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 -
That’d just lead you pointlessly down a rabbit hole in this context. First of all, you’re starting off from the assumption that genocide is defined by proportionate numbers of victims and not genocidal intent, which I’m sure many people will find objectionable, plus you’ll have to come up with accurate numbers of potential and actual victims, which again leave a lot of room for disagreement. If you want to argue with Holocaust revisionists, in most cases I’m sure it makes more sense to question their ideas about Holocaust remembrance being an industry, its memory being weaponized to further the goals of the Israel lobby and enforce ethnomasochism etc.
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One thing that has impressed me in the Revisionist space, unlike a lot of heterodox spaces where everyone has their own cockamamie theory, is that there's 100% consensus on the core claims. The claims are:
There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry
There were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms used to exterminate millions of Jews
The "six million" number is a propaganda/symbolic figure that has no relation to actual Jewish population losses
I would say the high-end of Jewish population losses among Revisionist estimates is 1.5-2 million, but most estimates are lower than that. The question of whether or not these events count as genocidal is a semantic question that I have not seen treated by Revisionists.
I don't have a problem with, even if you take those 3 claims away, still calling the real parts a "genocide." It really is all about the three claims above- no more and no less.
I really don't want to get into this, mainly because of the reasons described by 2rafa above, but:
Not for the world, but for Europe there definitely was. This is well-documented in the protocols of the Wannsee conference. It's full of euphemisms, but it clearly states:
Expulsion efforts have been unsatisfactory
We are now switching to an approach we'll call "evacuation to the east" where we will force the victims into hard labour
A majority of people will not survive this
The survivors will have to be "treated" as not to serve as a "gamete" for the reconstruction of European Judaism
Mixed children will, with some exceptions, be expelled, forced into "evacuation", or sterilised.
This is what historians say to hand-wave the fact that the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, a direct reading, supports the Revisionist case for the "final solution." Revisionists claim the "final solution" was the expulsion of the Jews from the European sphere, and the minutes from the Wannsee Conference are evidence of that interpretation. The plan was to concentrate them in the East and then resettle them out of Europe, Madagascar was the most serious proposal as that territory would be negotiated from France, after the war. Although there is evidence that a reservation in (planned to be conquered) Russian territory was also considered.
It is historians who say that the minutes are full of "camouflage and euphemism" because a direct reading of the documents simply does not support their case.
No. The minutes are explicitly stating that the expulsion approach is lacking, expulsion has been banned, and that a different path is to be taken. This path means deportation to the east for forced labour, during the course of which a "majority" of victims is expected to die. This is explicitly in the minutes. It then states that the survivors have to be "treated" as not to serve as the "gamete of a new Jewish reconstruction". This is a euphemism but it will be very hard to argue that it doesn't mean killing, given that this plan is explicitly introduced as an alternative to expulsion.
The different path was evacuation to the East. This is what is explicitly described in documents and this is what Revisionists claim the plan was. Historians say that "evacuation to the East" was coded language for gassed in gas chambers. But a direct reading of the document supports the Revisionist case for the German plan.
In the same way, Himmler will refer to a camp, like Sobibor, as a "Transit Camp", which is what Revisionists claim it was, while historians will say "Transit camp" was "coded language" for death camp. The historians rely on assumptions of euphemism and coded language while the documents supports the Revisionist case.
Transit? Between what? Somehow people were ending in camps and disappearing there, never heard about again.
And even if we believe all that (and there is no good reason for that), then according to own plans they were expecting that they will be enslaved and most of them will quickly die.
Seriously, starving people to death in concentration camps is not better - in any way - than gas chambers. So even if this specific denial you peddle would be 100% accurate then it would not change much, except historians being even more suspicious.
And your outright "mass murder of Jews never happened" is just absurd. Are you also denying that Germans mass-murdered Gypsies? Poles?
And thanks to RococoBasilica, nice to have confirmation that you were lying or being misleading about "no documents".
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It doesn't. Just read it. It's like 10 pages.
And I am telling you, for the third time, that the protocol explicitly states what this "evacuation" entails:
forced labour (p.7)
which means that a majority will die (p.7)
the survivors will have to be "treated" as not to serve as the "gamete of a new Jewish reconstruction" (p.8)
The Wannsee Conference was organized after Goering gave a famous order to Reinhard Heydrich “to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question.” Reinhard Heydrich was killed by ;artisans during the war.
But after the war Goering flatly denied the exterminationist interpretation of the "final solution" in the above context:
The Wannsee Protocol explicitly establishes that this was the planned proposal:
Here, the protocols explicitly identify the "evacuation of the Jews to the East" as the planned proposal. This is also how Goering describes the plan. This is also how Lina Heydrich, Reinhard Heydrich's wife (the one who organized the Wannsee Conference and appointed by Goering) denied the Holocaust and said the plan was to implement a 'territorial solution’ as described in the protocols.
The Wannsee Conference makes no mention of a gas chamber extermination policy whatsoever. A direct reading supports the Revisionist case, and historians have to rely on the accusation of camouflaged language and euphemism.
Josef Bühler, the deputy governor of the General Government and attendee of the Wannsee Conference testified at the IMT as a defence witness for Hans Frank, and claimed that the purpose of Wannsee was to discuss the forced resettlement of Jews in the northeast of Europe:
I am getting incredibly annoyed by your evasive tactics. Nothing of what you wrote adresses my point, namely what the so-called "evacuation" was expected to entail, as described by the Wannsee minutes, pages 7-8, and that, furthermore, this "evacuation" is explicitly introduced in the protocol as an alternative to expulsion efforts.
We already know that this plan was called an "evacuation". That is not new (in fact, I mention it in my very first reply) and is about as good an argument as saying that North Korea is a democratic people's republic because of its name. I am also not surprised that war criminals would deny their war crimes. The main issue still stands. Here again quoted for your convenience. Stop evading, adress the issue.
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Boy, it sure would've been a big coup if somehow, someone had managed to get a hold of the guy who prepared those minutes and asked some questions about it. Maybe have a big trial or something, I'm just spitballing. Then we could really get to the bottom of this. Too bad it never happened.
I would like to note that this entire time Mr. SS has been using the exact "levering" tactic I wrote about in the comment that sparked this whole chain of discussion. Of course it's all disingenuous, and there's ultimately no end to it because the impetus isn't just a bullish sort of contrarianism but also (rather obviously) a hate for Jews. There's no way to win on logic or a sound argument because that's not what put him in his position.
I don't think there is much point to getting into the trial of Eichmann when our dear SS hasn't even read the Wannsee minutes. Which is awfully suspicious, given his encyclopedic knowledge of WWII trivia.
Quite so.
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I think the main thing that people are actually interested in is an explicit accounting of what you think has happened with the rest of the Jews (ie 4 out of 6 million in the usual number). I haven’t seen you address this issue in the discussion.
Here and here. I linked to Sanning, who among other things, concludes an over-estimate of the 1939 Polish Jewish population due to fertility decline and emigration in the interwar period, an under-estimate of the post-war Jewish population in the Soviet Union. Mainstream studies have also neglected the large scale deportations of Polish Jews, and their subsequent mortality, into the Soviet interior and Siberia.
On the other side, the "six million" number was ordained when the official Soviet-reported death tolls at Auschwitz and Majdanek were 4 million and 1.5 million, respectively. Today those official numbers are 1.1 million and 68,000, but despite these mutli-million reductions in death tolls over the decades the sacred number remains unchanged. Demographic studies are not a substitute for the historical burden of proof to show where and how these six million died, so we have to rely on other evidence to investigate these claims.
It would probably serve the reader well to also read @Stefferi's excellent reply here.
To which you respond by retreating to a position of "Well, it's complicated".
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