site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   26858 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I don't really want to do this, but I had another family member confess to me that he denies aspects of the Holocaust, so I'm going to make another one of those threads. I'm sorry. At least it's on the last day of this particular thread.

Before I get into this: most Holocaust denial is kind of dumb. My dad had me listen to this podcast a year or so ago, and there were some really stupid theories in that. Namely, that Hitler did literally nothing wrong. Claims that those Jews actually did stab Germany in the back with rioting, that they actually were breaking Germans with their banking stuff and their horrible lending schemes, that Hitler was profoundly Christian, that Hitler actually really just wanted peace and tried desperately to make peace only for the war-loving British to decline because they hate Christians, that Poland was extremely necessary both for farmland and to stop the mistreatment of ethnic Germans, and then further claims that Jews comprised the USSR and put Christians into gulags. Also Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were all destroyed for being true holy places for Christianity. Also Jews are genetically evil because they killed Christ and called down a blood curse upon themselves. Many Holocaust deniers are similarly terrible weakmen for the cause.

But I have to make this post because despite all sorts of bad argumentative tactics on that side, if they commit to a specific kind of Holocaust denial, I can't really refute it. It goes like this: Germans only forced Jews into work camps, there were no death camps. All the death camps were on the USSR side for a reason, and there were no Americans who investigated them. Hundreds of thousands of Jews died, but 6 million is far too much, and the Nuremberg Trials were show trials.

I know of a few things that refute this: the Posen speeches, a certain Nazi who fled to South America and wrote about the Holocaust without prompting, and the likely absence of a particularly large number of Jews. But I don't know why the death camps were all on the USSR side. Why were the death camps all on the USSR side? There are probably answers that don't involve anything too crazy.

I also am aware that it's pointless to contradict most Holocaust deniers, because they generally are willing to spend a lot more time than you on the subject, and they also are unwilling to accept any evidence I have, anyway. I once blindsided my dad with the Posen speeches, who had not heard of it. He actually didn't deny the veracity right away, but questioned what Himmler was really talking about, because the evidence just wasn't there for him that they could possibly kill that many Jews. I was pretty sad for getting so close, but not quite reaching the destination.

But I don't know why the death camps were all on the USSR side.

They weren't. One of the first death camps was in Brandenburg, to the west of Berlin. This was part of Aktion T4, the precursor to the Holocaust, where mental patients were killed (and they later extended Aktion T4 to Jews on a small scale, until they later scaled up massively as part of a new program). At that location, they experimented with carbon monoxide gassings in a gas chamber disguised as a shower room. They closed that facility after complaints by the locals about the smoke.

There is no official document about why they chose Poland for most of the large scale program, but you only have to look at a map to see that Poland is an obvious choice if you want to do it outside of Germany, but within easy reach of Berlin. The Netherlands, Belgium or France are also close to Germany, but on the side of Germany that is far away from the capital.

I suspect that they preferred a foreign country, and especially an Eastern-European country because it is much easier to get things done if you are not beholden to an established bureaucratic system, and a populace that is used to appealing to that system. The idea was to establish a new nation in Eastern Europe, so then there effectively were no existing rules holding them back.

Well they did stab the germans in the back with their banking practices, and when the war started they also got their international banking buddies in the UK, and US to try and turn them against the germans. Тhey were also the purveyors of some of the worst kind of excesses the Weimar republic was known for. We haven't even mentioned the failed Commie revolution in germany.

cause the evidence just wasn't there for him that they could possibly kill that many Jews

It's mathematically impossible to do so, physically. Did he also mention the positively increasing number revisions from the somewhat believable 100k up on through the years?

The officially declared estimate is somewhere around 6 million Jews being killed via all causes, including shootings, gunshots, and concentration camps.

There were around 6 million members of the Nazis.

The genocide is supposed to have taken 4 years.

So each Nazi needs to kill an average of one Jew over the course of 4 years.

On a mathematical and physical level that seems trivial. ONE. It's not Hitler driving around with a gun trying to shoot everyone himself (which would require three kills per minutes without stopping or slowing down). It's the entirety of the Nazi party with weapons and organization vs the entirety of the Jews who are fleeing and mostly not fighting back.

I want to be clear, I am not making the argument that it did actually happen: I have no special expertise, insight, or evidence beyond parroting what other people claim and taking them at their word. But

It's mathematically impossible to do so, physically.

is such an absurd exaggeration that I feel compelled to object. You either need to study your math, or your physics, or your rhetorical honesty. You're already fighting an uphill battle by going against the mainstream consensus, you're certainly not going to convince anyone to take you seriously if you're not even trying.

Sure you could kill them by distrubuting the murder to the army, but the claims they were all gassed and cremated to an extent that not enough remains can be found in the time allotted isn't possible. That's the whole illegal cookie math shtick. I'll remind you also in parts of the EU even questioning the dubious possibility of the things being claimed is forbidden and enough to throw you in jail.

You're already fighting an uphill battle by going against the mainstream consensus

Since when is the mainstream consensus good for anything, if tomorrow the MSM news told me the sky was blue, I'd go to the window to check, just in case we were being invaded by demons or something.

I don't have to convince anyone, people are already starting to get fed up with the shit the current globalist neolib regime is pulling.

People sometimes forget the sheer scale of WW2. It truly was total war, or at least the closest approximation ever, unlike almost all that came before or after.

The camps were on the USSR side because the Pale of Settlement was on the USSR site. For the same reason hunting lodges are near the deer and not in the middle of fifth avenue.

Whether German jews screwed Germany? Probably not. I guess you really have to dig in the role of jews in German society during WWI to see if the resentment was justified.

Anyway the brunt of the Holocaust hit mostly the peasant-ish pale of settlement jews.

I recently went to Nanjing, visited the massacre memorial and watched Dead to Rights which is a recent Chinese movie about the massacre. What I find interesting about Nanjing is that there is a lively scholarly debate between numbers of dead. The Chinese government figure is 300k, some range closer to 100k and the Japanese stance is that it was purely collateral damage essentially.

Yet an argument between the 150k camp and 300k camp is something that takes place without anybody being accused of flat denialism.

Japanese stance is that it was purely collateral damage essentially.

Yup. When you bayonet a pregnant woman, the baby is collateral damage.

Not saying I agree with the Japanese but it is surprised how differently it is approached

I assume that by "the USSR side", you mean the areas that were controlled by USSR after the end of the war, so basically everything that eventually became part of the Warsaw Pact.

Here are my thoughts:

  1. It was natural for the German leaders to want to build the extermination camps close to the areas where the Jews were. The overwhelming majority of Europe's Jews during WW2, by a ratio of about 8 to 1, were on "the USSR side".

  2. The German leaders wanted to keep the Holocaust a secret, including from their own people. Most Germans of the time period were at least somewhat anti-Jewish by modern standards, but only a certain fraction of those would have been ok with the mass killing of Jews, especially given that even the women and children would be killed. Furthermore, the Germans continued to have hopes even far into the war that the UK would come to a peace agreement. Openly murdering millions of civilians would, we can imagine, have made that more difficult for Germany. Keeping the extermination camps a secret was easier in the wide spaces of Eastern Europe than it would have been in the dense areas of Germany or France. It was also easier in areas that, like Poland, were entirely under military and/or direct Nazi party rule, as opposed to areas like Germany and France that, while controlled by the Nazis, also still retained a large amount of their normal pre-war civilian legal structures.

To remove myself from the object details of which I am sure others have debated fruitlessly for decades at this point, let me bring up the example of the conspiracy theory that the Americans faked the 1969 moon landings, and that Stanley Kubrick was involved in the sci fi performance of the century.

Suppose it is actually true, for the sake of argument. First of all, who would actually care?

The Soviets wouldn't care. (They wouldn't be around.) The Americans faking the moon landing didn't stop them from doing the MIR-Spacelab spacewalks, or the Russian Federation from participating in the ISS. The revelation wouldn't make the USSR un-collapse.

Would the Chinese care? Maybe a little. No one, since the Americans, have made a manned moon landing. In fact, the landing being revealed to be a fake might induce a second space race, which would be actually a good thing.

Would Elon (and the private sector as a whole) care? Would they stop trying to make rockets, because of a Kubrick landing? No.

In fact, the only people that would actually care about this, in terms of real-world impact, would be the conspiracy theorists themselves. And it would prove what..? That the US government lies? Uh, that might be a few decades behind the popular zeitgeist, with that one.

(~)

Even if you give Holocaust deniers their premise out of the gate, it doesn't change anything in the real world. The 1948 Arab-Israeli war was real. The 1967 Six-Day War was real. The Yom Kippur War was real. The 2nd Intifada was real. 10/7 was real. In short, the Israel national mythology no longer requires the Holocaust to be true in part or in whole. The fact that it is true is historical trivia now, only of interest to historians, autists, and racists of a certain kind.

There seems to be a persistent belief amongst anti-semites of every stripe that once the normies are awoken to the Jewish Question, there will be a spontaneous uprising of sentiment as all Jews everywhere are cast out for... what, exactly? Exaggerating war crimes inflicted upon them? Making them up, whole cloth? Isn't that what every people have done, in the modern period? If they could only present their case, then the Yahuds would be driven out, and Israel would spontaneously combust, or something.

Uh, no. That won't happen. Seriously, no gentile cares. (Well, the Jews and Arabs certainly would. But that's another question entirely.) Because debating the Holocaust is Fucking Pointless because, right or wrong, it is now an academic subject and is not worth your time or energy. The only people who care about revisionist history are weirdos in any case - hoteps with black beethoven, feminists with their omnicultural patriarchal conspiracy to suppress female achievement. It's all retarded and anyone with sense keeps away from it.

for... what

They wouldn't be able to tell you your society MUST accept an unsustainable number of immigrants or else it's the holocaust 2.0 all over again. It would be a serious blow to the current globalist view that people are interchangeable fungible worker asset to be moved around at their whim. It would help rekindle further nationalistic and ethnic cohesion.

The modern holocaust deniers don't really much care how many jews or if any died in the holocaust, they have current day grievances with the internationalist machine and work their way backwards to who is pushing the ideas (critical race theory, abolition of nation states, gender studies, feminism) and become "radicalized" vs the people who they see time and again at the center of the clusterfuck.

I'd rebut your point in that pro-Palestine leftists who hate Israel's guts and even low-key subscribe to Arab conceptions of Holocaust denial are still all-in on globohomo immigration. Proving the Holocaust didn't happen won't stop the flow of Muslim migrants even if you kick out the Jews. There is no tactical or strategic benefit to be gained from tilting at this windmill.

They'll stop being my Realpolitik adversaries when they stop doing everything in their power to oppose a movement based on existential needs.

crushedoranges wasn't telling you to stop considering them you realpolitik adversaries. He was telling you that, in fact, wasting energy on Holocaust denial is not good realpolitik.

The Jewish political machine organizes itself through an oppressor/oppressed narrative, which makes Holocaust denial somewhat analogous to disputing the King's bloodline.

Because we live in a progressive-dominated society where these narrative frameworks carry legitimizing weight, if you view yourself in opposition to this machine then opposing these becomes the pragmatic approach regardless of their veracity.

Because we live in a progressive-dominated society where these narrative frameworks carry legitimizing weight, if you view yourself in opposition to this machine then opposing these becomes the pragmatic approach regardless of their veracity.

Yes, that's great, let's do that.

Just, please, let's do it without relitigating over and over in how far the exact mechanisms of mass killings in WW2 worked or didn't work. Can we instead just declare the whole topic a nullity and move on?

But Jews do have mountains of legitimate oppression to derive intersectional street-cred from, with or without the Holocaust. Without even going into pre-WWII antisemitism, the best that Revisionists can do to exculpate Nazi Germany is claim that the so-called death camps were actually just more labor camps. That is, the worst that they can do to Jews' stock of victim-points is to say that Hitler enslaved them rather than exterminated them. Newsflash, "past enslavement" seems to be plenty enough victimhood to get by in the progressive stack, judging by blacks.

Intersectional street cred is not granted based on legitimate claims, but effective opposition to white heritage Americans - a largely philosemetic group without whose support the Jewish political machine would not be able to operate.

More comments

Even if you give Holocaust deniers their premise out of the gate, it doesn't change anything in the real world. The 1948 Arab-Israeli war was real. The 1967 Six-Day War was real. The Yom Kippur War was real. The 2nd Intifada was real. 10/7 was real. In short, the Israel national mythology no longer requires the Holocaust to be true in part or in whole. The fact that it is true is historical trivia now, only of interest to historians, autists, and racists of a certain kind.

Yes, I think those people think that if everyone awakens to it being a lie, they'll be outraged to do what the denialists wanted all along, to kick out the Jews and to enact a Christian government and to either stop helping or actively destroy Israel. That's not what happens with other historical injustices. Did the youths, upon learning of the Trail of Tears, immediately start a wildly successful campaign to decolonize California? No, of course not, though it does seem like the anti-colonialists have been picking up some more steam lately on... something.

That makes me wonder: what is the future of Holocaust denial? And, what is the future of antisemitism in general? Does it die off in the new generation in America? I was surprised to find out recently that young people in China are actually okay with LGBTQ+ representation, and it's only the older generation that doesn't like gay people. I predict the same thing will happen with holocaust denial. I'd guess, if it's true that it only became mainstream in the 70s or the 80s or so, then it was specific to people who lived at that time, generally.

I am not convinced that Holocaust deniers want a Christian government or state. If nothing else, when I've talked to the Motte's own local Holocaust deniers, they tend to respond badly to professions of Christian faith - Christianity is perceived as just another head of the Jewish hydra, and believers are taken in by the racial mythology of a foreign group.

As a group of people, no, they don't want that. I'm talking about a very specific kind of Holocaust denier, the one that I have to deal with myself, and my example is the podcast I linked in the OP. That's two dudes called Corey J. Mahler and Treblewoe. Corey J. Mahler keeps getting banned off of Twitter, so my favorite posts about Adolf Hitler being the "last Christian king" are difficult to find. For how fringe they are, they still really like the LCMS, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, and keep getting into fights with its leaders or something because they don't want it to become corrupted.

Before I get into this: most Holocaust denial is kind of dumb.

From an alternative perspective: it is very dumb that people believe, as strongly as they believe any other mundane fact of reality, that ~3 million Jews were exterminated inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms, and that they were tricked into entering those death factories on the pretext of taking a shower. That is a very dumb belief; a very high confidence in an event that would constitute an outlier among historical outliers and lacks every shred of contemporary documentary and physical evidence that ought to exist if it were true. But people believe in a lot of very dumb things on the most thin basis of evidence. The Holocaust isn't even unique in this regard, it's just the Myth of the 20th century that you are required to Believe although it's a highly remarkable claim made on a very thin body of evidence.

But I have to make this post because despite all sorts of bad argumentative tactics on that side, if they commit to a specific kind of Holocaust denial, I can't really refute it.

That's because this line of arugmentation is True and the Belief in millions of Jews being tricked into walking inside gas chambers is nothing more than a religious mythos of the same vein of the Hebraic myths that cohered the Jewish people in the first place. It's the modern day Exodus myth.

  • -10

From an alternative perspective: it is very dumb that people believe, as strongly as they believe any other mundane fact of reality, that ~3 million Jews were exterminated inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms, and that they were tricked into entering those death factories on the pretext of taking a shower. That is a very dumb belief;

Is it really dumb to believe that people believe in dumb ideas? Don't you see people all around you that do so? Why would the Jews of the past be immune to wishful thinking and the like?

Note that information spread much more difficult in the past, and there especially was much less hard evidence (photo, video, etc) in the first place, and the hard evidence there was could not just be put on the internet in one location, where others could then see on the other side of the world. It's not like today where the media (and often by extension governments) are increasingly upset that their ability to control public perception is much less than in the past. For it to be very dumb to think that shower rooms that look like shower rooms, are not actually shower rooms, one would need more than just a general idea that people were killed, and even more than an idea that gas was used, but to have an understanding of the procedure. Otherwise they could very easily see this as just a precursor to being placed in a concentration camp (where disease risk is very real, of course), not as the actual killing procedure.

Imagine that those gas chambers actually did exist as claimed. Then how do you reckon that people that were being transported in from very far away, would come to know how the procedure was done?

lacks every shred of contemporary documentary and physical evidence that ought to exist if it were true.

So where did all the Jews go from countries that kept very accurate record about their population? And are all of the witnesses who gave testimony about the Holocaust part of a big conspiracy? What is your position even? That there was mass murder, but not with gas? Or do you deny mass killings in general?

a very high confidence in an event that would constitute an outlier among historical outliers

But the Jews are historic outliers! Throughout the ages they have faced persecution like no other race. And historically their culture was not one of fighting back or establishing their own country, but accepting oppression, fleeing, etc. The Nazis took advantage of this by establishing Judenräte and Jewish leaders were all too eager to participate in this, based on the idea that working with the Nazis would cause them to be nicer.

Where most people would figure out after a persecution or two that they might need their own country under their own rule, the Jews clearly didn't think this way for a very long time.

That said, this culture was already in the process of changing at the time, which is why what would later become Israel was already in the making when WW2 started. However, the Jews that moved to Mandatory Palestine would actually remove Jews with a willingness to fight back from the Diaspora, so the remaining Jews would be less prone to fight back, if anything.

very deep breath

…Look.

it is very dumb that people believe, as strongly as they believe any other mundane fact of reality, that ~3 million Jews were exterminated inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms, and that they were tricked into entering those death factories on the pretext of taking a shower

This is a caricature which you are taking over-literally to make the conventional narrative appear gratuitously absurd. I'm not saying nobody believes this dumb caricature, because lots of people's beliefs about history amount to dumb caricatures, just because they're more memorable - eg "Columbus was trying to prove the Earth was round". But weakmen aside, the serious historical claim is not that 3 million totally oblivious Jewish prisoners walked into what they guilelessly mistook for shower cubicles, like some sort of R-rated Road Runner cartoon. Why would the guards care whether the prisoners knew they were about to be murdered? The poor bastards weren't getting out, whatever they did or didn't figure out. It's an utter irrelevance. The deception, where it was employed, was a wafer-thin facade of plausible deniability, meant for the eyes of the outside world if it should ever come to that. And the sad thing is, it is in fact working as intended on those holocaust deniers who become obsessed with that particular data-point. We can only be thankful the rest of the world wasn't as easily fooled.

Take away that arbitrary sticking point, and the absurdity heuristic reverses. "So there was this regime of ruthless warmongers who slaughtered half of Europe on the battlefield in a quest for racial supremacy. Proponents of the regime's ideology hated the Jewish race most of all. Long before the party's founder had a shot at actually doing it, he wrote at length in his manifesto about how Jews needed to be exterminated. Once they'd taken over the country, these warmongering racists who thought Jews were a blight upon mankind organized a large-scale project to imprison all the Jews they could get their hands on and ship them abroad. And then they… made no attempts to kill them at all, actually???" It's a completely counterintuitive claim. The moment one quits harping on about the specifics of how the mass murder was achieved, it becomes blindingly obvious that of course mass murder would have occurred - that you would need huge amounts of evidence to prove anything else.

I think the most vaguely-plausible holocaust-denialism-shaped argument you could mount would be for a position along the lines of "although the Nazis absolutely intended to exterminate the Jews, they figured they didn't need the poison gas; they just packed the Jews in hellish work camps with no designated execution mechanisms, anticipating that they'd simply die in droves from starvation, squalor and exhaustion; and in point of fact, it worked out that way, hence the massive Jewish death toll we observe". But even if you argued that case convincingly, what would it prove? What would follow? "Your honor, my client did not poison that woman. That is a vile lie. I have documents here to prove that my client actually tied her up in his basement and left her there to starve, instead." This wouldn't change anything about the moral standing of Nazi Germany, it wouldn't change anything about how deserved the sympathy Jews get in Current Year based on the holocaust may or may not be relative to what their forefathers suffered in WWII - at most it would impinge on the commitment to the truth of the people who ran the trials, but again, who cares, "these actually-guilty murderers were convicted based in part on fraudulent claims regarding the methods employed" is not the great moral injustice of the 20th century.

And the same applies to quibbling about the numbers. I actually think it's plausible that the usually-bandied numbers have been inflated. But I said it once and I'll say it thrice: why the fuck would you care? "Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews" is not a claim that anyone can dispute with a straight face. Prove to me categorically that the Holocaust only killed, say, two hundred thousand Jews, and all you've told me is that the Nazis were incompetent as well as monstrous. And also it's still the mass slaughter of two hundred thousand human souls. None of this flips the narrative.

very deep breath

Adopting an exasperated, superior attitude when trying to address pointed and persistent historical inconsistencies isn't doing orthodox historiography any favors.

  • But I said it once and I'll say it thrice: why the fuck would you care? "Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews" is not a claim that anyone can dispute with a straight face

Some people care about the truth for its own sake. Insisting that people accept untruths unquestionably offends them even when these untruths are directionally correct. Civilization depends on these people.

Suppose one of these people believes you when you say Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews. He investigates the matter just as he would, say, 19th century British rolling stock or Pokemon exegesis. He discovers something that appears inconsistent. He asks about it. And then, unlike in his entire previous experience, he finds his questions generate neither indifference nor answers, but hostility and outright censorship. He comes to understand this subject is a third rail.

What you don't appreciate is that this person doesn't then back down and go back to obsessing over trains. He seeks understand why this subject is a third rail. He finds Irving. He finds internet witch dens. And he comes to understand, rightly or wrongly, that the entire narrative is bullshit.

Is that the outcome you want? Shutting down investigations into "well, how many actually died in the gas chambers?" out of a paranoid sense of a need to exert narrative control makes the whole narrative unravel.

That's where we are now. A lot of people doubt not only the six million figure and the gas chambers but the whole fucking story, and it's the fault of people who used every dirty wordcel trick in the book to prevent truth seekers doing their thing.

And you know what? That's a damn shame in the case the holocaust narrative is mostly correct, because it plays directly into the hands of its perpetrators. Good job.

Adopting an exasperated, superior attitude when trying to address pointed and persistent historical inconsistencies

I was adopting an exasperated attitude while dealing with SecureSignals specifically, whom I do not believe to be a dispassionate truth-seeker in this matter. I went back again and again to the "but if that's the most you can argue, why do you care so much?" angle not because it is or should be an all-purpose rejoinder to all questions about the Holocaust, but because SecureSignals in particular keeps acting as though the supposed holes in the conventional narrative, were they to be openly recognized by the public, would change… something. He's never terribly specific about what that "something" might be, but he clearly believes that his views on the Holocaust being widely circulated and vindicated should have a real impact on what people think about other topics of more immediate relevance. This is inconsistent with the motte of a narrow interest in facts and figures (the plausible "Hitler was indeed a genocidal monster, but as it turns out, he was a much less effective monster than usually portrayed"), and much more consistent with a bailey along the lines of "the Nazis were actually good, and never even dreamed of committing genocide, and anyway the Jews would have deserved it if they had" (which is a mixture of absurd and evil).

I don't make a habit of engaging in historiographical debates about the specifics of the Holocaust with apolitical truth-seekers who care about the facts for their own sake. I am, after all, not a historian. But if I did, I would talk to such people in a completely different tone. Moreover, I do not personally approve of censoring their earnest questions. That being said, I do have a lot more sympathy for the censorship advocates than you do, because, again, Nazi apologists trying to use Holocaust-related historical revisionism as a motte from which to settle the bailey of full-throated Nazi apologia are not an imaginary strawman. I just bandied thousands of words with one of them. So I don't think it's simply "paranoid". There are in fact bad actors here. Whether suppressing them is worth losing the trust of the genuine truth-seekers, that's a very different question. But the disingenuous bad actors exist; I was talking to one just now. You should not conflate my recognition of who and what he is to endorsement for indiscriminate censorship.

I believe I've had this argument with him before - it always comes down to quibbling minutiae, as if any individual crack in a story will cause a dam to burst forth.

I find it is helpful here to stay focused on the big picture. The specific details are trivia. "The Holocaust happened", in I think the minds of most normal people, means "the Nazis, in WWII, tried to kill all the Jews". There are a few details that are common knowledge past that, but beyond the six million figure or the idea that it involved death camps, I don't think most people know about or particularly care about the details or the process. The Nazis tried to kill all the Jews and they killed at least a couple of million. If that statement is true, then "the Holocaust happened" is essentially true.

Why would they care whether the prisoners knew they were about to be murdered? They weren't going out, whatever they did or didn't out. It's an utter irrelevance.

It is certainly not an irrelevance. Panicking crowds are very difficult to control, the notion that thousands of people were marched in orderly fashion inside narrow entrances into bedroom-sized "gas chambers" heavily relies on the mode of deception. This follows from that fact that all the alleged "gas chambers" were claimed to have been disguised as shower rooms, and that crowds of thousands of people were routinely marched inside without resistance on the pretext of taking a shower. This is the standard mainstream historical claim. The stories of panicking or resistance are suspiciously sparse.

The reason they would care is because normally people in a crowd of thousands being led to certain death would create panic, which would create enormous problems for the operation and the means attested to. This is especially problematic given the very small camps and number of personnel attested to: thousands of prisoners being managed by a very small security force- in the Holocaust mythos it is Jewish prisoners themselves who helped trick fellow Jews to their deaths.

So there was this regime of ruthless warmongers who slaughtered half of Europe

The same could be said of the Allies... it was Great Britain and France who declared war on Germany and demanded unconditional surrender.

It's a completely counterintuitive claim. The moment one quits harping on about the specifics of how the mass murder was achieved, it becomes blindingly obvious that of course mass murder would have occurred - that you would need huge amounts of evidence to prove anything else.

The actual historical events are not counterintuitive at all: Jews were concentrated into camps due to the belief that Jews would be detrimental to the German war effort for various reasons: espionage, partisan activity, etc. The Japanese were interned in America for the same reasons, and ethnic Germans were concentrated by Churchill also. In these camps Jews were made to perform labor to assist the German war effort. High fatalities in those camps followed mostly in the final months of the war when German infrastructure collapsed due to being bombed from all sides. This is a far more intuitive story than the mythos of millions of people marched inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms.

"Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews" is not a claim that anyone can dispute with a straight face.

This is a claim that you could actually prove if any sort of written orders to this effect were ever given. But they were not. Even mainstream historians admit this. You can say "Hitler wanted this" but there's simply no evidence that this was ordered by Hitler. Hitler wanted the Jews out of Europe. This is true, and there are orders to this effect. There are no "kill all the Jews" orders that have ever been found. So you run into the problem where you claim "OBVIOUSLY Hitler wanted this", even though written orders for that have never been found, whereas there is ample documentation for planning and orders for actual German policy with respect to the Jews, and those orders align with the Revisionist interpretation and not the claim that millions were exterminated inside gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms.

Prove to me categorically that the Holocaust only killed, say, two hundred thousand Jews, and all you've told me is that the Nazis were incompetent as well as monstrous.

How many Jews do you believe were exterminated inside gas chambers than had been disguised as shower rooms?

Panicking crowds are very difficult to control, the notion that thousands of people were marched in orderly fashion inside narrow entrances into bedroom-sized "gas chambers" heavily relies on the mode of deception.

Color me unconvinced. I see your appeals to panic and I raise you despair. Capture hundreds of people off the street and immediately try to feed them into a gas chamber - yeah, you'll get riots. But abused, half-starved prisoners of an omnipotent-seeming war machine, shipped hundreds of miles from home to a forbidding camp surrounded by barbed fencing, with armed men watching you in all directions? By the time the guards are leading you to what you're pretty sure is the slaughter… call it irrational, call it a coordination problem, or call it weakness, but I am not at all surprised if few people ever bothered to try and make a run for it. To do so would have been heroism, not the expected human response. I would expect as much even if the gas chambers had had big neon signage saying 'DEATH CHAMBERS, ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE'. We seem to have very different intuitions here.

This is a claim that you could actually prove if any sort of written orders to this effect were ever given. But they were not.

Please reread the quoted claim you were replying to. It was not "Hitler, once in power, gave orders for all Jews to be killed". It was, in fact, "Hitler, even before he took over the country, wanted to kill all the Jews". This is true. It just is. He says so in Mein Kampf. He said so in speeches. He got in power in large part by promising to make the Jews pay (and the commies, and the Jewish commies). Hitler and his followers hated the Jews. They did not simply regard them as a practical hindrance to German prosperity, which could be dealt with as practicality allowed: they hated them, viscerally, and wanted them dead if possible, the more painful the better.

What I am doing here is establishing motive. Opportunity, I hope, speaks for itself.

My overriding question to you and anyone else who argues that the Holocaust didn't happen is: why not? Why wouldn't a regime who had spent decades painting Jews as a plague upon mankind, and found itself in the process of gathering them all up in faraway camps, take a stab at slaughtering them? It isn't as if pogroms were a new concept. You say Hitler merely "wanted the Jews out of Europe", but what do you think his plan was, exactly? Having shipped all those hundreds of thousands of Jews to eastern work camps, do you believe that his earnest intention was to win the war, then graciously release all those people and pay for their resettlement to the Middle-East? Why? What do you believe would have motivated Hitler to spend a single red dime on peacefully resettling them when he had all the makings of an extremely successful genocide at his disposal? It just doesn't make any damn sense unless you're trying to argue that the Nazis had some moral objection - that they valued Jewish lives and would have balked at attempting genocide. I don't know how to characterize that kind of claim, other than "hilarious".

Or was I wrong about opportunity speaking for itself? Are you so concerned about the crowd-control practicalities that you think organizing a successful Holocaust would have been too hard? But then we return to the "so what" angle. If you grant that Hitler would have organized the Holocaust if he'd had the means, and simply argue that he didn't because golly, the logistics were too goshdarn persnickety to crack… well, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. "The Nazis were evil, but luckily, as it turns out, they were also morons" wouldn't be a bold world-changing revelation.

How many Jews do you believe were exterminated inside gas chambers than had been disguised as shower rooms?

And here we go again. Please stop talking about the shower rooms. You believe the shower rooms are the crux of this whole matter. I don't. We will not get anywhere with this if you insist on reverse-motte-and-baileying me like this.

What do I believe? I believe that any Jews who fell into Nazi hands were systematically sent to camps from which they were never seriously expected to come out alive. I believe that this policy was not merely a wartime precaution against agitators, but a means of erasing Europe's Jewish population in the long term, as Hitler had long said he wanted. I believe that six million Jews died as a direct result of this policy, and that as far as the Nazis were concerned, this amounted to the policy working as intended. This is what any sane person would describe as "the Holocaust". Anything else, the method of the killings, the timeline of the killings - is commentary.

I believe, fractionally more weakly, that the official consensus on those details is directionally true if perhaps over-dramatized. But I could be completely wrong about that last bit - there could have been no fake shower rooms whatsoever - and it would not impinge on the bottom line that "the Holocaust", by any meaningful definition, happened, and happened on purpose.

To do so would have been heroism, not the expected human response.

No, defiance. Which makes it even less likely, because defiance requires being an asshat just out of spite, usually at the expense of yourself. And anyone who was so inclined had plenty of chances to do so earlier, and would have not been on the train.

Heroism requires that there is at least a slight chance of success, which there isn't really, with a single person acting alone.

To do so would have been heroism, not the expected human response. I would expect as much even if the gas chambers had had big neon signage saying 'DEATH CHAMBERS, ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE'.

Your confidence just seems completely divorced from all human experience. We have innumerable examples of crowds panicking, often for no reason at all. The pure physical force exerted by hundreds of people in fear and the difficulty of controlling them is very well known. But you are confident that the Germans designed a murder operation that fundamentally required the cooperation of crowds of thousands of people walking inside their own execution chambers with hardly any security, and with them all knowing they were going to get gassed to boot. It's just absurd. It's not "weakness" it's just a tall tale about something that never happened.

call it a coordination problem

Getting that many people into these narrow entrances to stand with extremely high density in these small rooms requires military-discipline level of coordination by the victims. That's the impetus for the whole "they were tricked into taking a shower" story in the first place, to provide an explanation for why ~3 million people coordinated so neatly in walking inside the gas chambers without resistance. But in your mind, they mostly knew they were going to die but just cooperated anyway.

Having shipped all those hundreds of thousands of Jews to eastern work camps, do you believe that his earnest intention was to win the war, then graciously release all those people and pay for their resettlement to the Middle-East? Why?

You are asking why I believe this? Of course I believe this because there is an enormous body of evidence to believe that these were real policies, unlike the claim that the German plan was to murder all the Jews inside shower rooms. That is to say, I believe those things because there is a lot of evidence for them, and I don't believe the gas chamber story because it is an a priori outlandish claim that lacks evidence. The motive you mention is also explained by these policies, and if your claim is that the Germans departed from these long-standing policies and decided to kill them all inside shower rooms then that is a claim that requires more than appealing to motive.

And here we go again. Please stop talking about the shower rooms.

The reason the gas chamber story is so important is because, if you say, "the Germans killed 6 million Jews" the natural follow-up from any thoughtful person is: when? where? how? why? The fact is, there is no "alternative hypothesis" other than the story of millions of Jews being gassed inside shower rooms. So if it turns out that claim is false (which it is) then mainstream historians are categorically unable to answer those other questions with respect to the Holy 6 million. The entire narrative rests heavily and solely on the truth of the claim that millions of Jews were gassed inside shower rooms. You can't hand-wave it away without being faced with those other questions that historians have no answer for whatsoever.

Getting that many people into these narrow entrances to stand with extremely high density in these small rooms requires military-discipline level of coordination by the victims.

Ehhh, no. They could just make them walk in and then once the natural density has been reached, push more people in, and those people will push the people who are already inside, etc. This is also what they do for Japanese trains: https://youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA

What part of this requires military discipline? Do you imagine that the Jews marched in, in formation, and they took specific designated spots? What discipline is required to move when you get pushed?

For comparison, you can look at various tragedies at festivals, stadiums and such, where crowds got packed tight by people pushing from behind, which can easily cause extreme density at the far end. I'm not sure where you get the claim from that there was some extremely high density in the gas chambers anyway.

So if it turns out that claim is false (which it is) then mainstream historians are categorically unable to answer those other questions with respect to the Holy 6 million.

It seems to me that this is actually your problem if you reject the gas chambers, since then you need to account for where all those people went that provably disappeared. Where is your explanation?

Just like it actually seems to be you for whom the 6 million is Holy and it somehow matters if the actual number is 3 million, and those people where mostly executed by firing squads or gassed in trucks and box cars (but not gas chambers that looked like showers).

The evidence of the Holocaust is overwhelming, but you seem to believe that you merely need to prove one part wrong and then suddenly all that evidence will disappear.

I'm not sure where you get the claim from that there was some extremely high density in the gas chambers anyway.

It is claimed that up to/at least 2,000 people were gassed at a time in gas chambers that were by all accounts and according to construction documents (although they were documented to be Morgues) 7m x 30m. That means it is claimed there were stacked 9.5 victims per square meter. Here's an image to scale showing what that would look like. So you are saying the Jews stacked themselves like that even though they knew they were going to be murdered? You realize a person at the door pushing people inside would do nothing in the face of panic towards the door from a crowd like that.

You can watch this Revisionist film if you want to see a very well-sourced breakdown of the extermination process as claimed by mainstream historians. But yes the mainstream claims relies on the notion that Jews cooperated in arranging themselves with that much, or greater, density inside these structures. Through a single small entrance. Talk another look at that picture and tell me that this is a rational design for an extermination operation... it's just made up.

What part of this requires military discipline?

The people in the train want to reach their destination in a timely manner, they all have a strong incentive to accept being herded in that manner and if they didn't need to be there they would just go somewhere else. You are saying that the Jews would have exhibited the same level of cooperation as those Japanese train passengers but, instead of an attempt to take a train to get to work or whatever, to cram themselves inside their own execution chambers. I am saying they would not have cooperated like that. What exactly could the guy at the entrance do if the crowd inside the train panicked and all tried to leave the train at the same time?

For comparison, you can look at various tragedies at festivals, stadiums and such, where crowds got packed tight by people pushing from behind, which can easily cause extreme density at the far end.

Yes, crowd control is the most dangerous part of those events and when panic is caused for any reason it creates an incredibly dangerous situation for everyone involved. But you are saying the Jews would not have panicked, even though they knew they were being killed, and not only that but the Germans knew the Jews wouldn't panic so they didn't foresee an issue with a very light security detail simply telling thousands of Jews to arrange themselves inside the gas chambers.

The evidence of the Holocaust is overwhelming,

No, it is not overwhelming. The lack of contemporary documentary evidence for the operation is one of the biggest problems, with probably the biggest problem of all being the lack of physical evidence.

It is claimed that up to/at least 2,000 people were gassed at a time in gas chambers that were by all accounts and according to construction documents (although they were documented to be Morgues) 7m x 30m. That means it is claimed there were stacked 9.5 victims per square meter. Here's an image to scale showing what that would look like.

First of all, I have no idea whether your 'it is claimed' actually reflects strongly held beliefs by historians. And my strongly held belief is that lots of historians take bad estimates by eye witnesses as gospel, or simply copy claims by other historians, no matter how weakly supported that claim is, or they just make stuff up that sounds good to them. There is a reason why a lot of sensible people try to validate historical records through practical methods.

Anyway, because of this, the more specific historical claims get, the more likely that they are wrong. And historical records get more believable the more independent evidence there is, and the more we stick to more generic claims. For example, I am a lot more confident that the Battle of Actium happened, than that the claimed number of ships and men are correct.

So my belief that the Holocaust happened and involved intentional mass murder and gas chambers is not based on a specific figure being correct that is allegedly being claimed, but because there is a lot of evidence all pointing in the same direction, supporting a much more generic claim, that is thus not dependent on a single data point being true. Your narrative that these people died due to food shortages and the like, does not merely require you to reason away the gas chambers, but also gas vans, the development of an odorless Zyklon-variant, the mass executions behind the Eastern Front, various experiments in clinics/camps early on, etc. Essentially, there is a very clear progression in the methods used, and a lot of independent evidence, which adds a lot of credibility to the claim that there was a plan to annihilate the Jews.

In contrast, your narrative of deaths due to chaos near the war's end, completely fails to explain such things as why such a small fraction of deported Jews survived, versus prisoners of war. Because if the Jews were not targeted but just victims of chaos, then logically, that chaos should impact all prisoners somewhat equally. And your narrative requires you to explain why there weren't a ton of bodies lying about. Because how does it make sense for there being mass starvation late in the war due to chaos, but for the Nazis to then still be able to neatly dispose of almost all of the bodies? And with immense speed, since it the deaths would occur over a much smaller period than in the Holocaust narrative.

Here's an image to scale showing what that would look like.

According to your own image, 2000 people is actually quite possible if you have 30% children in the mix. You provide no reason why 30% children is the upper limit. In fact, we have records for a transport of 1,196 children and 53 adults. That is less than 2000 people, but I have no clue whether the figure of 2000 is supposed to actually have been reached, or whether it is a calculation.

You realize a person at the door pushing people inside would do nothing in the face of panic towards the door from a crowd like that.

Again, according to this reasoning it would be impossible for people to be pressed to death at a festival/stadium, because people would panic and press back again the people applying pressure. Yet we know for a fact that people get pressed to death in such circumstances, and that survivors report panic, but are unable to push back. So your narrative goes against established facts on how people behave.

You are saying that the Jews would have exhibited the same level of cooperation as those Japanese train passengers

I indeed think that it is quite plausible that malnourished, dehydrated people who had just suffered from horrible conditions during a long transport, and who know that they get beaten if they do not comply, act in a docile manner.

I am saying they would not have cooperated like that.

How could you know? Do you have experience being a person with 1940's Jewish culture, who has experienced a long train ride in a packed box car, and has been beaten by Nazis or has seen his fellows get beaten by the Nazis? Or are you just projecting your modern beliefs on the past?

It's my opinion that projecting modern beliefs on the past, rather than actually understanding how people of the time thought, is a huge cause for false beliefs of history.

But you are saying the Jews would not have panicked, even though they knew they were being killed

I never claimed that there was no panic, or that the Jews knew that they would be killed before the Zyklon-B was administered. At that point the doors would be closed.

What I am claiming is that your narrative that panic must have happened at the moment and to such an extent that it would have prevented the people from being packed tight is being disproved by the fact that people do end up packed tight and unable to resist this, at festival/stadium tragedies where people get pressed to death.

not only that but the Germans knew the Jews wouldn't panic so they didn't foresee an issue with a very light security detail simply telling thousands of Jews to arrange themselves inside the gas chambers.

You completely ignore that the Nazis scaled up their operations gradually. So your narrative that they gambled that thousands of people would revolt, does not match the historic record, where they experimented and learned what worked, and thus could simply scale down their security to a level that was sufficient, based on experience.

And it is a fact that occasionally, the Nazis did not actually know what security was sufficient, like at Sobibor, where there was a semi-successful revolt (but again, this was planned).

The lack of contemporary documentary evidence for the operation is one of the biggest problems, with probably the biggest problem of all being the lack of physical evidence.

Yes, it is truly damning for the Holocaust narrative that there is no video where the Nazis demonstrate exactly how the gas chambers work. It's not like they had a policy of keeping it a secret, with them using code words, destroying the evidence, etc. And all the witnesses who gave testimony shortly after the war were obviously all coerced into making that testimony, even though there is a total lack of evidence for that coercion happening. It's utterly believable for there not to be a whole bunch of Nazis who would complain about that coercion if it had happened.

Your confidence just seems completely divorced from all human experience. We have innumerable examples of crowds panicking, often for no reason at all.

there are also numerous examples of crowds-to-be-massacred not making any successfully resistance or 'mass panics' hindering the massacre. Barbed wire, physical violence, and machine guns are usually quite sufficient at crowd control. You and others in the crowd may panic, but if you are in enclosed space designed to prevent panicked prisoners escaping, 'panic' does not lead to successfully running away or overpowering the armed guards.

Suppose we discount all evidence from German operations. Pick aftermath of any 20th century civil war (Russia, Spain, Korea), some dozens of armed men can easily march a crowd of prisoners from a camp/prison to a place where they know they will be shot, have them dig a ditch, and shoot them. Rinse and repeat, and thousands have been killed during a single day. Soviets had zero trouble with prisoners panicking at Katyn. Many fled from Pol Pot's Cambodia to avoid death, but no mass panics of prisoners hindered the mass murder.

It is not beyond belief that same principles of crowd(-to-be-killed) control could have been applied to herd prisoners from train cars to a gas chamber.

in your mind, they mostly knew they were going to die but just cooperated anyway.

I assume you also think that every account of a prisoner being forced to dig their own grave is implausible? For instance, surely this old man was just blatantly lying about the atrocity he committed because it would make the victims look... better? Worse? I have no idea.

In an interview with the BBC, Réveil recalled the reaction of the German prisoners when they were told they were to be shot.

"They knew what was coming…. They got out their wallets and looked at (photographs of) their families. There was no crying out. They were soldiers," he said.

"They were shot in the chest from a distance of four or five metres."

The prisoners - 46 German soldiers and one French woman collaborator - had been ordered to dig their own graves in the form of a long trench.

Of course if someone doesn't cooperate digging, you shoot him and it's a little inconvenient. A full-blown riot of a thousand people is a massive security threat to what is supposed to be a top-secret operation. The operation's reliance on the cooperation of the victims to function at all is so conspicuous. That's why the shower room cover story is so important. Such a sensitive task would not have, by design, fundamentally relied on the cooperation of the victims. That's where the shower room story comes into play, it's not just a small detail.

Of course if someone doesn't cooperate digging, you shoot him and it's a little inconvenient.

I don't understand your logic here. You seem to claim that when people are forced to dig their own grave, then any resistance is going to be individual and can be dealt with easily due to that. But when people are merely asked to walk into a room, then that would somehow set off a coordinated riot. Why? How?

Note that this doesn't make much sense anyway, since the separation of the Jews into workers and those who got sent to the gas chambers, would be a much more logical place to riot, when you have not just strength of numbers, but the most healthy & strong Jews would still be present. Women, children, the elderly and the ill would be over-represented in the group being sent to the gas chamber.

A full-blown riot of a thousand people is a massive security threat to what is supposed to be a top-secret operation.

Which is why Sobibor was razed to the ground after the revolt. That was actually a carefully planned operation though, not a riot. And the workers of Sobibor were much more suitable for a revolt, being mostly healthy adults.

You have failed to explain why the Nazis would be particularly afraid of a riot by starved Jews who had been forced to stand for an average of 4 days, where many of those Jews would be women, children and the elderly, and where those Jews would have no particular reason to revolt then as they would not know the procedure at the camp (in fact, their previous 'arrive at a concentration camp' experience would have been at a non-extermination camp, so if anything they would assume that this is another camp where they would stay for a while).

That's why the shower room cover story is so important. Such a sensitive task would not have, by design, fundamentally relied on the cooperation of the victims.

Cooperation of the Jews with the Nazis has been documented every step of the way, so why would it be notable, or a weak spot in the narrative for that to also have happened at the extermination camps? The notable situations are when there was a revolt (Warsaw & Sobibor). And those were planned, not spontaneous.

Your narrative greatly suffers from double standards anyway. The Nazis also gassed some Jews in box cars. And Jews were packed tightly in box cars for transport. Yet you don't question the official story that has Jews being packed tight in the box cars for transport or for gassing, but suddenly when the Jews were packed tight in a gas chamber that looks like a shower, this required military discipline. Yet apparently no military discipline was required to be packed tight in box cars? And it was not logical for the Jews to revolt when being packed tight in the box cars, but somehow when being led to the showers, it is so unbelievable that they would not resist, that this supposedly undermines the entire narrative.

More comments

Having shipped all those hundreds of thousands of Jews to eastern work camps, do you believe that his earnest intention was to win the war, then graciously release all those people and pay for their resettlement to the Middle-East? Why?

You are asking why I believe this?

No. I am asking you why you believe the Nazis would have bothered. Kindness? Saving face? The impracticality of genocide? What? There is nothing in Nazi ideology which remotely motivates going out of their way to help the Jews where killing them would have been cheaper, more straightforward, more popular with their core supporters, and more in line with Hitler's decade-spanning rhetoric. Any lip service paid to re-settlement plans strikes me as the paperwork equivalent of dad telling little Billy that he's driving Fido to a nice farm in the country.

The reason the gas chamber story is so important is because, if you say, "the Germans killed 6 million Jews" the natural follow-up from any thoughtful person is: when? where? how? why? The fact is, there is no "alternative hypothesis" other than the story of millions of Jews being gassed inside shower rooms.

Well, surely there has to be. Those millions of Jews did, in fact, die without ever seeing the gleaming shores of Madagascar. Your explanation for this seems to be that they were left to starve (in you view, purely by accident as supply chains deteriorated), which is what I analogized to a murderer turning out to have left his victim to starve to death in his basement, instead of poisoning her. That seems perfectly sensible to me; "lock them all someplace under armed guard, in cold and squalid conditions, don't give them enough food, and while you're at it, maybe extract some slave labor out of them for as long as they still have a bit of life on them, that way you'll recoup costs and wear them out faster" is a perfectly cromulent way to kill six million people. Slower than gas chambers, possibly more expensive as a result, but it would get the job done, given time.

I would much sooner believe that was the plan, than believe that Nazi Germany was ever prepared to allot significant resources to Jewish resettlement in the event of German victory. Granting no gas chambers, I think the most likely scenario is that resettlement remains the official policy for international PR purposes, but its implementation is endlessly deferred until an overwhelming majority of Jewish prisoners are found to have already died in custody, tsk-tsk, what a shame, our bad. And by then, everyone with a brain knows what really happened, but what are you going to do now, even if you disapprove?

No. I am asking you why you believe the Nazis would have bothered.

Shouldn't you be asking that question? If their plan was to kill them all, why did they bother bringing them to all of these camps, feed them, give them shelter, etc.? Why didn't they just kill them? Jewish labor was crucial for the German war effort. If they were so intent on killing all the Jews, why didn't they pursue that before the war? Why did they enter diplomatic arrangements with Zionists and why did they go through the trouble of planning to transfer the Jews in Madagascar? It's up to you to explain why they planned to do that initially, but then changed their minds and decided to gas them all. But I'm struggling to understand why you're asking "why do you believe the Nazis would have bothered" when by all accounts that was the policy they were pursuing before the war and before 1942. I'm only saying they didn't radically shift their policy position in favor of some secret gas chamber conspiracy. If you are saying they changed their minds and drastically changed their policy you should be able to provide some evidence for that.

I would much sooner believe that was the plan, than believe that Nazi Germany was ever prepared to allot significant resources to Jewish resettlement in the event of German victory.

So you think the Havaara Agreement and Madagascar Plan were just fake or something? Or they were just cover stories? Why don't you believe they would have pursued a policy they were obviously pursing before and during the early part of the war?

Those millions of Jews did, in fact, die... I would much sooner believe that was the plan

The death toll in the concentration camps is not in the millions, I can't remember off the top of my head but it's overall <100k IIRC. That's why the gas chamber story is so important. You think it was Germany's plan to lose the war and have their infrastructure get completely destroyed from both fronts? That was their plan to kill all the Jews? The collapse of Germany was unplanned, and yes that created catastrophic conditions in the camps. It says more about your biases that you are more willing to believe the Germans planned the collapse of their infrastructure in order to kill the Jews than to believe that they would have pursued the policy they were pursing before the war and through 1941...

Shouldn't you be asking that question?

Huhuh. "This is how you deal with questions…"

I have counters to many points in that paragraph, some of which @Amadan has already fielded. But I think addressing them would distract me from pointing out that I asked you a very simple question and you are still refusing to answer it. Let me repeat it:

What do you think was going through Hitler's brain? If you're so convinced that right up until 1945 he totally wanted to deliver as many healthy Jews to Madagascar as possible, why do you think he was clinging to that plan instead of attempting the "annihilation of the Jewish race" which he had long promised his base, and was now in a position to deliver? I genuinely want to know. Do you think he didn't want a Jewish genocide? That he wanted it, but he didn't think he could get away with it? That the Madagascar thing was just easier? Tell me!

You think it was Germany's plan to lose the war and have their infrastructure get completely destroyed from both fronts? That was their plan to kill all the Jews?

No, obviously not. I think that, if all else failed, their long-term plan would have been "put all the Jews in camps and, once we no longer need their slave labor, let them all starve". You can, in fact, deliberately let prisoners starve even if your infrastructure is just dandy. In this scenario, to the extent that the breakdown of German infrastructure forced their hand, it would simply have accelerated an outcome which was already in the cards long before.

All specifics aside, if you have hundreds of thousands of people in camps (even camps which had only been work camps up til that point!), it is just evidently quite easy and quite cheap to let them die. It is certainly easier and cheaper than shipping all those people from Poland to Madagascar.

The same could be said of the Allies... it was Great Britain and France who declared war on Germany and demanded unconditional surrender.

For no reason at all... It's funny you accusing me of not knowing history while you are either ignorant, or pretending to be ignorant, of the causes of World War II.

The actual historical events are not counterintuitive at all: Jews were concentrated into camps due to the belief that Jews would be detrimental to the German war effort for various reasons: espionage, partisan activity, etc. The Japanese were interned in America for the same reasons, and ethnic Germans were concentrated by Churchill also.

It's amusing how often you bring up these false equivalencies. Sure, we did indeed intern people of German and Japanese ancestry, and it's regarded today as a historical injustice. It was regarded as an injustice by many even at the time. Note that nowhere were all people of German and Japanese ancestry rounded up, in some states (like Hawaii, ironically enough) most were not interned at all, and the "camps" we put them in were, even in your "work camp" narrative, not remotely as bad as where the Jews were interned. Nor did we use them as slave labor or starve them to death. (No, they didn't only start dying when other Germans were starving.)

But you could at least make a colorable argument that there was reason to be concerned about the loyalties of Japanese and Germans who were generally no more than two generations removed from the homeland. Not a very good argument, in my opinion (though it was either you or some other Holocaust denier who gave it a try with the Japanese, a couple of years ago). I mean, if we went to war with China today I'm sure some Chinese-Americans would feel themselves falling under a cloud of suspicion. What exactly is the colorable argument for Jews? Why exactly would German Jews work for the Allied gentiles against the Axis gentiles?

This is a claim that you could actually prove if any sort of written orders to this effect were ever given. But they were not. Even mainstream historians admit this. You can say "Hitler wanted this" but there's simply no evidence that this was ordered by Hitler. Hitler wanted the Jews out of Europe. This is true, and there are orders to this effect. There are no "kill all the Jews"

So Hitler talked for years and made it a major part of his entire political movement that the Jews were rotten and must be gotten rid of, we have everything that happened after, but since there is no paper saying "Kill all the Jews. Signed: Adolf Hitler," we should conclude that Hitler planned to peacefully deport them to Madagascar after the war? That maybe in his heart of hearts he wanted to kill all the Jews (which he absolutely could have ordered and no Nazi would have blinked) but he didn't because he thought that would just be too mean, and there was never any plan or intent to do so? And all the dead Jews were just wartime casualties?

How many Jews do you believe were exterminated inside gas chambers than had been disguised as shower rooms?

Let's say it's zero and the gas chambers are a complete fabrication. (They're not, but sure, I'll grant the number is much less than in the popular imagination.) Let's say the total number of dead Jews is far less than six million.

What would this prove? What should we conclude? That the Holocaust didn't happen? You worry at numbers as if casting doubt on the figures will debunk all the deaths. The reason no one with a good faith interest in accurately chronicling history is willing to engage in these arguments, even if there are good arguments that "six million" is an overestimate, is that the Venn diagram between "People who claim the Holocaust didn't happen" and "People who hate Jews and want us to consider Jews our racial enemy" is a circle. (Yes, yes, there are a couple of fringe Jewish historians you can point to as exceptions. There are black defenders of the Confederacy too.) Nobody autistically focuses on the exact number killed at this or that camp because they're concerned about accuracy, which means you have poisoned the well for historical inquiry on the subject. Which is unfortunate, but you know what you're doing and why you're doing it.

You keep accusing me of having a "religious belief" in the mainstream narrative, as if by motivated reasoning I refuse to consider the evidence, when your reasoning is motivated by a pseudo-religious intensity far greater than mine. I personally believe that you don't really believe the Holocaust didn't happen, but I am absolutely certain that if we did uncover a verified document signed by Adolf Hitler saying "Kill the Jews" and filmed and chemical proof of gas chambers no one could dispute (hah! as if), you would still argue that the Holocaust didn't happen and it's good that it did, you'd just change the vector of attack.

I mean, if we went to war with China today I'm sure some Chinese-Americans would feel themselves falling under a cloud of suspicion.

That's already kind of happening, at least in the Cleared communities. It's very difficult to not notice how many high-profile cases there are where it's Chinese-Americans selling out to China, and how few of any other ethnicity selling out to China (if you're vaguely white, you sell out to Brazil via a peanut-butter-sandwich information transfer mechanism).

It's amusing how often you bring up these false equivalencies. Sure, we did indeed intern people of German and Japanese ancestry, and it's regarded today as a historical injustice.

Amadan, it's not about whether it's justice or injustice it's about whether there's historical precedent for the practice. The concentration of the Jews is easily explainable without a grand conspiracy to exterminate them all inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The alleged "extermination camps" have no historical precedent, whereas the concentration and labor camps alleged by Revisionists have ample historical precedent. The purpose of the comparison is to show which explanation is a priori more likely.

Nor did we use them as slave labor or starve them to death.

The Japanese performed labor in American concentration camps. Certainly the Russians had work camps. But what you are alleging, that some of these German camps were secretly death factories where hundreds of thousands to 1 million + people were exterminated using diabolical trickery to murder people who thought they were taking a shower... obviously that is the claim that stands far and wide from any other camp system in history.

What exactly is the colorable argument for Jews? Why exactly would German Jews work for the Allied gentiles against the Axis gentiles?

The concern was primarily support for Communism among Jews. This was a concern shared by American intelligence as well who considered the mass of Jewish arrivals to be a security threat for the very same reason. The association of Jews with the Bolshevik Revolution was widespread and even accepted as conventional wisdom by Winston Churchill himself:

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek – all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.

You are free to argue that this pattern is overstated by Churchill and the Germans. But we still have a more plausible explanation, and one that is stated by the Germans themselves, for the concentration of the Jews compared to "they had a secret, unwritten conspiracy to exterminate them all in death showers."

So Hitler talked for years and made it a major part of his entire political movement that the Jews were rotten and must be gotten rid of, we have everything that happened after, but since there is no paper saying "Kill all the Jews. Signed: Adolf Hitler," we should conclude that Hitler planned to peacefully deport them to Madagascar after the war?

There's no need to understate that gravity of a mass deportation/expulsion from Europe. That is a huge, violent deal. It's not peaceful and I would never make that claim. But if you are trying to claim that the Germans were pursuing some policy, i.e. to exterminate all the Jews, it would make sense that there should be orders establishing this policy... how could this policy exist if it didn't exist in written orders? The actual, written plans make more sense from a logical and historical perspective. If the Germans wanted to kill all the Jews, why didn't they? Why bring them to camps with housing, food, medical services, etc.? Why not just kill them where they were found? But yes, if you are saying Hitler wanted to kill all the Jews it would be very helpful to show that he ordered such a thing, but those written orders have never been found because they do not exist...

What would this prove? What should we conclude?

I would actually volley this question back to you. Let's say Revisionists are correct: there were no homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. And that all the stories, propaganda, and pop culture which emerged from that mythos were false. What would you conclude? Would you just think "oh we all happened to get that historical fact wrong" or would you ponder greater Culture War ramifications from that revelation?

Amadan, it's not about whether it's justice or injustice it's about whether there's historical precedent for the practice.

"We put people in camps, they put people in camps." They are only the same thing if you studiously avoid looking at any details at all.

The concentration of the Jews is easily explainable without a grand conspiracy to exterminate them all inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms

Usually it takes until you come back after doing a fade from the last round before you start ducking arguments that have already been addressed, but here you are ducking the point @WandererintheWilderness already made in this thread. Characterizing those who believe the Holocaust is an actual historical event as "a grand conspiracy to exterminate them all inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms" is the most superficial strawman of Holocaust history. As Wandering already pointed out, no one seriously thinks millions of Jews were herded like sheep through an assembly line into gas chambers. Gas chambers disguised as shower rooms were a small part of the entire multi-year process and obviously it's a horrific image that looms large today, but you can complain all you want that the number of Jews killed in gas chambers was small, or even literally zero, and you still won't "debunk" that Jews were deliberately killed in an attempted genocide.

The concern was primarily support for Communism among Jews.

No, it wasn't "primarily" that. Hitler had been preaching against Jews for years before that, and you know this, and you are not willing to address the specific things he said about Jews and their harmful effects on German society because "actually he was worried about Communist sympathies" sounds a lot better and more plausible than the actual reasons he hated Jews.

But if you are trying to claim that the Germans were pursuing some policy, i.e. to exterminate all the Jews, it would make sense that there should be orders establishing this policy... how could this policy exist if it didn't exist in written orders?

They had been rounding up Jews, stripping them of citizenship and property rights, and putting them in slave labor camps for years. They were very clearly pursuing a policy that could only end one way--supposing Germany had won the war (or at least ended it on terms that preserved their autonomy). What could they possibly have been planning to do with all these Jews they'd made unpersons, starved and enslaved, and been saying for years were poisonous vermin? You don't need a signed document from Adolf Hitler; the order to start killing them didn't even need to start at the top. I am not surprised no one thought it would be either prudent or necessary to put down in writing a formal, official plan to commit genocide. I don't know how many countries that have committed genocide that wrote down "We intend to exterminate all these people as a state policy."

If the Germans wanted to kill all the Jews, why didn't they? Why bring them to camps with housing, food, medical services, etc.?

Machine-gunning them in the streets would have presented a host of logistical problems, and they wanted to get slave labor out of them at first. It's even possible that at first Hitler believed he could win the war and deport them to Madagascar.

I would actually volley this question back to you. Let's say Revisionists are correct: there were no homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. And that all the stories, propaganda, and pop culture which emerged from that mythos were false. What would you conclude? Would you just think "oh we all happened to get that historical fact wrong" or would you ponder greater Culture War ramifications from that revelation?

What do you mean by "all the stories"? The gas chambers, the human skin lampshades, the soap made from Jews, etc.? I have said before I have no problem believing that many of the more lurid stories we're all familiar with were exaggerated or even fabricated. I have no problem believing that the number of Jews killed might have been "only" 4 million, or 2 million. Now if somehow you could prove that in fact there were zero death camps, zero massacres, no plan to exterminate Jews at all, and all the Jews who disappeared from Europe were just normal wartime casualties or they got absorbed into Russia and other parts of Europe... well, that would require a hell of a lot of proof, and I've seen what you've presented on that score before, it's extremely unconvincing and transparently specious argumentation.

Of course Jewish organizations have a vested interest in either perpetuating, or at least not spending too much time examining the details, of such stories. Sure, there are Culture War implications. And once again I will circle back to the fact that if the well weren't so poisoned by people like you literally denying that there was any genocide at all (and low-key arguing that it was justified) maybe we could have frank and open historical inquiry into the matter. In a better and more honest world we could talk about Hitler's culpability and Nazi policy regarding the Jews, the same way we debate to this day how much knowledge and culpability Emperor Hirohito had in the actions of Imperial Japan.

But that better and more honest world would have to require some honesty on your part as well, and your motivations are fundamentally not honest because you don't actually care about the history, you care about the Jews.

Machine-gunning them in the streets would have presented a host of logistical problems

I cannot recall where I read it, but as I understand there were early mass shootings (more organized than just in the streets, basically rounding them up first), but there was found to be a significant psychological effect on the soldiers doing the killings.

but there was found to be a significant psychological effect on the soldiers doing the killings.

And the Jews also had a tendency to run away. Early on in the war, Jews fleeing further to the East was considered a benefit by at least one Ensatzgruppe leader, but I think that once they recognized that the war was not going well, they put more emphasis on killing the Jews quickly, rather than 'we'll get to it.'

That would be the Einsatzgruppen.

As Wandering already pointed out, no one seriously thinks millions of Jews were herded like sheep through an assembly line into gas chambers.

This claim has, in fact, been a huge part of my upbringing and education. You saying that "no one seriously thinks" it, is more radicalizing than anything SS could have ever said.

You were taught that every Jew killed in the camps was herded through gas chambers believing they were taking a shower?

I learned that was how a lot of them were killed (I couldn't tell you the numbers, I'd have to look up what non-denialist historians think it is now) but I was never told literally millions were gassed by deception.

More comments

As Wandering already pointed out, no one seriously thinks millions of Jews were herded like sheep through an assembly line into gas chambers. Gas chambers disguised as shower rooms were a small part of the entire multi-year process and obviously it's a horrific image that looms large today, but you can complain all you want that the number of Jews killed in gas chambers was small, or even literally zero, and you still won't "debunk" that Jews were deliberately killed in an attempted genocide.

You are wrong Amadan, the mainstream historical claim is exactly that they were herded like sheep through an assembly line and fully cooperated the vast majority of the time. And saying it was a "small part" is also not true: it is claimed about half of the "six million" were murdered inside these shower rooms. And if you take lower estimates of the overall death-toll form mainstream historians like Hilberg, then the claim is that the overall majority of the Jews who died in WWII were killed in this way. It's not a "small part" and yes the mainstream claim is actually that they just willingly walked in like herded sheep through an assembly-line. That's not me strawmanning, that's the actual claim. The alleged cases of resistance are very few and far between compared to the multimillion death-toll alleged.

According to Yankel Wiernik, childrens' feet froze to the ground while they awaited their turn to be gassed. Although Wiernik does report on a case of heroic resistance:

On one occasion a girl fell out of line. Nude as she was, she leaped over a barbed wire fence three meters high, and tried to escape in our direction. The Ukrainians noticed this and started to pursue her. One of them almost reached her but he was too close to her to shoot, and she wrenched the rifle from his hands. It wasn't easy to open fire since there were guards all around and there was the danger that one of the guards might be hit. But as the girl held the gun, it went off and killed one of the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians were furious. In her fury, the girl struggled with his comrades. She managed to fire another shot, which hit another Ukrainian, whose arm subsequently had to be amputated. At last they seized her. She paid dearly for her courage. She was beaten, bruised, spat upon, kicked and finally killed. She was our nameless heroine.

At Treblinka it's claimed that the Jewish workers who ran the extermination operation revolted only after the murder operation of 800,000+ Jews because the workers "knew they would be next." At some point the lack of chivalry is just hard to believe.

I don't know how many countries that have committed genocide that wrote down "We intend to exterminate all these people as a state policy."

What you are claiming the Germans did with their "extermination camps" is totally unprecedented in human history. That is not to say "genocide has never happened", it's to say that the establishment of secret camps with assembly-line/factory modes of extermination hundreds of thousand to 1 million+ using industrial means is not precedented in human history. The notion that this all happened without written orders, planning, or budgeting, it just somehow emerged organically from Hitler's rhetoric, doesn't hold water in comparison to the more likely explanation that the network of concentration and labor camps during WWII is perfectly consistent with German policy with respect to the Jews without the absurd stories of assembly-line death factories.

You notice I tried my best to address all your points, as tiresome as it is to tread this ground again since you'll just disappear and return with the same arguments in a couple of weeks. But as usual, you pick and choose a few points and ignore all the other holes that have been pointed out in your narrative. As I said to Arjin, my understanding is that large numbers of Jews were herded into gas chambers, but the majority of them were probably not marching in believing they were just showers. Was it 3 million who were gassed? 1 million? 100K? As someone pointed out above, in the case of the Rape of Nanking, good faith disputes about the exact numbers are possible, but good faith disputes about whether it actually happened are not.

If you proved to me that the Germans only gassed 100,000 Jews, I'd say "Wow, I wonder how historians got those numbers so wrong?" and I'd even consider "Certain groups had a vested interest in inflating them."

But you still would not have proved that the Nazis didn't gas large numbers of Jews in an attempt to exterminate them, which is what you are trying to claim.

What you are claiming the Germans did with their "extermination camps" is totally unprecedented in human history.

In scale and industrialization, yes, which is why it's so memorable. In sheer cruelty and intent to exterminate a hated subpopulation, no, not really.

it's to say that the establishment of secret camps

The camps were hardly secret, though what exactly was happening there was not widely known until after the war. See, you keep throwing out little "Hahaha how ridiculous that people believe such silly things" lines like this that are just straw men.

The notion that this all happened without written orders, planning, or budgeting, it just somehow emerged organically from Hitler's rhetoric

Again, this is ridiculous, no one is saying the camps were not planned or budgeted or there were no written orders about disposition of Jews. There may have been no written orders saying precisely "Kill all the Jews in your camp" or "Kill at least 1000 Jews per day." That doesn't mean it "emerged organically from Hitler's rhetoric."

More comments

At some point the lack of chivalry is just hard to believe.

I think you have a rosy-tinted view of human nature. The talk of "panic" had a veil of objectivity, but "chivalry"…? I mean, I ought to thank you. What a gift of a word-choice! Because now I get to appeal to C.S. Lewis. Chivalry, he very correctly discerns, is not in fact a natural state of human nature. It is a demand made upon human nature by society for the sake of civilization. If you expect individuals in circumstances such as those faced by Jews in concentration camps to spontaneously act "chivalrously", and are genuinely surprised when they don't, then I'm not surprised you end up way off the map.

And I'd like to register my mild amusement that the current stage of the discussion could be described as "Nazi apologist refuses to admit that a majority of Jews could ever be spineless cowards".

More comments

The same could be said of the Allies... it was Great Britain and France who declared war on Germany and demanded unconditional surrender.

Why did they declare war on Germany? Was it just out of the blue, or was there a specific reason for it?

They declared war on Germany, ostensibly, because of the German-Polish war. But in reality they declared war because they didn't want a strong Germany to upset the balance of power in Europe. If liberating Poland was their real motive in their hearts of hearts, they failed miserably and destroyed Europe in the process. But there's ample historical evidence that the British for example essentially sabotaged German/Polish negotiation which would have averted war. And that the British rejected German peace offers that included Germany evacuating from essentially all of Western Europe. Accusing just one side of being "warmongers" is absurd but that's definitely part of the myth.

Shouldn't this speculation take into account the immediate preceeding events, ie. Germany and Czechoslovakia making precisely such an agreement to avert war with Western backing and Germany then proceeding to violate that agreement in the most flagrant of manners?

Germany did not violate the Munich Agreement. The Munich Agreement is not very long you can read it for yourself if you want.

The Munich Agreement rested on the idea that the cessation of Sudetenland would be followed by no further German aggression against Czechoslovakia. It was then followed by further German aggression against Czechoslovakia.

More comments

I've never pretended the Brits didn't have their own ulterior motives (and their meddling in Greece towards the end of the war is ample proof of that) but there didn't need to be negotiations to prevent the war. Germany could have just, y'know, not invaded.

I agree with hydro that this looks very much like a "Just Asking Questions" post, but I'm sure SS will be by soon to dump his oft-refuted lore on you. You might as well have just pinged him if you want the "strong" (meaning walls of text that take tedious repetitive effort to debunk) Holocaust denier arguments.

It's hard to assume charitable intent when this appears to be covering absolutely zero new ground, and you're not new here.

See this reply. I don't know, do you want screenshots of me arguing with my dad?

The fact is asking questions about the Holiest of Holies will elicit snarky responses from people like Amadan, period, despite the fact that he most likely doesn't know the first thing about the history he claims to deeply Believe. It's the same pattern of behavior among the laity of any other religious order. It's the function of myth in civic society.

Claims that those Jews actually did stab Germany in the back with rioting, that they actually were breaking Germans with their banking stuff and their horrible lending schemes

I think it's intrinsically suspicious when Holocaust deniers trying to make their case immediately lead off with "here's why the Jews would have deserved the Holocaust if it happened... which it didn't FYI."

Weirdly enough, they bear a familial resemblance to those progressives confidently asserting that Palestinians have a right to engage in armed resistance against their oppressors - but coincidentally, 100% of the Israeli civilians killed on 07/10/23 were killed by the IDF under the Hannibal directive, and any footage clearly depicting Hamas squaddies murdering Israeli civilians is obviously AI-generated.

Yeah, I was struck by that listening to that podcast. They go into all the reasons why Jews are the worst people in existence, and then they use it as a point in how the Germans were truly really great people for not genociding them, even though they would have been completely justified in doing so. I even asked him about "untermensch" and he said it never got written down. Bullshit.

On the progressives point, it never struck him as ironic that he was agreeing with them so much, he just thought this was one instance where they were right.

I even asked him about "untermensch" and he said it never got written down. Bullshit.

"Untermensch" was certainly written, unlike the highly notorious "Master Race" which was never written nor part of popular propaganda. But "untermensch" was not a racial categorization, it was basically a designation for communist sympathizers and an inversion of "ubermensch."

In this comment I included difficult-to-find translations of that propaganda. The concept of "untermensch" is no different than what people today might call something like "bio-Leninism" and was not a racial categorization.

"Master Race" which was never written nor part of popular propaganda

Interesting. Digging I only find stuff like:

Wir müssen deshalb ein Herrenvolk werden, und deshalb müssen wir unser Volk zum Herrenvolk erziehen.

Right, "volk" is not the German word for "race". There are sparse references to "Herrenvolk" although it was very uncommon, and no references to "master race."

Volk is often used as a metonym for Rasse, though, or just used interchangeably due to semantic sloppiness. I wouldn't read too much into it.

The notoriety of the "Master Race" is supposed to be the most extreme invocation of scientific racism. That is not to say that the Germans did not believe in scientific racism (they obviously did), but the few cases of the use of "Herrenvolk", which was not common in popular propaganda and would not have been in the minds of the general public, is more in the context of this statement here of "raising the German people up" to reach their potential. The Nazis and Hitler in particular viewed the concept of "German" as multi-ethnic in itself. Rosenberg in particular did not go along with the interpretation of "Master Race" manufactured by the Allies at Nuremberg:

ROSENBERG: I do not need a foreign dictionary in order to explain the various meanings "Ausrottung" may have in the German language. One can exterminate an idea, an economic system, a social order, and as a final consequence, also a group of human beings, certainly. Those are the many possibilities which are contained in that word. For that I do not need an English-German dictionary. Translations from German into English are so often wrong-and just as in that last document you have submitted to me, I heard again the translation of "Herrenrasse." In the document itself "Herrenrasse" is not even mentioned; however, there is the term "ein falsches Herrenmenschentum" (a false master mankind). Apparently everything is translated here in another sense.

This is also seen in the fact that "untermensch" is translated as "subhuman", which is not a good translation in comparison to "underman"- the inverse of the Nietzschean Overman. So that concept of "untermensch" is misrepresented, mostly through manipulative translation, to make the concept about racial supremacism when it was about a deeper political and ideological struggle.

which is not a good translation in comparison to "underman"- the inverse of the Nietzschean Overman

I do actually take the point that "subhuman" is an imperfect translation, but I think a part of the story you're missing is that the received translation for Übermensch itself in the first half of the 20th century was "Superman", not "Overman". That only changed when the guy with the red cape became so famous as to make the term hard to take seriously in a grown-up context - thank heaven no serious philosopher had invested pivotal significance in the Spinnemensch or the Fledermausmensch. The upshot of which is that at the time the "subhuman" translation emerged, it would not have been intuitive to coin "Undermen" to translate it, because there was no "Overman" to base it on. Instead, you would look at "Superman", which used the Latin prefix "super", and find its antonym, which happens to be "sub". But "Subman" sounds absurd, like a comic book character who can turn into a submarine, and anyway "human" is in fact a more precise translation of the gender-neutral Mensch than "man" is.

End result, "subhuman", a questionable translation but not I think a deliberately manipulative one when it was coined.

More comments

I'm gonna be honest, I don't think you are genuinely concerned about this. Truly concerned people either make 'Jews are a Turkic race, Anne Frank's dad faked her diary' schizoposts or rant and rave about fueling present day anti-semitism.

I agree that considering Auschwitz merely a work camp is, in fact, retarded, that Germany was the aggressor in central Europe in WWII, that shipping Jews from western Europe to Poland to exterminate is weird. But Nazi doctrine regarding the slavic races seems sufficient to explain it.

I mean, I'm open to believing the popular culture narrative of the Holocaust is not true but it seems really exhausting to open that door and mostly unproductive. All that will happen is people will think I'm crazy, the epistemics will be too lousy to be confident of anything else, and I'll just have wasted a lot of time.

But I can see how if I was forced into debating this I'd write a post like OP did.

that shipping Jews from western Europe to Poland to exterminate is weird

How is it..weird?

Back then they didn't have municipal trash incinerators capable of burning 10,000 corpses a day with exhaust filters and so on.

If you wanted to turn a million bodies into ash, lots of weird smells were a given. Especially if crematoria weren't being used but pyres instead, as in Treblinka. People nearby pretty much had to know what was going on because the smells were horrible and most rural people probably knew how burnt flesh smelled.

So no, if you want to keep a genocide reasonably secret, best do it near people you're probably going to kill later too and who have absolutely no rights nor is there ever going to be any need of being on good terms with them. Poles fit that bill.

I am not sure what you mean by "genuinely concerned". I know there are trolls who join here to post normally and then start to make weirder and weirder posts that get closer to Jewposting. To tell you the truth, I am only mildly annoyed by this latest happening, because the family member in question is not likely to harass me with jewposts constantly like my own father is. I actually had to block my dad on certain social media for it. If you don't believe that, I can probably find some older posts where I mentioned it. But I don't know, I was bothered enough to post about it. In my family member's defense, he was probably pretty drunk when he confessed this.

I just wish there was some incontrovertible evidence that said "yeah a shitload of people died" that would be impossible to deny.

I just wish there was some incontrovertible evidence that said "yeah a shitload of people died" that would be impossible to deny.

I mean, it was WWII. 58 million people died. Some fraction of them were Jewish. I don't care what fraction of them were, and I immediately discount arguments based around what fraction of the casualties of the single deadliest event in human history were Jewish- or Chinese, or German, or whatever other stupid thing. It neither justifies, nor has anything else much to do with, Israeli current day security policy. Gaza is either a genocide(deserved or not), or it's not. The holocaust happened or it didn't. Those facts are entirely disconnected from each other.

@SecureSignals is fine, and even a welcome contributor. We can debate the holocaust as a historical fact. But boomers, uh, don't. Like that is not normal boomer behavior. Is your father a Mohammedan? Jews are about the only not-White-western-Christian group my own boomer relatives aren't prejudiced against on a racial level, maybe also Japanmen for some of them. Older folks are much less antisemitic than the general public.

Are you asking for some evidence to prove to this relative, regardless of whether he exists, that lots of people died in eastern Europe between 1941 and 1945?

My dad is a Christian fundamentalist who went steadily more insane as time went on. It started with regular conspiracy theories about fluoride or 9/11, to experiments where he had the entire house piss into jugs so they could be used for chemistry or fertilizer, to continuing paranoid arguments with my mother that eventually led to divorce in 2012, at which point he went far crazier, going into QAnon, going to /r/The_Donald until it was banned and then going to voat, where he then argued with Holocaust deniers until he found he couldn't argue anymore because he had been defeated by facts and logic, now on Gab and 8chan last I heard. Now he's a Christian fascist like the podcast I linked, who thinks that a revolution needs to happen so that the good Christians can take over the government and implement a Christian version of Sharia law. If that's not enough to convince you he's a real person, then I don't know, do you want the emails I've sent where I get into arguments with him, or the sprawling arguments I had with him over Discord about the earth not being 6000 years old? Yes, he uses Discord. Actually his account got banned once because he apparently was in a server that violated the terms of service a lot. Also he got super, super upset with me when he sent me a David Irving book about the Nuremberg Trials and my brother saw it and burnt it and sent him an email with a photo of it burning. I didn't even do it, and he was furious with me and super passive aggressive with me about it because I didn't prevent it happening. He got mad at me again after he bought me this game and I rejected it because it was poorly written platformer trash.

I was asking for a reason why the death camps are on the eastern side. Someone else already answered me pretty adequately, I guess, I don't really know for sure. But I get so fucking frustrated, and I have no fucking idea why I am still even thinking about this question after the war ended 80 years ago.

This, uh, sounds like a leftist strawman and not like an actual boomer evangelical fundamentalist.

Dude, you're not handling this well at all. If you don't believe oats_son that's your right. But in that case just move on and don't say anything, because it's completely uncalled for to tell someone that you think they are making up painful stories from their life.

You have to consider that sometimes people just go insane and no longer pattern match to left-right, boomer-Gen-Z extreemism.

As an 8chan poster myself it doesn't sound weird enough to be particularly implausible. (I'm assuming he's now posting on 8kun.top rather than 8chan.moe, most users migrated away from 8kun but the Qboomers didn't. Or he stopped posting entirely after the original 8ch went down.) It's atypical that he's into both QAnon and Holocaust denial, since 8chan traditionally thinks of those as opposed sides on the normal /pol/ anons vs. invading hordes of Qboomers divide and /qresearch/ is a dedicated board with little overlap. Also I don't think there's many young-earth-creationists among traditional anons (and don't know among the Qboomers). But it makes sense for there to be people trying to persuade the Qanon people once censorship has driven them onto the same websites, and probably Voat and Gab have less hostility and less segregation between the groups. I think there's a fair amount of people who pick up a mix of weird beliefs from their internet environment once they stop trusting the mainstream, even if you ordinarily wouldn't think of them going together.

Yeah, I mean he's been distrusting the mainstream for a long, long time. In high school, it took me a while to realize that lewrockwell.com was kind of a weird site that no one else ever linked and that I should probably stop linking it. I don't know if he still visits any of those sites anymore, and as I said, he doesn't believe in QAnon anymore, I don't think. He jumped in with the Gaza people pretty hard... I wish I could think to tell you more. He got into computers in the 80s, and made a "Traveler" character creator for his computer project in high school. He was an early uptaker of computers and the internet. I think for many of those types, the decades have not been kind to them, but he's an extreme case, and he never really ditched the fundamentalism, either.

Voat is defunct lol. Gab convincing actual Christian fundamentalists to hate Jews is itself plausible(it's definitely done that before) but discord is not a normal medium for that to take place over- maybe an imessage groupchat or whatsapp. Christian sharia is also a very strange self-description that I'm not sure has ever existed; it's more of a description libtards use for Christian conservatives than something even actual theocrats would use for themselves. Trump, racialism, Christian fundamentalism are also 'pick any two' things.

I have no idea what the status of Voat is, but I know for sure that he mentioned that that's where he first encountered "the Jewish question". Before that, I forgot to mention, he had standard Protestant views on Jews. He thought they were God's chosen people, and it was the fact that they were chosen that allowed them to fight off their surrounding enemies over and over again with minimal casualties, he thought. He also hated Muslims.

Now, he still hates Muslims, but now thinks everything Hamas does is justified because it's against Jews.

I don't think he's still into QAnon. I think he acknowledged that it was probably wrong even at the time, but I did have some emails where he said WWG1WGA.

Uh, are all those screenshots I sent to you convincing at all?

Okay. I will be PMing you some screenshots shortly. It would be a lot of work to anonymize these screenshots.

That's fine; I'm not tech savvy. But these beliefs do not particularly go together. Qanon is a woman thing, and most appealing among people who thing 'voat' is a typo(it's spelled 'vote'- go do it for Trump). YEC has little overlap with holocaust denial. The median boomer fundamentalist thinks Jews are different, however awful Muslims may be. You're describing a mishmash of several different people, in general. Dominionists exist(in much smaller numbers than popularly believed) but I have yet to meet- and I know many Christian fundamentalists, quiverfull, tradcath, old calendarist orthodox, independent baptist, etc- who describe their beliefs as Christian 'sharia'.

I think you enormously overestimate how strongly people "stick to pattern".

The median boomer fundamentalist- so what? If I've learnt one thing it's that people have variance.

I don't think he said sharia unprompted. He undeniably did advocate for taking away women's rights and for throwing gay people off of rooftops. I don't know if I have screenshots of those, but I think I drew the comparison to Muslim Sharia law, and he didn't disagree with it.

I mean, I just linked a podcast of people who think this, too, right? Do you still think they're strawmen? There are some crazy people in the world, my friend. They occupy a space on the internet, it stands to reason that they occupy a space in the real world, too.

More comments

Edit: just noticed your profile is private, reconsidering engaging.

Why were the death camps all on the USSR side?

Admittedly I'm not too well-versed in the history of WW2, so in a way I'm the perfect target for the Holocaust denialist to Euler.

As far as I'm aware, USSR reached Berlin in their last march on Germany. So is everything to the east of Berlin "the USSR side"? If so, there is a very straightforward explanation for why all the death camps were closer to the USSR than the West: you build the death camps next to the conquered people you'll be putting in the camps. You might as well ask "why were all the atrocities allegedly committed by Germany against USSR so conveniently on the USSR side".

I'm sorry, I turned off the private mode.

Thank you for your point. I hope I don't feel compelled to ever use it because I'm really tired of arguing this.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats