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SecureSignals

Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine

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User ID: 853

SecureSignals

Civilization is simply a geno-memetic-techno-capital machine

13 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 06 13:34:27 UTC

					

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User ID: 853

Post-war, everyone who had been at Treblinka, guard and inmate alike, said it had been a killing center for the Jews.

Which post-war accounts? You have a couple of accounts from former Jewish prisoners working with the Polish underground which are not at all plausible or reliable. The other accounts did not come until decades later during the Treblinka trials of the 1960s, well after the Treblinka narrative had already been created. The basic facts of the extermination narrative had already been established in court, and the broader narrative was subject to judicial notice, so "it didn't happen" wasn't a defense available to them. The former guards and even commandant all received very light sentences, either being acquitted or subsequently released from prison. If these guards had denied the Nuremberg narrative they would have been treated in a harsher fashion.

The case is not straightforward at all. The claim is that upwards of 2 million Jews were murdered at these "Aktion Reinhard" camps, and their remains were buried in precisely known locations. How many mass graves have ever been excavated at these known locations? Zero. An alleged 2 million murders and 0 mass graves ever excavated. You have a couple of witness accounts from Jewish sources that informed the conclusions at Nuremberg (Treblinka was barely discussed at Nuremberg) followed by the confessions decades later in the 1960s which earned the guards very light sentences. But ultimately, if you are claiming that 2 million people were murdered and buried in a known location, but you come up with all these excuses for why nobody should actually excavate to try to find these remains, you do not have a straightforward case.

To emphasize just how not straightforward the case is, notice how you spell the name of this operation- "Aktion Reinhard." This is the preferred spelling for the operation among mainstream historians, which according to mainstream historiography, is supposed to denote the secret plan to exterminate the Jews in the General Government of occupied Poland. The story goes, Reinhard Heydrich was given the honor of having this secret extermination named after him due to his assassination (though Heydrich had no role at all in the operation itself).

But, in fact, the operation was spelled Aktion Reinhardt (with a 't'), which, along with other evidence, ties the naming of this operation to the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Finance Fritz Reinhardt. Why the hubbub over whether it was Reinhard or Reinhardt? Because the former is used by historians as circumstantial evidence tying the operation symbolically to Heydrich, to imply a secret murder operation. Whereas the reality that the operation was named for an economist in the Finance Ministry does not at all fit that narrative. This corollary is conceded by mainstream historians, by the way, but they just use it to assert that it could only have been named after Heydrich and not Reinhardt:

/5. It does seem inherently unlikely that a murderous operation of the complexity of "Aktion Reinhard" would be named after an economist. The implication of naming the "Aktion" after Fritz Reinhardt is that the prime motivation was the expropriation of Jewish property.

So the implication of accepting the actual spelling of the operation (not the spelling you use) is that the operation was not what mainstream historians say it is. Aside from Revisionists, even some mainstream historians accept that Aktion Reinhardt was named after Reinhardt, like Joseph Poprzeczny in his 2004 biography on Globocnik:

In fact, the term "Aktion Reinhardt" was originally the codename for the seizure of Jewish wealth and property... I accept that the name was taken from Fritz Reinhardt, a Reich Finance Ministry official, not from the SS-Gruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, as so many contend.

So you have a murder case with 2 million victims and no bodies- and the main victims have used their considerable influence to avoid any excavations of the supposed mass graves (sounds a lot like a recent case in Canada). Even the spelling you used of the supposed murder operation is controversial, with mainstream historians again misinterpreting history in order to support their pre-canned narrative. Nothing about this is straight-forward, it is all highly unusual.

Edit: BTW, I don't know who is reposting my comments here. Probably a bad actor?

Yes, the witness accounts are full of exaggerations, contradictions, probably fabrication, etc.

Indeed; and in the mainstream scholarly view, three unreliable witness accounts full of exaggerations, contradictions, and fabrications yield a reliable account when the inconvenient parts are ignored and the somewhat-compatible pieces can be fashioned together (and expunged when necessary, like the embarrassing, former consensus that diesel exhaust was used to gas millions of people in the AR camps). Such was the logic used in hundreds of witch trials and in the Court of the Red Tsar, where witnesses attesting to supernatural occurrences and confessions extracted under duress were considered sufficient in lieu of concrete evidence.

Earlier, you allowed that one could be skeptical of such confessions extracted from the NKVD:

There were also trials in the USSR, where the same basic story was maintained, but you may be more skeptical about confessions obtained by the NKVD.

But let's take stock of the most major players in the Holocaust, and what they had to say:

  • Himmler: Died in Allied custody

  • Globocnik: Died in Allied custody

  • Christian Wirth: Killed by Partisans

  • Göring: Denied any plan to exterminate the Jews, and explicitly denied ordering Heydrich to exterminate the Jews (contrary to scholarly consensus). And then died in Allied custody.

Göring is particularly notable because he was the highest authority in General Government, where these AR camps existed. There is no doubt that if there was such a secret extermination program, he would have known about it, and he explicitly denied it. So either he was lying or Revisionists are right. For that matter, Göring affirmed the Revisionist historical interpretation of the "Final Solution" as such:

SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: Will you please answer my question. Do you still say neither Hitler nor you knew of the policy to exterminate the Jews?

Goering: As far as Hitler is concerned, I have said I do not think so. As far as I am concerned, I have said that I did not know, even approximately, to what extent these things were taking place.

SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: You did not know to what degree, but you knew there was a policy that aimed at the extermination of the Jews?

Goering: No, a policy of emigration, not liquidation of the Jews. I knew only that there had been isolated cases of such perpetrations.

Of course, the keystone of the entire Holocaust narrative, including the AR camps (which did not receive so much as 30 minutes of attention at the Nuremberg Trials), is the confession of the former commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss. His confession was extracted from the British, not the NKVD; but Revisionists had for decades pointed out the absurdities and contradictions in this confession which led the court to conclude that 4.5 million people were murdered at Auschwitz. Of course, that number was reduced to 1.1 million after the fall of the Soviet Union, but like water off a duck's back, it didn't motivate any sort of scholarly skepticism over the reliability of other court findings at Nuremberg, or at the subsequent trials which were downstream of this keystone confession.

It wasn't until a 1983 when a book by Rupert Butler, Legions of Death, audaciously bragged about how the confession of Höss was extracted after days of torture. The prime British-Jewish interrogator, Bernard Clarke revealed "It took three days to get a coherent statement out of [Höss]":

The prisoner was torn from the top bunk, the pyjamas ripped from his body. He was then dragged naked to one of the slaughter tables, where it seemed to Clarke the blows and screams were endless.

Eventually, the Medical Officer urged the Captain: "Call them off, unless you want to take back a corpse."

A blanket was thrown over Höss and he was dragged to Clarke's car, where the sergeant poured a substantial slug of whisky down his throat. Then Höss tried to sleep.

Clarke thrust his service stick under the man's eyelids and ordered in German: "Keep your pig eyes open, you swine."

...

"They brought him to us when he refused to cooperate over questioning about his activities during the war. He came in the winter of 1945/6 and was put in a small jail cell in the barracks," recalls Mr. Jones. Two other soldiers were detailed with Mr. Jones to join Höss in his cell to help break him down for interrogation. "We sat in the cell with him, night and day, armed with axe handles. Our job was to prod him every time he fell asleep to help break down his resistance," said Mr. Jones. When Höss was taken out for exercise he was made to wear only jeans and a thin cotton shirt in the bitter cold. After three days and nights without sleep, Höss finally broke down and made a full confession to the authorities.

There are a lot more details in the article, like his statement was written in English and then translated into German in an attempt to make the latter appear as the original. This confession is the wellspring of the entire narrative and all subsequent trials, as the defendants were not permitted to dispute the findings of the Nuremberg trials. Earlier you also remarked:

In short, "they didn't bother to contest the charges, because they knew the Jews would railroad them anyway." Personally, if I was being accused of complicity in the murders of hundreds of thousands of people, and it was a lie, I think I would maintain my innocence for the sake of my conscience.

Hard to say what you would do if you were suffering these same conditions, isn't it? There are of course those who did maintain their innocence, and they were found guilty and executed anyway. Again, not the NKVD, but Revisionist research has provided great insight into the tactics of these War Crimes investigations: incompetence, dishonestly, forging documents, witness intimidation, suppression of evidence.

For context, Bruno Tesch was accused of knowingly supplying gas chambers and Zyklon B for the purpose of exterminating human beings, a charge for which he was clearly innocent. He maintained his innocence, and that the entire extent of his work and that of his gassing technicians was for delousing purposes only. As just one example, this Revisionist researcher found that the original German transcript of the interrogation had been marked for modification in the official English court interpretation. Here's an example of a passage from the German interrogation that was deleted in the official English version, where a Sergeant Freud threatened extradition to the Soviets for not getting answers he wanted:

Q. ... I thought you would like to speak, but as you are not doing that, we must proceed differently with you; for we want to know what the firm had to do with the gassing of men. You know the firm's position today, as well as yours, and that of the other gentlemen, Dr TESCH and WEINBACHER? Your sphere of activity was mostly in the East, such as AUSCHWITZ, RIGA, LUBLIN, ORANIENBURG, and all those places are now under Russian authority. We shall be forced to pass you on to the Russians who now deal with such cases and probably employ other methods to make you speak.

A. I cannot make any other statements. I can only assure you that my tongue has been loosened and that I will tell you everything.

Q. Until now you have not told us anything.

A. I must adhere to my statement that only after your victory did I hear that men had been gassed in the concentration camps...

"At the time, there was still a realistic possibility that Tesch would be turned over to the Russians, and Freud took the opportunity to threaten that because of the 4.5 million people he had killed, the Russians would rip out Tesch's [finger and toe] nails.

They still maintained their innocence:

Both stated that they knew nothing about Gas Chambers, but had been engaged in 'delousing' only. It is practically certain that they had been `briefed' in what they should say when questioned, as they both professed ignorance of the simplest things. It was only after having been spoken to sharply that the above was wormed out of them.

They maintained their innocence- and they were railroaded, found guilty, and executed. If they had spun a story to Sergeant Freud about how they received an oral order from Himmler at some date then they would have been treated with more leniency. Instead, they were threatened with torture and executed anyway even though they were clearly innocent. This wasn't the NKVD. It was the Western Allies that did this.

As far as I'm concerned, they can go ahead and dig up Treblinka. But I can understand why modern-day Jews would be loathe to do this in order to appease a handful of neo-Nazis.

It is not acceptable that they proclaim that their suffering was so profound that it transcends the most minimal standards of scientific and criminal investigation. An investigation of a single murder would yield an order of a magnitude more forensic investigation than was done for the alleged murder of up to 2 million people. Particularly given that the original extermination narratives in the Western camps, Auschwitz, and Majdanek have fallen apart over time and after Revisionist scrutiny.

The AR camp narrative remains the most unscathed precisely because it has the least amount of evidence for Revisionists to scrutinize (and that evidence was in the custody of the NKVD, who knows what exculpatory evidence has been hidden or destroyed). It behooves them to keep it that way by avoiding excavations, because more evidence has only made the work of Revisionists easier in their study of the other camps.

This is how history works.

It is not at all how history works. Witness accounts are treated as a single dimension that ought be corroborated with documents and physical evidence, particularly when the witnesses involved have a motive to lie, and they attest to extremely unusual events. The lack of documents is well known and has long been admitted to by mainstream historians, like Léon Poliakov in 1951:

As regards the conception properly called of the plan for a total extermination, the three or four principal actors committed suicide in May of 1945. No document has survived or perhaps has ever existed.

No documents, no mass graves; a tortured confession with known errors and exaggerations, is the basis for the entire narrative which was already considered "history" well before the Treblinka trials in the 1960s. Renowned historian A.J.P Taylor acknowledged:

The evidence of which there is too much is that collected for the trials of war-criminals in Nuremberg. Though these documents look imposing in their endless volumes, they are dangerous material for a historian to use. They were collected, hastily and almost at random, as a basis for the lawyer's briefs. This is not how historians would proceed. The lawyer aims to make a case; the historian wishes to understand a situation. The evidence which convinces lawyers often fails to satisfy us; our methods seem singularly imprecise to them. But even lawyers must not have qualms about the evidence at Nuremberg. The documents were chosen not only to demonstrate the war-guilt of the men on trial, but to conceal that of the prosecuting Powers... The verdict preceded the tribunal; and the documents were brought in to sustain a conclusion which had already been settled.

Surely you are aware that the defense at the Nuremberg trials only had available to them documents which had been selected by the prosecution as relevant to the case. This is not how history works, this is how show-trials work.

The confessions of Rudolf Höss, who if I recall correctly said he had visited the AR camps once, is not the keystone of the evidence for AR.

Oh it's even better than that. Höss's statement said:

I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time, there were already in the General Government three other extermination camps: Belzek, Treblinka, and Wolzek.

Other than the fact that Wolzek was not a camp, the even more glaring problem is that it is universally agreed by historians that Treblinka did not open until July 1942 and received its first transport later that month. Some historians try to place a different year for Höss's order and visit to Treblinka, but none of the proposed timelines work. Every proposed timeline is contradicted by another part of the story. There is in fact no evidence at all that Höss visited Treblinka, so where does his descriptions of the gas chambers and such come from? Probably from the published accounts from Wiernik, Grossman, Rachman, etc which would have been known to the interrogators. In the same way the interrogators tried to lead the defendants in the Tesch Trial to admit to the "gas chamber disguised as shower room" scheme, which they never did. The fact is, even if you try to torture Höss's statement, there is no internally consistent account of his supposed visit to Treblinka.

This is of course not the only continuity problem with the Treblinka story. Revisionists uncovered a newspaper clipping from the Polish-language London newspaper Dziennik Polski which reported on alleged extermination actions at Treblinka a whole two weeks before the camp even opened. How does an international newspaper report on an extermination camp weeks before it even opened and received its first transport? It turns out that's not even the only apocryphal rumor of a "Treblinka extermination camp" published before the camp even opened. As early as May 1942:

At that time, i.e. in late May and early June 1942, the clandestine press published reports on two camps in Treblinka: the labor camp and the death camp. The first reference to the killing center there is to be found in a text by Gutkowski entitled ‘The Scroll of Agony and Destruction,’ which probably constitutes the draft of an Oneg Shabbat press bulletin. In the entry dated May 29, 1942, we read: ‘There are two camps in Treblinka: a labor camp and a death camp. In the death camp people are not murdered by shooting (the criminals are saving ammunition), but by means of a lethal rod [in the Yiddish original: troytshtekn].’ This item, without mention of the ‘lethal rod,’ was printed on June 2, 1942 by the newspaper Yedies. The next issue of that paper, dated June 9, 1942, carried an article entitled ‘The Death Camp in Trenblinka [sic]’ In it we read:

‘A Pole who managed to bribe his way out of the camp relates: 'I worked with the German personnel of the labor camp. The Poles present there were assigned the task of digging huge pits. The Germans brought a group of about 300 Jews every day. They were ordered to undress and get into the pit. The Poles then had to cover the pits with soil, burying the people there alive. After they finished their work, they were shot.’”

Again, it is unanimously agreed that Treblinka did not open until July 1942 and received its first transport on 22 or 23 July 1942. So how is an international newspaper talking about gassings in Treblinka before the camp was open?

But there are no train schedules for trains from Treblinka and to the Soviet east

The entire body of evidence was in Soviet custody. If there were exculpatory records, do you trust that the Soviets would have introduced them as evidence as they were building a case against the Germans? Keep in mind they accused the Germans of conducting the Katyn Forest massacre, which they were guilty of. A lack of records is indeed suspicious, but that suspicion can be cast in multiple directions.

I could buy that, maybe if some had confessed and others hadn't. Not for all of them.

The extermination narrative at Treblinka was not even in question at the trials in the 1960s. The only question was of the guilt of the alleged perpetrators. "It didn't happen" was not a defense they could have used. Take Lambert for example, who was found guilty of constructing the gas chambers at Treblinka. What exactly does he "confess" to? He confesses to a construction project, but denies involvement or knowledge of the alleged murder operation. He got time served for minimizing his involvement that way, and he would have faced a much harsher punishment if he tried to deny the entire basis for the trial. Even Kurt Franz, the commandant of a camp that allegedly murdered hundreds of thousands, was released from prison after a long sentence. Franz Stangl died in custody while awaiting his appeal, so it's also disingenuous to mark him down as purely a confessor given he was challenging his conviction. And, as already mentioned, key figures like Goering and Hanks Frank did deny all knowledge and involvement even though they would have been in a position where they must have known, if it had happened.

Famously, 54 of 180 of the accused witches admitted guilt in the Salem Witch trials. 19 who refused to admit guilt were executed. Confessions extracted in military tribunals, after the alleged war crime had already been purportedly proven, is not a good way to do history.

Kues thinks they were sent on to Belarus, the Baltic, and the Ukraine. His evidence for this is wartime rumor, second and third-hand hearsay, and reports in foreign papers. Wartime rumor, second and third-hand hearsay, and reports in foreign papers are course worthless when they talk about extermination facilities, but evidential gold when they talk about resettlement in the east.

Add to that postcards which deportees sent to Warsaw after their transit. Historians say that these were forged by the SS as a ruse to lure more Jews onto trains. Tracking the whereabouts with that level of granularity is basically impossible given the circumstances of the war. Even more so given the entire custody of the evidence was in the hands of the Soviet Union. Ultimately, historians are the ones who claim to know the precise remains of every single one of these people, but the evidence for their conclusion does not hold up to scrutiny.

If you accuse someone of having murdered and buried a busload of people in his backyard, it would be nothing more than a desperate attempt to reverse the burden of proof to demand that the accused must locate the people who were on the bus if he wants to dispute the claim. You're the one saying the busload of people was murdered and buried in the backyard, where's the evidence for that? Not a single grave has ever been excavated. It's a desperate strategy for an extraordinary claim that lacks evidence.

What do you make of Goebbels' statements in his diary, on Globocnik's operations in Poland?

His statements are vague, which is why Holocaust historians find it necessary to rely on them. Excavating alleged mass graves? Nah. Vague diary statements? They make reliable evidence because you can just work backwards and fill in the blanks with your preferred narrative.

You're referring to Goebbels' vague statement on March 27, 1942. Earlier that month, March 7, 1942, he wrote:

There are about 11 million Jews in Europe. Later it will be necessary to concentrate them in the East. After the war some island such as Madagascar can be assigned to them

Like other leaders, Goebbels expected a reboot of the Madagascar plan after the war, not some extermination plan.

The start date of Treblinka's operation is not as set in stone as Kues has it.

Yes, it is. It is universally agreed that gassing operations began with the transports from Warsaw on July 22. Can you cite one historian who places the beginning of gassing operations before that? There's also the July 7th letter from the first Commandant of that Treblinka camp, Irmfried Eberl, which states that the "Work Camp [Arbeitslager] Treblinkla" will be ready on July 11th. But by July 9th there were already reports, published by the London-based Dziennik Polski:

We provide here data [dane] on the state of affairs in Poland, presented the day before yesterday [i.e. 9 July 1942] by Minister Mikołajczyk to British and foreign reporters at a press conference held by the British Ministry of Information... All children aged 2-3 years from the orphanage, who numbered 108, were sent away from the city along with their nurses and murdered. Altogether 2,500 people were murdered that night, while the remaining 26,000 were sent to camps in Bełżec and Tremblinka... Reportedly in Bełźec and Tremblinka the killing is going on with the help of poisonous gas [za pomoca gazów trujacych].

Of course, that CODOH article shows even more rumors of an extermination camp in Treblinka going back to May 1942, where the original method of mass murder was described as "lethal rods." That was only the first of many variations of alleged method of mass murder. By November 1942, less than four months after the camp was open, the Warsaw ghetto resistance published claims of 2 million deaths by steam chamber in Treblinka (German disinfestation chambers during the war were often operated with steam):

The ghost of death in the steam chambers would stand before the eyes of the whole Polish people... we all have become aware of Treblinka. Over there, people are boiled alive.

Eberl's letter is also interesting because he refers to Treblinka as a work camp, not an extermination camp. It's not the only instance where an AR camp is explicitly identified as having a non-homicidal function. Himmler's 5 July 1943 directive for example reads:

"The Sobibór transit camp [Durchgangslager], located in the Lublin district, is to be converted into a concentration camp. A dismantling unit for captured enemy munitions is to be set up in the concentration camp."

And Osawld Pohl (head of SS-WVHA and camp system) replies:

"According to your above instructions, the Sobibór transit camp [Durchgangslager] in the Lublin district is to be converted into a concentration camp. I have discussed this with SS-Gruppenführer Globocnik...

There's a third document where Himmler's assistant referred to Sobibór as a transit camp. How do historians explain these documents? They say that the SS were using camouflage in their communications in order to maintain the utmost secrecy in their extermination operation. That's especially ironic given a London newspaper blew the lid on the Treblinka extermination camp before it was even operational. Historians don't even acknowledge these contradictions, they just act as if they don't exist because Revisionists are the only ones willing to point them out and show that the historiography does not explain the known evidence.

By the way, Oswald Pohl himself worked closely in Operation Reinhardt with both Himmler and Globocnik. He and the rest his SS-WVHA denied any knowledge of an extermination operation. He would have known if Operation Reinhardt was an extermination plan, and he denied any knowledge of that.

Hoess' statements are hardly critical to the AR story anyways. Apparently Kues agrees, since he believes Höss' confession was entirely cobbled together from previous testimonies.

Heoss' statements are critical precisely because they were clearly cobbled together from previous accounts. The significance of Hoess is that having the story come from a camp commandant gives it a lot more credibility than a story said to be written by anonymous escapees.

The credibility of Wiernik for example has always been enigmatic. Imagine if Wiernik really did witness everything he claimed, and planned the great revolt and escaped after heroically killing a Ukrainian guard with an axe. Why wouldn't he be an international superstar and why would his account be virtually unknown? You cannot even buy A Year in Treblinka on Amazon despite the importance of his remarkable, first-hand account of the single most unusual event in WWII.

Goering, Hans Frank, Oswald Pohl; that is a notable list of top leadership that would have known about this extermination operation in General Government, but they maintained their denial through the end. Heoss gave credibility to these tall tales by recycling them under duress, but he was never in Treblinka; and historians can't even "choose their own adventure", as they so often do, and a pick a date of his visit that's consistent with the rest of the timeline.

The Łukaszkiewicz report

The case is so straightforward that you are reduced to contradicting the conclusion of the report you are citing. "Łukaszkiewicz found mass graves!" According to Łukaszkiewicz, he did not. The murder, cremation, and burial of upwards of a million people would leave metric tonnes of evidence. Why are you reduced to these sorts of appeals for something that ought to have an enormous amount of physical evidence that should have easily been found at any point since 1945? Because the claim is extraordinary and the evidence is very weak.

Why do you find "the Soviets destroyed all the evidence" any less risible than "the Nazis destroyed all the evidence" (not that they did)?

It's a matter of the quantity and quality of the evidence not measuring up to the extraordinary nature of the claims. You are claiming that upwards of a million people were murdered, cremated, and buried in this small camp, and that all these cremations happened in about 120 days (with zero contemporaneous reports of such an enormous, non-stop cremation operation). The lack of evidence is the problem, and the reasons for the lack of evidence could be multiple. But ultimately, "it didn't happen" is the only plausible explanation for why such an allegedly enormous operation like this would have left behind so little evidence. And what little was left behind was in the custody of the Soviet Union, which denied access to outside investigators and even modified structures in existing camps to advance the gas chamber claim.

Reinhard staff

You've already dodged a defense of the official narrative regarding "Operation Reinhard". To answer your question, you first have to understand what Operation Reinhardt denoted, which was not what historians claim it denoted. Why are you so interested in the "Reinhard staff" if you aren't even interested in what Operation Reinhardt actually was? The reason is that the Revisionist interpretation of Operation Reinhardt fits the evidence far better than the mainstream story of a secret extermination plan named in honor of the Hangman Heydrich.

Did he challenge his conviction by denying Treblinka's status as an extermination camp? I don't believe he did.

Stangl died under suspicious circumstances before his appeal was heard. We cannot say how it would have unfolded if he had not died in custody like Himmler, Globocnik, Eberl, etc.

It isn't vague at all

Actually "considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention" is vague. You are starting with your own preferred conclusion and filling in the blank. But Revisionists claim that this was referring to the liquidation of the ghettos where Jews were indeed rounded up, robbed of their possessions, and deported. The Revisionist interpretation of these events explains both the March 27th entry and the March 7th entry which discusses a continuation of the Madagascar plan after the war. Your interpretation may explain the later but it does not explain the earlier entry. The Revisionist interpretation explains both entries.

I would compare it to a man kidnapped by two of his mortal enemies

This is the exact same logic used to hoodwink an entire country into believing atrocities that never happened, like the so-called mass graves at the Kamloops Indian Reservation schools. "The Catholic Church kidnapped those children in order to genocide their culture. You are a genocide denier if you think these GPR results aren't good enough to conclude that this is a mass grave of victims of the Catholic Church!"

In any serious investigation, witness testimony would be followed by excavations to try to identify remains, determine cause of death, and conclude if that evidence coincides with the various accounts. This has not happened in Kamloops and it has not happened in Treblinka.

It did happen in the German investigation of the Kayn Forest massacre. When the Germans discovered the mass graves of the Katyn Forest, they invited international observers and even released American POWs to monitor and report on the investigation to Western authorities. They (NSFW) excavated the remains in the mass graves, conducted autopsies, identified the remains they could, tried to determine cause and time of death, and documented everything. And the Germans were still accused of this crime by the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg, and the truth was denied until the fall of the Soviet Union.

Not a single iota of similar investigation has happened for the alleged murder of around 2 million people in the so-called AR camps. Contradictory witness accounts and confessions extracted in tribunals are not a substitute for a minimum level of investigation that any reasonable person should expect in order to believe these extraordinary claims.

We agree Jews were sent to Treblinka, just strongly disagree on what happened to them afterwards.

The fact is, it's ambiguous how many Jews were sent to the camp known as "Treblinka II." The only existing train schedules identify the destination as Treblinka, with a stop right before at the Malkinia junction. Treblinka was the name of a train station some distance from the Jewish camp called TII. Malkinia was a significant hub right next to the Treblinka station. The disinfestation facilities at Treblinka II were likely used as a transit camp in some capacity, but I believe TII was primarily a Jewish labor camp, as stated in Erbel's letter- used for the sorting, storage, and disinfestation of confiscated Jewish property during Operation Reinhardt. But the train schedules do not identify TII as the destination of those transports. It's not known how many Jews set foot in TII.

But you've said you don't put much stock in mainstream historians anyways, so what does it matter?

Because it's another example of historians and their apologists playing "choose their own adventure." All historians since Arad said that gassing operations began in Treblinka on July 22nd or July 23rd. But you cite a 2014 book by Chris Webb, who no doubt included this speculative line in his book in response to these Revisionist findings published a few years before. It's not based on evidence, it's just a helpless attempt to patch another hole in the official narrative made by Revisionist findings.

The May report (I've tried to find a copy of the cited source online, I can't) doesn't even mention gas.

It identifies a death camp in Treblinka. There were thousands of German camps, and only 5 are claimed to have been death camps. What are the chances that the May report correctly predicted a death camp in Treblinka before it was even constructed? Astronomical. The more likely explanation is that the rumors which preceded the existence of the camps formed the basis for later accounts.

Granting that Dziennik Polski is reporting Jews sent to Treblinka before Jews were sent to Treblinka (whether they were gassed or not), does that imply no Jews were sent to Treblinka?

There's a very big gap between "no Jews were sent to Treblinka II" and "a million Jews were sent to Treblinka II." The fact that Dziennik Polski is reporting something before it happened according to official historiography lends credence to Revisionist claims that the nature and extent of this activity was misrepresented by politically-motivated rumor and propaganda, and polluted later accounts and tortured confessions. At any point in the past 75+ years, investigators could have done due diligence and followed basic standards of scientific investigation to determine approximately how many people were killed at Treblinka, but they have specifically forbidden investigators from doing so. The accusers do not want investigators examining the most important evidentiary fact of the matter. That is evidence in itself for Revisionist conclusions.

So if Reinhardt was an operation to plunder the Jews and ship them east, the question as to why so many of the men assigned to these camps came from the former euthanasia program remains.

The euthanasia program ended, so the special staff was available for this special task in the General Government. Much of this former staff were truck drivers employed in the transportation of valuables in General Government. This was the entire point of Operation Reinhardt. The deportation operations were decentralized and handled by the local districts. Operation Reinhardt specifically denoted the sorting, disinfestation, transportation, and utilization of confiscated Jewish property. This was centrally coordinated by SSPF in the district Lublin. It was not a codename for the extermination of the Jews as claimed by official historiography. It was an economic initiative named after Reinhardt- State Secretary of the Ministry of Finance.

AR was about getting rid of Polish Jewry in particular

No it was not, it was about the utilization of property confiscated from the Jews throughout the course of resettlement and liquidations of the ghettos.

Sonthofen in 1944

The context of those passages, which you omitted, was the execution of partisans as the result of uprisings. Revisionists do not deny that reprisals of partisans was a very real part of the history of this time and resulted in large deaths tolls. It's the gas chambers disguised as shower rooms, the alleged plans of a "Final Solution" as extermination, and the hyper-inflated death tolls that they challenge.

The Sonthofen speech also provides support for Revisionist arguments, right in a passage you just referenced:

I am confident we could not have held the Lemberg front in the General Government if we still had the big ghettoes in Lemberg, Krakow, Lublin, and Warsaw.

You know full well that the Revisionists do not deny the liquidation of the ghettos; they merely deny that nearly all the evacuated Jews received a 1-way ticket to gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The ghetto liquidations were motivated by hygienic concerns of epidemic typhus, economic concerns for the confiscation of wealth and industry, and security concerns as stated here by Himmler. Not some top-secret plan to exterminate world Jewry with engine exhaust in gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.

The coup de grâce is the Revisionist critique of the alleged cremation operation at Treblinka, which is not credible in the size, scope, and methods attested to.

Even using extremely conservative estimates of the fuel that would have been required for the operation of cremations at Treblinka, the daily fuel required is roughly similar to the amount of wood combusted in a moderately-sized forest fire. This was a small camp with a small workforce. There is no logical explanation, or documentary evidence, or witness testimony, that explains how this alleged operation was logistically possible. For that matter, it was supposedly carried out without a single contemporaneous report from local villagers or the Polish Underground operating in the area of these raging infernos that were allegedly burning every single day during the cremation operations.

A London newspaper reported on gassing at Treblinka before it even opened, but nobody reported on the raging infernos from the open-air cremation pyres for months straight. That is not logical.

A significant proportion of people would become Revisionists if they learned the specific details of what historians claim happened at Treblinka. The devil is in the details, and the details are not believable. Even allowing that many, perhaps tens of thousands of Jews, died at the camp called TII, the 750,000+ estimated death tolls are equally as ridiculous as the original 4.5 million claim at Auschwitz, or 1.5 million claim at Majdanek. Circling back to the Caroline Colls investigation, her GPR results are not consistent with the shape, size, and scale of graves that would have been required to bury 700,000+ people. The alleged death toll is not credible and the ban on scientific investigation of the alleged mass graves is evidence that authorities are not confident in what they would find if they conducted those excavations.

In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money

Among the array of Holocaust literature that was required reading throughout public school, one of the worst was surely The Chosen. Although it took place in New York and the Holocaust was only part of the backdrop.

The novel explores the dialectic between Jewish Chosenness and Jewish secular achievement in the form of the Hasidic versus Modern Orthodoxy. Danny is a Hasidic boy being groomed to succeed his father as Rabbi. But he has photographic memory and secretly wants to pursue a career in Freudian psychiatry. Danny pursues secular studies at the library under his father's nose. Reuven is a Modern Orthodox Jewish boy whose father wants him to have a career in academia, but Reuven wants to be a rabbi. For Potok, the resolution is of course a synthesis where Danny achieves his academic goals while maintaining his orthodoxy and Reuven achieves Talmudic enlightenment or something.

But even at the time, what stood out was how poor behavior from the Hasidic was portrayed sympathetically although it was in violation of all the other principles we were supposed to be learning as children. Dogmatic, authoritarian, insular, abusive... Danny's rabbi father raises him in silence, only talking to him when they study Talmud together- because of Auschwitz, or something.

Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of

Americans are deeply incapable of grasping Jewish power structures. This is due in large part to the lessons they have been taught as children, like in The Chosen, where are are made to sympathize and valorize the worst elements of a cultural tradition as implicit penance for the Holocaust.

Econ departments tend to be less progressive than others. GMU econ in particular trends libertarian; Bryan Caplan is probably the most notable professor out of that department.

Caplan has himself been measured in the IQ debate. Caplan's book The Case Against Education is essentially premised on the relative immutability of IQ. At the same time, he maintains a spirited defense of Open Borders while largely sidestepping the Race question, although he has hinted at awareness of those critiques.

The criticisms of Israel are dual-pronged. The right-wing critique of Israel is more rooted in what could be regarded as anti-Semitism in the European tradition:

  • Accusations of dual loyalty among Jews.

  • Accusations of being stabbed in the back, like the USS Liberty attack, the theft of US nuclear secrets, and highly suspicious espionage.

  • Zionist influence in the neo-conservative movement and wars in the Middle East brought about by fabricated intelligence.

  • Duplicitousness. Jewish nationalism is pursued militaristically and violently while Jewish influence vehemently opposes European nationalistic tendencies, and uses considerable influence to promote diversity and immigration in other countries.

  • Jewish influence in media and culture has engineered a Holocaust Industry to defraud the West of billions of dollars and pacify would-be criticism.

As Zionists will point out, these criticisms of Israel do play the same beats as classical anti-Semitism, as it were. Those who would make this criticism would plausibly be called anti-Semitic, so the only people who are publicly willing to make these ciriticsms are those brave enough to face credible accusations of anti-Semitism (not many).

The left wing critique of Israel is not really rooted in this tradition, and it's more along the lines of:

  • Israel is a violent, ethnonationalist state.

  • As such, it is far closer to fascist that it is to the left-wing ideal of a state.

  • Israel is oppressing indigenous people, murdering them, and driving them out of their homes.

  • Illegal Israeli settlements are ethnic cleansing.

  • Billions of dollars for Military Industrial Complex and warmongering to steal Arab oil.

Jewish influence has had a harder time fighting the left-wing criticism because it really isn't anti-Semitic, as much as they are trying to redefine that word to incorporate those criticisms. These criticisms also follow from anti-racist ideology. Accusations of anti-Semitism are not really credible here and don't seem to be working very well in shaming them out of their positions.

The real concern is bridging the gap between these perspectives, as the left-wing criticisms of Israel could be a gateway to genuine anti-Semitism. Finkelstein for example is a leftist Jewish professor, so his critique in the Holocaust Industry is much more powerful than it would have been coming from a right-winger. Another example is Grayzone, a left-wing publication that danced into the Dancing Israeli Question, although it ultimately provided weak cover for it, talking about it is 95% of the way there.

Jeffrey Sachs has been a high priest of neo-liberal policymaking for decades. He's as establishment as it gets. It would be strange for him to throw his weight behind a US lab leak hypothesis unless he actually believed it was a possibility. Vanity Fair also ran an article about the lab leak hypothesis, but much of the story behind it takes place in the US. On the other hand, looking at Sachs' website he does seem to have pro-Russian/China sympathies.

We go to the library a lot for children's books and come home with a good pile. One of those books looked innocent enough on the cover, but turned out to be about a boy who wanted to dress up as a princess. So he goes dress shopping with his mother until he finds the perfect dress, and ends by giving a lesson to his friends on how it's ok for a boy to dress as a princess. Obviously I stopped reading it aloud on the second page when I could see where this was going. But after reflection, it was the first book in the house that was actually about the princess archetype.

They are subverting these archetypes before kids even learn them. The author was some gender identity activist. The culture has definitely changed.

It was definitely a "if it can happen to me it can happen to anyone" moment. Yes, they are going after the children. You have to take active measures if you don't want them exposed to it, and even then, it's pretty hopeless once the school system gets them in the classroom.

The scriptwriters for episode four (apparently it's Stephany Folsom and J. D. Payne & Patrick McKay, yes our boys again) are introducing the reasons the Númenoreans don't like Elves. And - wait for it - it's because "they're going to take our jobs!". No, I swear, this is actually it.

I just watched it and had a different reading. That line about jobs was one part of the speech, but the broader polemic was much more racialized. The Númenoreans are depicted as racially jealous of the Elves, and this jealously has inspired disloyalty to and suspicion the elves. Furthermore it is heavily foreshadowed that disloyalty to the elves is displeasing to the gods (Valar) and is going to lead to the downfall of the Númenoreans.

I don't think you're giving the writers enough credit, they are smarter than you think. The general theme seems to be anti-racist, but anti-racist in a way that is fairly close to Tolkein's interpretation of his work as you described it. That theme is "racial jealously leads to non-cooperation with more gifted races, which leads to the downfall of the ethnocentric empire." That could be read in multiple ways.

Númenór is Hellenized in the show. Its downfall could harken to the downfall of Old Europe, which was destroyed in Tolkein's day because of its suspicion of the "gifted people" as Tolkein called them. It could also be a warning against anti-racism itself, for drumming up struggle against those more gifted in a way that's self-destructive. In any case, the messaging is more esoteric than criticisms of rote populism.

There's a second part to the story. Whites are clearly pursuing a different strategy. Some might say that Whites are simply more enlightened; that they have learned key moral truths that led to the success of Western civilization. The other interpretation is that the strategy is doomed in the long-run, given that it is exploitable by alien defectors.

Whites will signal by proclaiming how non-racial they are. At any other point in history, this behavior would have been regarded as anti-social and ignorant. But through the alchemy of Hollywood and popular culture, these healthy instincts are denounced as taboo.

falling victim to the same congenital failing that Western media had since maybe Kirk Douglas's Spartacus framed the man as a proto-abolitionist

It's not a congenital failing, it's an intelligent system working as designed. Kirk Douglas wasn't stupid- his goal was never to "reflect history", at least in the way you understand that term. He was creating Myth; he was creating stories that had consciously developed, esoteric messaging for intended audiences. In this way, he created a story about a Marxist (or crypto-Jewish) hero standing up to proto-Fascism:

Looking at these ruins, and at the Sphinx and the pyramids in Egypt, at the palaces in India, I wince. I see thousands and thousands of slaves carrying rocks, beaten, starved, crushed, dying. I identify with them. As it says in the Torah: ‘Slaves were we unto Egypt.’ I come from a race of slaves. That would have been my family, me’.

This messaging is also conveyed through Christian symbolism. Spartacus is crucified at the end, after prophesizing that the rebellion would one day overthrow Roman (i.e. European) dominance for good. This is not a failing, it's an exercise of an immensely powerful cultural influence through well-crafted Mythmaking that has audiences rooting for the slave rebellion and against Roman civilization.

That's not to say these myths are always well-crafted. Based on your review, Woman King seems less well-crafted than Spartacus, although it looks like it has a whopping 99% Audience Score in Rotten Tomatoes.

I left the movie wondering if this needed to be a culture war issue at all? Couldn't everyone just written it off as a silly, Braveheart-esque vision of history?

It's turtles all the way down. Mel Gibson's Braveheart is very different than what would have been Kirk Douglas's Braveheart. The stories we tell, and the messages we try to convey through our stories, are intrinsically part of the culture war. Even by consciously trying to avoid it, you are merely participating with a different strategy.

It's not simply an American phenomenon either. Famously, Jesus taught in parable. The Movie Theater is, in some ways, the modern day temple.

The irony here is that Trumbo wanted the explicit Jewish elements of Fast's novel to be included in the movie but Kubrick shot that down.

Yeah, the article discusses one of those elements that was included in earlier drafts of the script but scrapped by Kubrick:

Trumbo expanded the role of David and magnified his Jewishness. Under Trumbo’s penmanship, David became a rabbi and one of Spartacus’s trusted aides, a brother-in-arms. Trumbo even has David organize a mass marriage ceremony preceding the final battle sequence. In considerable detail, Trumbo painted a very Jewish scene, which consisted of a fabric roof place on four poles to stand for the temple, beneath which is another smaller wedding canopy. Beneath that is an altar on which a seven-branched Menorah is standing. David wears a tallit. He chants in Hebrew and invokes ‘Talmudic law’. He makes a speech in which he compares the slaves to the Hebrews of the Exodus: ‘Behold us here in the wilderness – a little company of slaves’.

On one level I do agree that the film affirms Christian ideology insofar as it plays Christian morality (uncharitably, but relevant in context- slave morality) against Roman master morality. But ultimately Christianity is about Christ, and the heroes of the story are not Christian. Spartacus is squarely a Moses figure:

As a result, Spartacus very much resembles a Moses-like liberator who, having killed an overseer, leads the slaves out of captivity and into a Promised Land he will never see.

Douglas was also a passionate supporter of Zionism and Israeli independence. This was showcased in his earlier role as a traumatized death-camp survivor in The Juggler (1953). It helps to explain the depiction of Spartacus’ army as, in the words of Jewish critic Pauline Kael, ‘a giant kibbutz on the move’. It also explains the parallels between Spartacus and Otto Preminger’s Exodus which Trumbo began working on while he was finishing up on Spartacus. An adaptation of Leon Uris’s hugely successful 1958 novel, it promoted a fantasy of the muscular ‘New Jew’, the modern warrior reborn in violence from the ashes of the gentle old-world shtetl Jew and supplied a counterpoint to the Holocaust’s images of Jewish weakness, victimhood and passivity.

So the "Jewish element" exists in the source material, it was clearly a huge motivating influence on Douglas, Fast, and Trumbo, and it was written in the script but toned down in favor of a more cryptic identity of the heroes. Did they set out to make a Christian movie? Now that would be ironic.

If Braveheart was made by Jews

But it wasn't, it was made by Mel Gibson. It's like saying "If Passion of the Christ was made by Jews, you would have something to say about that." Well, it wasn't, it was made by Mel Gibson. If Jews did make Passion of the Christ, do you think it would be the same movie?

And yes, I do think Spartacus is cryptic and ingenious in a way that goes far beyond some Americanized glorification of abolitionism. And it is cryptic and ingenious in away that Woman King is not, and there are a lot of signs that this ingenuity has run its course.

There's a third pillar of Sovereign accountability, and that's intra-national political competition. The nationalist conception of the high and the low versus the middle paints a more historical picture of balance of power than Enlightenment morality and constitutionalism:

The “Jouvenelian model” Bond is referring to, and which his book is opposing to the liberal model, starts from the assumption that “there is in every society a centre of control” (24). What Bond aims to show in his book is that political reality is generated by the struggle of final power centers against intermediate power centers which interfere with the governing imperatives as determined by the final center. Familiar examples would be a medieval king contending with the nobility as he attempts to levy taxes to prosecute a war or some other project; or mid-20th century attempts on the part of America’s federal government to assimilate the recalcitrant Southern states into a fully modern, liberal order...

... all the concepts of liberalism—“equality,” “sovereignty,” the “individual,” “human rights,” and so on—are produced, not by moral advances, theoretical or philosophical inquiries, or “bottom-up” revolts of the oppressed, but, rather, by powerful actors within or close to the heights of state power levying powerless groups against institutions such as the Church, the aristocracy, the paternal authority of the family and, more recently, institutions maintaining law and order, education, business, dependent states, and more

In other words, the rhetoric of Free Market Capitalism, anti-nationalism, and anti-racism, are not some morla enlightenment brought about by Progress. They are the managerial tact of American empire. The move to strike nationalist sentiment is not moral enlightenment reached by individuals freely entering a social contract. It's a political strategy being employed by power actors.

Democracy has enjoyed a competitive advantage over the last few centuries because it makes an attempt to address both of these concerns.

That's the key insight. That liberalism has had a competitive advantage in the centralization of power is the reason it is dominant. Not because of flimsy moral premises, like the notion that the individual precedes the web of social obligations, or that there are inalienable "human rights." Those notions and self-justifications are themselves byproducts of these power struggles; such as the colonial subsidiary struggle against the former centers of Power.

We can move from a Whig view of history, from the view of Liberalism as an emergent moral enlightenment in which primordial truths were discovered, to a post-liberal model which recognizes that liberalism was an innovation in the centralization and organization of power.

Understanding liberal ideology as a set of competitive advantages is fundamentally different than understanding it as a moral Enlightenment. It's true that those are not mutually exclusive, but with this model the former is all that matters. Liberal moral presuppositions, like individual will preceding social order, are flimsy and ahistorical.

The desire to reduce the entire span of human behavior to originating scene governed by a simple equation is at best futile

Liberalism isn't guilty of this? Liberalism presupposes an ahistorical "state of nature" from which individuals consented to Social Order in order to protect their rights that are said to come from God.

The alternative view is that the social order precedes the individual, and that individual consciousness is and always has been inherited from the social order, and that rights are a consequence of the social order rather than a moral justification for its existence. That strikes me as much less hand-waving than the former story.

It also doesn't restrict these power conflicts to material conditions. Things like identity and race matter as much and often weigh more than material conditions. Liberalism is closer to Marxism in its emphasis on material conditions and de-emphasis of identity and race in comparison to nationalism.

The progressive Jews who are pro-Palestine are not subject to the ban. Why would progressive Jews oppose these measures any more than they would oppose similar measures against other speakers they deem as racist and supportive of ethno-nationalism? If they view Israel as an apartheid state, which they do as written in their bylaws, why would they take issue with this?

Calling these bylaws from some student organizations "Jewish Free zones" is a classic misrepresentation (nah, it's just a lie) by Jewish Journal, and it's revealing to see such kvetching for simply having a small fraction of the anti-racist critique against white identity applied to Jewish nationalism. Would these organizations allow speakers that support white nationalism? If not, are those "white free zones?"

Because last time I've read about this stuff I got the impression that, as you say, these graves were just detected from the surface with some radar but there were no excavations, prompting suspicion that these may not actually be mass graves. Has this changed?

No it has not. And per OP:

No excavation is happening in Canada because it would be disrespectful to the spirits of the children.

This means that there will be no excavations, and whoever doubts that these are the graves of children will be called a genocide denier. You may think "well, they've done pretty extensive excavations in other contexts, so why would this particular excavation be verboten?" It's because they know that if they excavated the entire thing would be exposed as a giant fraud.

Richard Spencer claims to have coined the term "Alt-Right" in 2010. But for a brief time around 2015-2017 the term was applied more broadly, with even Steve Bannon and Breitbart claiming to belong to the Alt-Right. It was never clearly defined, but broadly speaking it was a big-tent, right-wing movement that included populist elements and radical elements of the right. It spread through memes and edgy optics, and had some momentum from the election of Donald Trump. Richard Spencer was viewed as a leader, more by default due to his willingness to serve as a lightning rod for the media.

The Charlottesville debacle stopped the Alt-Right in its tracks, as for the first time it received serious opposition in the form of lawfare and mass deplatforming. So the movement immediately crumbled under the pressure and is defunct for all intents and purposes. "Dissident right" is used on one level to avoid the baggage of the alt-right, but on a deeper level the alt-right really does not exist anymore. I would estimate that a majority of those in the DR were red-pilled post-Charlottesville and never belonged to the alt-right in its heyday.

In contrast to the alt-right, I would define the dissident right (DR) as highly fragmented discourse surrounding issues of politics and culture that is only united by its universal acceptance of certain highly controversial premises. Things like the race question and Jewish question more broadly aren't controversial; they are premises that are just understood as true and therefore embedded in the discourse on other political and cultural topics, like the war in Ukraine.

And that leads to a bunch of small groups with wildly different ideas for how the right-wing should move forward. There are Nietzscheans, Christian nationalists, Neo-Platonists, fascists, but there's no broader organized movement and no aspiration for big-tent advocacy. Outsiders would probably consider them all alt-right, but they don't view themselves as part of the same movement although they'll refer to the broader discourse as "DR".

There's no analogue to Marxism on the far right, so the radical right is more of a greenfield. There is a lot of ideological diversity, even if they are unified on some issues. There's no sign of any consensus emerging from the DR any time soon.

This means, in brief, the belief in the common cosmic endowment of humanity, the moral imperative – Great Common Task – to overcome bodily death (and, ideally, reverse as many past deaths as possible by technical means, redeeming human history, regathering «particles of our fathers»), and the notion that institutions, cultures, techniques and weapons or warfare ought to be pointed away from our kin and aimed against the lethal force of nature.

Your vision seems techno-utopian and apolitical. It's fundamentally Christian- culminating in the resurrection of the dead, the lion laying down with the lamb, redemption from original sin, and a kingdom with no end.

We already have the promise of life after death. Our essence lives on in our children and our extended kin groups. Any ideology or project that neglects that, like promising personal salvation in the form of eternal life, from whatever divine source - celestial or technological - distracts from our real avenue for achieving life after death.

And a commitment to our progeny, in hopes that they are like us but better in every way: smarter, healthier, more beautiful, is intrinsically a political project and always has been; it's not a utopian vision that presupposes solving the political.

Why is your standard of living the decision boundary? Your model can't handle civilizational cycles that are seen all throughout history. You would end your own line at the first hint of decline rather than engage in a multi-generational contest for civilizational rejuvenation? Your ancestors made it through decline. They weren't sacrificing their progeny to Moloch. They lived on, and those who thought like you are long dead, in the most real sense of the term.

As for settling for "us but worse off"

Who wants to settle for "us but worse off?" I do not. But that's a political project, it's not a global humanitarian utopia or deus ex machina. It's civilization.

What's pitiful and disgusting is to not only settle for it but regard it as the only way. I must be frank, as immortalities go procreation is a mocking cope handed down by the blind idiot god of evolution as an afterthought.

How else are you going to achieve your immortality? Are you going to pray to Yahweh? Receive the eucharist? Or study machine learning in joyful hope for the coming of robot-Jesus Christ? All of those aspirational dreams are fine in their own, but if they are distracting you from realizing the actual potential of your own immortality, however limited, (or worse, if they are actively inspiring behavior that ensures the decline of your progeny) then that is what I would call pitiful and disgusting.

It's not the ideological staying power I question, it's that utopian visions of post-political, universal cooperation for personal salvation are a false god. It distracts from the real concerns of the here and now, the political, and our only actual hope for salvation: our children.

Ilforte is upset Anatoly Karlin, who shares his secular religion (I do not mean that as an insult, the creation of a secular religion is the greatest challenge of our time and I also think AI will have a place in that endeavor) is choosing Putin over cosmism. But what is Ilforte more upset about? Is he upset that Karlin is choosing Russian nationalism over Cosmism in general? Or is it only because the cause itself is lost and counter-productive to Russian nationalism?

Let's say that Putin were actually an extremely good leader for the Russian people and played his cards perfectly, and Russia stood to imminently gain from this conflict. If the strategic approach to realizing those gains for the Russian nation came into conflict with Ilforte's cosmist values, which would he pick? I know which Karlin would pick.

This can be taken to the extreme. You can ask a Christian: "Would you be OK with 100% of Europe being replaced by Africans, if all of the Africans were Christians?" The Karlin would say that this is not acceptable, but the good Christian who doesn't place nationalism before his religion would be more likely to consider this a worthy tradeoff. That's due to the staying power of the ideology. True. But it's not a good thing.