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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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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".

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.