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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.
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 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 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.
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