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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37394 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Is the progressive left developing it's own form of Holocaust denial?

I came across this video on Twitter where an ITV presenter informs us that:

"Six million people were killed in Nazi concentration camps during the second world war, as well as millions of others because they were Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".

This reminded me of something similar I saw last year, where then Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf talked for several minutes about the victims of the Holocaust without mentioning the...distinguishing ethnicity of who exactly was most targeted.

The above examples might just be two cases of human error, although I find it hard to imagine how such an oversight could have taken place in the ITV situation. And while this sort of thing stands out less in tweet format, where you don't have many characters to begin with, it still seems strange that Angela Rayner can't find space to mention Jewish victims when Keir Starmer manages to.

Does this point to the emergence of a longer term trend? Despite proportionally being the victims of most hate crimes, Jews are too pale and too successful for the left to care about advocating for (unless it's for the purpose of making dubious claims of fascist sympathies against right-wingers). Given that for many on the progressive left being anti-Nazi is the primary sources of their moral legitimacy, I do wonder if many of them feel the need to find more sympathetic victims of the Holocaust whose future wellbeing they can claim to be the only reliable safe-guarders of.

With the broad racial nature of the progressive coalition, it's also impossible to rule out straightforward antisemitism from many of the far-left's more diverse members. I wouldn't be surprised if the ITV staff member responsible for writing the script was from a Muslim background.

It is of course impossible to divorce this issue from Israel. Despite strenuous claims that anti-Zionism != anti-Semitism (which can technically be true), I imagine that even some committed progressives struggle with the cognitive dissonance of claiming to care about Jewish well-being while simultaneously advocating for the massacring of 50% of their remaining global population. It could well be just too tempting to give up this fig-leaf and instead aim to eventually shift the perception of Jews towards never having been serious victims of oppression in the first place. This comes with the bonus of being able to credibly claim that Israel is the modern day equivalent to Nazi Germany.

Is there something there? Or am I reading too much into a handful of small cases?

ETA: 15 upvotes and 13 downvotes. This is most likely my most polarising post in the short time I've been active here. I wonder what that says.

Strong War on Christmas vibes- conservatives complain "the cashier didn't adequately say the thing, there's a War on Christmas" while Christmas continues to grows bigger than ever in the culture. I was driving in the South last year and, I kid you not, I saw a billboard off a rural highway that said I miss hearing you say 'Merry Christmas' - Jesus.

How many people of influence have bent the knee to Jewish remembrance in the past couple days, but to retain power you need to find the people who don't correctly participate in the civic ritual and publicly make an example of them, right? That's how it works.

As a Holocaust Denier I don't see evidence of Holocaust denial on the Left, just public punishment for non-compliance to the small number of people who make the mistake of disrespecting the Holiday.

The entire consideration of Gentiles as Holocaust victims at all has been a very fluid matter; for a time it was claimed that there were 11 million victims in the Holocaust, 5 million Gentiles and 6 million Jews. But the figure of 5 million Gentiles being killed in the Holocaust was a number totally fabricated by Holocaust studies advocate Simon Wiesenthal. According to people close to him, he invented the number in order to manipulate Gentiles into having more stake in the Holocaust narrative.

Incidentally, the article is another attempted dressing-down of Sean Spicer for not correctly acknowledging Jewish victims:

It’s a statement that shows up regularly in declarations about the Nazi era. It was implied in a Facebook post by the Israel Defense Forces’ spokesperson’s unit last week marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. And it was asserted in an article shared by the Trump White House in defense of its controversial Holocaust statement the same day omitting references to the 6 million Jewish victims.

It is, however, a number without any scholarly basis.

Indeed, say those close to the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, its progenitor, it is a number that was intended to increase sympathy for Jewish suffering but which now is more often used to obscure it.

The White House statement sent waves of dismay through the Jewish community, including among groups that have been supportive of President Donald Trump.

By mentioning the “victims, survivors, [and] heroes of the Holocaust” without mentioning the Jews, said a host of Jewish organizations, the January 27 statement risked playing into the hands of the European right, which includes factions that seek to diminish the centrality of the Jewish genocide to the carnage of World War II.

In defending the omission of Jews from the statement, a White House spokeswoman, Hope Hicks, sent CNN a link to a 2015 Huffington Post-UK piece titled “The Holocaust’s Forgotten Victims: The 5 Million Non-Jewish People Killed By The Nazis.”

The “5 million” has driven Holocaust historians to distraction ever since Wiesenthal started to peddle it in the 1970s. Wiesenthal told the Washington Post in 1979, “I have sought with Jewish leaders not to talk about 6 million Jewish dead, but rather about 11 million civilians dead, including 6 million Jews.”

...

Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims – 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews.

“I said to him, ‘Simon, you are telling a lie,’” Bauer recalled in an interview Tuesday. “He said, ‘Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.’”

Bauer and other historians who knew Wiesenthal said the Nazi hunter told them that he chose the 5 million number carefully: He wanted a number large enough to attract the attention of non-Jews who might not otherwise care about Jewish suffering, but not larger than the actual number of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, 6 million.

It caught on: President Jimmy Carter, issuing the executive order that would establish the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, referred to the “11 million victims of the Holocaust.”

Nowadays, it is not fashionable to emphasize Gentile victims in the Holocaust, now that the "5 million" figure is acknowledged to have just been a symbolic propaganda figure intended to manipulate Gentiles into having more stake in the Holocaust narrative.

Of the 6 million Jews allegedly killed in the Holocaust, it is claimed that about half of that figure (approximately 3 million, give or take) were killed by being tricked into entering shower rooms that were actually gas chambers in disguise. It is not claimed any significant number of Gentiles were killed in these gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Likewise, the alleged "Final Solution" which purportedly ordered the extermination of the Jews is a cornerstone of the Holocaust narrative.

Given that these particularities of the Holocaust, and which define it really, are said to only have been applied to Jews it doesn't really make sense to include Gentiles as being victims of the "Holocaust" as such, and the current meta is more around emphasizing the Holocaust as a Jewish experience. But it should be noted that it was the Jews themselves who originally emphasized Gentile victims of the Holocaust in order to influence their perception of the narrative.

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