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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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It doesn't seem that absurd to me. The guards outnumber each individual person 150-to-1.

Of course even if there were 1 billion prisoners and 150 guards the guards would outnumber each individual person 150-to-1.

There's no statements to the effect that 100% of the security force or garrison was involved in managing the prisoners- quite the opposite, with the vast majority of the work was said to have been done and orchestrated by the unarmed Jewish "Sonderkommando" with little guard presence.

Of course even if there were 1 billion prisoners and 150 guards the guards would outnumber each individual person 150-to-1.

And yet, there are numerous examples available of the simple maxim that one or two people with machine guns can control a far larger, even if not infinitely or arbitrarily larger, group of unarmed people. I maintain that my formulation is an accurate description of the psychology of humans in crowds, and that your reductio does not actually answer it. I am confident that a demonstrated capacity and willingness to employ overwhelming lethal force is sufficient to overcome 20:1, even 50:1 odds, and maybe higher, and certainly for brief durations. The ratio for the Bataclan attack was ~500:1, for example. I bet if we looked at, say, the Khmer Rouge or the Gulags, we would not find guard ratios of 4:1. I bet if we looked at Vietnamese POW camps we would not find ratios of 4:1. A quick googling indicates somewhere around 10:1 for the Russian Gulag as a whole.

There's no statements to the effect that 100% of the security force or garrison was involved in managing the prisoners- quite the opposite, with the vast majority of the work was said to have been done and orchestrated by the unarmed Jewish "Sonderkommando" with little guard presence.

There's no evidence that 100% of the gulag guard force was involved in managing the prisoners either; If we assume split shifts, that bumps the ratio immediately to 20:1, 30:1 with three shifts per day. I bet you we can find photos, stories or SOP docs of two or three guards handling fifty prisoners or more for work details. Humanity has a long, long history of people with guns putting people without them in chains or in graves. The comparisons you're drawing seem question-beggingly selective.

Your argument was that there weren't enough camp guards to force large groups of people into a small building.

The idea that <150 guards (assuming every single guard and SS officer was at every single transport, which is not attested to) would be sufficient for the task of forcing 2,000 people to walk to their deaths without resistance is absurd.

This does not seem absurd to me at all. Again, Bataclan, three gunmen, 1,500 victims, who provided zero meaningful resistance. In this case, the victims have already arguably been repeatedly selected for meekness/ cooperation and keeping their head down, they've been subject to absolute power throughout their arrest, imprisonment and transport, and they presumably have no idea what's waiting for them. Uniformed men with machine guns and authority to use them on the resistant are directing their movements, as they have been on a regular basis for days, weeks, months previously. They tell you to go this way, all in a line. They tell you to go that way, all in a line. They tell you to go in there, all in a line. I see no reason to believe that people would panic at being crammed into a confined space, any more than they panicked when being into the confined space of cattle-cars for transport, as is generally claimed for both the Nazi death camps and the Russian gulag. humans will endure much misery if they don't see an alternative, or if they have even a glimmer of hope that they might survive.

Note that there are examples of procedurally-similar execution methods being used in other parts of history: loading prisoners into a barge, locking them in the hold, and then sinking the barge seems quite similar, and IIRC is attested to have been used repeatedly as an execution method in the French and Russian revolutions.

...If I had read the rest of the thread, I would not have bothered. Even from your evident priors, this does not seem like a productive line of argument. I'm not sure why you're expending this much effort to argue from such a weak position.

At Auschwitz it's claimed the extermination operation was managed by 100 (unarmed) Jewish prisoners and just 2-4 German guards. You can hear directly from a Jew who saw it all! So in the direct vicinity we are talking about thousands of people who ostensibly knew they were being led to an execution chamber guarded by a few Germans.