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 -
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.
You are disingeniously moving the goal posts because you cannot address my very simple point. The starting point of the discussion was not the claim "all or most Jews were murdered via gas chambers", it was your claim that:
To which I pointed out that there was, for Europe.
And no matter how much you try to avoid the issue, there is clear, explicit evidence, that there was a German plan to kidnap millions of Jews (and yes, this number is also in the document, p.5-7), murder them via forced labour, and "treat" the survivors. Your obsession with the fact that this murderous undertaking was euphemistically called an "evacuation" when the very document from which this nomenclature stems explicitly details its murderous implications is rather telling.
But since you are so keen on physical evidence, I'd like to ask you where the evidence of resettlement is. Where are the thousands of Eastern cities and villages to which the Jews were evacuated? And where are they and their descendants now?
So @SecureSignals are you going to continue to ignore this?
Why would I address it when you aren't even trying to defend mainstream historiography?
Mainstream historiography states that "evacuation" was a euphemism for "one-way ticket to homicidal gas chambers", where millions were allegedly murdered and buried in known locations- and precisely 0 of the mass graves allegedly associated with this secret plan have ever been excavated. You refuse to engage in any sort of debate for the physical evidence for that claim, like everyone else who has argued with me so far. And you furthermore try to take the non-mainstream position that "evacuation" was a euphemism for "murdered with forced labor."
You are quite the Revisionist already, since your proposal for the denotation of the "euphemism" stands in contradiction to mainstream historiography!
The Germans predicted high mortality with evacuation and labor, that's true. You can call that murderous, that's no sweat off my back. Although forced labor in the Soviet Union would have to be regarded as murderous as well. You could also call being conscripted and sent to the front line "murderous." You don't think the German, or Allied governments for that matter, would be aware of high mortality for conscripts being sent to the front line? "We will deploy workers here and we expect high mortality" is less murderous than conscription for active combat?
Documents show that these workers were very important for the war effort, and the German government was desperate to reduce the mortality rate in the concentration camps. The head of the WVHA sent orders to all the concentration camps demanding reductions in the mortality rate of workers (during the period when the German government was allegedly murdering them in gas chambers).
Yes, the German government deported the Jews and concentrated them in camps where they were made to perform labor. That is very different from the allegations in mainstream historiography- of chemical slaughterhouses where millions were murdered in makeshift gas chambers disguised as shower rooms and buried on-site, which you aren't even bothering to defend in your comments.
The reason it's not a euphemism is because evacuation actually meant evacuation, it wasn't code for "murdered in gas chambers" as claimed in mainstream historiography.
Because Germans were famous for not-terrible-treatment of conquered areas where everyone had first-hand experience of USSR.
Oh wait, they were so terrible that people as result initially welcomed USSR as liberators (despite that things then went almost as bad as "liberation" by Third Reich). And put plenty of effort into sabotaging German war effort to help USSR.
Germans had hilariously poor treatment of potential recruits and workers, they actually believed that they as subhumans and failed to even pretend otherwise.
This is hilariously backwards. Ukranians volunteered for the German War effort at such a rate that Germany had one of the largest foreign volunteer armies in history, composed mostly of slavs and Soviet citizens. IIRC it was something like a million Soviet citizens volunteered for the German war effort. The legacy of eager Ukranian support for Germany lingers to this day.
What happened was as the Soviets advanced an enormous number of people fled to west and caused overcrowding and catastrophic conditions as Germany was being destroyed from all sides. Then the Allies roll in and say "look at all the people the Germans murdered", which fine, if you want to say that they were under German custody so dying in any way counts as "murder", that is up to you. But that isn't the essence of the Holocaust lore, that essence are the matters that none of you want to talk about because you know the case for it is very weak.
It is well known that the Germans gave some prisoners at Auschwitz the option to either remain in the camp to be liberated by the Soviets or flee west with them. Many chose to go with the Germans, if you can believe that, with Elie Wiesel being among the prisoners who chose to go with the Germans rather than wait for the Russians.
not checking this, but given how "evacuations" were defined by Germans I would be suspicious what will happen with remaining ones. Also, if people there were aware of what awaits people "liberated" by Soviets vs actually liberated, then trying to escape both Third Reich and USSR would be a good idea.
(See German armies trying to escape to Elbe’s shore to not end under USSR rule, with help to substantial numbers of civilians marking a rare case of Wermacht doing something good during WW II)
And guess, how many Poles volunteered? And why ratio was so low despite USSR being evil, dangerous and both fact known widely in Poland?
Elie Wiesel and his father were given the option to wait for the Russians or go with the Germans, and they chose the latter.
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