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I moderated a forum once.
Like many forums it struggled with one of the basic problems of forum moderation — how much niceness do you enforce, which I'll explain by way of some endemic user types in any forum with enough people and anything but the most milquetoast topic.
A: Here's the troll who comes by only to post egregiously offensive "go kill yourself [list of slurs]",
B: Here's the more subtle troll, who keeps toeing the line as much as he can get away with.
C: here's the user who is not a troll. They actually do participate in discussion and are clearly trying to be a part of the community. They're also abrasive and/or obnoxious and/or inflammatory.
D: And then here's the final type of user that's problematic as a mod: They're a sensitive snowflake. Honestly they need to be sub-divided further, because some of them are just born snowflakes that can't handle any opposition to their viewpoint at all, and others are retaliatory snowflakes, because if I got a ban for three days for saying this opinion is dumb then that guy also needs to get a ban for three days for saying this other opinion is dumb.
The forum was one that was trying really hard to be heterogenous in terms of opinions and also to be nice and moderating it was a nightmare, not because of the obvious ban on sight trolls but because inevitably when you want to moderate niceness now 90% of your mod time — and the mod time becomes a balloon that expands to fill all available space — is spent on dealing with constant playground supervision of the snowflakes. Also you've been slowly but steadily banning your type C members when they eventually accrue enough complains from the type Ds, and because they're really annoying you initially don't miss them until you realize that conversation in your forum is drying up a bit and also some of the valuable forum members who were friends with type Cs also got pissed off and left and also mixed into the type Cs and their friends were, inevitably, some of the more useful members of the forum who knew a lot (and hence got into arguments that annoyed snowflakes).
Also it turns out snowflakes are basically never satisfied as long and are just a self eating death spiral of a forum culture.
After my experience moderating that forum and swearing off moderating ever again, I ended up lurking the notorious kiwifarms. It was full of people who engaged in what would definitely be termed elsewhere as hate speech against me. Now, I never actually made an account there, and I also stopped visiting a few years back so idk if things have changed, but at the time I remember being struck by how much less of a threat I felt reading kiwifarms, because yeah slurs were being thrown around but users were actually arguing, you didn't just have someone with the viewpoint that was the forum consensus and then everyone else against that consensus gets to tiptoe around what they can say or get banned. Everyone shared their most idiotic opinions and had other people arguing with them no holds barred, the forum also had reaction emojis so you could freely post your insane conspiracy theory but wou would get 50 "lol look at this insane conspiracy theory" reactions.
I remember a few years ago people were still making fun of t*kt*kers and how they would asterisk everything or use idiotic word substitution like "krill myself" because otherwise they'd get blackholed by the TikTok algorithm.
Meanwhile I took a long long break from reddit and only recently returned, to a forum dedicated to a game I play, and discovered that in the interim reddit has added some kind of probably AI based site-wide moderation against violent language (or actual human beings are being this dumb idk) and it's impossible to talk like a normal person there anymore, because if you say, in a joking and friendly fashion perfectly understood by you and the person you are talking to to be friendly, "you said my build was bad, I'm gonna have to shove you off a cliff" (this example is not great because I forget the actual exchange, but whatever, fill in something more normal) then you get banned from all of Reddit and the poor guy you were talking with gets to post your exit speech from the discord you're both in as well. It does appear to be a strike system where first you get warned, since I got my first warning for telling someone who posted about a pedophile moving into their neighborhood that hopefully the pedophile would die suddenly.
It's hard not to turn this into some kind of doompost about how the internet is turning into a horrible little hellhole where no one has a normal argument anymore just constant barricading themselves into their own opinions lest they be offended by the not niceness of having to hear someone else's opinions, each little forum and its own narrow band of acceptable ideology, all while the biggest social media sites are enforcing the most transparently fake bullshit kindergarten language upon us all. It brings out the free speech absolutist instincts in me, it really does.
But what if you don't want an aggressively anti-censorship forum that will involve a forum culture of calling everyone slurs? You want the veneer of respectability and gentility but also the ability to have an actual conversation?
Well I already listed the shitty experience I had trying to moderate such a forum, against what was not bad faith actors but just human actors acting predictably human hence this being a pattern you can see all over the place, and now I have to address the flip side of the coin.
Let's by analogy discuss locker room culture. I don't actually know if locker room culture is a real thing irl so I'm going to discuss hypothetical locker room culture.
It's a group of like fifteen guys in a guy's only space. They're basically all normal guys, plus rapey Kenneth and edgy Doug. Sometimes rapey Kenneth makes a joke about how some girl in the school really needs to be fucked into her proper place in society and Doug will make some follow up joke and everyone else is maybe thinking "c'mon man can we not do this" if it's been like too many times that day but usually you're just trying to finish getting dressed and maybe John also is like "that's not cool man" and pushes back. But like, the rest of the time the atmosphere is just a comfy men's only space plus the occasional rape joke or comment about how women suck or are all gold-diggers or are responsible for everything wrong with society.
Anyway, if for whatever reason that locker room decided it wanted to actually be a co-ed discussion space instead, it would have a little problem, which is that any individual woman walking in would get the vibe — they're the barely tolerated outsider — and then leave unless they're like extra autistic/socially challenged.
Because there's just the microculture of what kinds of things are ok to say there and what aren't, and sometimes what's ok to say is anything negative about group A and what's not ok to say is anything negative about group B, and it's not really about an active policy one way or another it's just this is the overall culture of the social group, read the room and get out.
This is, unfortunately, the part where I admit that I've spent weeks now debating if I should just quietly show myself the door. I didn't mean to enter themotte under false premises, I just decided my first post wouldn't be some "here's all my labels and opinions" and would be an actual post about a controversial topic I wanted to talk about. And then before I had the chance to like, casually drop the relevant information about me and get it over with (I despise sharing personally identifiable information online, but it was nonetheless something that needed to happen eventually if I wanted to talk about any number of topics I wanted to discuss), my government did a surprise attack on Iran. I quite vividly remember someone posting a comment about there being a siren and someone else saying "can't find any news confirming it" and not piping in with "it's me, I'm the news, posting from the spotty internet in the bomb shelter". And then it became just increasingly not the right moment for it (also I was quite sleep deprived and dealing with lots of other more immediate concerns).
And in the meantime I got to have the uncomfortable sensation of listening in on conversations I felt were very obviously not meant to include me. For several days now I've been debating doing a rip the band-aid off kind of post (how? What framing?) to get it over with and be able to discuss things again or to just... Leave.
Because of course the alternative is to figure out the correct, respectful way to tiptoe around the conversation over whether Jews control the American government/assassinated Kennedy, since we aren't doing kiwifarms style dialogue where someone talks about the kikes ruining everything and someone else responds by calling him a retarded autist, you've got to politely request sources and carefully have respectful mutually productive dialogue.
Or to just like ignore that the conversation is even happening? Stick to discussion of feminism and essentially continue faking being a normal non-Jewish mottizen...
Polite respectful mutual dialogue.
But only for some opinions, because others are an "immense pain in the ass".
Yes this is the actual reason I ended up writing this comment instead of continuing to waffle over if I should just leave. Because it is actually really annoying, if I need to play nice with the neonazis and have polite and measured conversations — I am willing to do this, even though conversations with people who are (only theoretically!) interested in me and my family being dead are a "pain in the ass" to conduct civilly — and to then see someone else express some opinion that is more objectionable to the baseline motte culture, but expressed according to all the rules of the site, and get banned (temporarily) for it. Because it just means setting the lines around what kinds of people are in the locker room, which is pretending to be a co-ed discussion space, but isn't. And yes I'm biased by being more inclined towards free speech over banning and thinking that it's better to have the opinions and talk it out then constantly police what people say, sure, but if the forum can tolerate holocaust denial I think it can also stretch itself to tolerate libtards. I'm not interesting in doing some tit for tat thing where I'm like "well if you banned them for this, why didn't you ban that other person for that" because like I stated up front that's just the path to a death spiral where almost no one interesting sticks around. But still, come on, you didn't ban them for constantly sticking their conspiracy theories into every discussion couched as consensus building obvious fact. Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement.
Eh, you can't have a forum dedicated to political discussion and complain when people hold opinions you disagree with.
I've wasted a lot of time here arguing with Holocaust deniers, until I realised that if it were possible to convince them with evidence or sound argument, then they wouldn't be Holocaust deniers. I found the block function a better solution. I suspect many others have chosen the same approach of non-engagement.
I think the moderation here is excellent. There will always be a few users who manage to get their pet issue into every topic. That's the price we pay for moderation that doesn't descend to purity spirals or 4chan-esque vulgarity.
My guess is that you will, for good reason, not believe me when I tell you this, but I'm not exactly a holocaust denier yet I still want to challenge you on the matter. JAQ etc. Sorry in advance for the broken formatting; idk how to fix it.
I haven't spent a huge amount of time researching these things, but I've read several books on the topic (including the ones they made us read in school), watched youtube videos from different perspectives, observed many acrimonious debates, etc., and my current assessment is as follows:
1a. Nazis are on record admitting to all sorts of absurd and bizarre abuses which clearly never happened, including but not limited to whimsical electric execution floors, massive mobile body-grinding machines which are postulated to explain where all the bodies went, and even nuclear explosions deployed to vaporize corpse piles (same reason). We shouldn't be surprised that confessions under duress are less than reliable.
1b. Meanwhile inmates are on record making the most outrageous, fanciful accusations including straight up Tom & Jerry style hijinks, including but not limited to the nazis making prisoners push a shotgun into a hole in the wall that bends the barrel around backwards at them, then pull the trigger, such that the prisoner shoots himself. (If you don't know anything about guns let met assure you this is entirely impossible. This is bugs bunny-tier nonsense.) Many of the first-hand accounts of extermination camps I've read (it's late and I'm a bit tipsy and can't remember which) turn out to fall apart upon even cursory historical examination and even mainstream historians will, when cornered, acknowledge that they're, to put it lightly, embellished.
If the holocaust were entirely a hoax (and I don't think it is) mainstream institutions are in a political situation where they have no incentive to entertain the possibility whatsoever and every incentive to double down wherever possible. The justification for this statement I'll leave as an exercise to the reader. We all know that if anyone even implies it might not have been quite as commonly portrayed everyone else absolutely flips the fuck out and actual arguments need not ever enter the picture.
Pursuant to the previous item, every incentive I see pushes the official narrative toward inflating the horrors of the holocaust not just qualitatively but also quantitatively. It's a classic ratchet situation. Anyone is free to claim more victims (and more monstrously) than usual; no one is free to claim fewer victims (or less monstrously) than usual. The numbers we're given seem historically tenuous at best and given these dynamics were likely much smaller.
It is certainly true that nazis didn't want jews around and tried to expel them, only nobody wanted to take them. Given the war, this subject population was put to work as slave labor in horrible conditions which, due to disease, malnutrition, and (yes) hateful abuse resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions. These slaves were used to help the war effort and were considered expendable. Given that Germans themselves were often facing death by starvation near the end of the war, it is not at all surprising that their slaves were often left to starve first, or even executed as convenient.
Here's the curveball: For all that, I'm A) Jewish and B) Once did a shitload of ketamine and... well, describing the experience probably won't make sense to anyone who isn't Jewish and who hasn't done that, but suffice it to say I'm entirely convinced that the holocaust did happen roughly as commonly described in the broadest strokes -- that does fit the Pattern of Reality and, uh, ancestral memory that I encountered -- but notwithstanding any of the above. An industrial state putting huge resources into mechanically killing a slave labor force while it's in the middle of an existential war for existence just doesn't add up. The targeted destruction of jews surely did happen, but sheer common sense indicates that the murders, rapes, and local pogroms happened relatively incidentally and organically, while malnutrition and disease did most of the work in the camps.
Instead European Jewry was first encouraged to leave, then pushed toward other countries as refugees, then massively conscripted as a slave labor force with zero compassion or concern about their wellbeing, then basically liquidated as convenient when resources ran low so as to conserve resources for Germans and the war effort in general. Colossal-scale industrialized killing just doesn't fit into this model.
As the war wrapped up, and afterward, it was obviously enormously politically beneficial for the winners to record history so as to make the losers look as bad as possible, and especially for Zionists to have something to point to in order to justify... whatever they want, really. Everything after that point follows naturally. The holocaust is huge business both politically and financially.
So -- I feel like I don't often get the chance to sincerely expose this perspective to anyone who A) has the background to correct me and B) is enough of a gentleman to do so without histrionics, but if I'm reading your post right you just volunteered yourself as both. So do let me know. I'm not even sure whether I technically qualify as a holocaust denier, which is a weird position to be in.
(But seriously, this autoformatting. Why is it designed around a use case where someone starts a numbered list with a number other than 1 but actually wants 1? When would that ever possibly happen? And what can one do to get around it?)
My recommended formatting solution that IS possible is to mix depths and unordered bullets:
First point
Now you can continue
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Well, ok, but the Germans did plenty of stupid things in WWII. Famously, Hitler was a bit of a madman and on a lot of drugs. The entire obsession with the Jews was immensely retarded. In a slightly different universe, the USA ended up nuking Berlin with a bomb largely developed by Jewish scientists, many with German heritage. The V2 project was immensely expensive for Germany, and did nothing to change the outcome of the war and there was never a plausible way it would.
It's one thing to broadly construe an actor as a rational agent, but to therefore eliminate the possibility that semi-rational actors do some self-defeating stupid shit is also a reasoning error.
And there's the classic counter-conspiracy logic of: "It would be harder to construct the Holocaust as a fake happening than for it to have actually happened."
Personally, I trust the CIA analyzing WWII aerial photography, which includes the dismantling of some of the execution facilities: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/305894 (I just happened on these, and it's really cool. The IG Farben chemical facility was surveilled from the air from April 1944 and inadvertently included coverage of Auschwitz and Birkenau--the chemical extermination camps of lore. Once the chemical plant was bombed, you didn't need as much labor anyway.)
My understanding is that a ton of this happened all over Europe and it's a very awkward subject. The Germans at least can be a scapegoat.
Oh and if you don't trust the CIA, here's the NSA:
https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-quarterly/sigint_and_the_holocaust.pdf
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209/pdf/GOVPUB-D-PURL-LPS92209.pdf
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Is this a controversial take amongst the left/zionists? Isn't this what happened, who pushes for a more extreme "industrialized" story than this? I'm pretty sure this is exactly what I learned in my extremely leftist primary school (we watched Schindler's list in grade 7).
@Clementine just described pretty much that exact view as Holocaust denial below, so yes, it’s controversial. Some people treat anything less than “the Nazis intentionally murdered six million Jews, mostly in gas chambers” as Holocaust denial. Some also get upset if you go further and mention any of the other victims of the Nazi concentration camps in the same breath as the Jews, claiming that that’s also Holocaust denial.
This feels close to the crux of my complaint. It seems that the truth has been overplayed for political purposes and the people who are supposed to be managing it show every sign of operating in bad faith.
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Functionalism vs Intentionalism.
For people who villainize Hitler, it's a pretty big step to say that there was no grand plan for a Final Solution orchestrated by him, and that things just sort of happened as a consequence of the war.
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That's just how it works. Comments are parsed in Markdown, which is translated to HTML. By writing "2.", you are creating an ordered list, which is an HTML object that starts counting from one by default. Fixing this would require breaking the standard.
Maybe create an unordered list? Instead of numbers, use bullets. You can indent the bullets to nest sub-lists.
To be more specific, markdown is NOT a single unitary standard: there are different parsers that interpret and render the typed ASCII text in different ways, although in most practical use these differences are minor, it can come up. For example reddit uses its own version that almost no one else does. Although particularly with lists, you're correct here this is mostly an HTML problem at the end of the day, not a flavor difference. Actually because of that basically all pure markdown gets rendered this way. I think the notable exception is if you allow in-line CSS or something but I don't think that's the case here, since you can type some stuff direct in HTML but only a subset of stuff (I assume for security/QA reasons)
Pandoc markdown for example will auto-number the lists for you if you put #. before each, which is neat, but they are the only ones. There are other differences in list rendering between more common markdown renderers, though, and enough that advice has to be pretty specific to the forum (I dunno what TheMotte uses)
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Yeah I originally used numbers because I wanted later items to be able to refer to earlier items, but when I saw that it was broken I just reworded everything.
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I think you make some very reasonable objections based on the way the holocaust is often taught and framed in Western countries. And indeed many people one /r/askhistorians coming from not a skeptical position at all but still nor understanding why the Germans took certain actions. Because the way the Holocaust is taught in high school as a singular event and not how it fit into the broader German war effort and also because I think most high school teachers and principles would be uncomfortable articulating Nazi arguments in a Steelman way. This leads to some holes in the framework and I think you'd be surprised how close you are to the academic and not the pop culture version of the holocaust.
The death camps we all know were part of a much larger machinery of forced labor ranging from keeping farmers on their fields in Soviet collectivized agriculture (the Ukrainian peasants who though the Germans were going to re-introduce private property were bitterly disappointed) to conscripted foreign laborers in factories, to forced labor in work camps, to finally the death camps. The economy of the third reich, especially in the war's later periods ran on tens of millions of slave laborers the majority of which were not Jews. Now if the Germans were simply using the Jews as a slave labor and ill treating them to death we would expect to see a demographic hole in Jewish communities, remember in pre-war Poland 10% of the population was Jewish and in the Western Soviet Union many towns were majority or plurality Jewish not mention many villages that were essentially 100% Jewish. If the Germans were just taking slaves we would expect to see the able bodied gone and the very old and very young remaining but this is not what we see instead we see essentially all of Eastern European Jewry just vanish the very old and the very young included. Sometimes people will say they just went to Israel at all but the numbers just do not add up at all even if you only use Poland and there is no reason to do that, say what you will about the Soviets but they were pretty autistic about demographics.
The idea the holocaust cost lots of resources is something of a myth about the holocaust it didn't take huge resources to do it was done reasonably efficiently and on the cheap and likely turned a profit. The actual number of German camp guards was fairly low as the actual function was mainly ran by capos and it just doesn't take that many people with guns to control large number of people especially when you are just going to kill them and bring in the next batch. You say killing a slave labor force when they were in the middle of a war doesn't make sense but they largely didn't do that. They largely killed the ones who couldn't work and then put the rest to work in conditions varying from being worked to death on starvation rations, to treated semi-ok as long as they were doing productive labor. The reason Oscar Schindler was able to save the Jews he did because they were doing productive labor for the war effort. If they stopped being productive well... We also have other examples of states doing similar things see the Ottoman Empire killing the Armenians while losing a war instead of even attempting to use them for labor. I feel like you are overly focused on the Jews being a useful slave labor force when from the German perspective they were an especially dangerous slave labor force subversive and radioactive. The Germans perceived, at least by the later stages, WWII as a war against Jews as they blamed Jews for both Anglo Capitalism and especially Bolshevik Communism. They viewed the Jews under their control as racial enemies and the entirety of the war as a race war but especially on the Eastern front.
We can see the Germans take special efforts to get their hands on Jews specifically such as in Hungary after the coup when the Germans had more influence over the government they used it to deport the entire Jewish population. If they needed these slave labor positions filled why weren't they already using Poles or Russians and why take the very old and very young and virtually the entire Jewish population of Hungary? In the standard narrative this does include lots of able bodied men being killed because of the sudden influx.
Another case where the Germans did kill able bodied men were the Einsatzgruppen and if you respond to anything in my post. respond to this I'm curious about what you think about them because they are often left out of alternative holocaust narratives and arguments and you didn't mention them either. A typical denier argument or even question by a curios redditor on Askhistorians (I know you don't identify that way and didn't make this argument) Is why didn't the Germans just shoot everyone? and the answer is they tried! But it turns out shooting tons of people is hard and plays hell on the psych of people doing it. Not to mention using bullets this way strains the war effort a lot more than working people to death. the Einsatzgruppen are also incredibly problematic for both the Western and Soviet narratives as they often were heavily involved with local collaborators which even today is something of a problem of the West in terms of Ukraine and the Baltics, which makes them incredibly unlikely for the West to falsify.
I'm not sure I agree about the witness testimony and historians don't actually give continence to stories like that it's not a hidden thing in holocaust studies and any event involving millions of people is going to have a lot of people making crazy shit up. But we do have evidence outside or witness testimony we have reams and reams of paperwork we have stuff like the Wannsee Conference and General Plan Ost. We have train manifests and none of the people put on trial for it actually denied it. You can say they were tortured but we don't actually have any evidence of that and the Nuremburg trials seem like the fairest version of victors justice I've ever seen given that some of them were acquitted. As for your idea the numbers can only go up in the narrative This is not the case the numbers of those killed at Auschwitz have been revised down several times by historians. If the evidence is there holocaust scholars will lower them. In fact deniers use the lowering of numbers killed out Auschwitz as something of a gotcha.
I know this is a long post and I don't expect a response to all of it or really want to get in a tit for tat. but if you respond to anything. I'd ask you opinion on the Einsatzgruppen, the lack of a demographic hole of missing able bodied Jews and what you think of the existing documentation we do have. I'm curious if any of this changed your mind and if not why not?
Thanks for a great reply. Regrettably I think it was caught in the spam filter or something because I didn't see it until like two days after you posted it, and also if others saw it I'm sure you'd have a lot more upvotes.
I'm about to move from the prep phase of dinner to the cooking phase, and you have so much here, so in short I'd just like to say
Hey I appreciate your response I was pretty disappointed when my effort post didn't show up forever so glad to know you at least saw it!. For what it's worth I think despite all the time it gets holocaust education in the West is pretty bad and pretty much any thinking person is going to have them based in the high school curriculum version of it we get taught. I spend a fair amount of time on /r/askhistorians and the amount of liberals with massive doubts about the holocaust is pretty telling. Well not doubts exactly they tepidly come in writing paragraphs of disclaimers about how they believe the official story but there are massive gaps where the tory they've been told makes no sense. Most true deniers start here as well and they are almost always arguing against the version they were taught in high school. IE the camps separated out of all context and a lot of myths thrown in combined with strawman version of Nazi ideology.
Most teachers are unwilling/incapable and probably just a little scared to actually explain Nazi ideology and goals and the Eastern Front is severely undertaught and without either of those the Holocaust narrative taught doesn't actually add up. and there are tons and tons of "Good Liberals" with those same doubts they are just to scared to voice them for fear of being labeled a denier. I actually think one of the reasons people get so hysterical when the Holocaust gets even slightly questioned is because many of them can't counter skeptical arguments at all so they are just running off pure emotion.
Yeah that's about right. The hand has been overplayed so egregiously that anyone with half a brain is going to commit the ultimate, unrecoverable crime of noticing.
(Thanks again.)
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IIRC, I'm not a programmer, it's been brought up before but it's part of the inherited codebase and apparently difficult to fix. Looking around it may be an issue with Markdown formatting, that both the motte and reddit use?
The easiest way around it is to just use lettered lists instead of numbered, and do nested lettering as you go. Maybe that spacing thing at the link will work? Let's try
Ah ha! It still won't do nested labeling correctly, but to get your 1, 2, 3 to number right, put four spaces in front of your 1a and 1b paragraphs. Or any other paragraphs that don't start with a list number.
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I’m not unsympathetic to the ideas that you present in broad strokes.
Figuring out an exact death count and sussing out exactly which of the stories told are true is difficult because everything seems to be memory and hearsay, not documents, photographs, videos, or other forms of records that can be examined. Many of the stories seem pretty fantastic even for a work of fiction, let alone a retelling of history. Things like medical experiments and torture in odd and grotesque ways seem less like something that happened and more like confabulation or rumors that get repeated as fact. The human mind is actually pretty good about inventing wild stories about gruesome torture and murder. And Theres the issue of Nazis not keeping up with quotas and simply exaggerating numbers so the higher ups don’t fire them or whatever for poor performance. You can do this easily especially with paper records. Just count fictional people, or count the same person several times— thus a Gay Jewish political prisoner counts on three different tables. That’s just the side of the camps.
And the allies both during and after the war have every incentive to exaggerate the numbers, tge stories, etc. which gives them the ultimate heroic story about themselves and their civilization and why you should be on our side. I don’t think most modern people understand just how much of the logic of WW2 has shaped how we think about our moral universe, our political and social systems, and ourselves. It’s basically the “state cult” of the modern neoliberal order. Hitler has replaced Satan as the ultimate evil in the moral universe, more or less. And for nearly a century, most regimes that we must go to war with are in some way like the Nazis. Depending on which side you take on Israel and Palestine, the other side are Nazi-like. So was Saddam Hussein, Slobodon Milosovic, and dozens of other leaders. Often you’ll hear “stories” of Nazi-like war crimes. In the first Gulf War, George H W Bush claimed that babies were thrown out of hospital windows to be caught on bayonets. In Serbia, they claimed concentration camps. It’s an easy way to manipulate people into support for a war by appealing to the founding myth of the modern age.
I certainly think there was a lot of killing of camp prisoners. Probably on a fairly industrial scale. I would put the full death toll at somewhere between 6-10 million, and much of the violence was genocidal. It happened. That doesn’t mean all the stories are true, nor does it mean that the camps had anything to do with why the allies were fighting the war. We didn’t care about them until they became useful to us.
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It's the second time today when I semi-sincerely wonder if someone on this forum needs a psychiatrist. I'm very cheap, I even do it for free.
(I hope this is a joke and that you're not looking for historical insight from a dissociative drug. Might have cured any depression, if you had it.)
Reading this I was thinking to myself, well if you're Jewish whether the Holocaust happened or not, of course your ancestral memories will be of the oppression of Jews, it's pretty much their entire history other than the reigns of like three or four guys in the Old Testament. Which made me imagine a guy who isn't just a Holocaust Denier but an Antisemitism denier: the Pogroms never happened, the Blood Libel never happened, the expulsion from Spain never happened, the Second Temple never existed so it was never destroyed, etc.
Hold up, new type of person just dropped. If they don't exist, I'd like them to, it would break up the boredom of bog-standard antisemitism.
Propose it to jet fuel denialist Twitter. They’ll probably get right on it.
I just hung out with a dude who at least expressed some degree of belief in the claim that 9/11 was an inside job. About all of.. 2 hours ago.
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Galaxy brain: the Israelis are indigenous to Palestine, because they never left for Europe and then left Europe to escape antisemitism, because there was no antisemitism to escape. The diaspora is a myth, Jews are just native to Israel and new York.
I am 4 beers in on an empty stomach and this is beginning to sound convincing. Next thing I know, you'll tell me that Christ was a Jew.
"Jesus wasn't a Jew" is at least more likely than the "St George and Santa Claus were Turks" gag I see from SJWs.
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Yes, I tried talking to not one but three sheltered leftist white women for exorbitant rates and in every case my takeaway was 'how can someone this detached from reality re: how humans work, have this degree?' (FWIW I've had much better success with priests, who seem to have a much more credible handle on the experience of being human and how to live in the world, shaped over millennia, untainted by the intellectual rot of the last half century. But I digress.)
Then I did ketamine (and mdma) and all I can say is that it saved my life. It reminded me of who I was before the soul-shattering trauma and showed me who I was called to be. Lost weight, started working out rigorously, dressed better, greatly expanded my business, met the woman of my dreams, and am generally living my best life. I'm not a regular drug user and usually don't even drink, but the work those things did on me has lasted for years now and shows no sign of diminishing.
Even so I wouldn't suggest others try 'drugs' without an extremely informed, experienced, and personally-committed guide. These things can be dangerous or even ruinous, but I was blessed enough to have two such people to help me through that crucible.
Well of course I didn't go looking for that! But yeah this part is difficult to explain and I was certainly being glib in how I described it. My belief that it happened comes from all the history I've read. My conviction that it happened comes from ketamine's unique(?) ability to synthesize many different understandings together into a comprehensible whole. It all fits and I could see that in a way I never had before.
I can confirm this as a reasonably common effect of ketamine on smart people who have done a lot of reading. Something about the dissociative effect unlocks creative synthesis, and allows you to really "feel" it instead of just assenting intellectually. I've had multiple realizations of this type which have all been of great value. Of course this can also oneshot people who aren't smart enough or who have read the wrong books, since the ultimate value comes from the value of the material you're synthesizing. Caveat emptor!
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It does irk me that famines in Ireland, British India, Africa, ancient regime France, ancient China, Tsarist Russia and the United States are all the understandable effects of blight, weather patterns and supply chain issues but that every famine in a communist country is automatically an intentional act of mass murder and must be treated as such.
I'll speak for the Irish famine: It was an act of nature. There is ample documentary evidence of the British government taking measures to alleviate the problem, such as repealing the Corn Laws to make food imports cheaper and arranging for large quantities of cheap cornmeal to be shipped from America and sold in Ireland at below market rates. These measures were taken at great political cost. Sir Robert Peel had to resign as PM after repealing the Corn Laws (they called him Sir Robert Repeal, no I'm not joking).
The potato blight was a Europe-wide phenomenon and Irish agriculture was notoriously backwards and over-reliant on the potato harvest. The fact that there was a famine is not surprising and I see no reason to blame the British. Contrary to popular belief, Ireland was a net food importer throughout the famine. This is in stark contrast to Ukraine during the Holodomor.
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Outside of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, there has never been a famine in the United States. No, not even the Dust Bowl.
Irish and British Indian famines often ARE blamed on mass murder.
It’s not “twenty million people died last month” level, but there was rampant systemic malnutrition and hunger in large parts of America during the Great Depression that contributed to tens thousands of excess deaths from various diseases. That’s actually how many famine deaths happen, but when it happens in America it doesn’t count.
No, but if I had a political axe to grind against Roosevelt and was looking for any excuse I could to discredit him, the fact that his administration was seizing and burning thousands and thousands of tons of food in the service of his unworkable extremist economic ideology could be presented to make it look pretty damn intentional.
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There’s a pretty direct line between the policies enacted by Maoist China and soviet Russia and the mass famines; it’s probably fair to give the British empire some portion of the blame for famines in Ireland and India but there’s also not a state ideology at the time of exterminating huge swathes of the victims(in the case of the holodomor).
And at least some African famines are downstream of socialist policies- most of Africa experimented with communism/socialism. Lots of the most famous bad actors were explicitly Maoist.
British landlords were growing massively profitable food cash crops for export only and were refusing to let them be used for starvation relief. The British navy was using military vessels to prevent food aid ships from other countries from docking in Irish ports. How the hell is that not a “direct line from the policies” of the British empire?
I said Britain didn’t intend to exterminate the Irish, not that Britain bore no responsibility for the famine.
I don’t know how to interpret chasing off famine relief with gunboats as anything other than intentional. It’s equal to any of the evidence that can be produced for the Holodomor and it far exceeds any of the evidence for the intentionality of the Maoist famines.
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I'll clarify again that I fully believe the holocaust happened and that death camps existed and that it would be crazy not to. I also think it would be crazy to not notice the incentives that were and are in place to inflate the numbers and distort the narrative as to how things went down exactly.
We're pretty much all contrarians here -- who among us can resist tugging at such threads? And if we feel afraid to because of a lifetime of conditioning against doing so in this one particular case, or fear of reprisal for daring to doubt, doesn't that make the skeptical case rather stronger?
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I don’t think the issue is that genocide and ethnic cleansing are always fake. I think the issue is that a lot of the history as taught and then used as propaganda are exaggerated and weaponized to create a propaganda machine that uses the mythology to demonize even relatively harmless ideas or to justify wars to destroy movements or to prop up bad ideas. It furthermore creates an idea that there was only one major genocide in human history and it was uniquely evil. It means that any ideology that you can connect to something the Nazis said or did is now to be suppressed and if possible eliminated by “right thinking people” everywhere.
I mean our “satanification” of Nazis and Hitler did quite a lot of harm in the world. It turned them into cartoons, basically, not real people who lived on earth. It flattened a lot of history into black and white thinking where anything a Nazi did anywhere is automatically considered at best suspect and at worst evil. Even things that are seen as potentially leading to ideas that lead to Nazis is seen as a pipeline. Nationalist? Traditionally European? Christian? I’ve seen hysterical reactions to the idea of: men trying to be masculine, fantasy novels, HEMA, traditional family structures, traditional Christianity, trans skepticism, and reading classics of European literature called out as “part of the fascist pipeline.” And since it’s obviously evil, the hysteria often means that people are being told to watch out for such “red flag” activities and materials in their children’s lives. It’s insane. Furthermore, from my point of view, the dose makes the poison. I think it’s perfectly well and good to embrace your own traditions. It’s certainly better than trying to LARP as East Asian or some other ethnicity. Why, if I want to learn a traditional martial art do I have to learn a tradition that has nothing to do with me? Why can’t I appreciate my own culture? American culture comes from England, not China or Japan or Argentina.
Furthermore, by removing them from humanity, you make outbreaks more likely. People who are like the Nazis know that having those aesthetics turn people off. They know that swastikas and Hugo Boss set off alarms. They simply rebrand. The propaganda looks different. And people don’t want to think that it can or is happening.
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Yeah it's used as an automatic conversation ender and the amount of 'genocides' on the colonial frontier that turned out to be a combination of less deliberate, invented by modern people not realizing the baseline for deaths in rural 1800s Canada and/or perpetrated largely by locals like the Belgian Congo.
I believed the Holocaust happened but the reaction of confused outrage from certain people who are used to essentially having an auto win button in these arguments is silly.
Past tense is a typo. I do believe the Holocaust occurred
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The Belgian population of the Congo never went over a couple thousand. Most of whom weren't exactly plunging off into the jungles to go disarm the locals. I agree they provided the economic incentives, but the vast majority of the cruelty was native on native
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My grandmother used to tell tall tales. She told us that she befriended a cat that followed her to school on the bus, she told us that my aunt was the lovechild of a public figure, she told us that she briefly travelled with circus gypsies as a teenager.
She also told us that she was evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz, that her future husband fought on a submarine, and that her cousin was on a Japanese POW ship which was sunk by a US strike.
Should I therefore conclude that the Battle of Britain and the Allied war against Japan didn't happen?
The difference here is scale. No matter how many Looney Tunes-esque stories Jew-haters can dig up (and you must have noticed how strong the overlap between people who hate Jews and people who deny the Holocaust is), the fact is that the Holocaust was massive. Europe had millions of Jews, and then it had millions less. There are hundreds of thousands of testimonies, not just from the victims who survived or Nazi soldiers, but also Allied soliders who liberated them. There are mass graves, gas chambers, millions of pages of documentation. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that most people in Europe have family or personal stories that interact with the Holocaust in some way. My high school history teacher had German grandparents who were housed in an apartment that had been forcibly vacated by its Jewish inhabitants the very same morning (the coffee was still warm). I have Jewish friends whose family trees are full of lives cut short. I have personally spoken to a woman whose entire extended family was killed except her and her father, and who saw her mother get shot in the head by a Nazi soldier.
This forum is full of contrarians. Contrarianism can be useful. It helps us to question things at are false, but if you don't control the scale, you end up questioning things that are true. You start doubting everything and everyone, and end up believing in massive conspiracies.
A dictator who wanted to establish a Thousand Year Reich deciding to declare war on half the world, thereby dooming his country to defeat in a few short years doesn't make sense. But that is what happened. Death camps may be a waste of resources, but so is invading Russia.
This isn't Ancient Rome. We're not relying on a few parchments from the court propagandists. There are photos, videos, radio recordings, billions of pages of documentation, millions of eyewitnesses, and all of the wonders of modern technology to investigate the recent past. The idea that 'they' (every government, every university, every professional historian, WW2 veterans, both sides of the Cold War, millions of civilian eyewitnesses, right down to chumps like me) is somehow involved in this vast coverup of the truth boggles the mind.
The truth is more prosaic. The Holocaust happened in the way that the historical consensus agreed that it happened. It happened in the same way that every other big event in WW2 happened. It happened because the dictator of Germany, who was always very open about hating Jews, was finally able to enact his will.
I pretty much reject the idea of Holocaust Denial without Antisemitism, because a faked Holocaust is pretty much a concrete open-and-shut case for a world Jewish conspiracy. It requires not only that Jews have had the power to force the story on everyone, to force schools in the United States to make me read five novels about the holocaust in the course of my public education and force half of Europe to throw you in jail if you don't believe in the holocaust; but also that every individual Jew who attests that they lost a family member is a liar. It pretty much positions Jews as a uniquely powerful and evil group. If you don't hate the Jews after confirming that they faked the Holocaust hard enough to sell 30 million copies of Anne Frank's diary, then you're a little looney tunes yourself.
That said, having personal experience as the center of Holocaust proof is rapidly running out of runway:
In 2000, there were close to 6,000,000 WWII veterans alive in the United States; in 2024 there were around 66,000. And worse, in 2000 when I was a kid there were still WWII veterans who were active scoutmasters or deacons or worked actively, I interacted with them as vigorous active guys; in 2024 they are mostly just pushed around senior living centers in wheelchairs. The family stories I pass down to my kids about WWII will be no more meaningful or inherently accurate to them than stories about the Civil War were to me.
Given these facts, it seems unwise to hinge an entire societal worldview on the Holocaust's exact details, or occurrence at all.
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I think part of the problem is that the vast majority of the public education you get about the Holocaust is in the form of unverifiable survivor narratives and nothing else, which leads to the erroneous conclusion that there is no other evidence. No one is going into a middle school history class and hearing the teacher say “ok kids! Here’s 20,000 pages of documents seized from the Nazi archives, let’s plug it into excel and run a statistical analysis!”
I had the opposite happen. Watching the documentary 'One third of the Holocaust', I found I had imagined that there was a much stronger case in favor of the holocaust than what I found.
Same for David Irving's challenge against the gas chambers in Auschwitz. He lost his defamation case on the basis of eye witness testimony, not physical evidence. As, according to Irving and his whole reason for denying the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz in the first place, there wasn't any.
The biggest realization was that I had not once even spoken to a person that had any idea of what the holocaust actually was outside of fiction. Every normie conversation that veers close to the topic is just people filling in the blanks where evidence is absent. They don't stop believing, Schindler's List is just that good.
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Yeah when I wrote my original post it occurred to me that I was going to have to repeat myself ad infinitum about this, but, I'm not disputing that the holocaust happened or that millions died.
I just think it was likely mostly much more, uh, organic, if you will, than is typically portrayed, and that the numbers given have every hallmark of being substantially inflated. I'm also calling attention to what I see as the fact that all pertinent institutions involved were, at the time, and are still now, under immense pressure to spin things in only one direction, including the nazis. During the war so as to please their superiors; after the war so as to please their captors.
Maybe you're an HBD-denier but if not you must surely see how possible it is for such a 'vast conspiracy' to be not just possible but successful -- outside of extremely niche uncontrolled spaces like this one.
People like to sneer about this but I don't think so. It was Stalin's plan to let the capitalist powers fight it out and then jump on the losing side. Hitler attacked because the USSR was only going to get stronger and was never going to stop being a threat, while if he won he would have the resources to hold off the US. It was a fatal gamble but arguably a necessary one.
There are many, many, many instances of Hitler making terrible strategic decisions; I don't think this is one of them.
Sure; I also notice that it's immaterial to the question, and easy to explain. C.f. HBD-denial again and the overlaps we see there. Actually I'd question your motivation in trying to make the point in the first place; it looks to me like dirty rhetoric.
How top down the holocaust was is actually huge debate in Holocaust studies. Saying your a functionalist ie the Holocaust happened organically through on the ground radicalism and local functionaries working towards the Fuhrer is a totally mainstream opinion in academia.
Can you say why you think the numbers are substantially inflated? We have a pretty good idea of the Jewish numbers throughout Eastern Europe from pre and post war census records and the Jewish community largely just vanishes. You can say those records were doctored but then that gets into the problem of those communities still not existing today.
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A common tactic of people questioning the Holocaust is to say "I'm not questioning the Holocaust but..." followed by things that are carefully worded to cast doubt on the Holocaust without explicitly denying it. And that's what you're doing. You're not disputing it, but you think the numbers are substantially inflated? That's disputing it.
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There was one aspect that was pretty terrible: the decision to invade Russia during winter. Hitler and his generals knew how that was likely to turn out thanks to Napoleon’s experience a century earlier, and IIRC they initially planned to invade in early summer. They were forced to delay the start of their campaign until fall, and instead of postponing the campaign until the following year, they decided to risk a winter invasion after all. It seems to me that that’s probably the stupidest decision he made during the war.
Yes. One imagines meth was involved.
This is also more rational then it looks on it's face the Soviets were the weakest they were every going to be from not having finished preparing their defensive lines on the new border to the officer corps still being a mess from Stalins purges. They likely would have done worse if they invaded the next year, also they needed the Soviets oil and were running out of goods and tech to sell for it.
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Yeah so I kind of was hoping that doing a post about being Jewish wouldn't immediately mean the replies would also include a bunch of "but Jews do rule the world" and "but the Holocaust probably is mostly fake"
I hope other mottizens can take the time to answer you.
For me, my great-grandfather was tortured to death publicly — we know because the local newspaper wrote about it, and after the war someone thought it would be a kindness to send this to my grandmother so she'd know what happened to him (...whether it was a kindness is a matter of opinion. Until that point the family had been attempting to maintain her belief her family might still be alive, even though everyone at that point knew everyone was dead)
All of the rest of her family simply disappeared, entirely. Aunts, uncles, cousins. Everyone except her (hiding in France) and one set of cousins (ardent Zionists, moved to Israel pre-ear). We had a huge family tree and then there was no one on it anymore. Our story is not unique, that's basically every Holocaust survivor story.
You dismiss the testimonies of both perpetrators and victims. Conveniently, because the crime was so massive, we still have additional testimonies left after that, photographic evidence of piles of bodies, photographic evidence of public humiliations and tortures, testimonies from the soldiers who liberated the camps, etc. But because there's a handful of fake accounts you then take alllll the evidence from perpetrators, victims, and bystander witnesses, the evidence submitted in trials, the research, and say "ok but since the opinion it didn't happen is taboo, maybe that opinion is true, because after all since it's taboo we'll only get cover ups because no respectable person will publish that it didn't happen". Which is the kind of argument you can immediately use for any belief you want to hold contradicted by piles of evidence.
I'm sympathetic to your OP and wasn't responding to it, which would obviously have been incredibly inappropriate. Nor did I, at any point, suggest that the holocaust is probably mostly fake. I'm disputing the narrative and I'm questioning details; not whether it happened.
More importantly, I'm asking someone who indicated his ability and willingness to correct others about their misconceptions on the matter to do that. Conversations ramify and often end up in very different places than they started. It's a forum.
Yeah. One side of my family was in the US before all that happened; the other side no longer exists.
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He is explicitly saying that it did happen as commonly understood in the broad strokes, though, and the he is jewish himself. He just thinks it was more work camps were starving to death is considered a bonus, and less industrialized killing. Which is still something I disagree with - we have some evidence of the Nazis putting in much more resources into killing than would be reasonable in a war, especially towards the end - but it's hardly comparable to outright Holocaust denial.
"actually the survivors aren't credible and what happened is that they worked people to death for free labor but with no mass shootings, no mass gassings, no locking people into buildings and setting those buildings on fire, just very polite Germans extracting human labor until it dropped dead" is still holocaust denial actually.
Since the claim about the Holocaust is that Jews were targeted for extermination, not just abused as slaves and "incidentally" dying.
He also mixes in the claim that many fewer Jews died than is accepted by mainstream historians and that these numbers are inflated to suit the Zionist agenda, which is also holocaust denial.
Allow me to clarify. I think that most of the deaths in camps are due to malnutrition and disease. It's also demonstrably the case that Jews in camps often received high-quality medical treatment and had access to all sorts of pleasant recreational facilities, which certainly doesn't make things okay, but does cast some doubt on the narrative that the whole point was to kill them.
FWIW my guess is that had the Nazis won (and stayed winning) Jews would have been expelled to colonies as ~slaves, generally whittled down by social and economic oppression, and in the long run probably mostly exterminated one way or another, yes. For obvious reasons I'm not a fan of this outcome.
However -- a whole lot of deaths did happen outside the camps. Neighbor on neighbor violence, pogroms, groups of Jews (and other political prisoners) quietly gunned down in the woods when transporting them became inconvenient, etc.
Are you disputing that inflating the numbers suits the Zionist agenda, or are you disputing that the institutions which would do so had many incentives to do so and few if any incentives not to?
Feel free to walk away from the conversation at any time if this is stressful to you btw; I'm not hounding you, didn't initiate conversation with you, and am at this point responding because you're responding.
This seems to violate "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."
This is not by any means a fringe assertion — I'm unaware of any mainstream historian or institution which disputes the matter, and you can easily google it and learn from whatever source you find credible — and one person on a forum claiming that it's partisan and inflammatory does not make it so.
Though I'll add that this sort of treatment was much more typical of the early days. It makes sense. Healthy slaves are productive slaves. It all seems to have gone out the window once resources got thinner.
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