SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
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The Destruction of the Rafah Ghetto
There has been intense debate between US and Israel on an impending ground operation into Rafah. It appears the operation is starting to take form, and it's going to look a lot like the evacuations from the Warsaw Ghetto on a much larger scale.
This is not going to look like the assault on the Northern Gaza, since the Israelis have already concentrated the Gazans within Rafah. One of the primary points of disagreement between US and Israel seems to be on the timeline of the evacuations, with the US insisting that it's going to take months to evacuate and sift through the civilian population while Israel has proposed a much more aggressive timeline. Here's how it is going to unfold:
- Israel will establish secure checkpoints and transit facilities around Rafah: registering, delousing, providing medical treatment and food to deportees.
- There will be some weekly target for the number of civilians to process at these transit camps.
- Deportees will then be transported to one of the many
concentration camps"humanitarian islands", they are calling them, with military-aged males likely being segregated from the rest of the population, or at least highly likely to be detained based on other criteria. - Israel will assault Rafah and the city will face a level of demolition similar to but probably not as intense as Northern Gaza.
Historical comparisons are always messy, and you aren't going to see journalists in good-standing noting this, but I can't think of another historical operation that is closer to the impending evacuation of Rafah than the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto. The second battle of Fallujah and the evacuation of Phnom Penh provide other examples of civilians evacuating cities by force or military action, but neither of those approximates the circumstances or tactics which will be used in Rafah.
The Brutal Reality of Resettlement and Partisan Wars
There seems to be two camps: on the one hand, Israel is waging a Genocide, a secret desire to kill all the Palestinians. On the other hand, Israel is engaging in a fight for its very existence and doing everything it reasonably can to limit civilian casualties. But the truth lies in the middle, and can be summarized with two points:
- Israel is fighting a partisan war, which cannot be won without high civilian causalities, in the first place because the militants live among the community but, more importantly, because reprisals against the civilian population are a requirement for winning a partisan war (Israel knows this, the US could never accept that). "Reprisal" provides a better interpretation of the high rate of civilian casualties than either a secret plan to genocide all Palestinians or the absurd notion that Israel is doing everything it can to minimize civilian casualties.
- Israel wants to resettle the Palestinians outside of its aspirational territory, to enemy territory like Egypt.
The actions of Israel, including the impending evacuation of the Rafah ghetto, can be understood by accepting the above two points. It so happens that the above two points are identical to the position of Holocaust Revisionists, or Holocaust Deniers, regarding the Nazi policies with respect to the Jews. Those policies also resulted in the concentration and mass resettlement of the Jews, culminating most famously in the evacuations of the Warsaw Ghetto, those infamous deportation trains, which took place over many months.
In contrast with the Official Narrative- that the secret policy of the Germans was to kill all the Jews, Revisionists maintain the policy was to resettle the Jews to a territory in Russia, with a Jewish state likely being created after the war in Madagascar or Palestine. The Revisionist position is supported by documents, which all refer to "resettlement" as the policy objective of the deportations. But historians maintain that, in all these documents throughout the sprawling German bureaucracy, everyone was "in" on the conspiracy to use "resettlement" as a codeword for "extermination". Even in internal, top-secret communication which was intercepted or captured after the war. That's why, they say, there are no documents outlining the German policy with respect to the Jews as claimed by historians, but there are very many documents outlining the Resettlement policies as claimed by Revisionists.
Israel's insistence it cannot win the war without evacuating Rafah speaks to a similar motive claimed by Revisionists for the evacuations of the Jewish ghettos. We lionize partisan efforts against the Nazis, including the Underground Resistance operating out of Warsaw, but Israel's calculus provides some evidence for the Revisionist claim that, also, the evacuation of the Jewish ghettos was not motivated by a secret policy to exterminate them all within shower rooms in secret death factories.
A Year in Rafah
Despite the similarities described above, there is obviously one major claim in Mainstream Historiography regarding the evacuation of the Jewish ghettos that is an outlier in all respects, from anything else that has happened in human history. Whereas documents all describe these evacuations being motivated by economic and security concerns, and deportees were told that they were being evacuated to Humanitarian Islands where they would have work, this is what actually happened according to orthodox historians:
The Nazis set a quota for the evacuations of the Warsaw ghetto. Deportees were given food and told they would be resettled to camps where they would have work. The deportation trains brought the deportees to a small, secret camp called Treblinka that was set up as a fake train station, complete with a fake train platform and clock, fake ticket booth and posted train schedules. They were told that they were going to take a shower before being transited onwards. They were given soap and a towel and tricked into entering what they thought was a shower room. Then, the doors were locked and they were poisoned by carbon monoxide exhausted by a captured Soviet tank engine.
More than 5,000 people were said to be killed daily in this secret camp staffed by no more than several dozen German personnel, a larger Ukrainian auxiliary, and Jewish workforce. After being killed, all of the victims were buried onsite in huge mass graves. According to the Standard Work on the Treblinka extermination camp by former director of Yad Vashem, Yitzhak Arad, Himmler visited Treblinka in February or March 1943 and:
Himmler learned from his visit to Treblinka that, in spite of his orders, the corpses of the Jews who had been exterminated in this camp had not been cremated, but buried. Immediately after this visit, the big cremating operation began in the camp. This was the main task imposed on Treblinka during the last months of the camp’s existence...
After Himmler’s visit, the date for closing and liquidating the camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka became dependent on the completion of the cremation of the victims’ corpses and the erasure of all traces of the crimes that had been carried out in these camps. The timetable for carrying out this decision lay mainly in the hands of the camp commanders and in their ability and desire to accomplish the erasure of the crimes as quickly as possible...
In Treblinka, the camp command faced the most difficult task—unearthing over 700,000 corpses and cremating them while at the same time continuing to receive new transports with Jews for extermination. In this camp the entire cremation operation lasted about four months, from April to the end of July 1943. To accomplish the task, the cremating took place simultaneously in a number of sites and the largest number of Jewish prisoner-workers were put to work in the various required stages.
So the 700,000 victims of the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto and other deportees were unburied and then cremated over the course of 4 months along with newly-arrived victims. In total, Arad estimated 850,000 victims at Treblinka, meaning that about 6,000 - 7,000 corpses were cremated every single day in this camp during cremation operations. Treblinka was not constructed with any cremation facilities, and so these corpses were cremated on huge outdoor pyres using locally-gathered brushwood although there are no documents or contemporary reports at all describing this process. The cremations were said to take place immediately adjacent to a major civilian rail-line, and adjacent to several Polish villages, and in spite of this there are no wartime contemporaneous accounts of this enormous cremation operation.
Yitzhak Arad heavily relies on an alleged eyewitness called Yankel Wiernik, whose account is by far the most important in the historiography of the camp. Given the complete absence of documentary or physical evidence for any of this- a Soviet excavation of Treblinka in 1945 found no mass graves on the site, and no investigation since then has ever found a single mass grave at Treblinka, Wiernik's eyewitness account is the keystone to the entire Treblinka historical narrative:
He remembered the horrors of the enormous pyres, where "10,000 to 12,000 corpses were cremated at one time." He wrote: "The bodies of women were used for kindling" while Germans "toasted the scene with brandy and with the choicest liqueurs, ate, caroused and had a great time warming themselves by the fire."[6] Wiernik described small children waiting so long in the cold for their turn in the gas chambers that "their feet froze and stuck to the icy ground" and noted one guard who would "frequently snatch a child from the woman's arms and either tear the child in half or grab it by the legs, smash its head against a wall and throw the body away."[7] At other times "children were snatched from their mothers' arms and tossed into the flames alive."
He was also encouraged by occasional scenes of brave resistance.[8] In chapter 8, he describes seeing a naked woman escape the clutches of the guards and leap over a three-metre high barbed wire fence unscathed. When accosted by a Ukrainian guard (Trawniki) on the other side, she wrestled his machine gun out of his grasp, killed the guard, and shot another guard before being killed herself.
You can read the witness account for yourself if you are inclined. In spite of the enormous historiographical importance of Wiernik's work, you cannot purchase it on Amazon in either print or digital form. I only learned about this work from Revisionists, it seems to be something of an embarrassment despite its extremely important position in the historiography of the camp. Excerpts from Wiernik were submitted as evidence by a Soviet Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial, along with a ~15 minute examination of another Jewish witness, who claimed to have been deported to the camp from Warsaw. That's all the evidence that was presented at Nuremberg, for the murder of 900,000 people- a Soviet excavation of the site uncovered no mass graves and no physical evidence was submitted.
I interpret it as a tacit admission to the weakness of the source, that this work is not required reading in every school across America in contrast with, say, Elie Wiesel's Night or Anne Frank's Diary, both of which have important literary significance to the Holocaust narrative but no historiographical significance. Wiesel, for example, makes no mention of gas chambers in his account, instead opting for extermination by burning people alive, which is not claimed by mainstream historians today. Anne Frank's tragic story likewise provides no historiographical relevance to the "extermination camp" narrative and actually contradicts it. She was deported to an alleged extermination camp, Auschwitz, and then transferred to another camp where she died in a hospital of Typhus.
Needless to say, Revisionists regard A Year in Treblinka as literary fiction. This is supposedly a direct eyewitness to the murder of 850,000 people who organized a prisoner revolt in Treblinka (which also has no documentation whatsoever) and heroically killed a Ukrainian guard with an axe.
Suddenly we heard the signal - a shot fired into the air.
We leaped to our feet. Everyone fell to his prearranged task and performed it with meticulous care. Among the most difficult tasks was to lure the Ukrainians from the watchtowers. Once they began shooting at us from above, we would have no chance of escaping alive. We knew that gold held an immense attraction for them, and they had been doing business with the Jews all the time. So, when the shot rang out, one of the Jews sneaked up to the tower and showed the Ukrainian guard a gold coin. The Ukrainian completely forgot that he was on guard duty. He dropped his machine gun and hastily clambered down to pry the piece of gold from the Jew. They grabbed him, finished him off and took his revolver. The guards in the other towers were also dispatched quickly...
Just as I thought I was safe, running straight ahead as fast as I could, I suddenly heard the command "Halt!" right behind me. By then I was exhausted but I ran faster just the same. The woods were just ahead of me, only a few leaps away. I strained all my will power to keep going. The pursuer was gaining and I could hear him running close behind me.
Then I heard a shot; in the same instant I felt a sharp pain in my left shoulder. I turned around and saw a guard from the Treblinka Penal Camp. He again aimed his pistol at me. I knew something about firearms and I noticed that the weapon had jammed. I took advantage of this and deliberately slowed down. I pulled the ax from my belt. My pursuer - a Ukrainian guard - ran up to me yelling in Ukrainian: "Stop or I'll shoot!" I came up close to him and struck him with my axe across the left side of his chest. He collapsed at my feet with a vile path.
I was free and ran into the woods. After penetrating a little deeper into the thicket, I sat down among the bushes. From the distance I heard a lot of shooting. Believe it or not, the bullet had not really hurt me. It had gone through all of my clothing and stopped at my shoulder, leaving a mark. I was alone. At last, I was able to rest.
Wow! How have you never heard of this guy? If his account is true, this work must be so remarkable as to have nearly biblical significance. But you cannot purchase it on Amazon, and Holocaust Deniers are the only ones who actually talk about this guy, rather than historians who quietly use his account as the most important primary source in the historiography of the camp, but who otherwise do not attempt to attach any cultural significance to the man himself who witnessed these things. It is very suspicious, and it's likely because if you read his account yourself you would not find it believable.
Parallel Interpretations
In case the point of my post isn't clear:
Israel's motive and tactics for dealing with the Gazans generally, but especially the impending Rafah Aktion, mirror the Revisionist interpretation of the resettlement of Jews in Eastern Europe. The part of that history which has no parallel- the allegation that the Germans tricked millions of people into entering a shower room, gassed them with exhaust from a captured Soviet tank engine, buried them, then unburied them, cremated them on open-air pyres and reburied the remains, is the part which has no parallel and is also the part of the story which is contested by so-called Holocaust deniers.
In the several years in which I have studied Revisionism, I have only ever noticed Revisionists really talk about Revisionism. But this seems to be changing, on Twitter from a pretty broad array of Twitter accounts I am noticing people talk about Holocaust Revisionism who are not known for that. It might be going viral and become the next forbidden knowledge now that HBD is being digested by the Twitter intelligentsia. The fact that Israeli conflict with the Palestinians is presenting so many direct parallels: the brutal reality of partisan warfare, the mass resettlement of undesirable populations, the ease with which false propaganda becomes "news", are all contributing to what appears to be a growing skepticism among right-wing Twitter that I have never seen before outside of Revisionist circles.
The growth of Holocaust Denial will likely be another consequence of this war.
Edit: Forgot to mention, One Third of the Holocaust is the most well-known Revisionist video discussing these alleged secret extermination camps, although there are many technical studies done for each of the individual camps by Revisionist scholars.
The element of the story you gloss over is the extensive but not-much-talked about cooperation between the Nazis and Zionists, which is a subject which was discussed in Ron Unz's new article on Israel and the Holocaust earlier this month. In addition to the extensive efforts of the Germans to transfer Jews to Palestine, there existed plans for a post-war Jewish state in multiple forms, including the Madagascar Plan (a plan which Joseph Goebbels still mentioned in his diaries when the Holocaust had supposedly already been decided and implemented). After the Madagascar Plan, there were various plans for resettlement in the Pale of Settlement, newly conquered Russian territory, the Lublin district of occupied Poland, etc.
This is why the gas chamber and alleged extermination program are such important claims in the story. Without those elements, this is a story of a country that brutally collapsed right in the middle of a mass resettlement. Like if Israel decided to concentrate and then resettle all Palestinians out of Israel into Egyptian territory, but then Israel was destroyed and conquered by Iran right as that was happening. And then the Iranians made a bunch of ridiculous claims about death factories using absurd methods of mass murder- i.e. the Israelis turned the Palestinians into bars of soap!
So, the Nazi plans all entailed the creation of a Jewish state after expulsion from the European sphere. Historians though claim that (for some reason) this long-standing policy was replaced with an extermination order (they can't say who, when, where or why such a radical change in policy was decided, and such an order has never been found) using primarily homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
If you accept the Revisionist interpretation, that the plan was for resettlement East ahead of the post-war creation of a Jewish state, then these plans by the AfD are absolutely comparable to what the Nazis did. And in particular, if it turns out the Wannsee conference really was all about resettlement as a plain reading of the minutes show, and not codewords for an extermination policy, then the Wannsee Conference is comparable to secret conferences planning for mass resettlement of migrants to their homelands or to a separate colony of some sort.
The gas chamber legend and alleged extermination order are the only things that set them apart, which is why those claims are so important to the broader history.
Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?
With everything going on in the world, it's notable that this article from the upcoming May issue of The Atlantic is featured as the One Story to Read Today. It deserves to be closely studied- not just skimmed and written off as "progressivism gone amok."
Earlier in the thread, @JTarrou theorizes on politics replacing religion:
Given our emerging consensus that politics is replacing religion as the dividing line of society, and taking on many of the same functions, perhaps we should try to formalize it and create an Ecumenical Political Church, espousing a very vague and general set of principles to bound the acceptable limits of politics, that recognizes the fundamental tension of politics and is maximally inclusive.
I'm not shy about being a Holocaust Revisionist, and I'm aware that it seems to be a strange hobby horse to the vast majority of people including most here. Why dedicate so much time and credibility to this issue? It's not profitable, it's extremely low status, there's an extremely low chance of Revisionist criticisms of the narrative breaking through the mainstream in the near future. Ostensibly it's a controversy surrounding history rather than an immediately relevant cultural or technological issue. The reasoning is simple: the Holocaust already is the religion in the West that fulfills the function proposed by JTarrou. Long before I would cite any Revisionist or anti-Semite to make that case, I would plead for anybody who doubts that to closely read this Atlantic piece by Horn.
The Holocaust religion is growing and evolving with technology, and the motives have never been more transparent.
... well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates. Public figures who make anti-Semitic statements are invited to tour Holocaust museums; schools respond to anti-Semitic incidents by hosting Holocaust speakers and implementing Holocaust lesson plans...
If you read the article title maybe hoping for some nuance or self-reflection on the Holocaust Industry, you will be disappointed. According to Horn, Holocaust education is essential, but it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews, particularly in young children.
One of Horn's chief complaints is that Holocaust education fails to impart on children the uniqueness of Jews. On the one hand, this is a fair criticism of Holocaust curriculum which is rife with the "Jews were completely normal and, one day for no reason at all, everybody hated them." On the other hand, it makes the political motivations of the Holocaust religion more transparent: the uniqueness and particularity of Jews should be explicitly taught and celebrated as curriculum. Jews aren't normal, they are special. If that sounds like an uncharitable interpretation, consider this exchange she had with a Holocaust educator:
“If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”
But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms? ...
I was baffled. Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?
“Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”
But Jews don’t do that, I said. Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam; Jews don’t believe that anyone needs to become Jewish in order to be a good person, or to enjoy an afterlife, or to be “saved.” This seemed to be yet another basic fact of Jewish identity that no one had bothered to teach or learn.
Gas Chamber Simulacra
The Dallas Holocaust Museum was opened in 2019 and features prominently in her article: it covers an entire city block in the historical downtown district (Dara complains that it has almost two wings dedicated to the suffering of other minorities in a noble act of self-erasure). If this isn't a proselytizing religion then I do not know what is. Many thousands of children will be herded to these temples of tolerance to Learn their Lessons.
They will be taught the moral thesis of the world, Jews, and the moral antithesis, Hitler. They will sit in the pews learning from the saintly apparition about the Holocaust, using a conversational AI that is no doubt archaic compared to what will soon be displayed in Holocaust museums across the world. They will write down the lessons they have learned and make pledges (i.e. to "welcome and help new immigrants coming into Chicago").
The article covers the ways technology is used to teach the Holocaust to children in the form of holograms, AI, and VR. Dana describes a VR exhibit at one of the museums that takes the viewer on a first-person adventure from a boxcar to inside a gas chamber at Auschwitz.
A way Forward
Still, according to Dara, this doesn't achieve the primary objective of fighting anti-Semitism, which she dubs as a "Western mind virus" in the vein of the critical theorists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists who preceded Holocaust remembrance in diagnosing the Gentile authoritarian personality. Dara emphasizes:
The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism.
Dara's idea of a credible explanation for why Jews were targeted is revealed near the conclusion:
“If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”
She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?” ...
More blank stares. Finally, one woman said, “Are you talking about the Old Testament?”
“Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”
“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said.
I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”
I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.
“The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”
This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.
I wonder what Safe AI-powered simulacra will be used on my children when they become of age, scientifically optimized to train their perception of Jews - and their own identity. Horn has no shortage of ideas:
Back at home, I thought again about the Holocaust holograms and the Auschwitz VR, and realized what I wanted. I want a VR experience of the Strashun Library in Vilna, the now-destroyed research center full of Yiddish writers and historians documenting centuries of Jewish life. I want a VR of a night at the Yiddish theater in Warsaw—and a VR of a Yiddish theater in New York. I want holograms of the modern writers and scholars who revived the Hebrew language from the dead—and I definitely want an AI component, so I can ask them how they did it. I want a VR of the writing of a Torah scroll in 2023, and then of people chanting aloud from it through the year, until the year is out and it’s read all over again—because the book never changes, but its readers do. I want a VR about Jewish literacy: the letters, the languages, the paradoxical stories, the methods of education, the encouragement of questions. I want a VR tour of Jerusalem, and another of Tel Aviv. I want holograms of Hebrew poets and Ladino singers and Israeli artists and American Jewish chefs. I want a VR for the conclusion of Daf Yomi, the massive worldwide celebration for those who study a page a day of the Talmud and finally finish it after seven and a half years. I want a VR of Sabbath dinners. I want a VR...
I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews does. There is .. no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
8d ago
Kurt Caz: The Physiognomy of Colonization
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need
I don't follow travel vloggers in general, but there's one who is more anthropologist than tourist, documenting a phenomenon that no modern academics would dare acknowledge in this day in age. Kurt Caz, the Aryan Wanderer, mostly travels alone, sometimes accompanied by a beautiful woman of the local variety. He only visits non-tourist locations, strides the peasant countryside like a colossus, shows up uninvited and unannounced where the locals have likely never seen a tourist, and is instantly treated with respect by the men and admiration by the women. This is a pattern which is perfectly consistent in his videos across all continents and villages he has traveled through.
Once he visited a village in Papua New Guinea, and I'm not sure how to describe what happened other than they started worshipping him, declaring his visit as the fulfillment of some local prophecy of a white man coming to the village.
Kurt is clearly aware of the racial dynamics at play (and drops hints that he's secretly Based), but he leans into them in the best way. He uses his physical presence and charisma to engage with the locals, who immediately show admiration and respect, and Kurt reciprocates with a genuine racial tolerance that is more real, but completely unlike, what passes for it today.
You see, today "racial tolerance" means fixing the dynamics which are obviously at play in Kurt's content. Don't believe your lying eyes, beauty is relative and the engrained reactions we seem to have is a conspiracy of White Supremacy. Body physique is just a trait with an attractiveness that is brainwashed into us by an intolerant culture; the indigenous reaction to a White Man showing up uninvited and unannounced is just an artifact the legacy of colonization.
And to be sure, there are many factors at play here. Conventional wisdom would likely point to these factors exclusively:
- Kurt's content is just a demonstration of rule #1: Be attractive, and rule #2: Don't be unattractive. He would have a similar reception if he were on the equally "attractive" point of the Belle Curve as an Africa, Asian, or Indian.
- The local women are attracted in particular because they associate him with Western wealth.
- The locals have consumed Western media so they are primed to welcome such a person into their homes.
- The locals are aware of Western cultural customs, so even if Kurt is this physically large stranger they have no fear inviting him into their homes or granting a baseline level of trust.
These factors surely come into play, but they also beg the question. White Colonization could not have happened in the first place without a much smaller number of White Men subjugating a much larger population of indigenous peoples in all cases. India, relative to its population size, was controlled by the British with an extremely small elite pool. Much ado is made about technological supremacy and the violence of colonization, again there's a lot of truth there, but the uglier reality is that the colonization was in many cases more peaceful than existing cultural practices and conflicts if the locals had been left to their own devices.
There's a myth that the Aztecs interpreted the arrival of Spanish Conquistadores as fulfilling a prophecy of the return of the Aztec's gods. That dynamic can be seen as a microcosm in Kurt's interactions throughout his travels. In general, the phenomenon of a race of people regarding another race as divine is much more common than we would expect at first glance. Many people who would laugh at the idea of the Aztecs believing the conquistadores to be emissaries of the Aztec gods also themselves believe in the literal truth of the Jewish covenant, that Jews are a people Chosen by god and they are a race of god-creators vis-a-vis the ancestry of Jesus Christ.
This dynamic also serves an important counterpoint to IQ supremacy. Imagine being a short, weak, ugly nerd with somewhat higher IQ than Kurt. The Rationalists would tend to regard that person as the Superior Being, taking for granted the relativity of Beauty and dismissing the importance of a Noble physiognomy and charisma to civilizational achievement.
This dovetails with @naraburn's post about the Pokemon Go avatar changes being designed, apparently, to challenge conventional beauty standards- especially the sub-question in that thread regarding a conspiracy to promote ugliness. That conspiracy exists, in its declaration that there is no Noble Physiognomy, and our attractions are just manipulated by White Supremacy. Whereas Kurt can just show up and use his physical presence and charisma to exert command, they are trying very hard to engrain - "don't believe your lying eyes, ugliness is beautiful." But in the same way educational interventions constantly fail to close the IQ gaps, these cultural initiatives will also fail because our brains have been tuned to perceive a person's physical attractiveness as a proxy for genetic fitness.
While they will never make Ugly become Beautiful, they absolutely can and will destroy Beauty through Ressentiment. Culture War has fomented a large amount of hostility towards White People from non-white people in the West, but it will never be able to reproduce the racial dynamic that Kurt is able to tap into in his content.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
3mo ago
Operation Poseidon Archer
Reported by CNN:
The United States has named the ongoing operation to target Houthi assets in Yemen “Operation Poseidon Archer,” according to two US officials.
The named operation suggests a more organized, formal and potentially long-term approach to the operations in Yemen, where the US has been hitting Houthi infrastructure as the Iran-backed rebel group has vowed to keep targeting commercial vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
I have mixed feelings about this. It is clearly the responsibility of the imperial hegemon to protect global shipping lanes. But by that same logic, it's time for the imperial hegemon to force a settlement onto the Israelis due to their never-ending destabilization of the region. That would entail the EU forcing a peace onto Israel, performing a Special Military Operation within Israel if necessary.
Bring back the 117 AD borders, with EU administration of Jerusalem. Jews may live in Jerusalem, wail at their wall and study Torah in peace, but it is utterly nonsensical for the West to continue to bear the burden of Israeli destabilization of the region.
This washy middle ground of appealing to imperial obligations when it comes to Middle Eastern intervention, without control of the "vassal" state destabilizing the region, is a never-ending pattern that has to stop. The US and EU has more than enough leverage to force a settlement onto Israel.
You can't divorce the discussion from the fact that Israel is slaughtering thousands of Gazan civilians, and it's especially rich that Jews have been able to force the discourse on an alleged call to genocide with a run-of-the-mill propaganda slogan like "Palestinians will be free in Palestine," when such slogans are common to every war in human history. We should be left in awe that they've been able to steer the discourse to pearl-clutching around that slogan while they openly endorse an ongoing ethnic cleansing. None of the hypocrisy you are trying to identify here between "POC vs Jews" on the free speech question can possibly hold a candle to the hypocritical Elite support for Zionist brutality. The fact this has been made an issue proves Jews are on the top of the pyramid, above and beyond the POC, and the kvetching over this controversy is just proof of that fact and not at all proof that Jews are put upon.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
10mo ago
Biden-Harris Administration Releases First-Ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism
Last week the Biden administration published the anticipated national strategy to counter antisemitism.
This national strategy sets forth a whole-of-society plan that both meets this moment of escalating hatred and lays the foundation for reducing antisemitism over time. Informed by input from over 1,000 stakeholders from every sector of American society, it outlines over 100 new actions that Executive Branch agencies have committed to take in order to counter antisemitism—all of which will be completed within a year. The strategy also calls on Congress to enact legislation that would help counter antisemitism and urges every sector of society to mobilize against this age-old hatred, including state and local governments, civil society, schools and academic institutions, the tech sector, businesses, and diverse religious communities.
To support the whole-of-society call to action, today the Biden-Harris Administration also announced commitments to counter antisemitism and build cross-community solidarity by organizations across the private sector, civil society, religious and multi-faith communities, and higher education.
The Full Report starts with a legal disclaimer that it does not supersede any existing regulation or law- it should be viewed as a blueprint and aspirational. However, the 100+ "calls to action" touch every corner of government, even the USDA and and Department of Forest Services. One of the main architects of the initiative is Kamala Harris's Jewish husband, Dough Emhoff.
The first question you may have is "what's antisemitism?" I have discussed the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism in the past, and it is acknowledged in the report as the most prominent definition which has been adopted by the US:
There are several definitions of antisemitism, which serve as valuable tools to raise awareness and increase understanding of antisemitism. The most prominent is the non-legally binding “working definition” of antisemitism adopted in 2016 by the 31-member states of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), which the United States has embraced.
The IHRA working definition of antisemitism includes:
- Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
- Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
- Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust
- Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
- Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
- Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
- Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
- Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
- Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
- Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.
The Biden administration's strategy to counter antisemitism includes censoring criticism of "the power of Jews as a collective", even while there exists a whole-of-society effort to engage in mendacious criticism of the power of white men as a collective.
There are indeed well over 100 calls to action, which includes things like:
- AmeriCorps will distribute resources on antisemitism and countering antisemitism through its national service programs. (By September 2023)
- Federal agencies will organize or participate in communications or events marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27) and Jewish American History Month. (By May 2023)
- The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will launch a campaign featuring artists who engage, unite, and heal communities through the arts, and who incorporate themes of countering antisemitism and other forms of hate in their artistic practice. (By September 2023)
- IMLS will increase learning opportunities in rural libraries and museums on both Jewish American history, such as Jewish contributions to agriculture, and histories of antisemitism, including the Holocaust. (By March 2024)
The most tangible impacts of this strategy in the short term are the mandated propaganda initiatives described here and in many more "calls to action" in the document. By my view, the most alarming dimension of the strategy is in combatting online antisemitism (emphasis in original):
The Biden-Harris Administration also encourages all online platforms to independently commit to taking several actions that will counter antisemitism, including: ensuring terms of service and community standards explicitly cover antisemitism; adopting zero-tolerance for hate speech terms of service and community standards and permanently banning repeat offenders of these policies; investing in the human and technical resources necessary to enable vigorous and timely enforcement of their terms of service and community standards; improving their capabilities to stop recommending and de-rank antisemitic and other hateful content; increasing the transparency of their algorithmic recommendation systems and data; treating antisemitism as a distinct category in transparency reports; and more.
In today's day in age, where something like Twitter is unambiguously the public square, this call to action is clearly intended to abridge the freedom of speech even though it wouldn't run afoul of constitutional checks in the court system. In particular, the call for permanent bans from the public square in the face of a "zero-tolerance" policy is chilling. If you rob a Walmart, or assault someone, even if you are a repeat offender, you will go to jail but then eventually be released. A permanent ban from the public square is tantamount to a worse punishment than faced by many criminal offenders.
The Call to Congress is even more alarming:
We call on Congress to hold social media platforms accountable for spreading hatefueled violence, including antisemitism. The President has long called for fundamental reforms to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and Congress should remove special immunity for online platforms. This should include removing immunity if an online platform utilizes an algorithm or other computational process to amplify or recommend content to a user that promotes violence, or is directly relevant to a claim involving interference with civil rights or neglect to prevent interference with civil rights.
...
We call on Congress to pass legislation requiring platforms to enable timely and robust public interest research, including on the spread of antisemitism and other forms of hate, using platforms’ data and analyzing their algorithmic recommendation systems, while maintaining users’ privacy.
The Right Wing has naively supported changes to Section 230 that would prohibit politically-motivated content censorship, on the logic that if they aren't publishers they shouldn't be censoring political speech. The more likely changes to Section 230 would be that social media companies will be required to have strict content policies and moderation against antisemitism and other forms of hate speech in order for social media companies to have legal protection.
This call to action doesn't seem unrealistic, I noted last month that Ron DeSantis travelled to Jerusalem to sign a hate-speech law which was described as "the strongest antisemitism bill in the United States". Likewise, this all-encompassing initiative by the Biden Administration has sparked absolutely no opposition of any note, indicating it's one of the rare areas of bipartisan consensus among "our" representatives.
Generative AI is only mentioned in one part of the fact sheet:
The ADL will partner with the Interparliamentary Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism to convene a meeting in the fall to examine the impact of artificial intelligence and generative artificial intelligence on online antisemitism.
No doubt AI will be more prominent in the Second-Ever U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism.
One of the most tired memes is "replace 'Jew' with 'white' in this article and look how 1488 it looks loool", but I have to say if this document were a whole-of-society effort to combat anti-white hatred online, among our society, and institutions, it would be unambiguously identified as fascist, white supremacy.
Facing Facts, even fraught ones: the quest for proto-Indo-Europeans in 2023
The old belief regarding the Aryans, which preceded the Nazis, was that the Aryans (now called Proto-Indo Europeans) conquered Europe and down through Iran and India. There were different theories about the Urheimat of the Aryans. German nationalists thought the Aryan homeland was in Germany, and Indian nationalists would say it was India. In the post-war period, politically correct archaeologists insisted that the Aryan invasion theories were wrong and that Indo-European languages spread through non-violent "cultural diffusion." But this has been definitively disproved by recent genetic evidence. The old story was essentially true although it seems the Aryans most likely originated from the Russian steppe. They had several important technological advantages like domesticated horses, the wheel, and bronze so they pretty much conquered everyone and replaced a large fraction of the males over a wide territory.
Proto-Indo European studies has rapidly changed in the past 10 years as emerging genetic evidence has confirmed the old story and disproven the theories of cultural diffusion and the assertion that the Indo-Europeans left no significant genetic legacy. Razib Khan's article traces the origin of the "lost knowledge" of the Indo-European migrations and its rediscovery in the face of new evidence:
In vast regions of Northern Europe, the Bronze Age steppe herders replaced earlier farming societies, the invaders unceremoniously sweeping away all before them, which often meant the extermination of indigenous male-dominated elites (ancient DNA studies show that Neolithic farmers too structured their societies around male kin-groups)...
Nevertheless, these analyses buttressing the idea of migrations out of the steppe fell out of fashion after the mid-20th century. Not, crucially, because they were systematically discarded based on evidence, but because they grew irredeemably stained by contemporary politics. Philology was highly concentrated in the German-speaking world; in addition to Müller, the list of Germans in the field includes Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Grimm. This led, in the decades before World War II, to the fatal confluence of the study of Indo-Europeans, German nationalism and eventually National Socialism. Between 1900 and 1930 the philologist and archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna hypothesized that the Corded Ware archaeological culture of early Bronze Age East-Central Europe was instrumental in the spread of Indo-European languages, and these ideas were taken up and popularized by the Nazis after he died in 1931. Because the Corded Ware Culture (CWC) flourished in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and Kossinna connected Indo-European theory with the rise of the Germans, Hitler’s annexation of these two nations was justified partly by the presumed proto-Germanic character of the CWC once indigenous to that region. Beyond Kossinna, the whole field of Indo-European studies was tainted by Nazism’s radioactivity and its repugnant social and political implications. Any model of prehistoric migration had to reckon with widespread scholarly suspicion about the concept after reflexive aversion from any thought favored by Hitler’s regime.
Steve Sailer, for his part, suggests that the rise of neo-Nietzscheans on the Dissident Right is due in part to the confirmation of the earlier, quasi-mythical stories of continental conquests by chad steppe warriors. Anecdotally I see this to be the case, with DR Twitter accounts heavily invested in Indo-European studies who closely follow the work of those like Harvard geneticist David Reich, whose lab in practice has probably done more than anyone to confirm the old story with genetic evidence.
So, is that it? Is the 1930s German model of European pre-history essentially confirmed? Not so fast, according to Khan, who tries to tackle that historical narrative from a different angle:
Despite accumulating victory upon victory, the Indo-Europeans were not, crucially, civilization-bearers. Their pastoralist world flourished atop the smoldering ruins of worlds lost, cultures that left behind hulking rough-hewn stone monuments and the faint outlines of vast villages that were once the loci of sophisticated civilizations. The early Indo-Europeans were barbarians par excellence; their arrival ushered in an age of animal competition, kill or be killed...
They emerged out of darkness, beyond the view of history, and they brought darkness to many lands they conquered, a process only finally reversed by civilization’s creeping spread. More than 1,000 years after Neolithic Europe and its grand megaliths fell to the barbarian nomads, the two traditions would fuse to set the stage for the eventual rise of Greece, Rome and the world of the Celts.
To summarize, at a high level, all indigenous Europeans are basically a genetic combination of three population groups:
- Proto-Indo Europeans - steppe pastoralists closely associated with Yamnaya culture
- Neolithic European Farmers who migrated across the European continent thousands of years before the Bronze Age
- Eastern/Western European Hunter-Gatherers
Khan's position goes, the Proto-Indo Europeans and their descended cultures (i.e. Corded Ware, the common ancestor of the Italo-Celtic, German, and Balto-Slavic languages) were barbarians par excellence and destroyed the fledging civilizational potential of the Neolithic farmers, a potential evidenced by their construction of megalithic structures and farming mode of societal organization. He claims that the proto-Indo Europeans, in contrast, were "not civilization-bearers", they actually hindered civilization until some vague, exogenous "civilization's creeping spread" brought civilization in spite of the Proto-Indo European conquests.
Thus, Khan presents a novel Aryan-skeptic position: dropping denial of the Völkerwanderungs due to its untenability in the face of recent genetic evidence, but challenging the presence of a civilizational quality to the Proto-Indo European people.
One point Khan makes, which I certainly agree with, is that the Aryan is a synthesis of the three aforementioned population groups, as Khan states "the two traditions [Indo-European and Neolithic Farmer] would fuse to set the stage for the eventual rise of Greece, Rome and the world of the Celts." But this position is actually not much different from the 19th century German pre-history model of Europe, as described by a speech made by Hitler as chancellor of Germany:
The German people came into being no differently than almost every truly creative civilized nation we know of in the world. A numerically small, talented race, capable of organizing and creating civilization, established itself over other peoples in the course of many centuries. It in part absorbed them, in part adapted to them. All members of our people have of course contributed their special talents to this union. It was, however, created by a nation-and-state forming elite alone. This race imposed its language, naturally not without borrowing from those it subjugated. And all shared a common fate for so long, that the life of the people directing the affairs of state became inseparably bound to the life of the gradually assimilating other members. All the while, conqueror and conquered had long become a community. This is our German people of today ... Our only wish is that all members contribute their best to the prosperity of our national life. As long as every element gives what it has to give, this element in so doing will help benefit all lives.
The operative difference, here, is that the German school of thought assigned the civilizational quality of the people foremost to the Bronze Age conqueror-elites whereas Khan assigns that quality to the conquered. Civilization followed in spite of Indo-European legacy according to Khan. Who is correct? We likely won't see serious academic study of this question, but looking at the big picture we can see hints.
There is no person alive today with 100% Yamnayan ancestry. According to David Reich:
the population that contributed genetic material to South Asia was (roughly) 60% Yamnaya [my note: European steppe ancestry], ~30% European farmer-like ancestry
The invaders of India who called themselves Aryan were already the product of this aforementioned synthesis, and today the Aryan people most closely resemble genetically Northern European peoples.
In contrast, the Sardinians provide insight into the pre-Bronze Age farmer populations, as:
Sardinia appears to harbor the highest amounts of Neolithic farmer ancestry and very little of the pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherer or Bronze Age pastoralists ancestries.
Khan's thesis doesn't pass the sanity test, the broad-range correlation in Europe appears to follow: population groups with greater Indo-European ancestry trend as nations with higher technological innovation, economic status, empire-building, and global colonization, all of which follow the modus operandi of the Indo-Europeans. The Aryan is absolutely the synthesis of all three groups, but the claim that the "Indo-Europeans were not, crucially, civilization-bearers" doesn't hold any water. Classical Greece, Rome, India, Persia, were all spawned from Indo-European cultural, genetic, and linguistic legacy after the Bronze Age invasions.
I.E studies is going to likely remain a growing area of interest in the DR. It combines genetics, history, and mythmaking in a way that fosters a positive sense of identity and aspiration for pan-European camaraderie among the right wing. It tracks with the DR model of 20th century intellectual movements as subversive towards white identity and obscuring "forbidden knowledge".
The glorification of the Indo-Europeans on the right wing also marks a shift from a liberal/conservative "white people didn't do nothing" opposition to progressive racial narratives, to a Nietzschean glorification of a Bronze Age spirit.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
Well, the alternative was for them to remain concentrated in the ever-growing ghettoes. They identified this is as a huge problem for three reasons: 1. The risk of organized revolt which is what happened in the Warsaw ghetto. 2. Sanitary conditions created health risks, including foremost epidemic typhus which threatened to spread to the Eastern Front and Germany, and 3. The desire to economically exploit the moveable/immovable property concentrated in the ghettos as well as Jewish labor.
There certainly were well-documented complaints about the risk of partisan activity with deportation. But it should be reasonable to see why the first three factors were given priority. It's not obvious that keeping all Jews in one place is less risky than having a Jewish labor pool dispersed across a larger area at many different, smaller camps.
The WMD hoax was engineered by Zionists in the American government under the newly-formulated Office of Special Plans, specifically as a workaround to slush fabricated intelligence from Israel to the Pentagon, working around the CIA. The goal was to formulate a propaganda narrative to instigate the United States into fighting a regional rival of Israel, Saddam Hussein.
In an interview with the Scottish Sunday Herald, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer Larry C. Johnson said the OSP was "dangerous for US national security and a threat to world peace. [The OSP] lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. It's a group of ideologues with pre-determined notions of truth and reality. They take bits of intelligence to support their agenda and ignore anything contrary. They should be eliminated....
Lawrence Franklin, an analyst and Iran expert in the Feith office, has been charged with espionage, as part of a larger FBI investigation (see Lawrence Franklin espionage scandal). The scandal involves passing information regarding United States policy towards Iran to Israel via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith's role is also being investigated.[15]
According to The Guardian, Feith's office had an unconventional relationship with Israel's intelligence services:
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship with Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.[16]
Allegations have also been made that Pentagon employees in the Feith office have been involved in plans for overthrowing the governments of Iran and Syria.[17]
Douglas Feith Himself, along with Richard Perle, another architect of the Iraq war, authored the Clean Break Memo.
Feith is an ardent supporter of Israel. Along with Richard Perle and David Wurmser, he was a member of the study group which authored a controversial report entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,[33] a set of policy recommendations for the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The report was published by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies without an individual author being named. According to the report, Feith was one of the people who participated in roundtable discussions that produced ideas that the report reflects.
The Clean Break memo was a policy document created by Feith, Perle, and Netenyahu:
Former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle was the "Study Group Leader,"...
From the memo:
We must distinguish soberly and clearly friend from foe. We must make sure that our friends across the Middle East never doubt the solidity or value of our friendship.
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions...
Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey’s and Jordan’s actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.
So the authors of this memo, in collaboration with Netenyahu, use their influence in the highest positions of American government to fabricate intelligence for WMDs (and also intelligence that Iraq was responsible for the post-9/11 Anthtrax attack which seems to be a memory-holed event in the context of 9/11. Israeli intelligence distributed the claim that Anthrax was given to a hijacker by an Iraqi spy in Prague, which was discounted by American intelligence agencies including the CIA but still became part of the WMD narrative leading up to the war.).
So to answer your question:
The WMD hoax was fabricated by Zionists, who formed special working groups and offices to slush false intelligence around the CIA. The CIA is not chiefly responsible for the WMD hoax or the Iraq/Al-Qaeda in Praque anthrax hoax, and was critical of the OSP and the intelligence provided by the OSP. The CIA did not have an incentive to fabricate evidence for a deception campaign that was not of their own making.
The OSP was not in a position to fabricate the evidence for WMDs on the ground, nor was that ever its goal. Its goal was to get America involved in a war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam on behalf of the sate of Israel, and it succeeded. Fabricating physical evidence for WMDs was not necessary for their goals, or even for their coverup. The leading theories for why America was manipulated into the Iraq War surround Bush's neuroses and Big Oil conspiracies. So fabricating physical evidence was not necessary for them to accomplish their goals or even to get away with their crimes.
There were some attempts to forge a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda. A big question is, who forged the Habbush Letter? I don't think it was the CIA.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
6mo ago
Not to mention that, if the claims commonly repeated on here about the terrible effects of higher gas prices on the well-being of US citizens are true, preventing a wider conflict serves the interests of those citizens.
Imagine still trying to shill the "US military Intervention in the Middle East is due to oil, it's not about Israel" talking point at this point.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
4mo ago
This would be like if Christians in Israel started demanding if a minor random Christian holiday near Passover be given equal standing to their most important holiday. Obviously this is absurd on its face and would never be taken seriously.
Christians could never accomplish such a feat, because the Meek will Inherit the Earth. Fortunately for Jews, they don't believe that tripe so they get their Menorah on the White House lawn with no Nativity or Cross in sight.
As Nietzsche said, the command 'love your enemies' had to have been invented by the best haters there have ever been. You can say "I don't want to blame this on 'da Jews'", but yeah, the cultural dynamic is the accomplishment of a concerted effort by da Jews.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
7mo ago
My hot take is that he deserves a standing ovation for fighting for his nation.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
About the only thing that could make the Holocaust not be real is if the entire world isn't real and I'm just a brain in a jar.
That's an interesting choice of words. How many homicidal gas chambers did Majdanek have? It was the very first camp where Soviet investigators revealed to the world the truth of the Nazi gas chamber factories, months before the liberation of Auschwitz.
If the Soviet investigators did at Auschwitz in 1945 exactly what they did at Majdanek in 1944, the entire world isn't real?
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
Menorahs on Public Lands
The Windows OS has a new feature that displays a small icon in the Desktop search bar. The icon rotates every few days based on the calendar, similar to Google's tradition of customizing their search page. I never paid attention to it until I noticed a Menorah displayed on my Desktop. Presumably subsequent icons would show presents or a Christmas Tree. Certainly, though, it will never display a Nativity or Christian Cross.
I learned recently that Allegheny v. ACLU ruled that a Nativity on public land, as a religious symbol, violates the Establishment Clause but a Menorah on public land does not. According to the logic of the ruling, the Menorah and Christmas Tree are secular symbols of the winter holidays and do not constitute the endorsement of a religion while the Nativity does so. The logic is on its face patently absurd as the Menorah is not a secular symbol in any sense. It is a sacred symbol honoring a miracle upon the successful Jewish revolt against the Hellenists. Reading various opinions from Jewish publications, it is clear that many Jews continue to interpret the public lighting of the Menorah from an adversarial perspective:
The policy argument against public menorah lightings is that we, as Jews, are a tiny minority, surrounded by a dominant religion with a missionary agenda. If the majority religion were given free reign to display its symbols publicly, the results could be disastrous. At best, we would be made to feel like outsiders, a tolerated minority. At worst, we would find ourselves victims of overt proselytization or even anti-semitic attacks...
The dominant religion surrounds us with its symbols anyway. Our children see it and are inevitably affected. The gentile "holiday spirit" touches almost every Jew's life.
We, as Jews, can react one of two ways. We can ignore it, hoping that this yearly bombardment goes away. Or we can affirmatively counter in a positive, Jewish manner. Public menorahs are the Jewish answer to the gap felt by many Jews during the holiday season. The dominant religion will display its decorations anyway, whether we light our menorahs or not. Why not give a Jewish child the opportunity to feel some pride about his or her holiday, when his Gentile friends are doing the same?
The Establishment of Religion Takes Many Forms
The concept of the Establishment of Religion is tenuous and arbitrary. What is religion except for a unique collection of symbols, rituals, and myths that have an, often consciously-designed, psychological effect on intended flocks? That psychological effect influences our behavior: it affects our loyalties and our behavior towards the ingroup/outgroup, our code of conduct in society, our mate selection and reproductive behaviors, our politics, our community rituals, and much more.
Myth, Religion, art, politics, and culture all belong under the same umbrella. Religion is everywhere and most people today do not consume their religious messaging through a church but through mass media. Many here have interpreted the BLM movement and protests as a Religious movement, often with the intent to dismiss it or ridicule it. This power of mass media was envisioned by Richard Wagner:
The text is fed into the throat of a singer; the output of this throat is fed into an amplifier named orchestra, the output of this orchestra is fed into a light show, and the whole thing, finally, is fed into the nervous system of the audience.
In other words, Wagner's acoustics is posited as a media invention that employed a large, yet hidden orchestra to produce "acoustic hallucinations" and immerse the audience in a reverberant sound. This account thus determines a "total world" of hearing in the vocal and musical content of Wagnerian music-drama... its sensory overwhelming created an aesthetic experience that we may now see as a "prehistory" for present-day cinema.
Wagner's conception of proto mass-media as Gesamtkunstwerk was preempted by Plato, who two thousand years earlier envisioned the psychological power of the cinematic projection of light. Today, our consumption of Myth: those projections which intelligently orient our view of the world in understanding right and wrong, heroes and villain, are increasingly delivered through mass media rather than traditional religious institutions.
Earlier this week at the lighting of the Menorah inside the White House, not to be confused with the giant Menorah on the White House Lawn, President Biden remarked "Together, we must stand up against the disturbing rise in antisemitism" while touting the December 12th formation of the Inter-Agency Group to Counter Antisemitism, which will be "led by Domestic Policy Council staff and National Security Council staff to increase and better coordinate U.S. Government efforts to counter antisemitism":
The President has tasked the inter-agency group, as its first order of business, to develop a national strategy to counter antisemitism. This strategy will raise understanding about antisemitism and the threat it poses to the Jewish community and all Americans, address antisemitic harassment and abuse both online and offline, seek to prevent antisemitic attacks and incidents, and encourage whole-of-society efforts to counter antisemitism and build a more inclusive nation.
At the ceremony, also emphasized was "securing the largest-ever increase in federal funding for the physical security of nonprofits, including synagogues and Jewish Community Centers".
Likewise, in the recently passed 2023 budget, in addition to at least $4 billion for Israel, over $65 million in federal funds was allocated to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum which, combined with the abundant support from private funds, amounted to a whopping $245 million in support for that museum in 2022. That makes it apparently, and by far, the most well-funded museum in the Nation's capital with well over 3x the funding of the National WWII Museum.
In contrast, the National Museum of American History had a 2018 budget of $40 million despite the fact it received 3.8M visitors in 2016, in comparison to the Holocaust Museum's 1.6 million for that year.
Which of the above should be considered the establishment of religion? All of it.
Christmas is Never Secular
In the same vein, Christmas is fundamentally a Religious festival even in its most non-Christian expression. It's the time of year where the masses practice a form of religious observance that is more comparable to a pagan, pre-Christian form of worship.
We ritualistically build our household lararium next to the hearth. We set out milk and cookies as an offering to a benevolent god who lives in a mystical Hyperborean realm, judges our behavior, and leaves us gifts. We honor his image in our films, songs, and Myth, especially to the delight of women and children. We carry on quirky household traditions which are transmitted ancestrally. Our celebration of Christmas and observance of Santa Claus would be more similar to the way the Romans, for example, worshipped their ancestral or household gods.
In this sense a "secular Christmas symbol" is an oxymoron. There is no such thing, which is acknowledged by the Jewish perspective which remarked on the foreignness and inescapability of the gentile "Holiday Spirit". The reality is that both the Menorah and Christmas Tree are religious symbols, and the government is constructively establishing religion with its display of both.
The "War on Christmas"
The Christians, in a way, get the short end of the stick for not being allowed to display their sacred symbols on public land. But who do they have to blame for that? They have allowed, without much protest, the designation of their own religion as second-class to the financial and legal privileges granted to Judaism. Christians tilt at windmills while sacred symbols of Jewish Victory tower over them during the Christmas holiday at the White House and Central Park, while their own sacred symbols are outlawed on the same land.
To reverse course, Christians would need to adopt the adversarial perspective that motivates Jews to light the Menorahs in these spaces. But given Christian doctrine it is not clear that the religion is capable of asserting itself in that way.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
4mo ago
The Jewish insistence to insert their Menorahs on public lands, regardless of how few Jews live in some municipality, has always been Culture War. And unlike the traditional Christmas displays which genuinely are now fully secularized, these Menorah displays are deeply religious in nature. The rationalization is that these Menorahs are symbols of "religious tolerance", but they are not, they are sacred symbols of the Jewish religion and everything it represents, including Zionism.
It is ironic to now see Jews complaining about "selective interpretation" of the law, given that they've enjoyed a state of affairs where Christian holy symbols- crosses and Nativity, are banned on public lands and the Jewish holy symbol is revered on the same. Really, they are complaining about an equalization of the law where only secular symbols are allowed. Yes, that includes the Christmas tree and excludes the Menorah.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
I don't think you fully understand, the "5 million plus non-Jews killed in the Holocaust" was a propaganda hoax created by Jewish Holocaust influencers in order to manipulate gentile feelings towards the Holocaust.
Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims – 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews.
“I said to him, ‘Simon, you are telling a lie,’” Bauer recalled in an interview Tuesday. “He said, ‘Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.’”
Bauer and other historians who knew Wiesenthal said the Nazi hunter told them that he chose the 5 million number carefully: He wanted a number large enough to attract the attention of non-Jews who might not otherwise care about Jewish suffering, but not larger than the actual number of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, 6 million.
It caught on: President Jimmy Carter, issuing the executive order that would establish the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, referred to the “11 million victims of the Holocaust.”
People don't understand how easy it is for whole-cloth lies to be embraced as truth by masses of people, or as the world's most famous anti-Semite put it in Mein Kampf:
All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true within itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
11mo ago
· Edited 11mo ago
With David Cole, it's interesting to point out that he is a Revisionist when it comes to Auschwitz. He's one of only a couple others who maintain this "halfway" Revisionism and I have to say it's quite weird. There is much more surviving evidence for Auschwitz than there is for the Reinhardt camps as extermination centers. Basically all of the evidence Cole relies on to assert the genocidal function of the Reinhardt camps, there is much much more of it for Auschwitz. There are many more witnesses, surviving camp facilities, photographs, thousands and thousands of documents compared to those other camps where there are virtually none...
I don't find Cole's case persuasive. For one, his "contemporaneous documentary evidence section" is extremely sparse, containing 5 pieces of evidence, none of which so much as mention Sobibor. The first piece, the Goebbels diary, is paraphrased and editorialized even though Cole uses quotation marks. It's not what Goebbels actually wrote and the context is different. For example, Goebbels does not mention "the head of Aktion Reinhard", that is added in by Cole and it is in any case completely false that Odilo Globocnik was the head of Aktion Reinhardt. So right off the bat, he's being really misleading by saying "Goebbels writes in his diary" without specifying that the part in quotes is David's interpretation of what he wrote and not what was originally written.
Secondly, his citation of the Korherr report is again off the mark:
SS statistician Korherr states that 2.4 million Jewish “evacuees” predominantly from Poland and Russia were “abgang” (dispatched/departed) via “special treatment in the Eastern camps” and those evacuees are “todesfallen” (that word ONLY means dead).
Just sloppy and inaccurate. The mainstream case is that there were 1.4 million, not 2.4 million as Cole states evacuated to the east. 1.2 of those millions were marked as "sifted through the camps of General Government" which the mainstream interprets as murdered at the so-called Reinhardt camps, but that is half of the 2.4 million he writes in the article. For both this and the previous I think he's working from memory and just getting details very wrong. His assertion that "those evacuees are “todesfallen”" is just completely false. You can search through the original German of the report here and see that this is simply not true. The term "Todesfalle" is not mentioned in the Korherr report, the expression "Todesfälle", which means cases of deaths, is used in two places in the report but not to describe the fate of 2.4 million evacuees.
The most controversial sentence in the Korherr report is "Transportierung von Juden aus den Ostprovinzen nach dem russischen Osten" which translates to "Transport of Jews from the Eastern Provinces to the Russian East", which is what Cole and historians say was code for extermination at the Reinhardt camps. Cole also neglected to mention that Korherr, the statistician who created this report, wrote a letter to Der Spiegel in the 1970s and said that he had asked what "special treatment" meant and was told it meant what Revisionists say it meant. So Korherr himself seconded the Revisionist interpretation in an unprompted letter to a newspaper (actually, Korherr wrote this before there was any Revisionist study or critique of these issues).
Cole mentions some documents from Kube, which is strange because Kube himself had nothing to do with the so-called Reinhardt camps. In fact, Kube's reports describe anti-partisan actions against Jews (very real) and complains about Jews being deported into his area of influence. Kube's letters provide insight into the partisan problem, but not to the camps that are the subject of the controversy. The fact Kube is complaining about deportees suggests they actually were transited east and not killed in secret gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
Cole references the Stroop report, but keep in mind is use of quotes is again not what is actually written it's Cole's summary. Cole neglects to mention here that >90% of the Jews captured by Stroop were sent to other camps in the General Government, and they were not all sent to be exterminated according to that report.
Lastly, there's the 1944 speech which I assume is that Posen speech that we recently talked a lot about here. Again, it's not what Himmler actually wrote in his speech.
Cole is alleging the murder of 1.5 million - 2 million people at these camps, the "contemporaneous documentary evidence" case is so weak that it should make you highly suspicious.
David Cole also ignores that, for example, Himmler and Pohl refer to Sobibor as a transit camp in documents. But Cole in his case cannot apparently find a single document to include in his "contemporaneous documentary evidence" section that mentions Sobibor at all.
In all, there are a lot of outright factual errors and quotations passed off as quoting documents, but he is editorializing the documents he is referencing.
David Cole also doesn't wade into the debate on the side of the physical evidence, which is wise for him as it's the strongest area of the Revisionist position. 1.5 - 2 million people being killed in these camps would have left huge amounts of evidence, but no mass graves have ever been excavated from these sites.
To me, Cole is missing the big picture. He himself does not believe the mainstream Auschwitz narrative, he is a Revisionist on that camp, he believes the Soviets were systematically deceptive in how they investigated the camp and produced evidence. He should also see that there is a co-dependency of these claims. If Soviet propaganda was able to deceive the world on what happened in Auschwitz, and Cole claims they did, then why does he put so much weight into the Soviet investigation of the Reinhardt camps, when by all accounts the evidence is much fewer and farther between than it is at Auschwitz?
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
1yr ago
If you question the findings on the basis of the weakness of the evidence, you're basically tantamount to a Holocaust denier. If you ask for excavation and confirmation, you're just asking for Indigenous people to be retraumatised.
It's fair to compare questioning the basis of the Kamloops mass grave to Holocaust deniers, because Holocaust deniers make the exact same arguments you make here. People like you saying "the story around alleged mass graves seem to be motivated by a propaganda campaign and culture-war hysteria- GPR results are not conclusive so excavations should be done to get to the truth of the matter" actually are making Holocaust denier arguments.
And your opposition: the people saying that excavations should not happen because it would violate the religious practices of the victims in order to satisfy the perversion of evil deniers, are also making the same arguments as the orthodox Holocaust believers on the question of excavating alleged mass graves.
This entire affair is an astonishingly similar discourse to the Holocaust deniers and anti-deniers on the question of alleged mass graves in a known location.
I don't think your representation of the Revisionist case is very good, I would divide it into these categories:
Census data: Inconclusive, heavily relies on the accuracy and political integrity of very complex measurements, and doing some simple additions and subtractions from many different demographic studies conducted before, during, and after the war in the Russian empire, Poland, and Soviet Union. It heavily relies on a level of precision (how many Polish Jews became "Soviet Citizens" on paper after the war?), accuracy and honesty that simply does not exist. Inaccurate census data also causes problems in estimating the death toll in other atrocities like the Armenian genocide. Census data also does not tell us how many Jews died under Soviet occupation during or shortly after the war. Revisionists suspect a very large number of Jews were deported into and likely died in the Soviet Interior.
Physical evidence: Strongly favors the Revisionist side. Historians claim ~3 million were murdered in these extermination camps, but the remains of approximately 0% have been identified in scientific excavations. This also includes technical arguments around things like burial density or cremation capacity, fuel requirements, etc. Although these arguments are usually not influential to non-Revisionists because they just assume that Revisionists are using math deceptively or not representing the mainstream position accurately.
Documentary evidence: Strongly favors the Revisionist side, as the Revisionist case mostly takes the documents at face value whereas the mainstream narrative claims that there was systematic euphemism and coded language. For example, there are documents where both Himmler and Pohl, head of the concentration camp system, identify Sobibor as a transit camp (Durchgangslager). The Revisionist theory is this camp was what the document says it was, the mainstream theory is that in their own internal secret documents they used coded language to camouflage the extermination camp. There are some documents that Revisionists struggle to explain, which is to be expected given that there are millions and millions of them. There are documents that the mainstream struggles to explain.
But most important of all are the documents that should be there but which are not. For example, you are likely aware that the top-secret communications between Auschwitz and SS headquarters were intercepted and decoded during the height of the Holocaust. The average person has not heard of these decodes because there is no indication in those communications whatsoever of what the mainstream alleges. The communication and death tolls reported in fact corroborate the Revisionist position. If it happened, it would be easy to discern from the decodes, in hindsight. That's only one example of an extremely broad, systematic absence of evidence that ought to be there but which is not. Apparently the Auschwitz Decodes do not even warrant a Wikipedia page.
Witness testimonies: The most strong aspect of the Revisionist case in my opinion. Witnesses are by far the most important part of the body of evidence for the mainstream narrative, so the Revisionist critique of that body of evidence is devastating.
You say Revisionists "poke holes", but that complaint is myopic. Mainstream historians claim that around 900,000 Jews were murdered, cremated and buried in a precisely known location. This is an extremely unusual and extraordinary claim. The documentary and physical evidence for this claim, by my estimation, conclusively disproves it. The reliance on witness testimonies and census data to prove something which could have easily been proven at any point with a scientific investigation points to the correctness of the Revisionist position. The Revisionist criticisms of the alleged cremation operation at these camps is absolutely devastating, and the side representing the mainstream can only really complain about "poking holes" rather than provide a convincing rebuttal. Any time we are, in the news, confronted with the logistical problem of cremating large numbers of corpses, Skeptical Paulie shows up to "Ayy Tone" inquiring how the Germans were able to cremate 6,000 people on open-air pyres every single day in the Polish winter in a small area of a small camp. It's not poking holes, it's a glaring weakness in the mainstream narrative which indicates this could not have possibly happened as they are claiming, and there is no convincing rebuttal to that point.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
3mo ago
Why do you think Amy Coney Barrett adopted Haitian children if there was no fixation on race? There is obviously a virtue signaling element to that kind of decision, which is tied to the racial dynamics at play. She is leaning into those dynamics rather than rejecting them.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
3mo ago
An interrogation in a show trial from a rogue state that violated international law by kidnapping someone is not a good way to establish the use of code-words in the minutes to a meeting. Decades before the Eichmann circus, Josef Bühler, the deputy governor of the General Government and attendee of the Wannsee Conference testified at the IMT as a defense witness for Hans Frank in 1946, and claimed that the purpose of Wannsee was to discuss the forced resettlement of Jews in the northeast of Europe:
I ask you now, did the Governor General send you to Berlin for that conference; and if so, what was the subject of the conference?
BUEHLER: Yes, I was sent to the conference and the subject of the conference was the Jewish problem. I might say in advance that from the beginning Jewish questions in the Government General were considered as coming under the jurisdiction of the Higher SS and Police Leader and handled accordingly. The handling of Jewish matters by the state administration was supervised and merely tolerated by the Police.
During the years 1940 and 1941 incredible numbers of people, mostly Jews, were brought into the Government General in spite of the objections and protests of the Governor General and his administration. This completely unexpected, unprepared for, and undesired bringing in of the Jewish population from other territories put the administration of the Government General in an extremely difficult position.
Accommodating these masses, feeding them, and caring for their health-combating epidemics for instance-almost, or rather, definitely overtaxed the capacity of the territory. Particularly threatening was the spread of typhus, not only in the ghettos but also among the Polish population and the Germans in the Government General. It appeared as if that epidemic would spread even to the Reich and to the Eastern Front.
At that moment Heydrich's invitation to the Governor General was received. The conference was originally supposed to take place in November 1941, but it was frequently postponed and it may have taken place in February 1942.
Because of the special problems of the Government General I had asked Heydrich for a personal interview and he received me. On that occasion, among many other things, I described in particular the catastrophic conditions which had resulted from the arbitrary bringing of Jews into the Government General. He replied that for this very reason he had invited the Governor General to the conference. The Reichsfuehrer SS, so he said, had received an order from the Fuehrer to round up all the Jews of Europe and to settle them in the Northeast of Europe, in Russia. I asked him whether this meant that the further arrival of Jews in the Government General would cease, and whether the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had been brought into the Government General without the permission of the Governor General would be moved out again. Heydrich promised me both these things. Heydrich said furthermore that the Fuehrer had given an order that Theresienstadt, a town in the Protectorate, would become a reservation in which old and sick Jews, and weak Jews who could not stand the strains of resettlement, were to be accommodated in the future. This information left me definitely convinced that the resettlement of the Jews, if not for the sake of the Jews, then for the sake of the reputation and prestige of the German people, would be carried out in a humane fashion. The removal of the Jews from the Government General was subsequently carried out exclusively by the Police....
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
5mo ago
Israel struck the Al-Shifa hospital and then lied about the source being misfired Palestinian munitions. The IDF even provided a trajectory map of the projectiles which they claimed to be based on radar detections:
It was the first of at least four strikes involving multiple munitions on different sections of the sprawling complex between 1 a.m. and 10 a.m. Friday morning. Al-Shifa’s director, Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, said in a phone interview that seven people had been killed and several others had been wounded.
Hours after the final blast, the Israeli military blamed unspecified Palestinian militants, saying a “misfired projectile” aimed at Israel Defense Forces troops deployed nearby had instead hit the hospital.
But at least three of the projectiles that struck it appear to have been Israeli munitions, according to pictures of weapons fragments collected and verified by The New York Times and analyzed by experts...
Israel’s assertion that Al-Shifa was actually hit by a Palestinian projectile echoed similar — and unresolved — claims and counterclaims following munitions that hit the courtyard of another Gaza hospital, Al-Ahli, nearly a month ago...
In addition to the weapons remnants, an analysis of video footage shows that three of the projectiles were fired into the hospital from the north and south, contrary to the western trajectory indicated on a map released by the I.D.F., which it said was based on radar detections. A review of satellite images showed there were I.D.F. positions north and south of the hospital early Friday.
The strikes analyzed by The Times did not appear to be targeting underground infrastructure. Two of the most severe strikes hit upper floors of the maternity ward.
SecureSignals
Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine
10mo ago
· Edited 10mo ago
I'm not sure there's a paradox here so much as there are Jews on both sides of the issue... Conservative and religious Jewish advocacy for an increase in fertility is no different than Mormon advocacy; incidently, the latter rate is higher than the former, and even secular Jews in Israel are below replacement level. This isn't evidence of some "hypocrisy" or scheming among Jews.
The key point is that religion and culture manipulates breeding behavior towards eugenic or dysgenic ends. Is the Brahmin being a hypocrite when he comes to America and joins the chorus of anti-racism and denounces eugenic-minded thinking for white people? It's his religion! There is, in fact, nothing hypocritical or paradoxical about preaching eugenics for your people and preaching dysgenics for your outgroup. If you are in competition with other tribes, this is going to be a powerful strategy, particularly if you can convince your outgroup that dysgenic behavior is the realization of a universal moral good, and eugenic behavior is the ultimate evil. It's ultimately tribalistic, not conspiratorial or hypocritical or paradoxical.
Religion, culture, and eugenics are one. This fact is understood foremost by the Jews, who have carried this knowledge through the millennia within their myths. Take the Book of Genesis: Jacob, the Patriarch of the Jewish people, swindles a herd of sheep from his father-in-law by peeling the bark off the tree. Seeing the striped tree, the white and black sheep interbreed and Jacob the Deceiver wins the flock of speckled sheep. This myth portrays ancient knowledge of the use of media for eugenic purposes, and it's important to recognize here that sheep are symbolic for people in biblical myth.
Of course Judaism is not the only religion that transmits an ancient knowledge of eugenics through the medium of religion, the Hindu caste system could be regarded as one of the most successful eugenic programs in human history, with most Brahmin to this day possessing the Aryan haplogroup R1a1 that has been inherited unbroken from the paternal line. It would be inaccurate to call this a conspiracy or eugenics with the veneer of religion, the religion is eugenics and eugenics is the religion.
There are of course some instances of outright hypocrisy, like LessWrong advocates for polygenic embryo screening falling over themselves trying to explain why it's not eugenics:
In my view, the term “eugenics” should not be used to describe embryo screening. In most people’s minds “eugenics” conjures images of government-sponsored sterilization efforts, genocide, and racist pseudoscience. I understand the technical definition is just “good for genes”, but this is not what comes to mind for most people when they hear this word.
Even worse, most of the horrible things done in the name of “eugenics” in the past were in fact not eugenic at all! The entire Nazi theory of genes was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how genes worked. They believed that non-aryan peoples were “contaminating” the “pure aryan bloodline”, and that only by purging those who were unpure could they make a perfect master race. Which is of course not just a morally repugnant theory, but also wrong.
If you want to have a productive conversation, I would suggest using the term “epilogenics” to describe non-coercive means of improving genes that are in line with what we expect those affected would want. There are of course still some concerns with epilogenics (increasing inequality for example), but they are decidedly NOT the same concerns that people have about eugenics.
Here is a case where we see a sheer hypocrisy, but I don't even know if the author of this LW article is Jewish- although I suspect many Jews will make a similar argument as they use polygenic embryo screening. The more profound behavior we see in this article is the familiar use of the Holocaust to denounce eugenic thinking for white people, which is actually the crux of the issue.
With the understanding that religion, culture, and eugenics are inseparable, then we must relate the genetic trajectory of the nation and Europe to its sacred myths, and there is no myth more sacred today than the Holocaust. Understanding the Holocaust as the body of myth that formulates the prevailing civic religion, the issue becomes much deeper than merely a question of hypocrisy. It's a religion that denounces European race consciousness as the ultimate evil and all behaviors against European race consciousness as the ultimate good. It's the anti-caste system, where the civic religion is used to deconstruct and destroy rather than moralize a race consciousness that would be required for eugenic-minded behavior and culture.
The article you link traces the use of this civic religion to derail eugenic-minded thinking within the Academy and culture writ large. There is a full knowledge and recognition of where this breeding program is headed, best illustrated by Lise Funderburg's National Geographic feature, The Changing Face of America: We've become a country where race is no longer so black or white.
Certainly, race still matters in this country, despite claims that the election of Barack Obama heralded a post-racial world. We may be a pluralist nation by 2060, when the Census Bureau predicts that non-Hispanic whites will no longer be the majority. But head counts don’t guarantee opportunity or wipe out the legacy of Japanese-American internment camps or Jim Crow laws. Whites, on average, have twice the income and six times the wealth of blacks and Hispanics, and young black men are twice as likely as whites to be unemployed. Racial bias still figures into incarceration rates, health outcomes, and national news: A recent Cheerios commercial featuring an interracial family prompted a barrage of negative responses, including claims of white genocide and calls for “DIEversity.”
...
When people ask Celeste Seda, 26, what she is, she likes to let them guess before she explains her Dominican-Korean background. She points out that even then she has revealed only a fraction of her identity, which includes a Long Island childhood, a Puerto Rican adoptive family, an African American sister, and a nascent acting career. The attention she gets for her unusual looks can be both flattering and exhausting. “It’s a gift and a curse,” Seda says.
It’s also, for the rest of us, an opportunity. If we can’t slot people into familiar categories, perhaps we’ll be forced to reconsider existing definitions of race and identity, presumptions about who is us and who is them. Perhaps we’ll all end up less parsimonious about who we feel connected to as we increasingly come across people like Seda, whose faces seem to speak that resounding line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself
“I am large, I contain multitudes.”
There's a recognition, celebration, that this is what Americans will look like in 2050, and this is absolutely downstream of the prevailing cultural and religio-political myth that defines the boundaries of our ways of thinking about race and eugenics. This is far more important than any individual-level hypocrisy, and after all pointing out a hypocrisy can be cathartic but it never motivates a rethinking of things and doesn't reach the crux of the issue in any case.
There was a big story in Holocaust studies during 2020: it turned out the deputy commander of the alleged Sobibor extermination camp, Johann Niemann, took many photos of the camp during its operation and put them all in a photo album, which were completely unknown until they were published in that year. This was a highly significant story because this was the first set of photographs of the camp to ever be published. It was thought that due to the extreme secrecy of the extermination camps, photography would have been strictly forbidden- although there is a similar photo album of the alleged Treblinka extermination camp. None of the photographs show anything incriminating (although the Treblinka album verifies the surprising fact that the camp had a zoo).
Likewise, the new Sobibor photo album contained nothing incriminating in terms of the alleged homicidal functionality of the camp. The image that became the most prominently featured in the various news reports about this Sobibor photo album was this one, which shows camp officials relaxing at a table drinking with some German women. There are other photos showing similar scenes at the camp.
These photographs were the most "incriminating" photographs of the album, with the news reports invariably mentioning how evil these people must have been to be relaxing so while they are murdering hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children and cremating them on open fires. These photographs certainly do not look like they were taken of people in the process of murdering hundreds of thousands, so these photographs therefore become proof of the banality of evil.
I mention this because so much of the Holocaust is subject to dual interpretation:
Homicidal gas chambers disguised as showers -> real showers
Zyklon B for extermination -> Zyklon B for delousing
"Resettlement was code for gas chamber extermination in documents" -> Resettlement was actually resettlement
"Transit camp was code for extermination camp" -> Transit camp meant transit camp
If we assume that Revisionists are correct that Sobibor was a transit camp (which, by the way, is what Himmler said it was in documents), it would no doubt still be a place of suffering and violence (the commander who took these photographs, Niemann, was killed in a prisoner uprising), but it would be far removed from the orthodox narrative of mass murder in gas chambers disguised as showers.
Then, these photographs would not portray the "banality of evil": the greatest murderers of human history, so evil that they carouse and fiddle while they are murdering hundreds of thousands- they would portray normal people acting normally in a difficult situation.
The "banality of evil" trope is used to invert evidence of people acting normally, as if they are not the greatest mass murderers in human history as being incriminating rather than evidence that they didn't do what they are being accused of. Usually in a criminal investigation, the suspect acting as if he had not committed the crime he is being accused of would be interpreted as evidence against the allegation. But in Holocaust studies, it becomes "These people don't look like they are murdering hundreds of thousands of people, this just shows the banality of evil!"
I haven't seen Zone of Interest yet, but presumably it does not portray the brutal torture of Rudolf Höss by his British interrogators, which extracted his absurdly false confession that become the bedrock for the entire Holocaust narrative.
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