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 -
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.
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.
Let's recap then. Historians claim that the "Final Solution" denoted the extermination of the Jews, using mostly gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Historians furthermore claim that the Wannsee Conference stands head and shoulders above other documents in proving the intent of the "final solution."
But if you actually press the issue, you learn that there is no mention of gas chamber extermination whatsoever in any of the Protocols, and that the Protocols explicitly describe the "final solution" as the evacuation of the Jews to the East. This is what Revisionists say the "final solution" was, and this is what the document says. The best the mainstream can do to support the "Wannsee Conference" legend is cite a couple paragraphs in a 10-page document that predicts labor attrition but otherwise makes no reference to gas chamber extermination. Here they lean very heavily on the accusation of "euphemism and coded language", because the language itself supports the Revisionist case.
Even in the most comprehensive, top-secret direct report from Globocnik to Himmler after the major resettlement actions, there was no reference or allusion whatsoever to mass gas chamber extermination. The "so-called evacuation" was discussed as an evacuation. So To_Mandalay, who relies very heavily on the trustworthiness and accuracy of NKVD documents which were released decades after the fact by the FSB, accuses the SS of using deception to hide their treatment of the Jews in their own top-secret internal reports.
In addition to Globocnik's report, which identifies the "so-called evacuation" as an evacuation, there is also:
Hans Frank, the Governor General, who would have known without any doubt that the "so-called evacuation" was a euphemism but he denied any knowledge of that and testified to his understanding of a policy of resettlement and not extermination.
Josef Bühler, Frank's deputy, who attended the Wannsee Conference and testified to the fact that the conference was about the resettlement of the Jews and not the extermination of the Jews.
Goering himself, who gave the famous "final solution" order to Heydrich, but at Nuremberg flatly denied that this was a policy of extermination, and stated it was a policy of resettlement.
Oswald Pohl, who worked directly with Himmler and Globocnik on Operation Reinhardt, and also testified to his understanding of a policy of resettlement and not a secret policy of gas chamber extermination. And so did the rest of his organization that was involved in this initiative.
All of these high-level officials directly involved in these events and related documents would have known about the actual policy underneath the "so-called resettlement" but they all maintained that this was not euphemism, it was the actual plan. Historians rely on the confessions of lower-level officials extracted under torture or duress in show-trials after the war (in many cases, decades after the war), and the dubious testimony of Jewish eyewitnesses.
But the coup-de-grace is the debate on the physical evidence which you will notice none of my interlocutors want to touch with a 10 foot pole. They want to say that 900,000 people were gassed, buried, unburied, cremated, and reburied in a known location within a small camp in Poland. But they do not want to discuss the physical evidence for that claim, they are only interested in demographic studies and a paragraph here and there from the Wannsee Protocols.
They know that the biggest strength in the Revisionist critique lies in the technical arguments made by Revisionists, technical arguments which were proven true at the alleged Majdanek extermination camp and which mainstream historians will never acknowledge or try to answer.
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