. It is so bad, I would laugh if it were satire. But no. There are actually people who seem to truly believe.

People who still believe that there is and has always been a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, and cite Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as proof (the fact that it has been known to be a forgery for over half a century notwithstanding). People who think it was the native Americans that were the aggressors and oppressors of the Spanish colonists in the 19th century. People who bloody think the goddamn white "race" is under threat currently from an ever-increasing number of foreign emigrants to their countries, when in fact they are helping to feed them and clothe them by sustaining the economy of the said country.

It is inconceivable how people can bring themselves to believe such garbage when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The Holocaust never happened, they claim. Oh? Thousands of survivors of the Nazi death camps would heartily disagree. The native Americans oppressed the Spanish conquistadors? Hardly, considering Spanish exploitation and foreign diseases such as smallpox caused a decline of the native American population in South America from 15 million at the time of the arrival of the white men to a mere 2-3 million just several generations later. And how can anyone seriously bring themselves to believe in the conspiracy hatched by rich Jewish industrialists to bring the world under a Zionist thumb, and what's more, cite that infernal manuscript (a forgery, and a crude one at that) as proof?

It is plain stupid, and goes to proof how idiotic human beings can really be. And the stupidest of all are people who not only hang on these beliefs, but make unsupported (or weakly supported, sometimes taking true quotes completely out of context) statements that distort historical events to support their asinine assertions.

Most extremists are guilty of such excesses, be they racist or nationalist. The denial and falsification of history is one as old as history itself, from exaggerated claims of enemy casualties in skirmishes to the extreme case of the USSR, where history was virtually rewritten to cast the Communist leaders in a far better light; down to airbrushing photographs in Pravda. yet extremists are currently guilty of most of this.

For example, I read on a white supremacist messageboard the fantastic claim that 400,000 Muslim soldiers fell at the Battle of Tours in 732, in addition to claims that Auschwitz was only a POW camp and Muslim Spain of the Middle Ages a tyrannical hellhole of violence and intolerance. I also visited a website that claims the Rape of Nanking never occured. Topping it all off are myriad claims of the Holocaust never occuring or being greatly exaggerated.

In my opinion, people who falsify history are idiots. I wish I could give them a more eloquent title, but the fact is they are stupid. What happened, happened, and unless the historical record is sketchy, there is little room to debate over the facts. Of course, one may postulate the various factors and motivations, but the facts, at the risk of sounding Dickensian, are inconvertible.

Idiotic they may be for denying or distorting historical fact, they are also shameless and contemptible people, lower than pond scum. These are people without a conscience or a sense of shame. They cannot even be considered to be human.

Oh, the stupidity of mankind.