This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
A few comments from the editor: first, sorry this is a little late, but you know--holidays and all. Furthermore, the number of quality contribution nominations seems to have grown a fair bit since moving to the new site. In fact, as I write this on January 5, there are already 37 distinct nominations in the hopper for January 2023. While we do occasionally get obviously insincere or "super upvote" nominations, the clear majority of these are all plausible AAQCs, and often quite a lot of text to sift through.
Second, this month we have special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: Career of a Concept began in the Old Country, and has continued to garner AAQC nominations here. It is a great example of the kind of effort and thoughtfulness we like to see. Also judging by reports and upvotes, a great many of us are junkies for good book reviews. The final analysis was actually posted in January, but it contains links to all the previous entries as well, so that's what I'll put here:
Now: on with the show!
Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread
@Tollund_Man4:
Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022
@problem_redditor:
Sexulation
@problem_redditor:
Holocaustianity
Coloniazism
Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022
@Titus_1_16:
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"This is the sense in which, post-2010s, all marriages are gay marriages."
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"Oppression makes brutes of a people, and the oppressor ends up riding a tiger."
@YE_GUILTY:
Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022
@To_Mandalay:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've read the discussions on the Holocaust. Maybe I didn't pay enough attention, but it seems nobody anywhere mentioned the various Holocaust memoirs and the role they play in the entire narrative. I find that odd.
Holocaust memoirs are the ultimate double-edged sword in the Holocaust industry. They can become immensely popular, commercially succesful, have huge cultural influence, and greatly increase the public perception of the Holocaust, especially among children, but they are often riddled with historical inaccuracies, contradictions, exaggerations, and outright fabrications that can put historians in an uncomfortable position of contradicting the experiences of the survivors.
Many authors of Holocaust memoirs are those who remained silent for decades, but finally decided to come out and tell their story for the first time. An example is Irene Zisblatt, who decided to break her silence and tell her story in her memoir, The Fifth Diamond published in 2008. Among other things, Zisblatt claimed that she escaped from a gas chamber, had her Auschwitz prisoner tattoo surgically removed by Dr. Mengele, that Ilse Kolche had selected her to be turned into a lampshade, and that she constantly swallowed, defacated, and re-swallowed diamonds given to her by her mother during her internment in the camp.
This also just wasn't a one-off book, Irene Zisblatt is one of the most prominently-featured survivors in Steven Spielberg's film The Last Days, which won an Oscar. Revisionists had a field day with exposing the absurd lies that Hollywood honored as their best output. I was surprised to come across this recent Times of Israel article that, finally, indicates mainstream skepticism for her obvious lies and laments that the deniers are asking good questions.
There are many other instances of Holocaust memoirs, like The Painted Bird (1968) being exposed as literary fraud, and the author of that bestseller eventually committed suicide. There are a lot of exaggerated and false memoirs.
Elie Wiesel's Night (1958) is another example- he doesn't mention gas chambers in his famous memoirs but he describes truckloads of babies being burned alive, which is not claimed to have happened by mainstream historians today.
But Herman Rosenblat takes the cake for the most iconic memoir fraudster who, after a couple appearances on Oprah, a book deal, and movie deal, was exposed for being a fraud. In an interview he did with ABC News, he was asked why he lied to so many people, and his response was "it wasn't a lie, it was my imagination, and in my imagination it was true".
There's a lot of commercial incentive for survivors to "tell their stories", with all the problems that come with perverse incentives and "recovered memory" syndrome. This also presents a problem because "the case" for the Holocaust entirely relies on witness testimony, so embarassing displays of prominent witnesses lying weakens the most important body of evidence that historians rely upon in lieu of documentary and physical evidence. Holocaust historians almost never reference the authors of these memoirs.
With all that said, there is one memoir that is extremely important to Holocaust historigraphy, and that is Yankel Wiernik's A Year in Treblinka (1944). Wiernik's memoir was published by the Polish Underground in 1944, making it an extremely early purported eyewitness account to the alleged Treblinka atrocities. Owing to the lack of documentary and physical evidence, Wiernik's memoir is heavily relied on as a primary source by Holocaust historians. But I encourage anyone to read it and decide for themselves. It doesn't come across as very credible, which is why it hasn't become "required reading" so-to-speak.
The most famous "memoir" of sorts is Anne Frank's diary, which does not claim to witness gas chamber extermination. Anne was deported with her family to Auschwitz, but then transferred to Belsen where she died in a hospital of Typhus. So the diary, while famous, does not enter into discussions of the authenticity of gas chambers and extermination camps.
In short, for a memoir to enter into the discussion it has to: 1. be relevant to the extermination and gas chamber claims, and 2. be credible (i.e. early accounts). There are not very many memoirs that fit this criteria, Wiernik is really the best they can do on that front, and his credibility is seriously lacking.
This is a blatant lie, dear SS. Unless you claim that for example demographic statistics before (or after) war were falsified and demographics of Polish Jews were falsified before war and so on. To say nothing about Gypsies demographics that somehow for some reason cratered during WW II.
The post-war demographic data entirely comes from Soviet authorities, who had a track record of lying about census data and fudging the ethnic distribution their citizens before the war. They also had a motive to downplay the number of Jewish survivors under their control, particularly the large number of Jews who were deported deep into the Soviet interior and never came under German occupation. The work of Sanning in The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry suggests that the pre-war population of Jewish Poles was over-estimated due to underestimates of interwar emigration and overestimations of fertility of the Jewish population, which had declined in the interwar years.
But in any case, the "Holocaust" narrative as such absolutely preceded any demographic study of Jewish post-war populations. The Six Million number, the gas chamber, the narrative surrounding the "final solution", these were all established in the historical record before any demographic study.
The "six million" number was not derived from any demographic sources, it first emerged from Zionist sources in January 1944, more than a year and a half before the end of the war.
It's also worth mentioning that the number six has special significance in the Jewish religion, i.e. six-pointed star. It is also said that there were 600,000 Israelite men in the Exodus according to Jewish myth.
Ultimately, historians are claiming that millions of people were killed in specific time and place, with a specific motive and murder weapon. The fact that there are constant appeals to demographic numbers that had nothing to do with the creation of this historical narrative in the first place only shows how little evidence there is. i.e., you cannot say "look at this unambiguous documentary and physical proof for a million people being gassed at Auschwitz," so you have to say "look at this Soviet census data."
Jewish identity was also suppressed in the post-war period in the Soviet Union. A drop in self-identification would likely follow from restrictions on other forms of identification like speaking Yiddish. In the last US census we saw a precipitous decline in the number of white people in the country, and the leading theory is that white Americans are increasingly identifying as mixed due to cultural pressures.
Not entirely. There were some many Jewish Poles that to detect that they almost entirely disappeared does not require reliable statistics. Entire communities disappeared, to the point that it was noticeable even in Poland where around 16% of population was murdered.
You are again being misleading. Populations of Jews in Poland (before they were murdered by Germans) was readily noticeable, it is not like COVID/vaccines where you need to rely on statistics to establish effects.
And for some weird reason they basically disappeared and by pure coincidence that happened during time when Germans invaded. And Germans had rabid hate toward Jews, even greater then toward Poles/Ukrainians which were supposed to be subjugated and enslaved.
Even if Germans imprisoned Jews in concentrations camps and starved there them to death, and gas chambers were entirely fake then it does not strongly change anything at all. OK, it reduces my opinion about historians. But surely it will not improve my opinion about Nazis.
Or are you denying that Germans were rapidly antisemitic? Are you denying deportation to ghettos? Are you denying deportation to concentration camps? Are you also denying murder of millions via shooting and starvation? (also Poles, Gypsies, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians and so on, Jews were less than half of victims of Holocaust). Are you denying that people in concentration camps were horrifyingly mistreated?
Where did they go?
It seems that some of them were able to escape the horror and end up
in the impeachment hearings
in the Biden admin
providing much needed pain relief to the American people
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As I said elsewhere:
Like, even if you're going with "the Soviets lied about their numbers" narrative, why would NVKD lie about their internal numbers in their reports to the party? The NKVD's job, or one of them, was deporting people and putting them to camps. They're deliberately trying to diminish the job they're doing in internal party assessments?
If the refutation of the demographic question for revisionists continues to rely on one 50-year-old book relying largely on guesswork, anecdotes and guesses about information they didn't have access to (but later researchers do have access to), doesn't that at least somewhat indicate there's a problem here?
The main takeaway from Sanning is that it's an intractable problem. Demographic study is hard in the best of times, and the political circumstances combined with significant changes during the interwar period, massive population movements during the war (including the large scale deportation of Polish Jews to the Soviet interior), floods of refugees after the war, and the fact that the Soviet Union was waging a propaganda war about a German extermination policy, and so it had a motive to lie about these things- as it lied about many other things during its various investigations (i.e. the Katyn Massacre and a "factory of death" in Majdanek where the Germans murdered 2 million people), makes it an impossible problem to solve.
None of the "big-ticket" items of the Holocaust were based on demographic study. The earliest of such studies came well after the establishment of the main components of the narrative that Revisionists challenge. If historians are claiming that a million people were murdered and buried in a known location, then any reasonable person should scrutinize the evidence that was used to "prove" that claim.
Revisionists acknowledge the inherent interdependency of the evidence. By that I mean- the Soviets falsely claimed that the Germans murdered 2 million people at Majdanek, murdered 4 million people at Auschwitz, that Majdanek had 7 gas chambers and a special crematorium with a gas chamber... but none of this was true. Any reasonable person should update his priors on the reliability of Soviet investigation since it has been proven by hard evidence beyond doubt that their investigations have been systematically wrong in service to a campaign of propaganda warfare.
It demonstrates a weak case that you need to rely so heavily on the accuracy and integrity of the number of Jews the Soviet Union said it had after the war when there is an extremely long list of reasons for why these studies are confounded. It's ultimately an attempt to reverse the burden of proof. You want to claim that a million people were gassed and buried in a known location, but for some reason you cannot rely on the evidence for it, you have to demand that Revisionists solve the impossible problem of post-war demographic study behind the Iron Curtain.
Revisionists don't claim to be able to do that, they do claim to be able to show, with the evidence, that what is claimed did not happen.
Again, as I said, we're not talking about Soviet external claims. We're talking about Soviet internal numbers, ones that became available during the period of expectional openness that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. (Among other things, such numbers have been generally used to bring clarity to the extent of the Great Purge, the gulag system etc.) These numbers might, of course, contain mistakes, just like all demographic statistics, particularly in authoritarian countries. However, even in such cases, one would expect those numbers to rather exaggerate the effort of instances like NKVD to do whatever they've been tasked with doing, rather than diminishing them.
I've been interested in demographic numbers and questions for a long time, so it's natural to me to take this approach also to this issue. It speaks volumes to me if the crucial question of "well, what happened to the Jews then?" is treated by revisionists in such a cavalier manner.
Imagine we are standing in a field in Poland. It has grass, trees, flowers- otherwise it just looks like any other field. Now imagine that you tell me - "900,000 people were gassed, cremated, and buried directly underneath where we are standing."
And then I ask, "really? That sounds extremely unusual and unlikely, what's the evidence for that?"
And then imagine after an exchange debating the evidence for the claim, you ultimately force a "stalemate" by saying "if they weren't murdered, cremated, and buried right here then where did they go?"
It's not treated by revisionists in a cavalier manner, it's just acknowledged as an extraordinary attempt to reverse the burden of proof for an extraordinary claim that lacks evidence. It's also acknowledged as a "reversal" that would not be necessary if you had sufficient evidence to establish what you are claiming in the first place.
Now imagine it's the Revisionist who says, "ok, well if you insist this is what happened, let's excavate the area so we can better understand what happened," and then you say "no, you have to tell me where these 900,000 Jews went if they weren't murdered right on this spot. We can't excavate this area because it would disturb the souls of the 900,000 people who were murdered here."
This is the "state of the debate", and Revisionists have the far better case.
You are correct that "then where did they go?" is the best retort against Revisionist critique of mainstream historiography... but it proves how weak the evidence is that the "best counter-argument" consists of a blatant reversal of the burden of proof. You are the one claiming they were murdered and buried in a precisely known location...
It's a bit hard for me to see it that way, since, as said, insofar as I've been interested in the whole debate, it's been through the demographic question, dovetailing with my interest in various other demographic questions. The whole debate about door hole placement in Auschwitz or the specific details of victim testimonies has never held my interest, and I have little to say about it.
However, howevermuch one would want to say "reversal of the burden of proof", the question is still there, isn't it? It doesn't just go way by such a reference. While the Holocaust has been, of course, related to many criminal cases, in the sense of this forum debate we're not talking about a formal criminal case debated by a court - it's a historiographical debate, one with many different varying facets, one of which seemingly is one that revisionists wish to avoid (apart from saying "Look, Sanning!")
Furthermore, Sanning's book is not just about debunking standard claims about the Holocaust - he makes some quite far-reaching claims himself, including one about there being a genocidal murder of the Polish Jews, just one done by Soviets instead of the Nazis. This highly unusual claim comes with precious little proof of this happening, especially considering - as linked previously - that we can now peruse Soviet files on this era, and they do not show a transport/labor camp operation of the claimed sort. If one uses Sanning as reference, shouldn't there be at least a bit more effort to offer proof for his particular claims?
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I would be happy to discuss facts even with neonazis, as long are they reality adjacent.
If it turns out that someone is full-bore genocide denialists (or praises Mao or claims that Pol Pot was a good leader or that there was no internal paedophilia conspiracy of any kind in Catholic Church or that there is no biological difference between males and females) then I will find better way to procrastinate.
Are you also denying that Germans were rapidly antisemitic? Are you denying deportation to ghettos? Are you denying deportation to concentration camps? Are you also denying murder of millions via shooting and starvation? (also Poles, Gypsies, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians and so on, Jews were less than half of victims of Holocaust). Are you denying that people in concentration camps were horrifyingly mistreated?
Also, are you a neonazi dear SS? Is your username shortening to SS coincidence or deliberate?
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It's not widely held, but there are a handful of posters who pretty much only post to grind that axe. It only takes a handful of obsessives to ensure that the topic gets revisited week after week. I understand it's annoying, but people are allowed to ride their hobby horses so long as they stay within the rules of discourse.
One does wonder if it isn't some gap in the rules if we have to re-litigate "did Auschwitz really have gas chambers???!?!?" every week though.
Have a Holocaust megathread and after it starts dying naturally put a moratorium on discussions on the topic (unless it's cleary a byproduct of some other topic, aka there's a new Holocaust-related film that causes a huge culture war or something) for some time.
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If you have a suggestion that isn't "ban certain topics/arguments," let's hear it.
I am also tired of the weekly thread about Da Joos and Their Fake Holocaust, and I'm sure many others are too. But this has always been one of those exploitable gaps in the Motte's culture of radically embracing free speech. One of Scott's more popular essays pointed it out back in 2015:
Scott didn't have a solution then, and we don't have one now. We have noted the witchward drift since we left reddit, and maybe that will be our final failure state, but the alternative is just deciding what opinions are and aren't allowed.
A "mute comment chain feature". You click it, a comment and all it's children get collapsed in the normal view by default, and don't show up in firehose.
Might even help out developing it.
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I've always been a fan of rate-limiting, in theory. If the "weekly" thread was a yearly thread then my reaction would probably be an excited "wow, here comes the fight again!" rather than an apprehensive "is anyone going to wade into the fight again or has everyone been exhausted to apathy now?"
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Isolate topic in some containment thread? (subvariant of topic ban)
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Yeah, I don't really have a suggestion either. The same reason I like this place is the same reason it shows up.
It's just frustrating when you can't work from a somewhat similar base understanding of the world. It would be like if we had a really annoying Flat Earther who insists that we have to prove that the Earth is round from first principles every work. Would be a lot easier if we didn't have to do this.
Maybe I should write a post about this kind of narrow skepticism. It's an interesting phenomenon where people will just aggressively narrow down on one specific thing that they're at odds with the entire rest of the world with, even though they take no issue with the same processes and methodologies that produced everything else
I think perhaps you're conflating the uncommonness/offensiveness of a belief with how disruptive the belief is to sharing a common understanding of the world with other interlocutors who don't share the belief.
Believing in a flat earth makes it difficult to have conversations that rely on the shared assumptions about air travel, time zones, gravity, the scientific community, and probably dozens of other things.
Believing the Holocaust killed an order of magnitude fewer people and/or wasn't a top-down intentional extermination makes it difficult to have conversations about... what, exactly, besides the Holocaust itself?
I'm not seeing much to convince me that your lamentations are much beyond the outrage that people like SecureSignals believe something false and perhaps even reprehensible and are "getting away with it" more than you'd like. Which isn't nothing! I have to step away from The Motte when I see people getting away with bad arguments I don't have the patience to deal with, too. But let's not pretend that the other party is some sort of alien you can't have other conversations with just fine.
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If you have a solution to the Internet's Eternal September, we're all ears. The standard approach here is something like this. Most other forums simply engage in topic bans, but a big part of this space's history was that the userbase routed around a topic ban in the SSC subreddit by just calling HBD Voldemort (inspired, I think, by this comment).
The only way to ensure that we don't have to re-litigate an issue is to ban it, but (1) we're against that because it undermines the foundation and (2) our experience with the userbase is that it doesn't work, anyway. Like brushing your teeth or sweeping your floors, cultural maintenance can be a repetitive and thankless chore! But refusing to do it on grounds that some issue is "settled" ignores the fact that there are always wise people dying, and always ignorant people showing up to take their place.
Offtopic but does anyone have a link to Kirkegaards OKCupid dump?
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No, there's just a handful of people that are stuck on it but otherwise aren't worth banning, and that most of us could be usefully persuaded by counterarguments like pointing to the Henryk Mandelbaum or Dario Gabbai testimony in the late 1940s; the buried Gradowski, Zalman Lewental, and Langfus manuscripts; so on.
((And I'll also admit some caution about either a) feeding trolls or b) not being enough an expert on this matter.))
Dario Gabbai and his fellow Sonderkommando are featured in the film I linked, I would encourage anyone to view their accounts captured on film right here and decide for themselves if their various stories seem credible. They are indeed very important witnesses, so much hinges on their credibility and historians rely heavily on their accounts.
So central that the other names and sources fade away?
Spell out your objections; I'm not playing guessing games.
My point was that the case relies on the credibility of witness testimony, and your counterargument simply lists a few names of such testimony, without explaining why you find them to be credible or sufficient to establish the murder of a million people. You are even relying on scrolls which were allegedly written by eyewitnesses, buried, and discovered decades after the war (mostly not until the 1960s or 1970s). I think most people assume that the certainty for the Holocaust at Auschwitz is established beyond doubt by contemporary, hard documentary and physical evidence. They would be surprised to realize how important the testimony is of a few witnesses, or scrolls remarkably found buried in the ground in the 1970s.
Needless to say, Revisionists are aware of all the sources you have listed and have studied them all in great detail across many volumes of work and do not find them to be credible in lieu of contemporary documentary or physical evidence.
CTRL + F "Gabbai". Huh: apparently not aware enough to mention him or his brother there, presumably since most of his writings were later. The paper at least mentions Mandelbaum, except for some strange reason without a separate analysis or even mentioning much of his specific testimony -- and I note again that his testimony dates back to 1947.
What's the specific reason for a neutral observer to doubt the specific testimony from these accounts?
I'm willing to go over topics with a fine-tooth comb to evaluate far more trustworthy experts, but especially if your appeal even remotely touches on an assumption that the mainstream isn't trustworthy and you need to evaluate things yourself, telling me nothing more specific than your experts "do not find them to be credible" is a retreat.
To follow-up my comment below, and after now having read Mattogno's work on the topic, the problems with Mandelbaum's testimony are insurmountable. To answer your question:
Mattogno analyzes pages and pages of contradictions, inaccuracies, and obvious exaggerations, but I'll cite the single most damaging aspect of Mandelbaum's testimonies, which comes from his 2003 interview with Igor Bartosik and Adam Willma:
According to the official narrative, children, being unable to work, were automatically selected and among the most numerous victims of the gas chambers. Mandelbaum would have cremated hundreds of thousands of children, and his adamancy that he never saw or cremated children is completely irreconcilable with the historical narrative, which his why his interviewers press him so hard on this question and make a futile effort to "jog his memory".
"Selective memory" due to trauma is the best the interviewers can do. But this is demonstrative of how historians will selectively pick the details from these testimonies to piece together a somewhat-coherent broader narrative and handwave the major problems, but when you take a comprehensive view of a witness the credibility doesn't withstand basic scrutiny.
There are of course a lot of other problems that Mattogno describes, but this part of his testimony completely sinks his credibility as it is not reconcilable with the historical narrative without relying on dubious theories of selective memory.
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There is an entire trilogy solely dedicated to the various testimonies of the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz.
Here is a PDF of Sonderkommando Auschwitz I: Nine Eyewitness Testimonies Analyzed. Henryk Mandelbaum's various testimonies (including testimony unknown in mainstream historiography and translated by Mattogno) are presented and criticized in a 37-page section in Section 10, starting at page 179.
I am not even aware of Dario Gabbai testimony in the 1940s. AFAIK Gabbai entered the scene along with his brother and cousins, the Venezias, no earlier than 1987. The earliest reference I find on Dario's wikipedia page only goes to 1991.
But the Gabbai's and their cousins are featured along with the other "late testimony" witnesses in Sonderkommando Auschwitz III: They Wept Crocodile Tears. A Critical Analysis of Late Witness Testimonies:
Witness testimony is notoriously considered one of the weaker forms of evidence. This is why the Revisionists emphasize historical examples, like Congressman Tom Lantos procuring an "escapee direct eyewitness" to the Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators and killing them, direct eyewitnesses to mass graves of babies, and this story probably tipped the scales of public opinion for waging war on Iraq. Likewise, there were eyewitness testimony to gassings at Dachau and Buchenwald, which are no longer claimed to have happened... although the Dachau museum used to have a sign that bizarrely read GAS CHAMBER disguised as a "shower room" - never used as a gas chamber. That Dachau "gas chamber - never used as a gas chamber" was prominently featured in the Nuremberg Trials by the way.
There were also many eyewitnesses to mass homicidal gassings at Majdanek who testified in 1944 (before the liberation of Auschwitz), in facilities which have been revised to have been real hygienic facilities and shower rooms. Soviet investigators claimed in 1944 that Majdanek featured a crematorium with a built-in gas chamber, which was revised recently and admitted to have never been a gas chamber, before Auschwitz was even liberated.
The suspicious over-reliance on the testimony of witnesses also obscures the evidence of which there is too little, which is why I linked the other book. Most people probably do not know that the British intercepted and decoded the secret communication between Auschwitz and SS throughout the war and period of alleged extermination, but even historians admit "The decoded messages contain no references to gassings."
Likewise, the blueprints and construction documents discovered in the archives by Revisionists show non-homicidal functions for these structures. Revisionists, for example, showed that all the blueprints throughout multiple years of one of the Krematorium shows a swinging door connecting the alleged "gas chamber", which is identified as a morgue in the blueprints, with the ovens. The best Believers can do is just argue that the "swinging door" must have been an error in all the blueprints, because a gas chamber obviously would have required a sturdy air-tight door.
Relying so much on the witness testimony, which has its own major problems, ignores a lot of problems with the documentary and physical evidence, or lack thereof.
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I'm not the OP but I'll take a stab at this.
The problem, so to speak, here is that the aspects of the Holocaust for which the case does not mostly rely on witness testimony are also the aspects that are, in the context of the 20th Century, mundane, and thus cannot be used to highlight the supposed uniqueness of it all. I'm taking about the pogroms committed by locals, mass shootings of the Einsatzgruppen, forced laborers dying due to hunger and typhus etc. There is material evidence of this: film footage, photos, written orders, telegraphs, official reports etc. However, that's not what people talk about when they make "the case" for THE Holocaust. They mean the gas chambers and Zyklon B, the fire of crematoria illuminating the sky, Jewish babies dumped alive into fiery pits etc.
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I'm a longtime mostly lurker and I'd also add that holocaust discussions are usually triggered by a small number of very insistent and highly active poster(s) for a while, and then often stop once those posters either get banned or have a meltdown and leave. There is a number of similar topics, like age of consent laws, where there is like a single super-prolific and abrasive guy that can't shut up about it and who will regularly try to start discussions on it until he is banned again, and then you have some silence for a few months again. The forum as a whole is certainly weirder then the population at large and hence fringe opinions are more common, but I don't think holocaust denial is anything close to a widely held belief here.
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One of the highest 'values' here is 'free speech if you argue reasonably and with evidence', so anyone can post that if they want to. It's not that common though. There are a few people like SS who post frequently about it. The vast majority of 'the community' (incl me) takes the standard line on the material history of the holocaust, individuals who actively argue for holocaust denial are a very small percentage of total posters.
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God damn it. Surely that entire wiki page was written by someone having a giggle, but all of them on the talk page take it dead seriously.
Why didn't she just use the infinity stones again?!
At the end, Chapter 14, Wiernik describes his daring escape:
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