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.
One of the most memorable and influential works on the Soviet Gulag camp system is a literal "Gulag memoir" (well, partly, at least) - "The Gulag Archipelago" by Solzhenitzyn. While important as a literary work, it's not a scientific study, and the estimates within of total gulag deaths, for example, are generally considered by modern studies utilizing actual Soviet records to be vastly exagerrated. Solzhenitzyn's ex-wife said that "Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of the camps that the information he received from prisoners and exiles “bore a folkloric and frequently a mythical character.”"
Nevertheless, people who refer to the unreliability of the Holocaust memoirs as an argument for Holocaust revisionism generally don't consider the claimed unreliability of undoubtedly the main Gulag camp narrative - still the main source of Gulag camps for many Westerners - to form a similar case for revisionism of Stalinist times. (Perhaps you might find people who are both Holocaust and Gulag revisionists in Russia?)
I have not seen Revisionists beleaguer the conditions in the Gulags based on witness testimony. The Gulags are used by Revisionists as a counterpart, an attempt to draw an equivalency, to the German concentration camps. If you take away the 4 or 5 alleged "extermination camps" with homicidal gas chambers in Poland, and are the left with the German concentration camp system as described in documents, then there is an easy comparison with the Gulags of the Soviets (who were an ally), and the American concentration camps to a lesser extent.
Gulag revisionists tend to be sympathetic to the Soviet Union in a similar way that Revisionists also tend to be sympathetic to Germany. But any Russian or Soviet sympathizers are going to rightfully be proud of probably the greatest accomplishment of the Soviet Union which earns it universal praise among the criticism- defeating Nazi Germany.
The Holocaust narrative adds a lot of moral weight and credibility to that accomplishment, and if you take it away, the "victory" and costs of that devastating conflict become a lot more ambiguous- particularly for the Western Allies. I think that's why I am not aware of any dual-Gulag/Holocaust Revisionists, and the conditions of the gulags is not something I have looked into so I cannot say.
Insofar as I've understood, the Soviet narrative was always concentrated on the crimes of Nazis against the Soviet people generally (now metastatized into Nazi crimes against Russia in the modern Russian patriotic narrative, with the obvious connection to the idea of Ukrainian Nazis continuing the same), not on the specific crimes against the Jews (ie. the Holocaust, as commonly understood).
Why not? Why attempt to revise only one genocide?
The Holocaust is truly a mishmash of myth and reality divided between the East and the West. On the one hand you have @johnfabian mentioning that the experience of Western Jews colors public perception of the Holocaust in the West, whereas the greatest parts of the Holocaust and gas chamber extermination actually happened in areas which were conquered and fell behind the Iron Curtain- where Western investigators were denied access to key evidence. And after the Nuremberg Trials, in which the Soviets provided most of the evidence and interrogations of witnesses that have informed the academic "Holocaust" narrative, the Holocaust did not become a part of Soviet culture in the way the Holocaust has become central to Western culture.
So you have a weird scenario where the East had the custody of most of the key evidence, but the Holocaust did not become part of cultural consciousness (where it actually happened (!)), but in the West, which did not have custody of most of the key evidence, the Holocaust became central to the culture. This was accomplished with the memoirs and Hollywood productions that @johnfabian accuses Revisionists of opportunistically using for their agenda. Just pause to appreciate the inversion of reality he is trying to pull, by accusing Revisionists of exploiting memoirs and Hollywood blockbusters which have formulated mass public perception of the Holocaust in the West.
Holocaust awareness has become a bigger part of the political narrative in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. It was the Great Patriotic War, and was therefore a Soviet accomplishment that could transition to being a Russian accomplishment. The Putin regime is leaning on the Holocaust narrative to justify aggression against Ukraine. Both Zelensky and Putin have used the Holocaust to frame the conflict and appeal to Israel. It would not be productive for Russian apologists or Soviet revisionists to entertain Holocaust denial.
Revisionists place special important on the Holocaust due to its influence in our culture and our foreign policy. The Revisionist film I linked earlier includes a section on the alleged atrocities of the Iraqis and Sadam Hussein in Kuwait, and how atrocity tales like babies being removed from incubators and killed were fabricated to manipulate public opinion towards war with Iraq. Not just that, but they were fabricated specifically by Congressman Tom Lantos, who was a Holocaust survivor and one of the 5 witnesses featured in Spielberg's film.
They place specific importance on this genocide because our culture does so. That doesn't mean Revisionists buy whole-cloth into all the witness testimony of all Soviet atrocities as implied in a different comment.
I don't think it requires some vast conspiracy to explain why communist eastern Europe did not place great cultural relevance upon the Holocaust, given that the Soviets very much wanted to downplay crimes specifically against Jews and place Russians and socialists as the chief victims of German aggression. Not to mention the rather... "awkward" issues that Ukrainian or Polish nationalists might run into when trying to shed more light on the Holocaust, these countries had more than their own fair share of murdered civilians to mourn and commemorate.
And public opinion is always formed more of pop culture than academic history. The popular image of the Eastern front in western popular culture was for decades based off the memoirs of German generals which, to put it very mildly, were very loose with the truth (especially with respect to their own culpability in committing war crimes). Some of the more famous "fighting soldier" memoirs are themselves either largely or fully inventions.
You say it "doesn't require a conspiracy" right before you propose a conspiracy for why this major event was not talked about or even widely known among the people the event is supposed to have actually happened to. That is the opposite of the way major historical catastrophes impact public consciousness, where they are most talked about in the immediate aftermath and then the saliency of that event in the cultural consciousness fades over time.
"The Holocaust" was virtually unknown in the public, including in the West, until Holocaust remembrance took off in the 1960s and probably peaked in the public consciousness in the 1990s.
No matter how you spin this, it's a very strange course of events. You would expect 1. The event to be most salient in public consciousness in the immediate aftermath, which did not happen, 2. The event to be most salient in the consciousness the people closest to the events, which also did not happen.
Nobody understands this better than Jews, who have done more than anyone to blur the line between pop culture and academic history on this issue.
The chief historical consultant for Spielberg's award-winning documentary The Last Days was Dr. Michael Berenbaum. He was the Deputy Director of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, Project Director of the USHMM, Director of the USHMM's Holocaust Research Institute, President and CEO of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and currently a Professor of Jewish studies. Here he is storyboarding The Last Days.
Berenbaum is also an ordained Orthodox Rabbi.
This is from an interview of Rabbi Berenbaum:
This is the "conspiracy" that Revisionists accuse Jews like Berenbaum of admitting to here- producing Torah, creating a new chapter in the long history of Jewish religious myth. In the interpretation of Gentiles who lack the capacity to truly understand this impulse, if revealed, would just come across as shameless lying.
Berenbaum's role in The Last Days and as content designer for the US Holocaust Museum reveals the, frankly, dirty tricks that Revisionists have to contend with. The historical establishment colludes with Hollywood to produce utter tripe that manipulates the American public with shameless lies like The Last Days. Revisionists, often at great personal risk of political suppression and persecution, expose those lies.
After the Revisionists expose the pop culture manipulations as systematically featuring indefensible lies, people like you try to say "well The Last Days was just a pop culture sensation, its indefensible lies do not reflect on academic historians." I do not buy it.
The Last Days is absolutely a product of academic historians, and the quality of that work is undeniably a reflection of the quality and integrity of academic study of the Holocaust.
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