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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
The same could be said of the Allies... it was Great Britain and France who declared war on Germany and demanded unconditional surrender.
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.
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.
How many Jews do you believe were exterminated inside gas chambers than had been disguised as shower rooms?
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
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."
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...
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?
"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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link