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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5680 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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This also presents a problem because "the case" for the Holocaust entirely relies on witness testimony

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.

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.

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.

“In early April 1943, on the clandestine radio, we heard about the outcry of Rabbi Stephen Wise [one of the leaders of U.S. Jewry] about 2 million Jews who were exterminated in Poland. We heard and were surprised: Didn’t the world know as yet that the number of the nation’s dead has already reached 6 million?” he said.

Several hours after his first speech, Unger also spoke at the convention of Hakibbutz Hameuhad kibbutz movement, which convened at Kibbutz Givat Brenner. There he cried out that “Six million martyrs are gone.” Two days later, his words made it to the front page of Haaretz...

About 15 years later, during Eichmann’s trial, chief prosecutor Gideon Hausner said that “In the consciousness of the nation the number 6 million has become sanctified.” But he added: “It’s not so simple to prove that. We did not use this number in any official document, but it became sanctified.” Now, thanks to Rappel, historical research had added another layer for understanding the context for the number.

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.

The post-war demographic data entirely comes from Soviet authorities

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

As I said elsewhere:

I have, actually, read the Sanning book, and found it, to put it mildly, underwhelming. It's essentially a series of it-just-so-happenses - it just so happens that the Polish demographical data on local Jewish population was vastly overcounted without either the Poles or the occupying Germans catching on to this, it just so happens that once this is established the same overcount can be expected to apply on other Eastern European nations as well, it just so happens that out of that population a larger-than-assumed share left for Soviet Union and the Soviets then deported/killed them (even though Soviet sources don't show such deportations and deaths - sure, such sources became available after the Sanning book was written, but that's no excuse for us to ignore them), it just so happens that there was a vast Jewish wave of emigration in the 30s to other countries not shown in official data etc.

And once you add all the it-just-so-happenses together, presto - the numbers advocated by the revisionists! Data massaging would be putting it lightly - and in many cases the data is essentially based on just the sort of testimonials, memoirs and what amounts to guesstimates by individual figures that revisionists don't generally consider to be valid (ie. the idea of Soviet deportations is justified by referring to several testimonies made in front of US House Select Committee on Communist Aggression) in establishing a Jewish genocide by Germans.

Beyond that, though, has there even been an attempt from the revisionist camp to make a similar demographic analysis post-Sanning, taking all the new data (methods of estimating populations in cases where demographic data is considered undertain, post-Soviet archives etc.) into account? If not, it speaks volumes that on this crucial field all that there seems to be is this one book from decades ago, while the general effort of the revisionist sphere seemingly concentrates on individual memoirs and technical camp details, and such.

Also, Karlin's predictive abilitites have not exactly shown their worth in 2022, regarding, well, most aspects of the Russian invasion and its presumed successes.

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.

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?

The Soviet census data that seems to mostly inform your position on this topic existed during a time when the Soviet-reported death toll at Asuchwitz was 4 million, and over 1 million at Majdanek. Presumably you would have dismissed Revisionist criticisms of those claims because, after all, there's the census data, right?

The Soviets claimed there were 7 gas chambers in Majdanek for many decades. This was disproven by Revisionists long before those "gas chambers" at that camp were officially revised at the Majdanek museum.

In other words, your narrow interest would have prevented you from accepting Revisionist arguments that have now been proven true. It seems that your acceptance of the mainstream historiography surrounding the operation of the alleged extermination camps is narrowly predicated on demographic analysis. I would never accept that as a reasonable position. Regardless of census data, we can and should critically analyze claims, like the claim of 7 gas chambers at Majdanek, because there is an interdependency of these issues.

Revisionists have proven beyond doubt that the Soviet Union:

  • Fabricated structures post-war to frame them as "homicidal gas chambers"

  • Misidentified crematorium and hygienic facilities as gas chambers after official investigation as early as 1944, before the liberation of Auschwitz- where identical claims were later made in 1945

  • Exaggerated death tolls by the order of millions and millions of people

  • Accused Germany of war crimes that it itself had committed. The lead investigators of Extraordinary State Commission report USSR-54 submitted to Nuremberg, blaming Germany for the Katyn Massacre (with eyewitnesses to support the accusation!) were the very same as the USSR-8 report on the "Auschwitz Death Camp" (with the addition of that biological quack Lysenko)

Therefore your narrow reliance on Soviet-provided data on the number of Jews in the Soviet Union post-war is putting far too much weight on an unreliable source. Even taking away the unknown variable of "intentional deception", there are many confounders that make any demographic study extremely difficult, and this is thoroughly analyzed by Sanning. There is more than enough uncertainty in that data to raise questions surrounding the official German policy with respect to the Jews, and whether this policy actually was "extermination" as claimed by historians.

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!")

You say that there are "various facets" to the historical debate, but Revisionists are the ones engaging all those facets while your interests are admittedly narrow. Revisionists were the first ones to publish a manuscript solely dedicated to the demographic problem in question. The mainstream response did not come until 8 years later. To repeat: Sanning came before any detailed demographic analysis from the mainstream camp, and of course the 6 million lore as "established history" preceded all study of it by many years. So to say that Revisionists "are not interested" in this issue is a complete inversion of reality- Revisionists were the ones who pressed the issue whereas the "6 million" number was never based on any such study in the first place.

Revisionists engage the demographic debate, but they also emphasize the technical debate which is ignored by you and mainstream historians. They say 900,000 people were murdered, buried, unburied, cremated on makeshift open-air pyres, and reburied in a small camp in Poland in a matter of months.... How did that happen? What is the evidence for it? What would such an operation have required? Is it even possible it happened?

But those questions do not capture your interest, which is fine, as nobody can force you to be interested in anything. But a historiographical debate cannot ignore these questions- these questions are only ignored because they cannot be answered in mainstream historiography. I believe you know this too, which is why you explain you are not interested in technical issues surrounding the operation of the alleged extermination camps. I will again repeat that these technical arguments were proven true at Majdanek, and so they are worthy of consideration in the other alleged extermination camps where identical claims are made.

It is unusual but certainly possible to be interested in the Holocaust debate and not be interested in the details surrounding alleged gas chambers and extermination camps, but if you are not interested in the latter then you are not going to be able to engage or appraise the Revisionist position on these issues.

Therefore your narrow reliance on Soviet-provided data on the number of Jews in the Soviet Union post-war is putting far too much weight on an unreliable source.

Again: that is relying on reports from actual people living in Poland. Before Germans invaded Jews were everywhere, after they were not there. Unlike with say expulsion of Germans we have no records of this people arriving anywhere.

The Soviet census data that seems to mostly inform your position on this topic existed during a time with the Soviet-reported death toll at Asuchwitz was 4 million, and over 1 million at Majdanek. Presumably you would have dismissed Revisionist criticisms of those claims because, after all, there's the census data, right?

For the third time, the reference here was not census data, but internal NKVD data in Soviet archives, opened for research after the fall of the Soviet Union, regarding the specific figures for Polish Jews moving to Soviet Union and the number of those Jews transferred to other areas. I am honestly not sure why there would be room for debate if this misrepresentation continues to be made again and again.

Revisionists engage the demographic debate,

This and previous engagements suggest that they "engage the demographic debate" by having one book, from 50 years ago, which is essentially thrown at the other party, with any further efforts to discuss the book's actual contents then dismissed and every effort made to return to the territory the revisionists prefer to debate.

More comments

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?"

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?

This is unnecessarily antagonistic, don't post like this please.

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