site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35009 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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.

12
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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:

It's astounding how much nonsense you are willing to believe without any concrete physical evidence or without the claims even being remotely possible. But believing this story requires belief in the impossible, because the official narrative makes impossible claims only supported by witnesses who lack credibility and have an obvious motive to lie.

I said:

The best piece of physical evidence I have is the missing six million Jews. Where did they all go? If Treblinka was merely a transit camp, where did the Jews transit afterwards? Compare the pre-war and post-war census data in Europe, especially Eastern Europe. Even accounting for emigration, millions of Jews disappeared.

In general, I think census data is a reliable source for estimating the number of victims. I'm not familiar with the details of the Holocaust in Europe as a whole, so the best example I can provide is the Jasenovac concentration camp. Shortly after WWII, it was estimated that around 600,000 people were killed there. These estimates were widely accepted, including by the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust and the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Later claims went as high as a million or more. In the 1980s, two researchers independently arrived at much lower estimates based on demographic data. Eventually, after the end of communist censorship, a new consensus formed that the number of victims is around 100,000, an order of magnitude lower than previous estimates.

This shows that it is entirely to possible for new research to greatly lower the estimated number of victims. There is no conspiracy to suppress the truth. Indeed, despite the number six million being embedded in popular culture, some credible historians place it at closer to five million. Yad Vashem says "the number of victims was between five and six million".

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:

You clearly know much more about Treblinka than I do, so I'm not sure if I can provide any good counterarguments. Let's suppose, then, for the sake of the argument, that the archaeological evidence for the "official narrative" is insufficient. That means we don't know what exactly was done with the Jews.

Other evidence exists for the claim that over 700,000 people were killed at Treblinka, such as the Höfle Telegram and the Korherr Report. But looking at them, thanks to the euphemisms used, I suppose they might also be interpreted as supporting the transit camp theory.

However, you did not address the question in my previous post: if Treblinka was merely a transit camp, where did the Jews transit from there? Where were the hundreds of thousands of eyewitnesses after the war who testified that they passed through Treblinka and were peacefully resettled?

And more broadly, demographic data has millions of Jews unaccounted for after the war. Where did they all go? Or do you accept the rest of the "official narrative" and are only sceptical with regard to Treblinka? Auschwitz had proper crematoria, with fuel and everything – do you believe that over a million people were killed there?

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?

Even reading Tacitus shows the same continuity of character.

Tacitus also says that the Germans nailed people to trees and burned them alive as sacrifices to Wotan.

The Germans wouldn't have wasted delousing chemicals to kill people or have wasted forced labor that would allow them to feel self-righteous in perpetuity.

Old people and children are not wasted force labor, they're dead weight.

The notion that Germans would use euphemisms in the one extant documented meeting concerning the implementation details is absurd to anyone that has ever met a rank-and-file German.

Here is Himmler talking openly about the extermination of European Jews without use of code-words in the Posen speech of October 6 1943:

In this connection, I may comment before this very tightly knit group on a matter which you, my Party Comrades, all take for granted, and which is the most difficult task I have ever faced in my life, the Jewish problem. All of you gladly take it for granted that there are no longer any Jews in your administrative districts. All Germans — with a few individual exceptions — are aware that we could not have endured the bombings, the hardships of the fourth year of the war, and could not endure fifth and sixth years of war that are perhaps yet to come, if we still had this demoralizing pest in our national body. "The Jews must be eradicated ["ausgerottet"]." This brief sentence is easily said. But for the man who must carry out what it calls for, it is the gravest and hardest thing in existence. Now, look, after all they're Jews, only Jews. That's plain enough. But just think about how many people — including Party comrades — have addressed to me and other officials those famous petitions of theirs in which they say: The Jews are all bastards, of course, but so-and-so is a good Jew and should be left alone. I daresay, judging by the number of such appeals and the number of people who express such opinions, the number of "good Jews" in Germany must have exceeded the total Jewish population! In Germany we have millions and millions of people who each have their "one good Jew." I mention this only because you can see in the vital field of your own administrative districts how many respected and upright National Socialists have their "good Jew."

I ask that you assembled here pay attention to what I have to say, but not repeat it. The question came up: Well, what about the women and children? — I came to a determinedly simple conclusion about that, too. I did not believe that I had the right to wipe out ["auszurotten"] the men — rather I should say, kill ["umzubringen"] them or have them killed — and let their children grow up to avenge themselves on our sons and grandsons. The hard decision to wipe this people ["Volk"] off ["verschwinden"] the face of the earth had to be made. For us, the organization that had to carry out this task, it was the most difficult one we ever had. But it was accomplished, and without — I believe I can say — our men and their leaders suffering any mental or spiritual damage. That was clearly a danger. To become too brutal, too heartless, and lose respect for human life, or to be too soft and bring oneself to the point of a nervous breakdown — the path between these two ever-present possibilities is incredibly narrow, the course between Scylla and Charybdis.

We have turned over to the Reich Ministry of Economics all the wealth we confiscated from the Jews — the sums were staggering — right down to very last penny. I have always maintained: We have a duty to our people, to our race, we have a duty to a leader such as has been given to our people only once in 2,000 years, not to be petty here, but to go the limit, as we must do in all things if we are to win the war. Yet we do not have the right to take even one penny of the wealth confiscated from the Jews. At the outset, I laid down the line: Any SS men who take so much as a mark of it are as good as dead. In the past few days, I've had to sign a number of death sentences — I might as well say it, there were about a dozen. One has to be strict here, or everyone will suffer. I considered it my duty to speak very openly to you — the highest bearers of the will, the highest dignitaries, of the Party, of this political order, of this political instrument of the Führer — about this matter and to give the facts as they are. By the end of the year, the Jewish problem in the lands we have occupied will be solved. There will be left only remnants, individual Jews who are in hiding. The problem of Jews who are partners in mixed marriages and the problem of half-Jews will, in accordance with this policy, be rationally examined, decided upon, and resolved.

Source is this thread on the CODOH revisionist forum, which anyone can read if they want to see whether the revisionist interpretation of such a speech holds up.

Here is Himmler talking openly about the extermination of European Jews without use of code-words in the Posen speech of October 6 1943:

In the Posen speeches Himmler describes the policy as "Judenevakuierung", which is alleged to have been a code-word. So he is still using the "code" at Posen. And months later he continues describing a policy of evacuation/resettlement/emigration to the East with the killing of Jews being in the context of partisan reprisals (which revisionists do not deny happened).

So he is still using the "code" at Posen.

In other speeches at Posen he uses the word "Judenevakuierung." In this speech he uses the word "umbringen," which unambiguously means "kill."

the killing of Jews being in the context of partisan reprisals

Partisans are in fact mentioned much earlier in the speech and then Himmler says, 'enough about partisans,' and then moves on to talking about other stuff, and finally when he discusses the solution to the Jewish question in the excerpted paragraphs partisans are not mentioned once.

The hard decision to wipe this people ["Volk"] off ["verschwinden"] the face of the earth had to be made.

Partisans are not a "Volk" and "the East" is a place on the face of the earth.

By the end of the year, the Jewish problem in the lands we have occupied will be solved. There will be left only remnants, individual Jews who are in hiding.

Goal is no Jews left in German-occupied territory by the end of 1943. Which included "the East," however you define it.

By October 1943 the Holocaust was in many ways complete; somewhere around 5 million Jews were already dead at this point. By far the largest remaining Jewish population in Europe was in Hungary, who was still an ally (and wouldn't start deporting its Jews to Auschwitz until after March 1944 when Germany seized control). The remaining Jews still on the chopping block were smaller populations in western countries: Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Germany itself.

The distinction is there were various kind of camps:

  • Arbeitslager (work camps), which were slave labour camps. Inmates were treated very poorly, but there was an active effort to keep them alive because they provided either useful manual labour or some element of skilled labour.

  • Konzentrationslager (concentration camps), where the inmates were more or less expected to work at menial tasks until they died.

  • Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) where almost all individuals were murdered immediately, usually within an hour or two of arrival. Only the strongest individuals would be selected as sonderkommandos, and these groups would be liquidated from time-to-time. If you had made it to November 1943 (the end of Operation Reinhard), the only extermination camp operational past that point was at Auschwitz (with the exception of a brief resumption of gassing operations at Chelmno in June 1944). The others were all farther east and by mid-1943 the Nazis realized they were at risk from a sudden Soviet advance.

The two main reasons why Auschwitz gets so much attention in memoirs/popular histories is that Auschwitz had a work camp, a concentration camp, and an extermination camp; so while more people were murdered there than anywhere else, there were also tens of thousands of survivors. Additionally, it was the principle destination for the western (and Hungarian) Jews who were the last to be targeted, so they were both those who entered the concentration and labour camp systems last (making them most likely to survive), and those able to freely write about their experiences post-war.

More comments

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats