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 -
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Lastly, The Alternative Hypothesis - who you may know as one of the more popular (and high-quality) HBD YouTube channels back in the pre-censorship days recently dove into this issue and produced this document. I looked through it and it seemed to pretty closely follow Sanning, but I'll mention it here because it's very interesting to note Alt Hype is breaking towards the Revisionist side of the debate.
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It is absolutely true that the strongest territory of the Revisionists follows from - is there evidence that what mainstream historiography claims happened actually happened? - and that speaks volumes... You will not enter that territory because you clearly know enough about the debate to know that mainstream historiography cannot answer the Revisionist case. So you will prefer the comfortable corner of relying on some data points from the NKVD on a tumultuous demographic question, in order to handwave the large body of Revisionist scholarly work and a suspicious lack of evidence for what is being claimed.
The most recent edition of Sanning's work is 2015. The "Holocaust Handbooks" are meant to provide a definitive Revisionist position on various issues, so updating Sanning's work is entirely appropriate especially since his core arguments were not addressed in the mainstream response. For example, whereas Sanning spent 20 pages explaining the problem of the demographic development of Polish Jewry in the years 1931-1939, the mainstream response only deals with it in two sentences:
The mainstream response does not engage or acknowledge Sanning's argument, it just makes the extrapolation that Sanning argued is invalid.
Likewise the mainstream response overtly made no effort to distinguish between Jews who died in the Soviet Union outside the German sphere of occupation:
You can make a moral case for this catch-all approach, even including Red Army soldiers or those who perished in Stalin's custody as "Holocaust victims", but the mainstream methodology further confounds the issue in determining German policy and an alleged mass gas chamber extermination based on their study. The mainstream study makes no effort quantify these various categories.
Sanning's observations regarding the evacuation of Polish Jews into the Soviet Union relies on entirely mainstream sources, and was widely reported within Zionist circles. Per the mainstream response to Sanning, any of those Jews that died for any reason, even those that never came under German occupation, are counted as "Holocaust victims" which confounds the controversies under discussion.
The mainstream response to Sanning also did not contain a single section on the problem of Jewish post-war emigration from Europe. It doesn't mention the large-scale migration after the war which has become known as a modern Exodus.
This is to say, a new volume would be largely a restatement of Sanning since his work has withstood the mainstream response.
Revisionists were the first ones to enter the demographic debate. Meanwhile, mainstream historians, like you, maintain a policy of categorically refusing to acknowledge or engage Revisionist technical arguments which have been proven correct in many important cases.
Sanning's estimate for the pre-war Jewish population of Poland is way too low. His analysis doesn't even mention that nearly half of Jewish births in pre-war Poland went unregistered, so his conclusion that death rate surpassed birth rate is unsustainable.
He has 100,000 Jews leaving Poland every year between 1933 and 1939, based on a single cite from the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich in the early 50s. I cannot access the primary source, but I am unaware of any other source with numbers this high. In *Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland 1919-1939," by Joseph Marcus, drawing on a variety of sources, estimates roughly 150,000 Jewish emigrants from Poland between 1931 and 1939. Half of these went to Palestine, which had displaced the US as the primary destination of Polish Jews, so there is no room for extra hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews floating around the rest of the world.
Sanning cites Polish government statistics between 1934 and 1937 as showing 75,527 Jewish emigrants from Poland, but discards them as a "worthless" underestimate. For roughly the same period (1932 to 1936), Marcus cites a little more than 85,000. It is believable that the Polish authorities might miss 10,000 or so illegal emigrants, but it is not really believable that they would undercount Jewish emigration by a factor of more than five, as Sanning needs for his thesis to work.
Sanning doesn't really provide any grounds for removing 700,000 Jews from the standard estimate of Polish Jewish population in 1939.
@Stefferi by the way, I don't know if you've ever heard of or read this book, but if you are interested in demography it is a pretty interesting look at Polish Jewry in the inter-war years.
Thanks, added to my Goodreads to-read list (which admittedly also has a thousand other books, like all good Goodreads to-read lists).
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From the 1958 publication of “Opinion of the Institute for Contemporary History”:
This is a mainstream source. You can cite other sources but you are just affirming the uncertainty of the problem...
The heavily-urbanized Hungarian Jewish population also experienced considerable excess deaths over births after 1927, reaching 0.5% annual decrease in 1938 (Sanning p. 33). On the other hand, the Mainstream source extrapolates the excess births over deaths of Polish Jews from the 1931 census as a constant through 1939, despite the sharp demographic decline which was measured within these heavily urbanized Hungarian Jews during the same period. It would also be unusual to assume constant high-fertility during a period of high emigration due to the push factors described above. Sanning's estimation tracks with data in Hungary, whereas the Mainstream study assumes no decline at all in fertility during this period. Sanning's methodology is clearly superior on this front.
Finally, Sanning and Revisionsits do not claim that these numbers or the sources provided are definitive. The entire purpose is to demonstrate the variance and uncertainty, and Revisionists are able to do so using entirely mainstream sources.
It's also worth recognizing here the controversial 1939 Soviet census:
So the Soviets said that "officially" the 1937 population should have been 170-172 million, so the real 1937 census that showed a population of 162,000,000 was a conspiracy by "enemies of the people" which was squashed by the "brave NKVD" in the statistical bodies. Of course these adjustments are considered to be false and motivated by propaganda purposes.
This is proof of Soviet manipulation of population data. It's desperate that anyone would treat population numbers coming from the NKVD post-war, even internal numbers, as beyond reproach.
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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?
This is unnecessarily antagonistic, don't post like this please.
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