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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5681 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for December 2022

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:

@naraburns:

@Bernd:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@RandomRanger:

@Iconochasm:

Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022

@zeke5123:

@ymeskhout:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@gattsuru:

@Southkraut:

@Bernd:

@problem_redditor:

@FCfromSSC:

@urquan:

@gemmaem:

Sexulation

@RococoBasilica:

@problem_redditor:

Holocaustianity

@johnfabian:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@SecureSignals:

Coloniazism

@gaygroyper100pct:

@screye:

@urquan:

@georgioz:

Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022

@SecureSignals:

@Titus_1_16:

@Dean:

@cjet79:

@JarJarJedi:

@gattsuru:

@YE_GUILTY:

@aqouta:

@HlynkaCG:

Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022

@MathiasTRex:

@To_Mandalay:

Robophobia

@gattsuru:

@IGI-111:

@NexusGlow:

Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022

@FCfromSSC:

@gattsuru:

@LacklustreFriend:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

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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:

What's the specific reason for a neutral observer to doubt the specific testimony from these accounts?

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:

Q. When working at the crematorium did you come across the corpses of children?

A. No.

Q. Mr. Mandelbaum, the records clearly indicate that there were children in the transports.

A. But I didn’t see it! You are speaking with a serious man, and I have lived through a great deal. I didn’t come here to lie to the two of you. If I don’t know something, I say I don’t know. I did not see children. Maybe there weren’t any on my shift.

Q. Or perhaps your memory has erased these painful images.

A. There were women. But children? After all, I would remember children going to the gas, how they are burned.” (pp. 49/45)

To justify this unique affirmation by Mandelbaum, the interviewers refer in a footnote to psychological studies of ex-inmates from which it appears that “in eyewitnesses, memory was highly selective” (pp. 49/45, Note 65).

Q. When you began working in the crematorium, the transports of Hungarian Jews were still arriving, and there were a lot of children among them.

A. When we were working three shifts, two other transports could arrive on the other shifts. And have you heard about the destruction of the Gypsies in Auschwitz?

Q. Of course.

A. So, a multitude of people were murdered, and I never saw a single Gypsy on the pyre. I only heard from the other guys that there was some kind of fighting with them. They were obviously burned on another shift. I repeat that, when I was working, there were only childless transports.” (pp. 50/48)

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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