johnfabian
2yr ago
All the above said, “where did the Jews go” is the most persuasive anti-revisionist argument.
It's a good one for sure, but maybe an even better one is that "the Germans never claimed they didn't do it." Oh, plenty of German officers were to claim that it was all the SS, the Wehrmacht played no part, it was Hitler's idea, they were against it from the start, etc. etc. If you snagged yourself a diehard they'd say it was just retribution against international Jewry and the Judeo-Bolshevik system for starting the war in the first place, but no one claimed it didn't happen. Holocaust denialism was a thing of the future circa 1945-47.
There's arguments downthread over the interpretation of the Wannsee minutes. The man who prepared those minutes never claimed the things that denialists claim were implied! Oh, Eichmann argued he was just a tiny cog in a giant machine, that he was just following orders, that he felt no guilt for the deaths of millions because if it was not him in that position it would have been someone else. But at no point did he ever that the murder of millions of Jews didn't happen.
The steadfast refusal of denialists to deal with why Germans and their collaborators were apparently willing to concoct grand fantasies of millions of murdered Jews, is to my mind the most glaring gap. Instead they focus on picking apart sensationalist/fraudulent memoirs, for obvious reasons.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Certainly in terms of raw numbers more Soviets than Jews perished, but there was a differing zeal to which the Germans pursued and killed Jews. Somewhat ironically they were aided in this by Soviet censorship of near-any information concerning their chief ideological enemies: most Soviet Jews were not aware the Nazis were anti-semitic. For example when the decision was made to liquidate all the Jews of Kiev, the German authorities were shocked at the turnout when they demanded Jews present themselves for "relocation"; ~33,000, more than double what they expected. It took 3 days to murder them all, with help for Ukrainian militias.
Ukrainians themselves were of course of various minds with respect to the Soviet authorities; especially many of the older generation were welcoming of the Germans, at least initially. Currently I'm reading Retribution: The Soviet Reconquest of Central Ukraine, 1943-44, and so far it has featured a lot of anecdotes from German soldiers about helpful Ukrainians. This was of course partly merely survival tactics. The German logic was brutal: the book quotes Erich Koch (Reichskommissar of Ukraine) as saying:
If these people [the Ukrainians] work for ten hours a day, eight of those must be for us. All sentimental considerations must be put aside. These people must be ruled with iron force as this will help us to win the war. We have not liberated the Ukraine for their pleasure, but to secure the essential Lebensraum and food supply for Germany.
and further:
We did not come here to dispense Manna from heaven, we came here to create the preconditions of victory … We are the master race and must bear in mind that the most insignificant German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times as valuable as the local population.
The Nazis were at least as willing as the Soviets, if not more, to work Ukrainians to death for their utopia; and that of course would only be the beginning.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Yeah, I don't really have a suggestion either. The same reason I like this place is the same reason it shows up.
It's just frustrating when you can't work from a somewhat similar base understanding of the world. It would be like if we had a really annoying Flat Earther who insists that we have to prove that the Earth is round from first principles every work. Would be a lot easier if we didn't have to do this.
Maybe I should write a post about this kind of narrow skepticism. It's an interesting phenomenon where people will just aggressively narrow down on one specific thing that they're at odds with the entire rest of the world with, even though they take no issue with the same processes and methodologies that produced everything else
So you have a weird scenario where the East had the custody of most of the key evidence, but the Holocaust did not become part of cultural consciousness (where it actually happened (!)), but in the West, which did not have custody of most of the key evidence, the Holocaust became central to the culture. This was accomplished with the memoirs and Hollywood productions that @johnfabian accuses Revisionists of opportunistically using for their agenda. Just pause to appreciate the inversion of reality he is trying to pull, by accusing Revisionists of exploiting memoirs and Hollywood blockbusters which have formulated mass public perception of the Holocaust in the West.
I don't think it requires some vast conspiracy to explain why communist eastern Europe did not place great cultural relevance upon the Holocaust, given that the Soviets very much wanted to downplay crimes specifically against Jews and place Russians and socialists as the chief victims of German aggression. Not to mention the rather... "awkward" issues that Ukrainian or Polish nationalists might run into when trying to shed more light on the Holocaust, these countries had more than their own fair share of murdered civilians to mourn and commemorate.
And public opinion is always formed more of pop culture than academic history. The popular image of the Eastern front in western popular culture was for decades based off the memoirs of German generals which, to put it very mildly, were very loose with the truth (especially with respect to their own culpability in committing war crimes). Some of the more famous "fighting soldier" memoirs are themselves either largely or fully inventions.
johnfabian
2yr ago
I forgot to mention that one, I really enjoyed it (though found myself perplexed at the ending)
johnfabian
2yr ago
One does wonder if it isn't some gap in the rules if we have to re-litigate "did Auschwitz really have gas chambers???!?!?" every week though.
johnfabian
2yr ago
I think it merits separating "revisionists" from "denialists"; revisionism is a legitimate practice in history. For example the claims of tens of millions of GULAG victims were inevitably going to see a revisionist movement once the Soviet Union collapsed and historians had access to the Soviet archives. Or Holocaust revisionism (like the functionalism-intentionalism debate, for example) is an ongoing process like it is in every other historical subject that sees active scholarship.
"Denialism" on the other hand is an ideologically-driven act aimed at specific goals, working outside the historical method and essentially in bad faith. They're lying liars who lie, to put it more bluntly.
johnfabian
2yr ago
Gladue is awful and has been a disaster for indigenous Canadians; it doesn't just affect sentencing, it also makes convicting people more difficult because it can be used to "shield" juries from information that may prejudice them (like prior offences). But because the policy actually makes life worse for indigenous communities, it becomes a self-reinforcing justification for doubling down.
There was an awful incident a few years ago in Hamilton where an indigenous man high on meth shot a Good Samaritan who had intervened to stop him bullying an old man. Gladue provisions were introduced into the trial to prevent the jury from knowing about the killer's previous convictions for assault and weapons offences, and this measure was subsequently upheld in court. In a darkly ironic twist, while the killer was found not guilty, the two paramedics who came to the scene got 6 months of house arrest for mishandling the medical treatment.
johnfabian
2yr ago
What TV shows did you enjoy this year? Thinking about starting watching a new one with friends and figured I would solicit opinions.
So far this year I've watched Severance, Andor, and House of the Dragon; the former two I very much enjoyed and the latter I thought was mediocre.
johnfabian
2yr ago
We have some records from the Persians, but they tend to be more archaeological rather than narrative histories (or plays, or essays, or other written works).
The long story short is that papyrus scrolls require careful handling, and even with that reproduction; i.e. the surviving Classical works from the Romans and Greeks were not the originals but copies of copies. Hellenistic scribes evidently were less interested in reproducing Persian texts than they were Greek ones. Presumably the Arab conquest and subsequent wars didn't help either, but even by the time of the Romans, written Persian sources were noticeably lacking.
Herodotus was evidently working with Persian sources when writing his histories, be they written or oral histories, as well as presumably interviewing Persians themselves. By contrast Plutarch's Parallel Lives (which is our first reasonably full accounting of the life of Alexander, despite being written about 400 years after Alexander), while drawing heavily from now-lost Greek sources that were written during or shortly after the time of Alexander, is near-completely silent about the Persian perspective.
With a lot of historical subjects, historians often have to deal with the problem of "surviving accounts"; i.e., they get the perspectives of one group of people, but not the other. A classic example: almost all the written sources with respect to the period of Byzantine iconoclasm were written by the ultimately victorious iconophiles. Or take the Greco-Persian wars, of which we only have the perspective of the Greeks. This obviously creates problems with writing narrative histories: to what extent does the modern historian trust what sources survived when there is nothing to cross-reference their believability?
With the Holocaust this form of "survivor's history" is very literal: Eastern European Jews were killed in vastly larger numbers than Western Jews, and even among those who survived for the most part now lived under communist regimes with strict censorship. Media perceptions of the Holocaust are coloured by the disproportionate number of memoirs that came from western Jews; i.e. Jews that were much more likely to survive, live in a country with a free press, and write in a language other than Yiddish. The most famous Holocaust victim is Anne Frank, a German Jew, and likewise education about the lead-up to the Holocaust focuses largely on German Jews. Yet if you were order Holocaust victims by their nationality, German/Austrian Jews were only the sixth-most numerous victims (after Polish, Soviet, Hungarian, Romanian, and Czechoslovak Jews). You've almost certainly heard of Auschwitz, which had tens of thousands of survivors (mainly western Jews) due to housing a concentration camp and labour camp as well as its extermination facilities. But Belzec and Chelmno combined saw about as many deaths as Auschwitz but less than 70 survivors; how many Americans could name them? And roughly as many Jews died via mass executions as by gassing - not many of those machine-gunned by the Einsatzgruppen or beaten by a Slavic nationalist militia survived to tell their tale (though given any substantially large mass execution, there were always a few).
Memoirs themselves are often of dubious historical value. They are consciously meant to be read in a way by the public that a diary or correspondence is not, and that colours their usefulness. Holocaust deniers use them as a source of arguments because, naturally, they are a wellspring for exaggerations, misrememberings, and far-fetched anecdotes, and not infrequently outright invention. That's not to say they're worthless, but in terms of academic work historians prefer to use them as a supplement to other sources rather than rest an argument/narrative on them.
There is an incredible amount of first-hand testimony about the Holocaust, but what we have in abundance (namely accounts of western Jews, Germans, and German collaborators) is less revealing than the perspectives we're missing: the thoughts of those who died, and those of the higher-ranking Nazis who facilitated their deaths.
johnfabian
2yr ago
I do not think the average person (who cares little about such things) considers "gender" and "sex" to be different. After much thinking on the matter I do not think there is a difference either.
I don't know what exactly is driving this but among the American public more and more people instead say that gender is determined at birth.
johnfabian
2yr ago
It was probably for defensive reasons, compounded by military weaknesses and competition with neighbouring groups; similar to Venice's origin. At the time they settled in the area the Mexica were a comparatively poor and less numerous tribe, and were the last to arrive in the Mexico valley (already one of the most densely populated regions in the world; space was at a premium). If you assume the traditional founding date of 1325 (which like its origin story is mostly symbolic) they were vassals of another city state (Azcapotzalco) for roughly a century, forced to provide men as conscripts for wars and construction projects. In the early 15th century they joined with two other city states to rebel against Azcapotzalco, forming the Triple Alliance (what people call the Aztecs, which is itself a modern invention).
The Mexica, once having established their military hegemony within the Triple Alliance, substantially rewrote their own history to remove from awareness their past episodes of weakness and submission. The founding myth presenting the creation of Tenochtitlan as an instance of divine revelation and favour rather than that of necessity is in line with this.
Eagles, snakes and cactuses are mundane creatures that very obviously exist in Mexico.
It specifically refers to the founding myth of Tenochtitlan: that the Mexica people had a divine revelation that they were to build their new home where they were sent a sign of an eagle eating a snake on a cactus. They purportedly saw this on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco, and so were forced to build their capital (which by the time Cortés landed housed several hundred thousand people) on reclaimed artificial islands
johnfabian
2yr ago
I run a youtube channel just for fun with small viewership (~ 1k subscribers). I can tell you that even I (with no youtube partnership or monetization) have a whole bunch of automod options to filter out negative/aggressive comments. I imagine a lot of channels have this on by default, and have even more powerful options at their disposal
johnfabian
2yr ago
Interestingly enough I ran across discussion about this phenomenon just the other day. I sometimes watch a youtuber called Todd in the Shadows who talks about pop music (usually through a negative lens because most of anything is bad, but he appreciates good pop music). Every year he releases his "top 10 worst songs of the year" and he began this year's video with a diversion about how critic culture has morphed into fan culture. The discussion on reddit (on a similarly very "poptimist" subreddit) agreed how the culture of positivity is utterly cloying and suffocating. Specifically the genre of "self-empowerment/positivity" is called out as fake and saccharine.
I'm not really hooked into social media so I don't really have much else to add. I do know that RottenTomatoes and other kind of review sites have become utterly worthless as metrics of quality because big companies have realized how important internet cachet has become as an advertising mechanism, and the inevitable tyranny of Goodhart's Law follows. You do have to wonder how much of this endless positivity you talk about is organic. I don't think it's necessarily that all the comments are AI-generated or bots or whatever, but there's obviously corporate fingers tipping the scale. A simple example is youtube removing the dislike button so that the hoi polloi can't show their disdain.
johnfabian
2yr ago
I have limited insight into this: I had a former student who worked at Charles de Gaulle airport as maintenance crew, and he would explain to me the changing labour situation with respect to the airport. According to him the goal was to pare down staff to minimum required levels: anything to reduce costs was acceptable because they were in a highly liberalized market where consumers are very price-sensitive (for reasons unknown, customers discriminate by price much more heavily in air travel). That meant limiting crews, getting rid of redundancies, using third party, non-union contractors for every bit of unskilled labour, and generally running as light as possible personnel-wise. This meant that when you had those three or four days a year with bad snowstorms you got absolutely fucked and you have no one in reserve to handle the massive increase in work; but hey, that's a few days in the year and the other 360 customers get cheaper fares. People who get shafted are angry of course, but ultimately they don't interface with upper management and they forget soon anyways because hey, air travel is ridiculously cheap for what you're actually getting: unsurpassed convenience and safety for intercontinental travel.
My dad just got delayed 6 hours in Vancouver flying back (he was lucky: lots of people delayed multiple days). He couldn't fathom why every problem seemed to be someone else's responsibility (I tried to explain that job roles are heavily specialized to minimize the number of skilled labourers), why airport workers were so laid-back (it's no one's dream to load luggage, and they're not getting paid particularly well), and why in general the airport seemed entirely unused to this strange white substance falling from the sky (they know snow exists, it's just cheaper to not prepare for it).
johnfabian
2yr ago
I've seen various attempts to expand the definition of "the Holocaust" to refer to all civilian deaths caused by German aggression; directly and indirectly. I think it's not a very rigorous approach. Academic historians generally use the term solely to refer to the persecution of European Jewry by Germany (and its allies).
johnfabian
2yr ago
Indeed All's Quiet on the Western Front depicts what happened to soldiers who refused to go into battle on nov 11th after the armistice had been signed but before 11am when it went into effect.
That's of course a complete fabrication of the film though, and to the detriment of the book's ending (and themes). At that point the German Revolution was already starting; the High Seas Fleet famously mutinied rather than carry out a final attack.
In the last days of the war it was the Entente who were still launching attacks, either out of general eagerness (the Americans) or the belief that Germany either wouldn't surrender, or would need to be completely defeated to avoid a repeat.
johnfabian
2yr ago
There's really only one rigorous approach to all of this: as long as you're married to a homo sapiens sapiens, you're not in an interracial marriage. Everything else is nitpicking
johnfabian
2yr ago
Musk acts like an eight year old and I don't care that he's poking people I don't like; it's just embarrassing to be so rich and still be a tantrum-prone child
johnfabian
2yr ago
A month ago there was some discussion about historical European colonial efforts vs. modern day difficulties of "nation-building" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. I saw this article that discussed the various strategies the British used for colonial pacification. @JulianRota
johnfabian
2yr ago
The problem is his claims aren't concrete, but they take a much more time to debunk than they take him to spew out. They're classic conspiracy nonsense; if you were to listen to say, a charming and intelligent flat earther, he could spend all day telling you why this experiment or this photo or this piece of evidence is false in ways that seem eminently reasonable. He would also be completely unable to provide an alternative theory.
SS can come in here and say, "well, given that we lack a written order from Hitler, maybe there was no German attempt to kill European Jews?", but he can't and won't explain his idea of how ~5.7-5.9 million Jews just disappeared off the continent. They always argue by chipping away at the "narrative", never by providing one of their own.
SS, I think it's fair to assume, does not speak German. He doesn't speak Polish or Russian either. Those are the languages, at minimum, you need to be a historian of the Holocaust. Yiddish and some other eastern European languages help too, because the Holocaust was almost entirely an Eastern European phenomenon (somewhat at odds with its perception in the west). He has not done archival work, he has not done first person interviews, he has not grappled with primary sources in their original languages. He has done nothing himself except to read the biased and bigotry-poisoned works of other people who have also not done that work.
I'd be more interested in writing a post about the general logical failures of Holocaust denial than engage with him.
johnfabian
2yr ago
I've spent enough of my life having exchanges where people say "oh wow, my username means 'race science' in German? I had no idea, I just thought it sounded cool. Anyways, here's why Britain and France were responsible for starting WWII..."
The guy's initials are SS. C'mon.
Boy, it sure would've been a big coup if somehow, someone had managed to get a hold of the guy who prepared those minutes and asked some questions about it. Maybe have a big trial or something, I'm just spitballing. Then we could really get to the bottom of this. Too bad it never happened.
I would like to note that this entire time Mr. SS has been using the exact "levering" tactic I wrote about in the comment that sparked this whole chain of discussion. Of course it's all disingenuous, and there's ultimately no end to it because the impetus isn't just a bullish sort of contrarianism but also (rather obviously) a hate for Jews. There's no way to win on logic or a sound argument because that's not what put him in his position.
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