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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?
IMO, a stronger argument is 'how hard is it to conduct a genocide'?
The Ottoman Empire was capable of killing 600K-1.5M Armenians in 2 years during WW1. Islamist militias managed to kill between 300K and 3M in Bangladesh back in 1971, in 9 months! Nazi Germany was a far more capable state and they had six years in WW2 to do their killings.
I cannot believe that Nazi Germany, a country that could conquer Western Europe with apparent ease, a country that killed about 10M Soviet soldiers, would struggle killing 6 million unarmed and disorganized Jews. The whole logic of 'oh the gas chambers weren't big enough or it was too hard' is ridiculous when you consider all the other things the Germans were doing at the same time.
The theoretical possibility of something happening is not proof of it actually happening. The specific claims made as to what happened and how matter far more in determining that.
There is nothing ridiculous about the logic relating to the size of an alleged gas chamber and the amount of people you could possibly fit into it when the claim made is that people were fitted into it and killed at a necessitated rate. If it turns out that you can't fit as many people into the chamber as you would need to maintain the rate then what can you make of the claim? You would have to revise it.
Do you revise back to a different estimate of killings? One false claim doesn't disprove a narrative based on a thousand claims, afer all. Well, what if we do this for most of the claims of the holocaust and come away from them with the conclusion that the vast majority of them don't hold up to scrutiny all that well. Does it then matter that it sounded plausible to us that the Germans could have done it?
This is rather pertinent since it calls into question on just what we are grounding our belief in the holocaust. I mean, yeah, of course, it sounds plausible to me that the Germans could have done it. After all I've been told all my life that they were evil back in the day, on top of being industrious and efficient. If that is our basis for belief is it even possible for us to question the holocaust at all? Won't it always sound plausible to us that the evil regime would do whatever evil thing?
Does it matter whether Germany killed 3 million or 6 million Jews + another 6 million Slavs, gypsies, homosexuals and so on? Nobody particularly cares whether Soviet casualties in Stalingrad were 1M or 1.2M. For nearly all purposes, it is enough to say that they were very high.
So what if there was some kind of accounting error (or deliberate overestimates) and they revised figures at Auschwitz down? You can prove or disprove anything with statistics if you try hard enough, especially if it's 70 years ago and the fog of war is involved. I don't buy the 'because of the Holocaust Jews deserve unique privileges to never be called out for their disproportionate role in promoting harmful social trends with their outsized political, economic and media influence' line. You can see this in the Holocaust wikipedia page, which relegates the non-Jewish victims to 'other victims' when they make up about half the total. Poles, homosexuals and gypsies clearly do not have as much clout as Jews. And Bangladeshis have no clout at all, nobody's heard of their genocide in 1971. The notion that megadeaths buy you moral superiority points is ridiculous. Otherwise we'd never be able to say a bad word about Russia or China, yet we're clearly happy to do so.
But the Holocaust surely happened. There's definitely some reason that Jews hate Nazism so much! Even if they exaggerated it, a large-scale killing effort is a natural conclusion of Nazi ideology and is within their considerable capabilities.
Yeah, I think so.
Maybe it's just me but when I first learned that I had been heavily mislead by a supposed arbiter of truth I started questioning things that came from that arbiter. I mean, if they'd lie about the holocaust why wouldn't they lie about "Nazy ideology"? How could you trust them? Have you ever heard "Nazi ideology" expressed by an actual historical national socialist? Has anyone aside from select soundbites and quotes? Who selected those?
And don't get me started on the idea that this is just an error. If historians can collectively make errors like this there is no reason to take the field seriously.
I don't hold to that notion nor do I know anyone who does. The holocaust is pushed because jews have a lot of power in western society. There's nothing objective about the standard of placing it front and center in victimary discourse.
No it doesn't.
In a sort of man bites dog analogy: holocaust education, like you describe it, is like listening to a CNN pundit explain why people voted for Trump with a CGI rendering of Capitol Hill on fire in the background.
Very similar to how people will frame National Socialism as an elaborate Rube Goldberg style mechanism to hate jews. With a hatred that practically sprung out of thin air via philosophies and theories, Hitler was just a sort of 'whacky idea man' and the German people voted for him because they were insane.
To be clear, you're right to be tired of this kind of argument, often used by midwits, but most serious historians do concede that Hitler had a point about Germany's crushing Versailles debt and that he did well in reconstructing Germany after taking power. Conceding these facts doesn't exonerate his behaviour during the war.
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