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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34435 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Her excavations didn't find any graves containing these huge quantities of remains

Thank you for clarifying that you're talking about weak Holocaust denial (it happened, but not on the orthodox scale) rather than denying that there were mass killings of Jews, on a greater scale than, say, David Irving would argue.

Her excavations weren't on on a scale to find such quantities as you describe, so that's not an interesting result. However, insofar as they looked, they apparently found lots of remains:

Brick walls and foundations from the gas chambers remain, as do massive amounts of human bone, including fragments now eroding out on the forested ground surface.

"For me, that was quite shocking," said project leader Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist who normally works with police to find modern murder victims. "These artifacts are there, and these human remains are on the surface, and they're not being recorded or recovered."

Indeed, when the archaeology team began digging to confirm the lidar results, they uncovered shoes, ammunition, and bones — including bones with cut marks indicating that the victims had been stabbed or otherwise assaulted.

The part of the Holocaust denial debates that you are describing doesn't seem parallel to the current state of the dialectic with respect to the Residential Schools mass graves, where the question is their existence rather than scale.

The part of the Holocaust denial debates that you are describing doesn't seem parallel to the current state of the dialectic with respect to the Residential Schools mass graves, where the question is their existence rather than scale.

I feel like there's also a substantial clouding with the fact that life on the Canadian frontier was genuinely tough with high youth mortality, and there's reasons why a residential school might have earnest reasons to have a mass grave nearby due to Tuberculosis outbreaks et al. People seem to reflexively frame this as though the region at that point in history was operating on 2020 healthcare norms.

True, although it's also the case that a lot of people were dying in Europe during WWII, though not on a scale that would explain all the missing Jews.

There is no aspect of Holocaust denial that claims Jews were not killed. It was a war where 50 million civilians were killed, including many Jews.

The Holocaust claim is that 750,000 - 1 million people were murdered and buried on the site. I strongly deny that, not just the scale being a little inflated. That is not the same as claiming Jews were not killed in the war, any more than denying the Kamloops graves is not "soft denial" if you acknowledge that children did indeed die of various causes at the time in question.

It is exactly the same. Mainstream historiography says "we identified the graves containing the remains of up to a million people with GPR, here they are, but we have not and will not excavate them." Holocaust deniers say they should be excavated, while mainstream authorities claim they do not need to be excavated to prove their existence. It's the same thing.

Her excavations weren't on on a scale to find such quantities as you describe, so that's not an interesting result.

The point is that the sheer scale of the crime in such a small, known location would make trivial to find huge quantities of remains. A small scale excavation ought to be able to find enormous quantities of remains extremely easily.

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