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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?
Lay off the ad hominem, please.
I understand that dealing with SS is frustrating to say the least. You’ve still got to follow the civility rules. Take a one-day break.
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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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