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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?)
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.
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.
What am I supposed to Google? I tried medical care in concentration camps and got : https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/camp-hospitals/conditions-in-the-hospital/ and https://perspectives.ushmm.org/collection/medical-care-nazism-and-the-holocaust
As first results, neither of which corroborates your statement.
When I search for recreational facilities in concentration camps, I find this:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/654671/summary
And this
https://www.auschwitz.org/en/education/e-learning/podcast/sport-and-sportstpeople-/
If it's so easy to search and find please tell me what to search for.
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