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johnfabian


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 06 14:31:18 UTC

				

User ID: 859

johnfabian


				
				
				

				
2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 06 14:31:18 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 859

I honestly think straw vegetarians are much more a product of the cognitive dissonance of meat-eaters who realize deep down the incredible cruelty of the meat industry and on some level register vegetarians as a walking mirror of their own hypocrisy.

(I say this as a somewhat self-hating meat eater)

Well, not only is it not obvious to me, but I think it takes an astonishingly poor imagination to think that there might not be anyone out there who, in good faith and without denying Hitler's genocidal ambitions, questions how many people were killed in the holocaust or what methods were used...

... he writes, after implying that the total death toll was fewer than a million.

I'm going to echo @2rafa's thoughts here: of course this amounts to Holocaust denial. But I'd like to point out something else in this kind of argumentation. You say that claiming only a few hundred thousand Jews dying would not amount to "denying Hitler's genocidal ambitions", but if this claim was actually accepted, or merely allowed to exist as a hypothetical, am I to believe that this would not then change? After all, if it was only half a million Jews who died, well then that would be roughly similar to the number of German civilians who died via the Allied strategic bombing campaign, or the number of ethnic Germans who died in the ethnic cleansing campaigns in Eastern Europe in 1944-46. That would be particularly rhetorically useful to a prospective Holocaust denier: to equivocate between the slaughter of Jews and the killings of Germans, or even to suggest that while the Jews did suffer, Germans were disproportionately and unequally punished for this (which was generally speaking the prevailing public opinion in immediate post-war West Germany). Hell, given the rough-and-tumble nature of total war it would be natural then to suggest the Holocaust wasn't deliberate, but an unfortunate, regrettable, violent episode in a war full of them.

I'm much too well-versed in the rhetorical style and strategies of Holocaust deniers not to get a lot of red flags popping in my brain as I read this post. There's been a lot of this kind of bullshit this past few weeks, and I hope it's not a sign themotte.org is turning into the internet's #1 haven for witches.

Man, if only they had somehow tracked the guy who wrote those Wannsee minutes down. Maybe interrogated him, or had a big trial or something. What an incredibly insightful process that would have been. Shame it didn't happen.

Your hate is too obvious, it makes the shtick too visible. You need to apply a few more layers of lacquer or something. I don't get the point of it all either, it's too effortful to be merely the product of some kind of stubborn contrarianism. I know you're lying, you know you're lying, you know I know you're lying, what's the point?

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.

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

Given your obvious bent and contempt for academic history, again I don't know if you're being deceitful, ignorant, or just plain dumb. The "functionalist" camp is the pre-eminent one in Holocaust studies; scarce few contemporary historians hold that the Holocaust was masterminded by Hitler from the beginning. The Holocaust began roughly simultaneously within three separate Nazi bureaucracies, each with specific problems, methods, and goals. Again, like almost all deniers do, you steadfastly ignore the Holocaust by bullets. By the time the Holocaust moved onto a more deliberate stage and the combined resources of the Nazi state begin to dedicate itself to the task, yes then we have plenty of documentation of that effort (which again you just ignore). Surely you know you're not convincing anyone who has ever opened a history book on the subject?

Here's an alternative hypothesis: there was no order and never a plan to exterminate the Jews as the "final solution", and that's why the historians have been unable to find documents or even agree on a basic timeline of how this occurred.

Well, Himmler would've disagreed with you. And Heydrich and Eichmann, and Goebbels. C'mon dude, these are your heroes! Why are you denying them their greatest works? Think of the shame they would have if 80-odd years on people who claim to follow in their footsteps would disavow the immense effort and sacrifice in attempting rid Europe of Jewry!

Well then help bring back the people who would potentially be swayed upon learning that there are no such documents ordering the extermination of the Jews. You say "if you would read a history book, you would know", but can you just explain it to everyone real quick and save them the trouble? Why are there no documents, @johnfabian?

Well there were documents ordering the killing of Jews, and unless you read exclusively denialist writers you would know this. With your wording I'm not sure if you're being deliberately dishonest or if you're just nonspecific in your wording. But I'm going to assume honesty and believe you're referring to the lack of a Führerbefehl: an order from Adolf Hitler, starting the Holocaust.

First of all, you might want to flip the question: would you necessarily expect an order to undertake a vast criminal conspiracy to survive? Ignore the context of everything else for a second: there were 9 million Jews in Europe, give or take, in 1939 (the Nazis believed a higher number because of their racial theories). Planning to kill that many people would qualify as the greatest conspiracy of all time. The key perpetrators might want to conceal their decision-making a bit. Certainly the lack of similar documents haven't stopped the same people who believe in Holocaust denial from alleging in 9/11 or moon landing conspiracies, as an aside.

And the Nazis were quite keenly aware of the importance of secrecy in what they were undertaking. Not only were they not so un-self-aware that they anticipated the rest of the world might quibble with them murdering millions of civilians, the Aktion T4 program had been undermined by insufficient internal secrecy leading to a considerable protest movement against it both within and without Germany. Awareness of the systematic murder of Jews, POWs, and "useless mouths" could (and eventually did) harden resistance and resolve to German conquest, pacification, and occupation of lands in the East. Institutional and operational secrecy was as important and necessary as the undertaking itself. It was, as Himmler later said, a "glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of."

Take the Commissar Order, for example. It acknowledged quite openly that it was brazenly in violation of international law, and there was a concerted effort to limit possible leaks: only thirty copies of the original were created, and the ultimate promulgation to the Army Groups was only extended to 340, and ultimately all copies were ordered to be destroyed. If they had been, presumably you'd also argue that "there was no proof of the order to kill Soviet commissars!" which would again be untrue, because even if the primary source documents had not survived we have plenty of contemporary secondary sources, both of those who received the order (including many who subsequently lied about receiving it) and of those who carried it out.

That at some point Hitler ordered the extermination of Jewry is not contested among historians. The specific date is contested; some favour an "early" hypothesis (around September 1941) and some favour a "late" hypothesis (around November-December 1941). The order was almost certainly issued verbally to Heinrich Himmler, hence the lack of "documents", but many of the key figures in the Nazi regime discussed being aware of such an order. In any case, by the time this order had been issued somewhere between 500,000 and a million Jews had already been murdered, but that's a different discussion and deniers tend to very pointedly ignore the Holocaust by bullets anyways.

The big problem deniers have to always work around is that the Nazis themselves never denied the Holocaust. While individuals might have tried to shirk their specific responsibility, when it came to the criminal trials and executions the one legal defence never attempted was "it didn't happen."

If you accept the Revisionist interpretation, that the plan was for resettlement East ahead of the post-war creation of a Jewish state, then these plans by the AfD are absolutely comparable to what the Nazis did. And in particular, if it turns out the Wannsee conference really was all about resettlement as a plain reading of the minutes show, and not codewords for an extermination policy, then the Wannsee Conference is comparable to secret conferences planning for mass resettlement of migrants to their homelands or to a separate colony of some sort.

Is this where you pretend that Eichmann doesn't exist again? This is well trod territory by now. I'm trying to keep my wording compliant in order to avoid a warning by the mods, but your particular fixation wouldn't be so annoying if it were just merely dishonest - it's that you have to constantly bring it up as well.

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.

I think you know that's a rather markedly atypical use of the word "liquidate". I'm inclined to think you are trying to be deliberately inflammatory, and (poorly) pretending otherwise.

"Ah you see officer, when I said on twitter that Hamas should liquidate all the Jews I simply meant that they should be provided with refreshing beverages!"

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.

The thing that this meme forgets about (and a lot of men in general forget about) is all the women who aren't beautiful

I feel like your response is a bit CW-brained, so to speak; that is to say it's rooted in a kind of contrarianism that is overriding your faculties. Yes, it's annoying and silly and perhaps unfair that the media does its best to overlook levels of violence among black Americans. That does not mean it alone is the secret ingredient that explains everything wrong with American society. If you removed all gun violence caused by black Americans from the picture tomorrow the US would still have a higher murder rate than most other western nations with significantly more gun deaths. And I would note that specifically I was addressing these kind of random mass shootings, which as far as I'm aware aren't disproportionately committed by blacks.

I mean the very first thing that came up on google when I searched for a representative article was a WSJ op-ed with the the sub-headline "Don’t believe this week’s denials. Progressive Democrats really are coming for your kitchen appliances."

At least among Canadian conservatives the response was similar. For example from the Toronto Sun: Just the gas stove? No, green zealots want your furnace, hot water tank, too

I'm not a partisan in this debate. I think it would be good if gas stoves get eased out in the near future (more important in areas with high renewable energy production), but there are valid practical, aesthetic, and survival reasons for having a gas stove.

Again, I apologize if I'm making less sense now. This is one of the few subjects that makes me really emotional, and when I'm emotional, I don't make as much sense as I otherwise would. But that's why I need to talk about this, and there aren't any other places for me to talk about it.

I'm actually going to back off and apologize here. In general I take a very dim view of anybody who comes out with the "what do we really know about the Holocaust" shtick because 9 times out of 10 they're deniers in disguise. With your response I think I overreacted and you're not actually a denier (though it did bring some out of the weeds). Something like acknowledging that the Germans were quite fastidious in documenting the murder of Jews is something deniers typically never cop to. So I'm sorry I was overly dismissive of your concerns.

If I have to accept the label of Holocaust denier to have this discussion, then fine. I don't care. My point is that I don't understand why getting details wrong about a historical event is a moral failing and that people who do it should be "damned to hell."

I think @Nantafiria gets to the heart of it. I would also add that in the contemporary context Holocaust deniers almost uniformly fall into one of two camps: white nationalists and Muslims. Both deny the Holocaust for obvious ideologically-motivated reasons, and people find it both crass and dangerous in this respect, because the ultimate aim of the denial is to again build support for violent ethnic cleansing.

That Holocaust denial gets more attention than any other historical genocide I think is mostly a product of the number of Jews in America, their relative influence/prominence, and of course the cultural soft power of the USA. But it is also history's largest genocide (in so far as the word can be rigorously defined) and perhaps also its most unique with respect to the extent and sophistication to which it was pursued.

I don't follow this logic at all. Why would I be obliged to enjoy gay sex if I supported gay rights? It's not a question of taste: I don't think pineapple on pizza is unethical because I don't like it. I wouldn't seek to criminalize things that are simply not my preference. The hypocrisy would be to deny others the right to marry the people (i.e., consenting adults) they love, when I already enjoy that ability.

The crux is that you get meat by killing a sentient, emotionally complex, intelligent animal. I think that if you can't bring yourself to do that (and have to rely on the emotional distance of someone else doing the dirty work), then yeah, I don't reckon you should eat meat, because industrial meat processing takes that one bloody act and multiplies it billions of times yearly. We all have our hypocrisies and have to pick where to draw the extent of which we tolerate them, so I think if you can't stomach the very simple act the meat industry is built upon, you shouldn't seek to benefit from its utterly horrific economies of scale.

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.

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.

I think small family farms are an entire world of difference from industrial meat processing. I feel people who actually kill/process the animals the eat basically have no moral burden. They are willing and able to do the task themselves. I've killed animals before and have found myself able to have done so without self-disgust, so that somewhat mitigates the qualms I have about my meat-eating. As for the rest of it I try to only eat meat once or twice per week.

I've kicked around in my head the hypothetical of requiring people over the age of 14 or 16 to get a "meat-eater's license", i.e. having to kill/dress a larger mammal by themselves in order to qualify to eat meat. I wonder what percentage of the larger population would disqualify themselves from eating meat if they were forced to jump through that hoop. I do feel that if you cannot steel yourself to take the life of an intelligent, social animal like a pig or a deer or a cow, then you should not eat meat.

I don't identify as an effective altruist (but I generally shirk from labels, and I dislike that label for much the same reason I dislike "rationalist").

Are you looking for a discussion of historiography, or specifically a focus on primary sources?

Eh, I think that's underselling Paul's position. Her chief-of-staff was saying that all Green MPs have to be Zionists, and she was backing him.

Holocaust deniers tend to all focus on Auschwitz, and with good reason: it was a massive operation with three prominent subcamps, it had the most victims and most survivors, it received mostly western and Balkan Jews as well as POWs and political prisoners. In short, it had a wide range of experiences; which is ideal for someone who wants to chip away at a subject that an individual has a very general and non-specific understanding of.

A classic tactic of deniers (and conspiracy theorists in general) is to insert a wedge into the mind of a layman, and then try to lever it. They have a vast array of knowledge of all kinds of minutiae about the subject, and the layman does not. They have an endless arsenal of anecdotes or factoids or even legitimately true things that they known and the layman does not. A classic example would go like this: did you know Auschwitz had a swimming pool? It's true! The Germans even let prisoners use it! Boy, that doesn't sound like the sort of thing a death camp would have, now would it? Huh, I wonder why we never learned about that in history class... wonder what else we're not told about.

And then maybe the layman goes and googles it and boy, sure enough it's true. Of course some of the details are fudged: yes, there was a reservoir for firefighting that the German guards would swim in sometimes, and even let certain privileged political prisoners use from time to time. It was a massive operation, with thousands of guards and support staff that along with lodgings and mess halls needed some form of entertainment. And in the bigger picture it doesn't really change anything: somewhere close to a million people were murdered at Auschwitz, swimming pool or no. Someone posted the link to epistemic learned helplessness: this is the exact kind of thing that heuristic is meant to guard against.

So when @SecureSignals says something like "There are no written orders for extermination of millions", he's hoping you might go google it and think "well jeez, it turns out we don't have a Führerbefehl relating to the Holocaust. Why did I never know that?", and from that be incrementally swayed to his side. Of course, if you were to actually read a history of the Holocaust you would know; but most people don't read history books about any subject, and let pop culture shape their impressions for them.

it's some dude in the midwest who every time he has a bratwurst thinks "Heil Hitler, we must save the Fatherland"

Here's a fun historical hypothetical: say you wake up tomorrow and it's May 1944, and Dwight Eisenhower comes to you and says "TheMotte User X, you are our top expert on collateral damage. Our forthcoming invasion of Fortress Europe has to succeed, or else condemn millions more innocents to die at the hands of Nazi Germany. Our plan is to maximize our chances of victory by bombing enemy fortifications, re-supply, repair depots, airfields, road junctions, marshalling yards, rail bridges, training grounds, troop barracks, radio transmitters, telephone exchanges, fuel and ammo dumps, and more. Furthermore once on the ground, our soldiers will make use of their supreme material, technological, and doctrinal advantages in naval and land artillery to crush German resistance in all environments, be their urban, rural, or fortified. Inevitably this will result in the deaths of French civilians, who are not only innocent of Nazi crimes but victims of them, and our allies in this fight. So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"

What would your answer be? What would you consider reasonable? Could you come up with a specific number as a threshold for what you would deem acceptable civilian deaths? (Ideally don't look up the actual number before coming to an answer for yourself)

This is also not meant to be a direct analogy to any extant geopolitical crisis; its function is primarily a thought experiment and not a commentary upon or justification for acts of any specific government.