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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I may well get banned for asking this, but whatever. Are there any books or sites that present the case for Holocaust denial in a sane and somewhat reasonable way? I read some book skeptical of the Anne Frank diary that someone on here mentioned a while back, but I wasn’t impressed with it.

Now I understand the witches problem, and the fact that it is so taboo/ghettoized it’s going to select for nuts, but if there’s anything to it surely someone has put together a relatively coherent argument that actually engages with the strongest arguments of the non-denial side.

I have seen enough BS like Kamloops to be willing to give denialists a hearing, if any of them have written a summary worth reading

Despite some answers below written with excessive charity, the best answer is "they don't exist". At most you can find books that use neutral language but present misleading information.

It's like homeopathy. Homeopathy is not a subject which leads to people being banned as witches, but even so, if you ask "give me books with reasonable arguments for homeopathy", there won't be any. Homeopathy is so out of touch with the real world that you can't have books with reasonable arguments for it, because there aren't any reasonable arguments for it. It's the same here.

Every once in a while, I'll take a look through the transcripts from the tribunals/interrogations to fact check an anecdote about the war and they're not quite the best at clearly establishing what happened either. Lots of inference, jumping back and forth between various incidents or to previous statements abruptly trying to catch out inconsistencies, try to get an admission then (at least in transcript form) quickly moving on to the next thing. And for many things testimony is the only thing that survived the chaos and destruction of war. For the ones I remember off-hand the textbook summary was generally in line with what was established in the transcripts but that establishment wasn't necessarily clear, reasonable or detail rich even if ultimately convincing.

The best resource is the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, they do consistently excellent work and have a rich archive of high-quality articles on many topics. They have an overview pamphlet of their claims but if you are willing to give their case a hearing I would suggest reading Debating the Holocaust (which is published by CODOH, you can get the full book or ebook here). This book is useful because it presents what is claimed in the official historiography alongside the Revisionist case, making it easier to see where mainstream historiography disagrees with Revisionism and where it does not.

Why would you get banned? The idea is not verboten, no matter how distasteful. If you're going to get links to decent scholarship...here is probably the place.

Bear in mind the usual disclaimers about epistemic learned helplessness. Given enough time--and a powerful enough selection effect--specialists in any field will develop some elaborate fortifications.

I think the case for the Holocaust is much, much stronger than Kamloops. The most defensible objections, in my opinion, are of scale or of details. But I will defer to some of our other regulars for actual citations.

Also the opposite if anyone knows of one. It's almost impossible to research this because you'll just get banned in most places. I would be interested in an account of how scholars came to the modern consensus on how the holocaust happened with lots of original documents.

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

A focus on primary sources, ideally something that goes through what would typically be taught in a class about the Holocaust but that meticulously shows how each claim is supported by primary sources.

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