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"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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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That would be the Einsatzgruppen.
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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.
I say, it is a scissor: no, median history textbook probably was not supposed to teach that. But it is quite likely the textbook was similar to what I recall: there were some numbers of total deaths, some images and descriptive text of situation of concentration camps, naming the most famous one. Add "explanations" by a teacher who was not very detail-oriented, apply some non-classroom sources such as documentaries and lazy newspaper articles concentrating on making Nazis look bad than getting details right, people easily leap to making connections between most salient details they misremember and think they were thought ("6 million murdered in Auschwitz gas chambers that look exactly like shower rooms" sums up my understanding as a pre-teen).
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Do you really, honestly, not see a difference nce between these statements?
Okay, I will rephrase:
You were taught that millions of Jews were herded through gas chambers believing they were taking a shower? Or is the "herded like sheep" line you are taking issue with? Wandering already covered this pretty well: the conventional narrative is that millions of Jews were indeed gassed, and probably most of them knew what was happening. (Argue as you wish about coordination problems and why that happened.) SS is trying to make it sound silly by claiming that this narrative is that they all just tralalaed into what they thought were showers.
Yeah, pretty a much. Every trip to a concentration camp museum focused on elaborate descriptions of the unusually cruel and/or underhanded methods of execution. They were very much attempting to paint a picture that this was representative of the Holocaust writ large.
This wouldn't be the first time in the history of man that a ruling regime thought "the commonfolk are too simpleminded to grasp the nuances of the truth, so we have to teach it in a form they can digest", nor would it be the first time that subversives exploited that to turn those among the commonfolk who can grasp the nuances against the regime. When the latter is happening, a reaction like "no one serioisly believes that", is possibly the worst response you can have.
Okay, I cannot say what your schooling was like. Maybe I am wrong that "no one seriously believes that" but I don't think that is a serious historical claim. Millions of Jews murdered, yes, Millions of Jews murdered with gas, yes. Millions of Jews who all thought they were taking showers, it obviously couldn't work, even in one camp. (Thousands go in, no one comes out, do the guards just tell everyone else they were loaded into buses in back and sent to another camp? Just the first of many logistical problems that make this obviously implausible.)
Is this what normies out in the world believe? I dunno.
You do know that Auschwitz consisted of about 40 camps? So it would indeed be perfectly plausible for them to be marched to a different (sub-)camp, potentially quite a bit away. And the Nazis would obviously not be worried about making them do quite a long march.
And why do you think that it would make sense for people to be brought out of the showers back to the railway station? Why would they leave again, right after arriving?
Do you have any actually convincing problems, that are not simply because you don't understand that these camps consist of separate areas with a purpose (and indeed, separate sub-camps also with a different purpose), and people would not come back to places like the railway station unless they were leaving?
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For what it's worth, my recollection from high school was broadly, "millions of Jews were killed, these are some of the ways in which it was done", and gas chambers were just one of the methods listed.
You know, this might not be far off from how I was taught, I don't think they literally said "this is how a representative sample of the Holocaust victims were executed". The problem is that the "just one of the methods listed" approach meant that it was indeed a list, a grotesque parade of man's cruelty to man that is now seared into my mind. It doesn't help that it included things that "no one seriously thinks they happened" like soaps, lampshades, showers, and euthanasia trucks.
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That's about my guess, and it's the point I was trying to make with "yeah, well, lots of normies seriously believe Columbus was out to prove the world was round, but that obviously has no bearing on a discussion of the historical consensus about Columbus's travels" way upthread.
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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
You said that it's a straw-man to characterize the operation as them walking to their deaths like sheep through an assembly line. But that is not a straw-man. that is the actual claim made by mainstream historians with cases of resistance being the rare exception and not the rule. The alleged operation fundamentally relied on the cooperation of the victims. Whether or not they actually believed they were taking a shower is immaterial to the fact that they cooperated in the way you implied was silly to believe... and yes it is silly to believe they would do that- they wouldn't and they didn't.
The Germans did not gas any Jews. The "gas chambers disguised as shower rooms" is a total myth, it did not happen. Many Jews died of various causes throughout the war, none died in that way because there were no extermination camps, there were concentration, labor, and transit camps.
There are no plans... no budgets.... no orders.... there's nothing to establish some policy to kill all the Jews.
You might say that I am strawmanning mainstream historians when I characterize their position that the extermination camps "emerged organically from Hitler's rhetoric." But consider the words of renowned Holocaust Historian Raul Hilberg:
So there you have it- no plans, no budget, no orders; instead it was "mind-reading" by lower-level officers. This is the mainstream position which has emerged due to the inabilitiy of mainstream historians to find any documents substantiating their characterization of German policy in this respect.
How does this differ from the mainstream position on how the Great Purge, Holodomor, the Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward and similar Communist atrocities happened?
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This would hardly be surprising. It's essentially what is happening now with transgender care, infinity immigration, race swapping of historical figures in media, etc. This might have implications that are rather uncomfortable for modern liberals, and academic historians might laugh off the attempt to provide any such explanation in any other context, but on the simple matter of whether it actually happened that way - why not?
There are plans, budgets, orders for all of those things... But ultimately the claimed Extermination Camps are a monumental logistical challenge. Murdering and disappearing the bodies of that many people in that time frame is an extremely difficult and dangerous task. It's not a task that a mid-level officer would just put on his own shoulders because of "mind-reading." It's a task that would absolutely require careful planning, budgeting for resources and building suitable structures, provisioning the operation, etc.
We have an extremely large body of documents pertaining to written orders, construction orders, blueprints, plans, budgets when it comes to the concentration and labor camps. But it's the "extermination camps" that have none of those things.
The notion that this operation emerged without orders, without plans, without budgets is highly unlikely and the claim it did so is necessitated by the fact the existence of the operation not corroborated by those things.
Not in the sense that is being talked about here. The closest to it that you could come up with is admiral Levine getting the age limits pulled, but the sudden mass-promotion of the phenomenon wasn't done on the order of Transgender Hitler.
On the flip side, the camps weren't operating without budgets, plans, and orders either. The point being raised here is that the order wasn't literally "exterminate all the Jews", so the plans weren't things like "to exterminate all the Jews, we will need XYZ", and the budgets did not include things like "Jew extermination gas canisters" as line items. This again strikes me as eerily similar to how the modern progressive regime operates.
Did the judge that ruled the migrants can stay in the Epping hotel need a direct order, or an act of law being passed? Is it really that surprising an underling might interpret "will no one rid me of this turbulent priest" as an order of execution?
Regarding the logistical issues, it would be interesting to see the orders, plans, and budgets, that they did have. If the mid-level officers were charged with managing the Jewish population, didn't have enough resources to do it properly, and knew no one in the regime would really miss them if they disappeared, but conversely could get into trouble for requeating more resources to be diverted from the war effort, then mass murder is starting to look like a perfectly rational conclusion.
Obviously a court ruling is an example of a bureaucracy implementing a policy. There's an official paper trail there.
Of course they weren't, and there is a huge amount of documentary evidence for budgeting, planning, and orders pertaining to the camp system itself. But there isn't any reference to some top-secret extermination operation or the planning or construction of homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. The problem is not that there is a lack of documentation pertaining to the camp system, there's an ENORMOUS body of documentation pertaining to the most minute details and planning of the camp systems, with the very stark omission being any reference whatsoever to a top-secret extermination program
Do you know how difficult it is to cremate i.e. 800,000 bodies in the matter of ~120 days? It was something like 6,000 people allegedly cremated on makeshift open-air pyres in Treblinka every single day without fail, rain or shine. That is an impossible operation, one that could not possibly have evaded planning and budgeting for the immense resources required for the task. The mainstream historians simply nave no explanation for where the camps, for example, procured the immense amount of fuel which would have been required for the cremation operation. Of course there's no documentary trace for any planning or budgeting for the bare necessities required to run the operation. It's just left without explanation- an operation of this magnitude could not have escaped substantial amounts of planning.
The British intercepted and decoded all communication between Auschwitz and SS command during the height of the "Holocuast". The communications contain not an iota of reference or mere allusion to any extermination operation. They do contain explicit orders from command to reduce the high death toll caused by epidemic typhus "at any cost" in order to maintain a productive workforce which was important for the war effort. The sheer lack of reference to the operation in documents, planning, and communication is a big problem for the mainstream theory and not something that can be hand-waved with "it was planned through an incredible meeting of minds." Incredible indeed.
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You could say the same thing about the Pyramids, and yet, there they are.
Do not mistake difficulty for impossibility. Moving multi-tonne stone blocks down the Nile with Bronze Age technology, let alone assembling them in massive load-bearing structures is perhaps impossible to the mind of a layman. It is not impossible, when you consider the Pharaohs had the resources of a sophisticated state that literally gives out seeds to its farmers so that they can pay their taxes in the expected amount and kind.
Indeed, you could say that the function of states, besides war, is to organize resources to accomplish wasteful yet impressive things. In this light, the Holocaust is merely a modern-day version of pyramids of skulls, at an industrial scale. The Nazis embarked on a multi-front war of conquest which logistics spanned from the coast of Normandy to the fjords of Norway to... Egypt, all the way to the gates of Stalingrad, supplying millions of men in the field with cutting-edge technology. Are you telling me, that of all people, Germans are not organized?
If you look at their plans for Berlin after the war, for the Volkshaile and other wonders, you understand they had no lack of ambition.
Do you have the same level of skepticism for the Pyramids, too? Maybe the Great Wall of China, as well. How about the Holodomor? Maybe aliens did help them. Perhaps aliens were involved in the Holocaust, since is simply impossible for human beings to accomplish it on their own.
We call these aliens bureaucrats.
Obviously the Pyramids are there, you can look at them. Not so for the "gas chambers" or alleged burial sites for millions of people. The remains have never been found. Imagine if the Pyramids were never found and they were never mentioned in any documentation contemporary to their existence.
No in fact the opposite, they were incredibly organized and the level of detail that went into drafting orders, budgeting, planning- the sheer amount of bureaucracy was actually astonishing. The notion that the most sensitive and secretive operation in the entire history of the Third Reich escaped all trace of written orders, planning, budgeting, and procedure that was standard operating procedure among the regime, and was instead coordinated with "mind-reading" among the bureaucracy, is incredibly unlike the German mode of organization.
Have you actually visited Auschwitz and Treblinka? Seen the physical evidence for yourself?
Or are you, to put a blunt point on it, blowing smoke up your ass?
No, you'd probably have some pithy response to that. Okay. How about you go to Tuol Sleng? Or you can go to the Balkans where freshly uncovered mass graves are something of a regular occurrence.
I am very right-wing. I have resided on very right-wing parts of the internet. What I am saying is that you are being a coward. You lack the honest and brutal character of a Serb, who, confronted with war crimes, will go: "It's good that it happened, and we regret that we didn't get enough of you." The fact that you are evading and speaking of apologia is evidence that you know that the crime of genocide is something to be ashamed of.
The lady protests too much, methinks.
To put it in frogtwitter terms, you are a theorycel, an academycuck. If you had the balls, you'd be with the other WN shitposters calling for a second Holocaust. Even the pro-Palestinians have more courage than you. David Irving-style denialism is a relic of the past, and you look ridiculous. The cool zoomers who want to put the Jews in the oven right now sneer at you for even bothering to engage in academic debate in the first place.
If you're not even at the most extreme edge of the Overton window, why bother?
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What I am specifically claiming is that it's silly to believe millions of Jews walked docilely into gas chambers because they thought they were just taking a shower.
I do believe they were herded into gas chambers and probably more or less knew what was going on. No doubt the guards tried to hide what was going to happen as much as they could, and some of the victims might have believed a story about showers. That they did not put up more resistance is not a difficult question to answer. They were weak, they were terrified, they had their families with them and men with guns ready to shoot them. In a movie or a comic book, someone decides they've got nothing to lose and goes down fighting, and sparks a mass uprising. In reality, people do usually go to their deaths without much resistance, especially if they have a single thread of hope, some faint chance of convincing themselves they might survive. In reality, maybe one guy does try to go down fighting and promptly gets shot, thus demonstrating to everyone else how effective that is.
You are simply insisting there was no gas, there was no genocide, there was no plan to kill Jews, and as usual, duck all the other questions that are inconveniently unanswerable.
So how do you explain testimony from survivors of Auschwitz where they tell very consistent stories about how they had no clue that the fires they saw in the distance were crematoria, and that they didn't understand what the Kapos meant when they whispered things to them like "You’re young and healthy!" and "everyone is healthy" ? In hindsight, they understood that these were instructions on what to say (or not say) to the sorting officer who would decide who would go to the work camps or to the gas chambers.
What motivation would these people have to lie (consistently) or what mechanism would result in them coming to believe a false story, very quickly after liberation?
To believe that the arriving prisoners could identify the gas chambers for what they were, you need to go a lot further than to believe that the prisoners knew that Auschwitz was (in part) an extermination camp, which already contradicts the testimony, but you also need to believe that they knew the manner of execution (even though using gas for executions was novel at the time), and that they either knew that the gassing would happen straight after arrival or somehow be able to recognize that a fake shower room is not a shower room.
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The reality is that it just takes one person to flip out to cause a chain reaction and ruin the entire operation which was allegedly run in extreme secrecy and on a tight schedule. A riot in which hundreds of people are running, hiding, fighting is not an easy situation to deal with and would cause substantial delays in the entire "production" process. The notion that the Germans would design a system so finely tuned to a specific crowd reaction to that scenario beggars belief, it is well suited for the "evil genius" archetype but it's a totally nonsensical way to organize an operation like that.
There are innumerable instances of crowds reacting to danger and imminent death with panic, I cannot think of any example of crowds reacting in the way you seem to think is sensible. Being tired or hungry would not mute that response in your brain which would make you panic at the idea of marching your child down a narrow hallway to a gas chamber...
Again you subtly reword the parameters of the scenario. No, what I described is realistic. What you describe intentionally exaggerates or omits.
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Do you believe there were Einsatzgrupen?
Yes there were. They engaged in anti-partisan activity and reprisals, etc. But evidence shows they weren't on some mission to "kill all the Jews" and there was no such policy.
The Commissar Order is an example of an actual "extermination" order, and there's nothing like that for Jews.
What evidence shows this?
And does the testimony of Felix Landau, Erwin Bingel, Petras Zelionka, Halina Jankoska and Edward Anders, who recounted the shooting of Jews, not count as evidence? Do you deny that this testimony exists?
And what about the testimony of Siegfried Schuchardt, Julius Bauer and Wilhelm Findeisen, about the use of gas vans by Einsatzgruppen to murder Jews?
I did not say no Jews were shot- Jews were shot as part of anti-partisan efforts. I said that there is no equivalent to the Commissar Order for "killing all the Jews". The Commissar Order shows that when there was a plan to kill a certain class of people, it was communicated through orders. And it leaked. And it was not followed by all officers. There's no equivalent to that for the claim that the German policy was to kill all the Jews. But if you were to say there was an order to kill all the Soviet Commissars, sure, the document giving the order says so right there! That's usually how history works, a claim is made and it's supported by documents.
But with the Holocaust we are told the order to kill all the Jews was communicated through Mind Reading, and no that is not a straw-man those are direct words.
Where do you get that claim from, that the narrative says that they communicated through mind reading?
It's pretty obvious that orders can be given in person, with no records being kept.
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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".
Well that's the thing, the claim is that they murdered 800,000+ of their co-ethnics and then they got the courage to revolt when the deed was done. If they were so certain death awaited the end of their operation why not revolt sooner? Or try to save some innocent people, or revolt when there's actually a transport of thousands of people to assist a riot? Of course none of it makes sense, it's just bad fiction.
Every regime has collaborators, including collaborators who know there is probably no good ending for them but continue to cooperate because a bullet in the head tomorrow is better than a bullet in the head today. The number of such who will actually try to "revolt," let alone pull off a successful act of resistance, is vanishingly small. Both because of the natural human instinct for selfish self-preservation, and basic coordination problems. (The Nazis were not stupid and were undoubtedly very aware of the possibility.)
Your (purported) understanding of human nature is the one that's off.
This is all, of course, assuming we accept your version of what supposedly is claimed about Treblinka. I know you usually take the most cherry-picked and unreasonable-sounding claims taken from a single source.
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