Oh no, you didn't

After we talked about which way I should go to take him to the Saint Francis medical building, he asked

"Are you a native San Franciscan?"

"No. I grew up in Germany."

"I have been to England, France and Amsterdam. But I have never been to Germany."

"Ah."

"I would love to go to Germany and take a tour of all the concentration camps." I was fascinated by his mouth when he spoke. His face was a stiff mask, but his lips formed different shapes. Nothing else in his face moved when he spoke.

"Yeah, that would be an experience."

"What do you think about the new law that makes it illegal to deny that the holocaust happened? I think you can go to jail for that now."

"I generally don't like those kinds of laws. They infringe upon freedom of speech."

"Yeah, but those are lies."

"So you're in favor of the law?"

"Well, somebody has got to do something about those lies. If you were a politician, you could never get away with saying anything that condones genocide. Like if you said anything in favor of killing jews, or blacks, or Native Americans, you would never get anywhere as a public figure."

"But denying that something happened and being in favor of genocide are two different things, aren't they?"

"I think anybody that denies any kind of genocide is very suspect. They are probably in favor of genocide. Why else would they lie about it?"

"Maybe they just don't want to believe that the world could be that bad? Maybe they just don't want to believe that people could do something that horrible to each other?"

"I don't know."

"Like with the Native Americans--" I was going to say regarding Native Americans, that maybe patriotic Americans don't want to believe that their country ever committed genocide, so they try to tell themselves that it never happened. But he interrupted me.

"Well, we had to kill the Native Americans."

"What?"

"We had to build railroads from the east to the west, and they didn't want that."

For the remainder of our time together, which luckily was only a few blocks' worth, I was very annoyed. Yes, it's a lie to say that the holocaust never happened. But it's also a lie to say that we had to kill the Native Americans.