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If 'WWII revisionism' means the idea that the Nazis weren't all that bad, or even Holocaust denial, then no. No, it is not.
I think it would help to avoid woolly euphemisms like 'WWII revisionism' and clearly state the thesis that is being considered. I do not think the public consensus that Nazi Germany was bad, that it committed hideous atrocities, and that it was right to destroy it is likely to change.
Holocaust Denial is receiving the most engagement at this moment than it ever has since it was formulated in the 1970s. By far. Yes it is going mainstream too.
Some of the keystone claims of the Holocaust narrative are plainly absurd and will be Revised as well. Many already have been Revised. It was claimed 4 million were killed in Auschwitz until the 1990s, when the death toll dropped to 1.1 million. It was claimed 2 million were killed in Majdanek at the Nuremberg Trial and the most recent estimates by the Majdanek Museum estimate the death toll from all prisoners from all causes was about 70,000. It was claimed 5 million Gentiles were killed in the Holocaust, but that has been Revised and acknowledged to have been a deceptive lie. The Holocaust has already been revised a lot and it has a long way to go.
One of the most infamous claims, that the Nazis manufactured bars of soap out of the fat of Jewish Holocaust victims, was Revised not too long ago and admitted to not have been true. The other salacious claim involving shower rooms stands today but it won't for that much longer. Holocaust Revisionism has entailed a steady stream of victories but it hasn't penetrated the public consciousness although it is clearly beginning to do so now.
Ah so we are at the "it's just a bunch of weird college kids nobody cares about in the Real Worldtm and it doesn't matter" step of the cycle we saw Woke messaging go through.
The vast and dishonest Zionist campaign in media and astroturfed across the internet to pretend that nothing was happening in Gaza and if it was happening it was a good thing was the best thing that happened to Holocaust Denial since, well, the Holocaust. Because suddenly a lot of people arguing on the internet, like me, found themselves agreeing with people like SecureSignals. Over and over. And a lot of them are probably going to look into things that SecureSignals says otherwise, and start to give them a chance they might not have before.
Wait, where was there a vast media conspiracy to say that nothing bad was happening in Gaza?
That sounds like the opposite of how I remember the last year and a half. On the contrary, it seems to me that the mainstream media has been obsessed with Gaza in a manner totally disproportionate to its actual importance. There has been a constant feed of events from Gaza, especially those critical of Israel - I remember a few weeks when the media could not stop talking about one specific hospital building that the IDF attacked.
If you compare coverage of Gaza to, say, coverage of Artsakh, which happened around the same time as October 7 and was much more unquestionably a genocide, the difference is stark. I suspect Gaza is that way because firstly there's more direct American involvement with Israel, secondly there's a large constituency in Western countries that cares about it (i.e. Jews, who are both wealthier and more influential than the Armenian diaspora), thirdly pro-Palestine activism has been a cause of the left for decades so there's a pre-existing infrastructure, and fourthly Gaza is just ambiguous enough to be spicy. A more obvious or unambiguous genocide doesn't mobilise the existing political coalitions, one to defend and one to attack. It has to be in the just-right zone, bad enough to mobilise people against it, but not so bad that people won't defend it. Gaza is in the zone - just ambiguous enough to be one movie and two screens, just enough for "Israel is committing a genocide!" and "Israel is defending itself from murderous fanatics!" to be both more-or-less defensible claims.
@upsidedownmotter
Government numbers from both sides seem to show under 200 civilian casualties in that conflict. If it was a genocide or ethnic cleansing, it was, per Moldbug, a basically peaceful one. Armenia lacked either the material support and power to resist like Ukraine, or the suicidal nationalism of Palestine, so it's not really any more interesting to me than any other border adjustment.
Compare again to Ukraine. Ukraine has seen vastly fewer civilian casualties, despite a larger and more intense conflict, between larger and better armed adversaries, over a longer period of time and across a wider geographical area. Yet Ukraine is both more clearly one-sided in coverage (Orcs, bayraktar techno edits, Russia blamed for things done by Ukraine etc), and also the subject of more good faith debate in politics and media and culture.
One can play whataboutism with various African conflicts, but no one ever gives a shit about those, nor should we.
Meanwhile the NYT has frequently resorted to the passive voice in Gaza coverage, people "die" rather than being killed. Hospitals blow up rather than being bombed.
Meanwhile the TikTok ban was largely justified by supposedly slanted pro-palestine coverage.
Meanwhile very clear and direct hate crimes against Palestinians by Jews get a fraction of the coverage that mythical anti-Black, anti-Gay, and anti-Asian violence get. Jews even feeling uncomfortable at school is a national story.
Meanwhile there have been talks about deporting people who protest Israeli conduct, which are now coming to fruition.
There's a pretty big spread here.
But in your comments, I think a big part of the story is the expectations. I was shocked at the coverage of Ukraine, because I expected it to be closer to the Georgia war in the 2000s: just a line item in foreign coverage, no big deal. We're both talking about expectations, and we can literally see the same things and announce that the conflict is overrated or underrated depending on our expectations going in.
So let's just limit it to a pet example we're familiar with: TheMotte. Before the current Gaza crisis, I was more likely to side with @2rafa against @SecureSignals on virtually every conversation where the two were involved. Because I think the Holocaust happened. Post-Gaza, I find it split closer to 50/50, I still tend to side against SS when WWII comes up, but I'm finding us on the same side against @2rafa et al on discussions about Israel and Gaza. For Jews and Israelis and fellow travelers, that should be concerning, even if they assume I am wrong. It represents a large number of Americans turning against them, and starting to see their enemies as perhaps having a point.
Most people in America also don’t give a shit about conflicts in which some tens of thousands of people die in the Middle East.
Ukraine was an event because it involved Russia and involved white people. This isn’t some fringe accusation, in the debate in the German Parliament the day after the Russia invasion the most commented upon as powerful speech pretty much directly said that the events were so extraordinary and horrific because they happened to people that look like us in a place that looks a little like this.
What is it about Gazans that makes them more valuable or worth caring about than Africans? For Muslims, the answer is obvious; their enemies are their enemies in an ancient tribal religious conflict, have humiliated the ummah and so on.
For Western dissident rightists, the sole aim is to bloody the nose of the Jews. The worst thing, as Norm said, is the hypocrisy; it is unfair that Jews get their ethnostate even as ‘they’, it is alleged, advocate and work towards Europeans losing their homelands / ethnostates. Israel’s war on Gaza and attempted ethnic cleansing isn’t unreasonable (it is not as if they would be opposed to ethnic cleansing not only in their ancestral homelands in Europe, but also in settler colonies like the US) because the act is unreasonable, it’s unreasonable because of who is doing it.
If they have memed themselves into caring, it is only because - already believing in the inhumanity of their enemy - they can’t help but sympathize with their ‘fellow’ victims, plus some of the Muslims are pretty based and redpilled etc.
As an aside, the Ukraine war comparisons are ridiculous; it’s a war with a clearly defined front against an enemy that wears uniforms. Gaza is a war against an army that doesn’t wear uniforms, melts into the civilian population at will, has no front, and where the enemy’s only strategy (because they would get wiped out in open conflict) is to hide in the most densely populated civilian districts of one of the most densely populated places in earth. That the civilian death toll will be much higher than a forest or marshland in Eastern Ukraine is obvious.
You write of
But really, the dishonest thing is the claim that a low level regional conflict between two tribes about who owns a small patch of the Middle East is the subject solely to lobbying on one side. Gaza is a canvas upon which every political debate is played, from LGBT rights to decolonialism, from nationalism to internationalism, from the politics of victimhood to the politics of strength. It’s also deeply personal to 1.5bn Muslims (perhaps double the total white population of the world) who care a great deal about their honor and who are often very active online.
What happened in Gaza? What happened is what happens when this kind of thing happens, which is all the time. Protesting that it’s special, or different, is more about who is involved than about what is happening.
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