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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?)
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.
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.
Not sure about this one as IIRC starving people were killed when trying to access grain in warehouses during the Great Leap Forward, and one of the reasons why the famine was so horrific was because Mao and co. continued to export food for political gain and refused foreign aid for at least a year or two.
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