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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28697 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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Certainly there were lots of people who at the time of the Holocaust saw it as a uniquely terrible crime, even as it was ongoing. For example in July 1944, Churchill wrote to Anthony Eden (concerning the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz):

There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilised men in the name of a great State and one of the leading races of Europe. It is quite clear that all concerned in this crime who may fall into our hands, including the people who only obeyed orders by carrying out the butcheries, should be put to death after their association with the murders has been proved. I cannot therefore feel that this is the kind of ordinary case which is put through the Protecting Power, as, for instance, the lack of feeding or sanitary conditions in some particular prisoners’ camp. There should therefore, in my opinion, be no negotiations of any kind on this subject. Declarations should be made in public, so that everyone connected with it will be hunted down and put to death.

It's worth noting that Churchill does not, in this passage nor anywhere else in writing- including Churchill's six volumes of Second World War, reference Nazi gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The Holocaust is not referenced at all in any concrete terms either in Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe, nor in Charles de Gaulle's memoirs.

It doesn't seem worth noting unless you care about the history of chemical warfare and it's supporters. Churchill had a complicated political history with chemical and gas weapons.

It is worth noting in understanding the WWII mythos that is the subject of the discussion. Why was it not mentioned at all in thousands of pages of memoirs across the most important leaders? There are two theories: the mainstream theory is that this is just a testament to how much Allied leaders were ambivalent towards Jews, therefore also providing evidence they wouldn't wage a psychological warfare campaign to sacralize a Jewish victimization narrative which is the ultimate bedrock to this entire discussion- including the reason a song like this is censored so heavily. The Revisionist theory is that they knew the nonsense story about millions being tricked into gas chambers disguised as shower rooms would eventually be debunked like the very similar WWI propaganda about the Kaiser's death factories.

But @johnfabian is wrong that Churchill's writing represents the Holocaust being viewed as uniquely terrible early on, it isn't mentioned at all in many volumes of writing across thousands of pages written by the most important belligerents who otherwise have a strong incentive to feature that story to justify their own frame of the war.

The Dream, 1947 The Dream was Churchill’s fanciful short story about conversing with his long-dead father in 1947. In it he explains all that had happened since his father died in 1895. The full text is available. Referring again to the Holocaust, he spoke of the two World Wars:

“Papa,” I said, “in each of them about thirty million men were killed in battle. In the last one seven million were murdered in cold blood, mainly by the Germans. They made human slaughter-pens like the Chicago stockyards. Europe is a ruin. Many of her cities have been blown to pieces by bombs. Ten capitals in Eastern Europe are in Russian hands…. Far gone are the days of Queen Victoria and a settled world order. But, having gone through so much, we do not despair.”8

That wasn't hard to find.

So we're talking about one of the biggest events of WWII, and certainly the most unusual event, with millions of men, women and children allegedly being tricked into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower and murdered. It's the event that forms the foundation of the contemporary anti-Christ mythos around Hitler.

And you couldn't find a single concrete reference to that in Winston Churchill's six-volume The Second World War, as I said, so you instead point to a single vague reference in a dialogue during a dream-sequence in a short story, which doesn't mention gas chambers or even Jews. Certainly my point still stands very, very tall. The fact you have to reach so hard to find a single reference of this world-changing event (which doesn't directly mention it in any case, it's just a literary allusion) from someone like Churchill proves the point very well.

I don't really believe you in the first place, and I'm not about to scan a book I have no interest in reading.

You made it sound like they never talked about it. But they obviously have in other contexts.

They didn't memory hole this thing. Multiple world leaders basically went from never caring about the Jews and actively keeping Jewish immigrants out of their country to being willing to help them found their own nation state.

Your an unreliable source of facts for me. It's like when I used to talk to 9/11 truthers. Sometimes what they said was correct in a very technical sense, but it would lead to false impressions. The "jet fuel can't melt steal beams" was the memed example. It always took a ton of effort to tease out the truth, way more than their initial assertion.

I've seen other people go through that circus with you. I'm unimpressed. As far as I remember your alternate history basically comes down to something like "gas chambers weren't used and only about 2-3 million Jews died" which seems like not enough to even change anyone's reaction.

The Germans were capable of a 1% death rate in prison camps (the death rate of American POWs). Those are optimal circumstances, since those prisoners are more likely to be healthy young men.

There was an estimated 10 million Jews in Europe. Giving you a nicer target like 500k (5% death rate) which assumes all Jews in Europe were captured and numbers still fall way short of the Germans running normal prison camps where they make an effort to keep people alive.

I also don't really care how mass murderers achieve their numbers. Stalin and Mao got their record breaking numbers through starvation and brutal work conditions, no gas required. They were still evil assholes that committed atrocities. The fact that they aren't condemned as heavily as Hitler is something I blame on leftist academics and media covering for the communist regimes. The Jewish conspiracy angle makes little sense to me since vast number of Jews were also killed by Stalin.

It's pretty dishonest to pretend that nobody would react to the revelation that the entire extermination camp and gas chamber story was a lie, and nobody was killed in that fashion. You are saying you wouldn't care if that turned out to be false (I don't believe you by the way) but it would be shocking to many people. Certainly that story is the epicenter of the placement of Hitler as the anti-Christ of Western Methology. Things get very awkward if you admit the entire gas chamber and extermination camp story was all just a huge lie meant to manipulate the public, a lie you will get arrested in Europe for challenging.

The Germans were capable of a 1% death rate in prison camps (the death rate of American POWs).

The Typhus epidemic killed 2-3 million people during WWI, mostly civilians. The Germans did not have a vaccine for Typhus during WWII.

The conditions in the concentration camps were also tolerable throughout most of the war, save for outbreaks of disease. It was in the final months of the war when German infrastructure was being destroyed from all sides that the catastrophic conditions became ubiquitous, a fact that this Revisionist film covers very well.

You misread me.

Imagine an alternate world where no one claimed gas chambers and said 2-3 million Jews were rounded up and effectively murdered through horrible conditions and starvation. My assertion is that the end result would have been much the same. It was still a horrible atrocity and large scale genocide carried out with the machinery of the state, and under the guise of a racial ideology. I believe there still would have been a push for a Jewish state, the Nazi ideology would still be viewed as evil antichrist stand in, and this alternate history world would be mostly indistinguishable from our own.

(It should be worth noting that they did not need to be rounded up. So the death rate should be compared to the general civilian population, not the general prison camp population. The choice to round them up in such large numbers was still that: a choice.)

And yeah I will still say I don't really care if they lied about the method of death and doubled the numbers. But I mostly don't care because everyone that would have perpetrated the lie is dead and out of power. Had this lie been 10 years ago, yes I absolutely would care, and I'd want to punish the liars.

I've self assessed this on other issues I care about. I care about communism being an evil ideology that leads to mass murder and starvation. The New York Times is now known to have had active communist agents on the payroll in the 30s-50s. And that these reporters actively helped cover up the atrocities committed by the USSR. But it all doesn't actively bother me very much. And it bothers me far far less than the errors and lies perpetrated over covid. I have a recency bias, and WWII is not recent.

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