This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Dear "revisionists", where are all the Jews?
A couple of months ago, I had a discussion with the self-proclaimed "revisionist" @SecureSignals concerning the veracity of the Holocaust, always a fun topic.
There was a bit of back-and-forth on the archaeological evidence and witness testimony, which I eventually gave up on because SS (very subtle username, by the way) clearly knew much more about the subject than me, and could thus, as the saying goes, drag me down to his level and beat me with experience. Calculating the number of corpses that can fit in a given volume definitely felt like I was being dragged down a few levels.
A more fruitful line of questioning is that of where millions of Jews disappeared to. In response to SS's accusation that:
I said:
SS replied with arguments as to why the "official narrative" on Treblinka is implausible, which I was unable to argue against because, as I said, I'm not familiar with all the details of every Nazi camp. It is possible that the consensus figures for a single camp are wrong. As in the Jasenovac example, this has already happened (though it should be noted that most of the victims at Jasenovac were not Jewish). Even if true, this is at most evidence that the consensus on Treblinka is incorrect. It says nothing about the other camps, where the vast majority of the murders happened. In my reply, I said:
As far as I can tell, SS never addressed any of this. It seems some of the comments in the thread have since been deleted, which apparently hides all child comments when viewing the thread directly, though they are still visible on the profile page. This makes it hard to reconstruct the exchange, but looking at SS's profile, I can't find anything where he addressed my argument. From his post below on Holocaust education, we can infer that he does indeed believe that not just Treblinka but the entire Holocaust is fake, a position for which he has not provided any evidence.
So, to SS and any other "revisionists" who may be lurking: Where are all the Jews?
There are revisionists who believe that Jews died due to diseases like typhus as well as from starvation, but that this does not meet the criterion of purposeful holocaust / genocide. Or, you could even say it fits the criterion of “negligent genocide”, if you wanted to use such a term, but that this again does not reach the same peak of evil required for conscious and systematic genocide. According to historian Richard Bessel’s 2009 work on Germany in the year 1945, praised by the NYT for its sober and objective analysis, give or take 500,000 Germans starved to death or died from malnutrition in the final months of the war. If Germany in all its ethnocentric might was not able to feed half a million of its own people in 1945, then clearly they lacked the power and the will to feed those in concentration camps in 1945. As for why Jews were placed in camps to begin with, it must be noted that (according to those like Winston Churchill, no fan of Nazism) many of the original Soviets were Jewish, to a degree that the system was labeled Judeo-Bolshevism. The leaders of the failed November revolution in Germany were Jewish. Additionally, the international Jewish community had figuratively declared war on Germany (cue those old newspapers clippings “Judea Declares War in Germany”; remember Kristalnacht was a response to Jewish boycotts among the Allies). It makes sense in war that you quarter your ideological enemies. As Judaism conceived itself as a nation and not simply a religion, and has historically conceived itself as such, and actually still does today, it makes sense to not have a large group of foreign nationals roam free in your country. Hell, if we go to war with China, I would not exactly be opposed to first gen Chinese placed in a guarded quarter of a city (hopefully replete with all necessary accommodations and more, even swimming pools and a concert hall). If I lived in China, I would expect no less for myself down to the second generation. Hence why America had concentration camps for Japanese. I am not justifying Germany creating camps for those they see as a national threat. I’m explaining why they did this. As the reasoning makes sense from a position other than “we want to genocide them”, the mere existence of camps does not prove the holocaust.
Anton Joachimsthaler, another giant of historical studies, notes that Germany was aware of impending shortages and acted accordingly. As such you can imagine that they chose to redistribute goods that went to camps, to Germans in cities. He estimates up to one million Germans died from food insufficiency in the last year of the war. And this is sufficient in my mind to prove that, had Germans not dramatically gassed Jews, a huge majority would have starved to death anyway. In fact, it’s crazy to think there could be any holocaust survivors at all, given the level of food insufficiency. Indeed, the mere existence of holocaust survivors makes one puzzled as to why a genocidal regime would direct any food to concentration camp residents as opposed to Germans in cities. Why did they not all die, as you would expect from their genocidal sociopathy? Lastly, for another source, Ian Kershaw‘s 2011 work specifically mentions the destructiom of supply railways as a reason for the starvations. He pins the number at 500,000 dead from food insufficiency.
I am definitely not against revisionism discussions, because the holocaust is one of the most important events of the 20th century that still affects us today. The more important an event, the more it deserves people to attempt to nitpick and over-analyze. There is, of course, enormous reason for why the Allies would want it to be true that Germany gassed Jews rather than allowed them to starve. It weakens Germany’s morale, making them pliant to influence we still exert today; it allows for a geopolitical justification for the state of Israel that makes sense to the Western palette; it repudiates anti-semitism once and for all; and it staves off any criticism of the Allies for how it targeted supply chains and railways (not that this criticism would ever be legitimate).
Remember that in WW1, we used a ton of propaganda against Germany which was then proven demonstrably false. This was called atrocity propaganda and professors wrote books about it after the war. Atrocity propaganda is not unusual. It wouldn’t be some “new thing” the Allies tried after WWII, it would be the Anglophere strategy used from the Belgian Congo Propaganda War through WW1.
Even if I would accept claims that gas chambers and death camps were fake, then genocide by starvation is genocide anyway - so it does not change much.
And forcing Jews into ghettos created by Germans and trying to starve them is, I think, not disputed even by resident SS man?
Of course it would change much. Starvations are not unusual among the losing powers of war, and the starvation would be out of Germany’s control. There is also less planning, foresight, and direct involvement, which obviously reduces culpability. As an example, if a losing Ukraine has civilians starve to death, our media would blame Russia. If POWs starved to death during this same time, our media would blame… Russia.
Germans were deliberately starving Jews, imprisoning in newly created ghettos, forbidding them to work and so on - long before Germans were starving in cities.
Tragic situation ghettos was not out of Germany’s control, it was not even accidental or unintended mismanagement, it was entirely deliberate. And that is before we even start considering death camps.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link