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.
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.
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.
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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