I did not engage, mainly because I agreed with your assessment that this is not the place. But since @faul_sname already opened that can of words and since I very much disagree with your description of our discussion, here it goes.
They do support the mainstream perspective, they are just defending the mainstream narrative with a non-mainstream framing. It's called a Motte and Bailey... the mainstream claims that the "Final Solution" was the German government's decision to exterminate the Jews in gas chambers, and that they exterminated millions of people in gas chambers and buried them in known locations. But they don't try to defend that narrative- they functionally concede the Revisionist position that the "Final Solution" denoted the deportation and concentration of the Jews East. They then try to say that the latter still counts as an "extermination plan" because of a single paragraph in a document that predicts high mortality from forced labor deployed East. Nobody except for Revisionists considers that to be the "Final Solution."
I did none of that. The only substantive position I claimed in our discussion was that there was a plan for the extermination of European Jews and that this is evidenced by the minutes of the Wannsee conference. I have been very clear about this, repeatedly, just as I repeatedly refused to be cast in the role of a stand-in for every "mainstream historian" ever:
I am not interested in where you moved the goalposts for the umphteenth time. I am no mainstream historian, I am no historian at all. I am, however, interested in this eyebrow-raising claim of yours:
"There was no German plan for the physical extermination of world Jewry"
But there was, for Europe. There were plans to "rake through Europe, West to East" (p.8), to round up "roughly 11 million" (p.5) Jews, subject them to forced labour, during the course of which the majority was expected to die (p.7) AND "treat" the survivors so they would not serve as the "gamete of a new Jewish reconstruction" (p.8).
It is this second part that you once again ignored, willfully, for the fifth time. I ask you again: what do you think "treatment" means in this context?
This, my dear SS, is no mere labour expedition, this is planned genocide. How many of the victims that were rounded up during this process later died in gas chamber is immaterial for this discussion.
"You can call that murderous, that's no sweat off my back."
I call that genocidal.
NB that, in order for us to get to this point, I had to repeat my claim over and over and over again because you kept evading my very simple objection.
All you had to do in order to get me off your back was to admit that yes, the minutes of the Wannsee conference contain a genocidal plan. You would then have been free to save your revisionist account in any number of ways: you could have questioned whether this plan was followed through, what authority the attendants had, and so on. And I wouldn't have been able to engage further because I lack the expertise for that.
What you did instead was pure sophistry.
First you claimed that the Wannsee protocol describes a plan to expulse European Jews from Europe. Which would have fooled anyone who didn't read past page 5 of that document where this plan is explicitly abandonded. You knew this was a lie because you quoted correspondence to me stating exactly that.
Then you claimed that gathering people for forced labour was a totally ordinary thing to do, completely ignoring the part in which it states that a majority of the victims were expected to die and the survivors "treated" as not so function as a "gamete for a new Jewish reconstruction".
When I finally got you to stop ignoring this latter part, you started claiming that the "treatment" in question meant that the expulsion plan which is explicitly abandonded in the document was to be followed through after all.
You ignored my objections to those claims.
Nobody would call the expulsion of the Germans an extermination plan
I call it pretty fucking murderous in practice. I have family who died on that track.
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Notes -
I did not engage, mainly because I agreed with your assessment that this is not the place. But since @faul_sname already opened that can of words and since I very much disagree with your description of our discussion, here it goes.
I did none of that. The only substantive position I claimed in our discussion was that there was a plan for the extermination of European Jews and that this is evidenced by the minutes of the Wannsee conference. I have been very clear about this, repeatedly, just as I repeatedly refused to be cast in the role of a stand-in for every "mainstream historian" ever:
NB that, in order for us to get to this point, I had to repeat my claim over and over and over again because you kept evading my very simple objection.
All you had to do in order to get me off your back was to admit that yes, the minutes of the Wannsee conference contain a genocidal plan. You would then have been free to save your revisionist account in any number of ways: you could have questioned whether this plan was followed through, what authority the attendants had, and so on. And I wouldn't have been able to engage further because I lack the expertise for that.
What you did instead was pure sophistry.
First you claimed that the Wannsee protocol describes a plan to expulse European Jews from Europe. Which would have fooled anyone who didn't read past page 5 of that document where this plan is explicitly abandonded. You knew this was a lie because you quoted correspondence to me stating exactly that.
Then you claimed that gathering people for forced labour was a totally ordinary thing to do, completely ignoring the part in which it states that a majority of the victims were expected to die and the survivors "treated" as not so function as a "gamete for a new Jewish reconstruction".
When I finally got you to stop ignoring this latter part, you started claiming that the "treatment" in question meant that the expulsion plan which is explicitly abandonded in the document was to be followed through after all.
You ignored my objections to those claims.
I call it pretty fucking murderous in practice. I have family who died on that track.
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