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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   32994 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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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.

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.)

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.

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.

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