WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
I have explained how the mistranslation is used to propagate false information
No you have not. You have shown how that mistranslation led to the propagation of false information, but this does nothing - nothing at all, zilch - to prove that the mistranslation was intentionally coined or used for that purpose by people who knew they were engaging in deceptive behavior. My null hypothesis is that the original mistranslation was an innocent mistake, which led to earnest misunderstandings. Translation is a difficult business, translating esoteric philosophical coinages all the more so, and I have explained at length how the translation "subhuman" could have arisen in good faith.
It doesn't matter how much evidence you provide that "subhuman" went on to be misunderstood as racially connotated; it does nothing to change my mind about the probable mens rea of the translator. At most they may have been sincerely biased by their starting premise that the Nazis were all about scientific racism, and mistakenly-but-sincerely understood the German text to have spurious racial implications. But you have not provided any credible evidence of intentional conspiracy as a result of those slightly-off-kilter premises. You just keep pointing to subtle misunderstandings and asserting that therefore the translators were bald-faced liars.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
To me the case for hope around Trump is that, in his corrupt flailing, he destroys that which ought to be destroyed, or inadvertently opens up a kind of space for new growth
I think the case for hope, and the reason I've never been much of a doomer about Trump, is that he's taking up oxygen that could be going to an actual fascist, or some other effective representative of the forces of evil. My bitterest political opponents have decided to spend all their energies pumping up a petulant old windbag who's all bark and hardly any bite. Not to mention his cult of personality becoming synonymous with their values means that his death - which is, in the grand scheme of things, imminent - will deal a tremendous blow to the entire way the Red Tribe is organized. Trump is not Hitler, and to the extent that one is worried about the prospect of an American Hitler in principle, one should therefore be very thankful that Trump is hogging the spotlight. He's like a kind of tyranny lightning-rod, collecting the loyalty of everyone who'd support an actual dictator while having very low odds of actually declaring a dictatorship. Long may he continue to do so.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
You seem to have spent a lot of words on justifying the fact that Untermensch as originally employed by the Nazis did not have a racial connotation - which I already agreed with - and then simply swerved into reasserting the claim I originally questioned, ie that the misleading translation subhuman was "deliberately manipulative" (or "deliberatively" manipulative, as you had erroneously written) as if you had refuted my counter in any way.
I will admit it is interesting to learn that the term was originally coined in English as "Under-Man" before it was translated into Untermensch and backtranslated into "subhuman"; but this is, as you say, esoteric. I find it pretty likely that whoever coined "subhuman" as a translation was simply unaware of Stoddard's writings. My assumption is that they coined "subhuman" based on "superman", with no deliberate intent of introducing a racial connotation at the time, and that this neutrally-intended English translation went on to be misunderstood.
Besides, I suspect we now associate "subhuman" with racial bigotry at all because of the widespread belief that the Nazis used Untermensch as a term of racial abuse. I'm not entirely convinced that "subhuman" is innately more scientific-racism-coded than "under-man". Had "under-man" remained the accepted English translation from the start, we might simply find ourselves in a place where most people mistakenly assume the Under-man is an inherently racism-based concept. That is, after all, what happened with "the Superman", spandex-clad Kryptonians aside.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
which is not a good translation in comparison to "underman"- the inverse of the Nietzschean Overman
I do actually take the point that "subhuman" is an imperfect translation, but I think a part of the story you're missing is that the received translation for Übermensch itself in the first half of the 20th century was "Superman", not "Overman". That only changed when the guy with the red cape became so famous as to make the term hard to take seriously in a grown-up context - thank heaven no serious philosopher had invested pivotal significance in the Spinnemensch or the Fledermausmensch. The upshot of which is that at the time the "subhuman" translation emerged, it would not have been intuitive to coin "Undermen" to translate it, because there was no "Overman" to base it on. Instead, you would look at "Superman", which used the Latin prefix "super", and find its antonym, which happens to be "sub". But "Subman" sounds absurd, like a comic book character who can turn into a submarine, and anyway "human" is in fact a more precise translation of the gender-neutral Mensch than "man" is.
End result, "subhuman", a questionable translation but not I think a deliberately manipulative one when it was coined.
This is just Russell's conjugation.
Not exactly. Russell's conjugation is a form of sheer hypocrisy - describing the same bad behavior differently based purely on whether you're unrelatedly biased in favor of the person who's doing it. Crucially, if you had perfect information about the facts of each case, and passed judgement under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, you would regard the misdeeds as morally equivalent.
Whereas, in the case of Blues who are aware of Democratic wrongdoing (and granted, that isn't all of them; in the quoted sentence, "Left-wingers" implicitly referred to the kinds of left-wingers who argue about politics online, not to random normies) but largely ignore it while clutching pearls whenever Trump puts a foot wrong, I believe that they do sincerely believe Democrats' bad behavior is more excusable. They won't admit that to a political opponent mid-debate, but they'd defend it before God Himself with a clear conscience. "You're a murderous psycho, he saved an innocent victim's life" is not a Russell conjugation if you actually believe that A committed murder for personal gain while B was trying to save a third party.
Hence "He will stop at nothing to destroy Our Democracy, they took a few dubious shortcuts to try and save it", which I contend is subject to value disagreements and factual disputes, but not inherently an incoherent/hypocritical sentence.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
My claim is very clear,
What you explained after this statement is not in fact your claim; it is your counter to the conventional claim. I believe @Aapje58 would like you to plainly state what you believe did in fact happen, as would I. You mention that "the remains of those people have never been found", but as has already been brought up elsewhere in the thread without reply from you, this would still be an issue if those millions of Jews had died of starvation and typhus, except with less motivation for the Germans to make the bodies disappear. When a person goes missing, there is an extent to which the absence of a body is itself evidence of foul play. The same applies when we're talking about hundreds of thousands. Where do you think they all went to?
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
But Jews do have mountains of legitimate oppression to derive intersectional street-cred from, with or without the Holocaust. Without even going into pre-WWII antisemitism, the best that Revisionists can do to exculpate Nazi Germany is claim that the so-called death camps were actually just more labor camps. That is, the worst that they can do to Jews' stock of victim-points is to say that Hitler enslaved them rather than exterminated them. Newsflash, "past enslavement" seems to be plenty enough victimhood to get by in the progressive stack, judging by blacks.
The primary difference is that the Democrats have been very successful at the "We're not doing the thing we're doing." for about 10-15 years
I would argue that the primary difference is that Trump is evil. (From a left-wing perspective)
Left-wingers very rarely come out and say it, because it's a difficult thing to admit out loud, but one cannot have a sensible conversation about the "hypocritical" responses without taking morality into account. Left-wingers are not mysteriously unable to notice the Dems' underhanded tactics. Nor do they necessarily approve of them. But whether or not you approve, unethical shortcuts are much more forgivable when wielded towards mostly-good aims than when wielded towards evil aims. It's the difference between your properly corrupt cop who's covering for a gang boss in exchange for cash, and your archetypal cop-show "loose cannon" who ignores protocol & anti-entrapment laws in his quest to fuck the bastards back. They may violate exactly the same laws on paper, but one is obviously rotten, while the other should probably be tolerated. There's no hypocrisy here, just an underlying values difference which is rarely admitted to in plain English because "it's okay when our guys do it" sounds hypocritical.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
thé medieval church
thé Washington Post
thé concern
Is there a bit you're doing that I'm missing, or has your spellcheck just gone rogue?
Adopting an exasperated, superior attitude when trying to address pointed and persistent historical inconsistencies
I was adopting an exasperated attitude while dealing with SecureSignals specifically, whom I do not believe to be a dispassionate truth-seeker in this matter. I went back again and again to the "but if that's the most you can argue, why do you care so much?" angle not because it is or should be an all-purpose rejoinder to all questions about the Holocaust, but because SecureSignals in particular keeps acting as though the supposed holes in the conventional narrative, were they to be openly recognized by the public, would change… something. He's never terribly specific about what that "something" might be, but he clearly believes that his views on the Holocaust being widely circulated and vindicated should have a real impact on what people think about other topics of more immediate relevance. This is inconsistent with the motte of a narrow interest in facts and figures (the plausible "Hitler was indeed a genocidal monster, but as it turns out, he was a much less effective monster than usually portrayed"), and much more consistent with a bailey along the lines of "the Nazis were actually good, and never even dreamed of committing genocide, and anyway the Jews would have deserved it if they had" (which is a mixture of absurd and evil).
I don't make a habit of engaging in historiographical debates about the specifics of the Holocaust with apolitical truth-seekers who care about the facts for their own sake. I am, after all, not a historian. But if I did, I would talk to such people in a completely different tone. Moreover, I do not personally approve of censoring their earnest questions. That being said, I do have a lot more sympathy for the censorship advocates than you do, because, again, Nazi apologists trying to use Holocaust-related historical revisionism as a motte from which to settle the bailey of full-throated Nazi apologia are not an imaginary strawman. I just bandied thousands of words with one of them. So I don't think it's simply "paranoid". There are in fact bad actors here. Whether suppressing them is worth losing the trust of the genuine truth-seekers, that's a very different question. But the disingenuous bad actors exist; I was talking to one just now. You should not conflate my recognition of who and what he is to endorsement for indiscriminate censorship.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
crushedoranges wasn't telling you to stop considering them you realpolitik adversaries. He was telling you that, in fact, wasting energy on Holocaust denial is not good realpolitik.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
none died in that way because there were no extermination camps, there were concentration, labor, and transit camps
Do you believe there were Einsatzgrupen?
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
Maybe I am wrong that "no one seriously believes that" but I don't think that is a serious historical claim
That's about my guess, and it's the point I was trying to make with "yeah, well, lots of normies seriously believe Columbus was out to prove the world was round, but that obviously has no bearing on a discussion of the historical consensus about Columbus's travels" way upthread.
Shouldn't you be asking that question?
Huhuh. "This is how you deal with questions…"
I have counters to many points in that paragraph, some of which @Amadan has already fielded. But I think addressing them would distract me from pointing out that I asked you a very simple question and you are still refusing to answer it. Let me repeat it:
What do you think was going through Hitler's brain? If you're so convinced that right up until 1945 he totally wanted to deliver as many healthy Jews to Madagascar as possible, why do you think he was clinging to that plan instead of attempting the "annihilation of the Jewish race" which he had long promised his base, and was now in a position to deliver? I genuinely want to know. Do you think he didn't want a Jewish genocide? That he wanted it, but he didn't think he could get away with it? That the Madagascar thing was just easier? Tell me!
You think it was Germany's plan to lose the war and have their infrastructure get completely destroyed from both fronts? That was their plan to kill all the Jews?
No, obviously not. I think that, if all else failed, their long-term plan would have been "put all the Jews in camps and, once we no longer need their slave labor, let them all starve". You can, in fact, deliberately let prisoners starve even if your infrastructure is just dandy. In this scenario, to the extent that the breakdown of German infrastructure forced their hand, it would simply have accelerated an outcome which was already in the cards long before.
All specifics aside, if you have hundreds of thousands of people in camps (even camps which had only been work camps up til that point!), it is just evidently quite easy and quite cheap to let them die. It is certainly easier and cheaper than shipping all those people from Poland to Madagascar.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
At some point the lack of chivalry is just hard to believe.
I think you have a rosy-tinted view of human nature. The talk of "panic" had a veil of objectivity, but "chivalry"…? I mean, I ought to thank you. What a gift of a word-choice! Because now I get to appeal to C.S. Lewis. Chivalry, he very correctly discerns, is not in fact a natural state of human nature. It is a demand made upon human nature by society for the sake of civilization. If you expect individuals in circumstances such as those faced by Jews in concentration camps to spontaneously act "chivalrously", and are genuinely surprised when they don't, then I'm not surprised you end up way off the map.
And I'd like to register my mild amusement that the current stage of the discussion could be described as "Nazi apologist refuses to admit that a majority of Jews could ever be spineless cowards".
Having shipped all those hundreds of thousands of Jews to eastern work camps, do you believe that his earnest intention was to win the war, then graciously release all those people and pay for their resettlement to the Middle-East? Why?
You are asking why I believe this?
No. I am asking you why you believe the Nazis would have bothered. Kindness? Saving face? The impracticality of genocide? What? There is nothing in Nazi ideology which remotely motivates going out of their way to help the Jews where killing them would have been cheaper, more straightforward, more popular with their core supporters, and more in line with Hitler's decade-spanning rhetoric. Any lip service paid to re-settlement plans strikes me as the paperwork equivalent of dad telling little Billy that he's driving Fido to a nice farm in the country.
The reason the gas chamber story is so important is because, if you say, "the Germans killed 6 million Jews" the natural follow-up from any thoughtful person is: when? where? how? why? The fact is, there is no "alternative hypothesis" other than the story of millions of Jews being gassed inside shower rooms.
Well, surely there has to be. Those millions of Jews did, in fact, die without ever seeing the gleaming shores of Madagascar. Your explanation for this seems to be that they were left to starve (in you view, purely by accident as supply chains deteriorated), which is what I analogized to a murderer turning out to have left his victim to starve to death in his basement, instead of poisoning her. That seems perfectly sensible to me; "lock them all someplace under armed guard, in cold and squalid conditions, don't give them enough food, and while you're at it, maybe extract some slave labor out of them for as long as they still have a bit of life on them, that way you'll recoup costs and wear them out faster" is a perfectly cromulent way to kill six million people. Slower than gas chambers, possibly more expensive as a result, but it would get the job done, given time.
I would much sooner believe that was the plan, than believe that Nazi Germany was ever prepared to allot significant resources to Jewish resettlement in the event of German victory. Granting no gas chambers, I think the most likely scenario is that resettlement remains the official policy for international PR purposes, but its implementation is endlessly deferred until an overwhelming majority of Jewish prisoners are found to have already died in custody, tsk-tsk, what a shame, our bad. And by then, everyone with a brain knows what really happened, but what are you going to do now, even if you disapprove?
Panicking crowds are very difficult to control, the notion that thousands of people were marched in orderly fashion inside narrow entrances into bedroom-sized "gas chambers" heavily relies on the mode of deception.
Color me unconvinced. I see your appeals to panic and I raise you despair. Capture hundreds of people off the street and immediately try to feed them into a gas chamber - yeah, you'll get riots. But abused, half-starved prisoners of an omnipotent-seeming war machine, shipped hundreds of miles from home to a forbidding camp surrounded by barbed fencing, with armed men watching you in all directions? By the time the guards are leading you to what you're pretty sure is the slaughter… call it irrational, call it a coordination problem, or call it weakness, but I am not at all surprised if few people ever bothered to try and make a run for it. To do so would have been heroism, not the expected human response. I would expect as much even if the gas chambers had had big neon signage saying 'DEATH CHAMBERS, ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE'. We seem to have very different intuitions here.
This is a claim that you could actually prove if any sort of written orders to this effect were ever given. But they were not.
Please reread the quoted claim you were replying to. It was not "Hitler, once in power, gave orders for all Jews to be killed". It was, in fact, "Hitler, even before he took over the country, wanted to kill all the Jews". This is true. It just is. He says so in Mein Kampf. He said so in speeches. He got in power in large part by promising to make the Jews pay (and the commies, and the Jewish commies). Hitler and his followers hated the Jews. They did not simply regard them as a practical hindrance to German prosperity, which could be dealt with as practicality allowed: they hated them, viscerally, and wanted them dead if possible, the more painful the better.
What I am doing here is establishing motive. Opportunity, I hope, speaks for itself.
My overriding question to you and anyone else who argues that the Holocaust didn't happen is: why not? Why wouldn't a regime who had spent decades painting Jews as a plague upon mankind, and found itself in the process of gathering them all up in faraway camps, take a stab at slaughtering them? It isn't as if pogroms were a new concept. You say Hitler merely "wanted the Jews out of Europe", but what do you think his plan was, exactly? Having shipped all those hundreds of thousands of Jews to eastern work camps, do you believe that his earnest intention was to win the war, then graciously release all those people and pay for their resettlement to the Middle-East? Why? What do you believe would have motivated Hitler to spend a single red dime on peacefully resettling them when he had all the makings of an extremely successful genocide at his disposal? It just doesn't make any damn sense unless you're trying to argue that the Nazis had some moral objection - that they valued Jewish lives and would have balked at attempting genocide. I don't know how to characterize that kind of claim, other than "hilarious".
Or was I wrong about opportunity speaking for itself? Are you so concerned about the crowd-control practicalities that you think organizing a successful Holocaust would have been too hard? But then we return to the "so what" angle. If you grant that Hitler would have organized the Holocaust if he'd had the means, and simply argue that he didn't because golly, the logistics were too goshdarn persnickety to crack… well, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. "The Nazis were evil, but luckily, as it turns out, they were also morons" wouldn't be a bold world-changing revelation.
How many Jews do you believe were exterminated inside gas chambers than had been disguised as shower rooms?
And here we go again. Please stop talking about the shower rooms. You believe the shower rooms are the crux of this whole matter. I don't. We will not get anywhere with this if you insist on reverse-motte-and-baileying me like this.
What do I believe? I believe that any Jews who fell into Nazi hands were systematically sent to camps from which they were never seriously expected to come out alive. I believe that this policy was not merely a wartime precaution against agitators, but a means of erasing Europe's Jewish population in the long term, as Hitler had long said he wanted. I believe that six million Jews died as a direct result of this policy, and that as far as the Nazis were concerned, this amounted to the policy working as intended. This is what any sane person would describe as "the Holocaust". Anything else, the method of the killings, the timeline of the killings - is commentary.
I believe, fractionally more weakly, that the official consensus on those details is directionally true if perhaps over-dramatized. But I could be completely wrong about that last bit - there could have been no fake shower rooms whatsoever - and it would not impinge on the bottom line that "the Holocaust", by any meaningful definition, happened, and happened on purpose.
very deep breath
…Look.
it is very dumb that people believe, as strongly as they believe any other mundane fact of reality, that ~3 million Jews were exterminated inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms, and that they were tricked into entering those death factories on the pretext of taking a shower
This is a caricature which you are taking over-literally to make the conventional narrative appear gratuitously absurd. I'm not saying nobody believes this dumb caricature, because lots of people's beliefs about history amount to dumb caricatures, just because they're more memorable - eg "Columbus was trying to prove the Earth was round". But weakmen aside, the serious historical claim is not that 3 million totally oblivious Jewish prisoners walked into what they guilelessly mistook for shower cubicles, like some sort of R-rated Road Runner cartoon. Why would the guards care whether the prisoners knew they were about to be murdered? The poor bastards weren't getting out, whatever they did or didn't figure out. It's an utter irrelevance. The deception, where it was employed, was a wafer-thin facade of plausible deniability, meant for the eyes of the outside world if it should ever come to that. And the sad thing is, it is in fact working as intended on those holocaust deniers who become obsessed with that particular data-point. We can only be thankful the rest of the world wasn't as easily fooled.
Take away that arbitrary sticking point, and the absurdity heuristic reverses. "So there was this regime of ruthless warmongers who slaughtered half of Europe on the battlefield in a quest for racial supremacy. Proponents of the regime's ideology hated the Jewish race most of all. Long before the party's founder had a shot at actually doing it, he wrote at length in his manifesto about how Jews needed to be exterminated. Once they'd taken over the country, these warmongering racists who thought Jews were a blight upon mankind organized a large-scale project to imprison all the Jews they could get their hands on and ship them abroad. And then they… made no attempts to kill them at all, actually???" It's a completely counterintuitive claim. The moment one quits harping on about the specifics of how the mass murder was achieved, it becomes blindingly obvious that of course mass murder would have occurred - that you would need huge amounts of evidence to prove anything else.
I think the most vaguely-plausible holocaust-denialism-shaped argument you could mount would be for a position along the lines of "although the Nazis absolutely intended to exterminate the Jews, they figured they didn't need the poison gas; they just packed the Jews in hellish work camps with no designated execution mechanisms, anticipating that they'd simply die in droves from starvation, squalor and exhaustion; and in point of fact, it worked out that way, hence the massive Jewish death toll we observe". But even if you argued that case convincingly, what would it prove? What would follow? "Your honor, my client did not poison that woman. That is a vile lie. I have documents here to prove that my client actually tied her up in his basement and left her there to starve, instead." This wouldn't change anything about the moral standing of Nazi Germany, it wouldn't change anything about how deserved the sympathy Jews get in Current Year based on the holocaust may or may not be relative to what their forefathers suffered in WWII - at most it would impinge on the commitment to the truth of the people who ran the trials, but again, who cares, "these actually-guilty murderers were convicted based in part on fraudulent claims regarding the methods employed" is not the great moral injustice of the 20th century.
And the same applies to quibbling about the numbers. I actually think it's plausible that the usually-bandied numbers have been inflated. But I said it once and I'll say it thrice: why the fuck would you care? "Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews" is not a claim that anyone can dispute with a straight face. Prove to me categorically that the Holocaust only killed, say, two hundred thousand Jews, and all you've told me is that the Nazis were incompetent as well as monstrous. And also it's still the mass slaughter of two hundred thousand human souls. None of this flips the narrative.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
I think it's too widespread for belief in it to count as evidence of mental illness. Or, rather, you can say that widespread belief in this stuff constitutes a massive mental illness epidemic, but at that point you're just making a point about wokeness writ large, not teasing out anything related to transness as a specific mental profile. Everyone who's sufficiently far left believes Trump is itching to throw sexual minorities in camps, whether they're trans themselves or not.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
That's an interesting question, though not decisive. I think all the rhetoric about how Trump's goons could break down every trans person's door any day now, nation-wide, would be enough to unbalance even someone living in the queerest neighborhood in Portland.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
I think there's a Psychopolitics of Trauma angle here. A plurality of trans people currently believe themselves to be at risk of genocide. Even setting aside existential risk, they all correctly believe themselves to be despised by half the population. Did German Jews in the 1930s have worse mental health than Gentiles? Wouldn't surprise me. This doesn't necessarily say much about the effect Jewishness and transness would have in an environment where people with those traits did not perceive themselves to be widely-loathed and/or in mortal danger.
Well, you've turned the "shooter" from your first post into specifically a cop, which already changes the odds a bit. I do agree a cop who'd shot her would have better odds at the trial than a civilian who'd shot her in self-defense, which was where my mind initially went.
Still, I just don't think that that's realistically how it would go. Forget the legal risks - cop or not, nobody wants a twelve-year-old girl's death on his conscience. And, more cynically, nobody wants to be known for the rest of their life as the guy who killed a twelve-year-old girl at point blank range. Unless she's actually coming for your jugular right now, I just don't think you pull the trigger. Come to that, I'm pretty sure someone drawing a gun would be enough to make the girl drop the hatchet; we aren't dealing with a berserk druggie here.
tl;dr, it's not so much "the shooter would walk free" that strikes me as particularly implausible so much as the assertion that "in the US she would have been shot". It would certainly have been a more likely outcome than in the UK, but it doesn't scan as what would inevitably happen, not by a longshot.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
The information that this was a Bulgarian couple, rather than a single man, should surely be significant. Surely even a genuine pedo would be unlikely to go after a pair of preteen girls with his own wife right there? Not saying it couldn't happen, but still.
Do you think the difference in the damage a 12 year old and an adult could potentially do with an axe is really so significant? That seems ludicrous to me.
What she could do is one thing, what she's likely to do is another. A kid who's raided daddy's tool shed to look tough needs a stern talking-to from her parents or other authority figures, but frankly, as much because of the risk of injury to herself as anything else. It's not that much easier for a kid to kill or seriously injure someone with a hatchet of the type seen in the video relative to, say, an ordinary hammer. Would you call the cops on a young kid waving a hammer around a playground? I'd try to do something, if I felt civic-minded, and I might involve the police if I had to, but "record evidence in case this goes to court" would not by my first or even my third move. If it did get as far as A Police Matter™ I would feel I'd failed in my intervention; that I'd escalated the situation way beyond what should ideally happen.
Yep. I second all those questions. @SecureSignals , please answer them as best you can. The longer you fail to do so, the harder it is to take your arguments halfway seriously.
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