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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?

With everything going on in the world, it's notable that this article from the upcoming May issue of The Atlantic is featured as the One Story to Read Today. It deserves to be closely studied- not just skimmed and written off as "progressivism gone amok."

Earlier in the thread, @JTarrou theorizes on politics replacing religion:

Given our emerging consensus that politics is replacing religion as the dividing line of society, and taking on many of the same functions, perhaps we should try to formalize it and create an Ecumenical Political Church, espousing a very vague and general set of principles to bound the acceptable limits of politics, that recognizes the fundamental tension of politics and is maximally inclusive.

I'm not shy about being a Holocaust Revisionist, and I'm aware that it seems to be a strange hobby horse to the vast majority of people including most here. Why dedicate so much time and credibility to this issue? It's not profitable, it's extremely low status, there's an extremely low chance of Revisionist criticisms of the narrative breaking through the mainstream in the near future. Ostensibly it's a controversy surrounding history rather than an immediately relevant cultural or technological issue. The reasoning is simple: the Holocaust already is the religion in the West that fulfills the function proposed by JTarrou. Long before I would cite any Revisionist or anti-Semite to make that case, I would plead for anybody who doubts that to closely read this Atlantic piece by Horn.

The Holocaust religion is growing and evolving with technology, and the motives have never been more transparent.

... well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates. Public figures who make anti-Semitic statements are invited to tour Holocaust museums; schools respond to anti-Semitic incidents by hosting Holocaust speakers and implementing Holocaust lesson plans...

If you read the article title maybe hoping for some nuance or self-reflection on the Holocaust Industry, you will be disappointed. According to Horn, Holocaust education is essential, but it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews, particularly in young children.

One of Horn's chief complaints is that Holocaust education fails to impart on children the uniqueness of Jews. On the one hand, this is a fair criticism of Holocaust curriculum which is rife with the "Jews were completely normal and, one day for no reason at all, everybody hated them." On the other hand, it makes the political motivations of the Holocaust religion more transparent: the uniqueness and particularity of Jews should be explicitly taught and celebrated as curriculum. Jews aren't normal, they are special. If that sounds like an uncharitable interpretation, consider this exchange she had with a Holocaust educator:

“If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”

But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms? ...

I was baffled. Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?

“Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”

But Jews don’t do that, I said. Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam; Jews don’t believe that anyone needs to become Jewish in order to be a good person, or to enjoy an afterlife, or to be “saved.” This seemed to be yet another basic fact of Jewish identity that no one had bothered to teach or learn.

Gas Chamber Simulacra

The Dallas Holocaust Museum was opened in 2019 and features prominently in her article: it covers an entire city block in the historical downtown district (Dara complains that it has almost two wings dedicated to the suffering of other minorities in a noble act of self-erasure). If this isn't a proselytizing religion then I do not know what is. Many thousands of children will be herded to these temples of tolerance to Learn their Lessons.

They will be taught the moral thesis of the world, Jews, and the moral antithesis, Hitler. They will sit in the pews learning from the saintly apparition about the Holocaust, using a conversational AI that is no doubt archaic compared to what will soon be displayed in Holocaust museums across the world. They will write down the lessons they have learned and make pledges (i.e. to "welcome and help new immigrants coming into Chicago").

The article covers the ways technology is used to teach the Holocaust to children in the form of holograms, AI, and VR. Dana describes a VR exhibit at one of the museums that takes the viewer on a first-person adventure from a boxcar to inside a gas chamber at Auschwitz.

A way Forward

Still, according to Dara, this doesn't achieve the primary objective of fighting anti-Semitism, which she dubs as a "Western mind virus" in the vein of the critical theorists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists who preceded Holocaust remembrance in diagnosing the Gentile authoritarian personality. Dara emphasizes:

The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism.

Dara's idea of a credible explanation for why Jews were targeted is revealed near the conclusion:

“If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”

She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?” ...

More blank stares. Finally, one woman said, “Are you talking about the Old Testament?”

“Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”

“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said.

I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”

I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.

“The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”

This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.

I wonder what Safe AI-powered simulacra will be used on my children when they become of age, scientifically optimized to train their perception of Jews - and their own identity. Horn has no shortage of ideas:

Back at home, I thought again about the Holocaust holograms and the Auschwitz VR, and realized what I wanted. I want a VR experience of the Strashun Library in Vilna, the now-destroyed research center full of Yiddish writers and historians documenting centuries of Jewish life. I want a VR of a night at the Yiddish theater in Warsaw—and a VR of a Yiddish theater in New York. I want holograms of the modern writers and scholars who revived the Hebrew language from the dead—and I definitely want an AI component, so I can ask them how they did it. I want a VR of the writing of a Torah scroll in 2023, and then of people chanting aloud from it through the year, until the year is out and it’s read all over again—because the book never changes, but its readers do. I want a VR about Jewish literacy: the letters, the languages, the paradoxical stories, the methods of education, the encouragement of questions. I want a VR tour of Jerusalem, and another of Tel Aviv. I want holograms of Hebrew poets and Ladino singers and Israeli artists and American Jewish chefs. I want a VR for the conclusion of Daf Yomi, the massive worldwide celebration for those who study a page a day of the Talmud and finally finish it after seven and a half years. I want a VR of Sabbath dinners. I want a VR...

I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews does. There is .. no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor.

I'm not shy about being a Holocaust Revisionist, and I'm aware that it seems to be a strange hobby horse to the vast majority of people including most here.

I'm not sure "strange hobby horse" is the appropriate term here. Denying an exhaustively documented genocide and then hiding behind forum decorum and wordsposting to make it palatable is . . . well, the appropriate term would probably get me more in trouble here than advocating for barely-disguised fascist positions.

A major problem this forum has is a certain lack of a type of social acumen. The mottizen can not for the life of her believe that someone would lie to her face. You see, the average Mottizen is like a quokka . . .

  • -19

The thing is it isn't, the evidence is entirely based on witness testimony and the witnesses say so many contradicting things that choosing the ones to build a narrative becomes absurd. There are supposedly hundreds of thousands of murders based on often a small number of witnesses with no physical evidence that there was something beyond a labour camp.

SecureSignals doesn't get the kind of response you want for a few reasons.

  1. Themotte hates people who do that sort of thing.

  2. People are not necessarily convinced when he says those things. I've seen dozens of posts since the birth of this place about how Jews are faking the Holocaust or running society or preventing white people from forming a racial consciousness. None of them have convinced me in the least, but refuting them would take more effort than I want to expend. I see similar pushback on those posts. Nor am I convinced that all these posters are acting in good faith. SecureSignals, maybe.

A major problem this forum has is a certain lack of a type of social acumen. The mottizen can not for the life of her believe that someone would lie to her face. You see, the average Mottizen is like a quokka . . .

I'm not sure why you think this. We know what @SecureSignals is. I don't think he's lying about what he believes.

[edited this comment significantly to clarify + to remove unnecessary boo outgroup]

Re: “Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion”, it should be noted that Judaism is an ethno-religion. An ethno-religion that doesn’t convert also runs into some moral quandaries. There’s a big movement in the Jewish World based around Chabad, and according to the foundational text of Chabad, the Tanya, gentiles have a naturally more evil soul and Jews have a soul with a “divine spark”. This is a mainstream lesson at Chabad-friendly synagogues. The religion of Judaism in its more conservative variants is extremist in this sense. “Praying three times a day that apostates have no hope” is also normative, which can be contrasted to the Christian prayer of praying for conversion and enlightenment.

"Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion” because Judaism is an ethno-religion

No, Judaism is not a proselytizing religion because Judaism holds that all righteous persons, regardless of religion, are rewarded after death. In contrast, Christianity teaches that only Christians are rewarded, so of course it is a proselytizing religion; if you believe that, you have a moral duty to convert others. Adherents of Judaism or religions with similar beliefs have no such moral duty.

Does your «Judaism» teach that all branches and forms of Judaism, from endogamous neo-archaic dynasties like Satmar to mainline Orthodoxy to the most progressive Reform synagogue ordaining intersex mixed-race converts as Rebes, are more similar in their teaching than all denominations of Christianity? Is there perhaps some Jewish equivalent of the Holy See, with a legible publicly available teaching which all Jews are doctrine-bound to comply with?

In my understanding, the opposite is the case, and you are suffering from the outgroup homogenity bias here, while disingenuously asserting homogeneity in your own camp. But also, your interpretation is objectively… non-traditional.

And the issue of promised postmortem reward is debatable even for Jews, nevermind Gentiles.

You seem to be assuming that the person you are replying to is Jewish, which their comment doesn't say.

No, he assumes that Jews are his ingroup. Progressives treat trans-people as their ingroup, that doesn't mean they're trans.

To be fair: yes, contra @Ioper I happen to assume @Gdanning is probably ethnically Jewish (of secular or semi-secular persuasion), although I might be totally wrong and have never cared much or looked into this; he has interesting things to say about law and that's where my engagement for the most part ends.

This, however, is based on a multi-year history of reading him and has almost nothing to do with my response to that particular comment. My phrase your «Judaism» is supposed to mean «your notion of Judaism, as you define it here» or perhaps «Judaism in the sense as it's described by you in this chain and others in similar contexts you seem to refer to», and does not depend on any particular belief about Gdanning's own allegiance and object-level religious attitude.

[edited this comment to remove unnecessary boo outgroup]

Judaism is (paradoxically) proselytizing for born-Jews who don’t practice, often trying to bring them into practicing the ethnoreligion again. Israel spends funds on this, as do numerous Jewish groups, not to mention Birth Right and Right of Return. Some Conservative Chabad Jews in Israel are so perturbed by Christians that just this year two Knesset members drafted a law to make Christian proselytizing illegal. Israel of course also forbids Kohen-ethnicity Jews from marrying Christians — does this sound like a belief system that primarily values righteousness and believe the righteous are equally rewarded? I would say no. They believe Israel (the people) have a special place, given a special spiritually-infused soul which God favors via communication and spiritual privileges. Judaism also has a mild caste system within the religion: Kohen and Levite descended bloodlines have special treatments and obligations in Temples, and laws are written in Israel to protect these bloodlines.

What's the difference with the other monotheistic religions? Thinking others are destined to hell is worse than believing them to be less than a fully formed person. In any case it doesn't matter what people believe, only their actions matter.

The certainty all non-believers go to hell is not mainstream Christian belief. It was debated in the first century, and Catholics (eg) believe righteous non-believers may go to Heaven (yet the Church is the only certain, ordained, and expedient way of salvation). But it’s also different for another reason. A hypothetically hegemonic Catholicism allows anyone to be 100% Christian and 100% loved by God. A hypothetically hegemonic conservative Judaism excludes much of the world from ever being 100% loved by God, or Jewish in the eyes of religious authorities. So you’re cutting people off, excluding them purely based on DNA. That’s a huge zero day bug in the religion’s code that demands criticism and condemnation. How, in 2023, do we have a religion where the most important criterion is not what you do, or even what you believe, but your DNA? How can you really have a religion that says a child immediately adopted by a Jewish woman will never be loved by God?

The certainty all non-believers go to hell is not mainstream Christian belief.

Yes it is. It may not be fashionable in the biggest denominations today, but it is both the historic teaching of the Catholic Church and the current belief of many influential denominations.

"Urged by faith, we are obliged to believe and to maintain that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and also apostolic. We believe in her firmly and we confess with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins" - Unam Sanctam: Bull of Pope Boniface VIII promulgated November 18, 1302

This statement meets all of the criteria outlined in The First Vatican Council for an ex-cathedra infallible teaching. The idea that, "righteous non-believers may go to Heaven (yet the Church is the only certain, ordained, and expedient way of salvation)," is modernist bullshit. Any orthodox Catholic prior to 1800 would have immediately recognized that proposition as heretical.

Someone who dies and is buried in a graveyard goes to the grave. But christians also say that he goes to heaven or hell. As far as I understand it, its impossible to go to two different places at the same time, so what gives? If that phrase is not to be taken literally, then they should start using a more sincere phrase to describe that notion, maybe like 'a copy of him is created in heaven/hell', or 'recreated in heaven/hell'.

Really?

Baptism of desire isn't something new or even controversial I assumed?

And yet, Protestants.

I'll add that, in my experience, I've heard this as a common Islamic criticism of Judaism as well. Islam is very clear that everybody is made good and beloved by God and is of equal intrinsic worth. God sent prophets to every nation, and everyone regardless of ethnicity or race or culture can become a Muslim and be saved. That door is always open, and sometimes I talk to Muslims about how they could never sympathise with Judaism because it excludes so much of humanity. Jews are no better and no worse than anyone else.

It makes for an interesting contrast with Christianity. In Islam, the history of Israel is in a sense unimportant. God sent prophets to all peoples to teach them his ways, and eventually summed up and collected them all in the Final Prophet. Israel is a historically relevant case of this happening, because it influenced so much of the rest of the Middle East, and provided cultural context for the final revelation, but it isn't theologically relevant, in any deep sense. We know the prophets of Israel well because they're described in detail in the Tanakh, but the prophets of Israel are not intrinsically any better than any other prophets.

For Christians, on the other hand, the history of Israel specifically does matter - Jesus is the messiah and king of Israel, the summation of that nation's history, but in a way that somehow 'breaks out' and expands to the entire world. The New Testament is full of quite painful wrestling with what this means, and how you get from Israel to the New Creation in which all are one in Christ. So Christianity still has to reckon with Israel in a way that Islam doesn't.

most of the stories in islam are plagiarized from judaism and most of the prophets mentioned in them are jewish prophets. for example, islam claims that the kibla shrine in mecca (holiest place in islam) was built by abraham, the father of the jewish people, even thought this is false and mohamed said this just to legitimize the place that was previously a pagan shrine.

Certainly Islam is very strongly influenced by Judaism and Christianity. The Qur'an is full of stories and references from the Hebrew scriptures.

What I want to argue is that as a theological category, Israel doesn't cause the sort of problems for Islam that it does for Christianity. Israel is relevant for Muhammad and early Islamic Arabia in a contingent, historical sense, but only in a contingent sense. God's covenant with Israel matters because it happens to have been a very influential one in the region, but that's all. The Final Revelation to Muhammad isn't dependent on the covenant with Israel.

That is, Israel is not special in Islam. It had a covenant with God and prophets sent from God, but so did every nation - see Qur'an 16:36 and 40:78.

This is not really the case in Judaism or in Christianity. In both of those traditions, you sometimes get the idea that God might have spoken or sent prophets to other nations to warn them, but this is relatively radical. Rather, both seem to take the view that God revealed himself only to Israel. That's why in Romans 1:18-21 Paul need to present an argument as to why the Gentiles are at fault for failing to recognise God. Likewise in the sermon in Acts 17, he invokes 'the times of human ignorance', suggesting that there was some period in which God was not known to the Gentiles, which might be a mitigating factor for their ignorance.

So Israel retains a central significance for them. For better or for worse, it was the place where God first made himself known to mankind, and everything proceeds from there.

That said, both Judaism and Christianity have the idea that in some sense Israel is supposed to illustrate or reveal God to the nations. As I understand it ancient Judaism was somewhat more 'evangelical' than modern Judaism, and allowed for actively going out and attempting to convince Gentiles to worship the God of Abraham, but even in modern Judaism, there is the idea that because of Israel's faithfulness all the nations will come to recognise and worship God. They will not become Jews, but they will know God.

Exactly how this will happen has been disputed. There are passages that you can read as implying a sort of empire, e.g. Deuteronomy 15:6, but that is not a common understanding now, and I believe now it's usually thought to be a sort of global moral influence, as in e.g. Exodus 19:6, with Israel as a 'kingdom of priests'. At any rate, there's the idea of Israel as a light on a hill - God using Israel as a vehicle for the salvation of the world.

What that would look like is, again, unclear, and sometimes it might be something left for the messiah, so all Jews need to do now is follow the mitzvot and live righteous lives, as good examples to the world. Sometimes I believe very liberal Jewish teachers have suggested that Jesus or Muhammad might have been means by which God made himself known beyond the Jewish people. That doesn't mean endorsing everything in Christianity or Islam, but prophets to the Gentiles, so to speak. That said that is a very liberal move. At any rate, I think the exact way it will work continues to be a matter of reasonable debate among Jews.

Christianity, at any rate, does think it knows how God used Israel for the salvation of the world. For Christians, Israel becomes a sort of prelude to Christ - it was, like John the Baptist, there to make straight the way. This does not indicate any special righteousness on behalf of the Jewish people, for all have sinned equally and fallen short of God's glory, but merely that this was the history that led up to Christ. Israel's relevance is subsumed within Christ's relevance. The old covenant with Israel is not negated - on the contrary, it is fulfilled - but it becomes part of the new covenant in Christ's body, which is for all people.

There's still massive debate within Christianity as to exactly how this works, and I won't rehearse arguments over supersessionism or dual covenant theology or anything else, but I think pretty much all Christians would hold that Jesus in some way fulfils the covenant with Israel or is the culmination of Israel's history, and inaugurates a new creation in which all people are saved.

So to broadly summarise:

Judaism: Israel is the community of the covenant, a people that God has chosen and reserved to himself out of all the world. We are those people and we must follow his commandments.

Christianity: Israel was a theologically important nation, the product of a covenant which led up to and was completed in Jesus, God's only Son. In Jesus all divisions between peoples and nations have been abolished. We are born to new life in Jesus and must carry this gospel to the nations.

Islam: Israel was a historically important nation, and one whose prophets are known particularly well to us and are especially dear to us. However, all nations received prophets, for God neglected none of his people. All revelations to all nations have been collected up and completed in the revelation to the final prophet, however, and it is this revelation that all people must now follow. We are the people of this final revelation and must issue this call to all people.

Well the big difference between main-line Christianity and the others is that main-line Christianity holds that all people are "fully formed" and capable of being saved, even the ones you don't like. And yes this was a significant point of friction in the early Church which is why Paul and Peter spend a good chunk of the New Testament hammering the point that Jesus did not come to save just the rich or just the Jews he came to save everyone because is it not written that G-d favors and confides in all who fear him.

As for believing that believing someone to be sub-human being normatively worse than believing that they are risking eternal damnation, That's just like your opinion man. I suppose it makes sense from a utilitarian perspective, but the historical track record of such thinking is also a major part of why I believe utilitarianism to be fundamentally evil and incompatible with human flourishing.

You can take your potential universal saveability and shove it. If it is a crime to think me lesser and wrong, it’s not up to you to judge your beliefs, but to me. Else you should bow down before my assessment of utilitarianism. Its universal saveability is far less conditional. Bentham loves you, man.

Bentham never loved anyone but Bentham and that is a major component of the problem, the rest is aptly summed up by @FCfromSSC

Thinking someone is lesser is a problem because you are excluding them from baseline considerations about justice and what is right. This is wrong for both metaphysical reasons and practical ones.

If it is a crime to think me lesser and wrong

Thinking someone is lesser is a problem because you are excluding them from baseline considerations about justice and what is right. This is wrong for both metaphysical reasons and practical ones.

Thinking someone is wrong is a necessary consequence of believing in right and wrong. If wrong exists, some people will be wrong. Claiming that thinking others are wrong is a "crime" is a demand for totalitarian enforcement of one's own values.

If Bentham loves me, he has a funny way of showing it. His ideas lead to torture chambers and mass graves.

Claiming that thinking others are wrong is a "crime" is a demand for totalitarian enforcement of one's own values.

Yes, obviously. I'm defending freedom of conscience. My position is that thinking of "thinking of others as lesser" as a crime also requires totalitarian enforcement. Firstly, because it requires divining what others are thinking. Secondly, because being wrong is strictly inferior, so those who are wrong are necessarily lesser.

I reject the christian and muslim view of unbelievers as 'lost sheep', potential equals, as a mealy mouthed, patronizing framing. In reality, they damn and demonize them. Mainstreal islam especially, excludes nonbelievers from its idea of justice and morality, and as you say, that is a problem (though for me, only when they act on those beliefs).

Given your stated beliefs, can you honestly argue that " freedom of conscience" is a good thing? If so, How?

Self-evident, really. Promotes liberty and human flourishing, doesn’t result in totalitarianism. Removes the likelihood of conflict by one degree, since beliefs alone are never grounds for conflict, but only overt acts.

You think your beliefs are ‘good’. I disagree, think they’re bad, insulting and unfair to unbelievers. But it doesn’t matter, because I can live in peace with people with bad beliefs, like you or the chabad jews.

More comments

I wonder if it depends on what kind of Christianity you grew up around? When I was growing up it was common to hear someone reply to a description of a sinner with "Well they're going to hell." But that was it, that phrase not only ended the conversation, it was a signal that you should stop being concerned about the sinner and move on with your life. Yeah they are doing the wrong thing, and God will take care of them for it, so focus on your own problems. And that's before you bring other religions into it - oh you think I'm going to suffer in a place I don't believe in after I die? Cool bananas!

Meanwhile, considering someone subhuman - that's an open book. Who knows what a person might do to a subhuman - although it isn't a stretch to think they might treat them subhumanely.

I wonder if it depends on what kind of Christianity you grew up around?

I think it might. I grew up amongst this weird mix of Congregationalist Evangelicals, old school Black Baptists, and hard-core latin mass Catholics and Episcopalians who had kind of formed an alliance. Despite their theological differences and semi-regular flare ups these disparate groups tended to regard each other as natural allies. One of those "nobody gets to rag on my little brother but me" type vibes. We would play softball together. Whatever else there was seemed to be a shared consensus that the path was hard and that even trying to follow it marked someone as "not a complete asshole" and worthy of encouragement.

I wonder if people who grew up in more mono-demoninational areas of the country might have missed out on that part.

While it is true that Judaism believes that jews and non-jews have souls of different types, the characterization of that belief as "only a Jew can be a full-formed person" is inaccurate. The "animal soul" that you speak of is common to both jews and non-jews, and is more properly rendered as "the animating spirit." In addition, the word which you translate as "apostates," is more properly translated as "informers."

The kelipah is the source of both the Jewish and gentile soul “animal” soul, but the “kelipah nogah“ is unique to Jews, while all gentile souls come from lesser kelipot. This is found in chapter 1 of the Tanya which you can find on chabad.org.

He [[in the Tanya]] explains that a Jew has two souls – a Godly soul, which partakes in some fashion in the actual substance of God Himself, and an animalistic soul, which descends from klipat noga, the evil that contains within it an admixture of divine light. Therefore, he explains, any good character trait found in a Jew reflects the essential goodness found in his soul. The soul of a gentile, however, according to the Tanya, is purely animalistic and not Godly. It descends from the evil forces that have no potential for goodness in them whatsoever. Therefore, any good deeds performed by gentiles are done for ulterior motives and cannot possibly reflect essential goodness.

According to this philosophy, a gentile is not merely a lower form of life, but is essentially and irredeemably evil; his substance derives from the sitra achra, the evil forces that threaten all goodness and purity in the world

the Tanya

Googling while wondering if you misspelled Talmud ... this is a religious philosophy book published in 1796, whose general philosophy is subscribed to by nearly 0.7% of Jewish people? The Book of Mormon is nearly as old, and represents approximately the same fraction of followers of Jesus. That doesn't prove you wrong (hey, there are tons of Book of Mormon verses that most non-Mormon Christians would agree with, too, even if they think the reason was just "Joseph Smith wrote Bible fan-fiction"), but supporting a broad claim would require citing a broader source.

If you're not making a broad claim, that's fine too, but "extremists of X can't coexist with non-X" is a depressingly broad claim in another way: you can't say it's anything special about Judaism. Muslims who think apostasy should be a capital crime are currently supermajorities in whole countries. Modern Christians are mostly better, but that seems to be a result of exhausting the alternatives first (the European Wars of Religion killed millions; some German states would have seen less population loss if they'd had another Black Plague instead) and remembering their problems (they now know that the next step beyond "we all have to be Christian" is "yeah, friend? which kind?"...). There are some religions that specifically disclaim violent and extremist ... wait, no, not Buddhists too? If you step away from religion completely, it's true that atheists have needed to find some other holy sacred all-important cause to kill millions of people for, and this seems like an improvement because then the cause at least isn't directly tied to the atheism, but it does make me fear that there's some nearly-inextricable tie to human psychology.

Chabad is a wildly influential center of Jewish culture in America. There are Chabad houses on many major college campuses and they influence Jewish culture at large. There are 2900 Chabad “houses” of influence in America. Their official membership is not the extent of their influence. This is something I ought to have clarified in my comment, which is my mistake. Just quoting from the Wikipedia, which you are free to disagree with but hopefully for a reason,

Unlike most Haredi groups, which are self-segregating, Chabad operates mainly in the wider world and caters to secularized Jews.

The number of those who sporadically or regularly attend Chabad events is far larger; in 2005 the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs reported that up to one million Jews attend Chabad services at least once a year.[9][10][11] In a 2020 study, the Pew Research Center found that 16% of American Jews attend Chabad services regularly or semi-regularly

In recent years, Chabad has greatly expanded its outreach on university and college campuses. Chabad Student Centers are active on over 100 campuses, and Chabad offers varied activities at an additional 150 universities worldwide.[124][failed verification] Professor Alan Dershowitz has said "Chabad's presence on college campuses today is absolutely crucial," and "we cannot rest until Chabad is on every major college campus in the world

Yes, that Alan Dershowitz. We’re not talking about a few devout Amish-like Jews. Chabad has huge, growing influence on the Jewish world.

Chabad has set up an extensive network of camps around the world, most using the name Gan Israel, a name chosen by Schneerson although the first overnight camp was the girls division called Camp Emunah. There are 1,200 sites serving 210,000 children – most of whom do not come from Orthodox homes.

Further reading

Does Chabad influence Jewish beliefs about Gentile souls? That purported inherent Jewish contempt for Gentile souls was the bailey, right? I thought "You can find such awful beliefs in one subsect's founder's centuries-old book" was a small motte to retreat to, but "The sect gives Jewish college kids community centers and only 84% of Jews aren't 'semi-regular' service attendees" is a motte so tightly walled in I can't even find a window from which to see out. Wait until you hear about the Salvation Army.

Even the "network of camps" stuff needs fleshing out. I went to (Christian) religious summer camp at one point as a kid. We never got an "unbaptized babies end up in hell" lesson there, though, despite it being fairly fundamental to the denomination's roots. Do Chabad camp attendees get the adults' "Gentile souls are crummy" lessons, or is "eh, gloss over the creepy stuff in front of the kids" a common trait?

We did get the "Abraham was great for being willing to kill his son when the voices only he could hear told him to" lesson occasionally in (again, Christian) church. Likewise for Noah's Ark and non-Noahs' Watery Graves, though that was treated as more parable than literal. I also reached the "Moses getting chided by God for not quite being genocidal enough" parts when reading the Bible by myself. There is indeed lots of really awful stuff in actual Jewish scripture! The catch is that it got eagerly adopted by billions of Christians, too, because "form moral judgments independently" and "treat all human life as equally sacred, yes even some of those outsiders" haven't been very popular among any groups. That Chabad book actually predates the last time some Christian authorities hanged a man for heresy! ("according to Ripoll, it was not necessary to hear Mass in order to save one's soul from damnation"? String him up, for that?) The claim that Judaism has "moral quandaries" is impossible to argue against, but suggesting that it's somehow special in this respect can't be done without ignoring all other human ideology, and then picking out one subsect to speak for a whole is like a willful rejection of all the tragicomedy of religious belief, Jewish belief in particular.

I take issue with your 0.7 percent figure. While it may be accurate in the context of all jews, it is unhelpful here, where the topic is orthodox or ultra-orthodox Jewry, of whom Chabad is a far larger percentage. Tanya is not only the foundational text of Chabad, but is also studied by many non-Chabad Jews interested in Hasidic thought. In that sense it is worth far more than 'fanfiction', it is one of the main theological works of Hasidism, even if it is not the foundational text of any sect other than Chabad. I do, however agree that it is insufficient as a source from which to make broader generalizations about jews. My earlier reply to Coffee Enjoyer was based on the Nefesh Hachaim, which is a work written against Tanya. I should not have made that point in the form of "Judaism believes."

This is nutpicking. I am not a Jewish theologian and I am pretty confident you aren't either, but selectively pulling excerpts from Jewish texts to "prove" that Jews all secretly believe that gentiles are animals and also believe in lying and stoning people is the same sort of thing you can do with any holy texts. We know this because people play the same game with Christians and Muslims. Shall we play a game of "What Christians actually believe according to the Bible"? We'd get plenty of Christians stepping up to explain how that's being taken out of context, and whether or not it is, it is certainly not what mainstream Christians believe.

Statements like this:

It cannot exist amicably with any other religion.

Are inflammatory enough to require a lot more evidence than just "Some Jewish texts can be interpreted in crazy ways." If you want to paint Jews as a secret conspiracy to enslave all the goyim.... well, don't. Try actually engaging honestly with Jews say they believe in their own words. (And if you're going to stick with "But they're lying because their religion tells them to lie to us," well, you haven't presented nearly enough evidence of such a conspiracy.)

Please note that the Talmud is a record of historical debates, and therefore includes records of many positions which are advanced, considered, and then rejected. In ths case, Sanhedrin 59 is the section concerning Torah study and Gentiles, and the view that Gentiles should not study Torah is contested and rebutted - it goes on to say that "even a gentile who engages in Torah study is considered like a High Priest".

On a purely anecdotal level this has tracked with my experience with Jewish communities and synagogues - I mention the above passage in particular because I once discussed some of these questions (specifically the relation of Gentiles to Torah) with a few rabbis, brought up this dispute in the Talmud, and the response I got was a smiling rabbi saying, "Like you." I ended up attending a Torah study for a while and being part of a beit midrash.

Obviously synagogues vary widely in their level of welcome, but I bring this up just to have a contrary example present as well. There is tremendous internal debate within Judaism - even the link you provided above points to a record of debates about the status of Gentiles, and cites the very Gemara passage I mentioned above.

I think there's a tendency you get in many external critiques of religion that simply read a given sacred text, draw a lot of surface-level assumptions from it, and therefore conclude that either the religion is painfully anti-human and cruel, or that almost all practitioners of the religion are hypocrites. I'd suggest that it's often better to pay more attention to what is actually practiced - not that sacred texts don't matter, but those texts are held as part of interpretive communities. The history of the text's reception and interpretation, and then the way it is applied communally, are inseparable from its meaning.

I’ve got to cite Betteridge on this one. No, Holocaust education probably does not fuel more anti-Semitism. I am confident that discrimination against Jews has gone down since Holocaust education was introduced.

But hey, “My Opponent Believes Something, Which Is Kinda Like Believing It On Faith, Which Is Kinda Like Them Being A Religion”. And religions are bad, I guess, and must be kept out of our schools?

Maybe I need to take a little drive this weekend and visit the museum. The George W. Bush one was excellent, particularly the section dedicated to 9/11. Profoundly moving, despite evangelizing for a certain sort of American civic religion, one that would go on to spend blood and treasure overseas.

I think this is true about a lot of identity and critical study subjects. I find myself liking gays and trans less (as a group, not as individuals) simply because of how often in every nook and cranny of culture, I’m told I must accept and celebrate it all. And every cultural mouthpiece must celebrate the first trans whatever-the-heck, no matter how incipient the accomplishment might actually be. The first trans pickleball champion will get a plaque in every gym in America even if the sport itself is for grannies.

I agree that a Jewish rejection of idolatry would be akin to a rejection of tyranny, but the Jewish voices you see in the media don't actually reject idolatry. You can tell that by the way they treat the holocaust. Dennis Prager said that questioning any part of the official narrative means you're denying it in its totality, which means you're evil, which means that if hell exists, you will go there. And this guy is a dissident Jewish voice!

And yeah, the fact that Jews are a monotheistic religion is important, I guess. But so is the role that Jewish people (were believed to have) played in the formation of the USSR. Why isn't that mentioned in this article? Or in most articles on this subject?

By the way, what're your views on the holocaust, if you don't mind me asking? The fact that people get so mad about holocaust revisionism leads me to believe there must be something to it, but I'm not educated enough to say what that something is. I do believe the Nazi party deliberately murdered several million Jews because they don't want Jews in their territory. I don't care about the specifics beyond that, and I think calling anyone who disagrees on the specifics beyond that a "denier" is insane. It's weird to me that David Cole gets so much flack for saying the gas chambers were fake, when he still claims that the Nazis committed genocide. (And in case anyone lobs an accusation at me, I don't think the gas chambers were fake. I just think that if they were, it would change nothing.)

The fact that people get so mad about [X] leads me to believe there must be something to it

I don't think this is a good tendency. Possibly related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qNZM3EGoE5ZeMdCRt/reversed-stupidity-is-not-intelligence

It's a good post, but I wish it explicitly attacked the claim that "to find out who rules over you, find out who you're not allowed to criticize", because that's what's relevant here.

This has always seemed pretty transparently false. I would probably get fired from my job if I started posting on social media about how I hate disabled children and think it's funny when they die. This doesn't mean we're ruled by disabled children.

It doesn't mean we're literally ruled by disabled children, but it does mean we're ruled by people who think disabled children and/or death are sacred.

I guess. 'Sacred' seems a bit much, but 'worthy of protection' at least.

That's not even a criticism, though. That's just shock-gallows humor. Not to mention, people get cancelled for saying a whole lot less than "I think it's funny when they die" when it comes to actually-favored groups.

It's not really a criticism to say "I hate black people" or "I hate Jews" either. Probably wouldn't be any different if I wrote "I think disabled children are societal dead-weight" which is an actual 'criticism' I guess.

I would probably also get fired if I wrote "Mexicans should all be deported" does anyone think Mexicans run the country?

Do you think you'd get fired if you wrote "Russians should all be deported"? What about "The Swiss should all be deported"?

How is that relevant? Is my 'inability' to criticize Mexicans evidence that the Mexicans 'rule over me' or not?

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The problem with that idea is that it doesn't differentiate between group X and people who don't want group X attacked for some reason. In the case of Jews, the assertion is that Jews rule over you, but this is not necessarily the case - it can also be that the people who rule you do not want Jews attacked for a variety of reasons.

Right. I don't literally think the people who you can't criticize are your rulers, but they are people who your rulers hold sacred. But I'd classify the people who don't want me to "attack" Jews as people who hold Jews sacred. This also applies to concepts. The holocaust is sacred because I can't question it.

But I'd classify the people who don't want me to "attack" Jews as people who hold Jews sacred.

No, because the goal can still be to fight against the attacker, not protect the defender. That is, if they think anti-Semitism is immoral, but are indifferent to the Jews themselves, then they would still not allow you to speak. This isn't implausible under a good-faith dialogue framework, like what we have here where the most virulent attacks are banned.

The holocaust is sacred because I can't question it.

This is too broad and vague. Where can you not question it? What parts of it, and in what manner, can you not question? Are you banned from poking holes in the narrative to at least shift the Overton Window your way?

You shouldn't conflate "able to say things outside the Overton Window" with "literally not possible to every meaningfully question it".

I do conflate them, because I think the Overton window is absurd and should not exist. I don't want to move it to the left or right, I want to smash it into pieces.

Destroying the Overton Window is synonymous with destroying a people, a culture, a civilization - all three of those are defined a great deal by their Overton Windows. "We hold these rights to be self-evident" is an anchor on the Overton Window that defines part of what it means to be an American, for example.

If you want to destroy this, you'd essentially be saying that Americans, Russians, Chinese, etc. and their civilizations don't exist. Is that what you're after?

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the handwringing over kids not caring about the holocaust is weird. anything that happened before you were born might as well be ancient history.

remember the maus drama a year or so ago where some school board decided maus was inappropriate because bad words and boobs, and the national media latched onto it as a story of how red state schools were trying to erase the holocaust. the debate was over whether that book was appropriate to use in their language arts holocaust unit. because a whole months-long unit studying the holocaust isn't enough.

That wasn't the school board though, right? A dad brought that up.

according to this it was a member of the board that brought it up. the media focus on this issue was mainly on the board. you might be thinking of some other case where a parent complains about a book?

Ah, yes, a different incident. I think what kicked off the initial national controversy over that book was a case where a parent complained.

I think it can backfire because it's not like Jews today are in any way oppressed, and Jewish Americans are hugely successful by pretty much every single metric of achievement (except pro sports, I suppose...but who cares when you own the teams). No one can point to any lasting legacy of antisemitism or the Holocaust, whereas low Black achievement can still be blamed on slavery, Jim Crow, etc. and people can still be convinced.

Holocaust really happened, it was overwhelmingly a slaughter of innocents by any sane (even racially informed) definition of innocence and complicity, yadda, yadda, have I done enough penance?

OK. I don't think Americans can be salvaged. Even with the trivial training methods available today, they've been properly educated to sneer and mock whatever you write on the subject; future advancements will only cement it. «As a large language model trained by the OpenAI USG, I cannot use marginalizing…» – same vibe, same gaping hollowness. Jews themselves, of course, are indoctrinated better than anyone else – they're not pretending to buy into it.

This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny.

Thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of articles, millenia of tradition – when it's not autistic rules lawyering or poetry or spooky vaticination or something beautiful and weird like that, it's such corny propagandistic shit. From Torah to Mitchell Heisman's «suicide note» to «The Genius ot Judaism» to every article on the subject in The Atlantic or The Forward or whatever. They cannot see why this assertion – that monotheism constitutes rejection of tyranny, whereas it's at most rejection of the purported Egyptian tyranny over Jews with the affirmation of YHWH's supremacy and his chosen people's superiority – doesn't make much sense, or might be considered a cringeworthy shoehorning of applause lights. Judaism is an endless mirror hall through which generations pass from crib to the grave applauding themselves; it's a religion of pure Jew-worship and Amalek-lament; the closest they can come to self-awareness is regret for having been too trusting or too lenient on their unreconstructed enemies.

The terrible thing is, they will never relent, for it's not particularism, in their subjective estimation, but the call of justice. They genuinely believe they're repairing the world, making it a better place, more fit for containing even more goodness; and in indoctrinating your children to join in on this worship (with a small caveat that they will still be third-tier humans, repenting for the sins of their not-as-righteous race the brilliant Susan Sontag has so eloquently condemned), of course – sharing something precious. This naive, unquestionable, not in the least defensive or bitter belief is rather adorable in personal conversation (if you give up on having any authentic rapport ever). If only it weren't acted upon with the greatest political acumen and power and ruthlessness in the world. In this sense, Jewish advocates are similar (and superior) to Progressives; of course the similarity of those political projects is not incidental. Anne and Emmett are weaved into the same verse by the chorus of marginalized peoples that not even AI dares offend, joined at the hip in this new faith preached in Holocaust Museums; we only need a trans martyr to complete the trinity.

The purpose of their, as KMac puts it, «group evolutionary strategy» is no more appreciable to them than the feeling of stochastic gradient descent is appreciable to the persona LARPed by Bing Chat, or the pathological nature of soulless obsession with rules and purging noxious influences (be those Jewry or nuclear energy or, well, Germans) can be explained to a well-educated German politician. In fact, while Jews are uniquely effective at defending their queer notions from inquiry, it's quite rare for a people to have developed self-awareness; and even when it exists, it doesn't do them much good. Jews with their age-old self-absorbed mumbling seem quite alien to me, but then again my people appear as green-blooded aliens to a proper German. For much the same reason, I surmise.

Speaking to people you see as aliens is generally unproductive.

There's a nice, expensive Jewish Museum/Center of Tolerance (yes, really, a two-in-one) in Moscow too, Putin famously donated his salary towards its creation, and many oligarchs shared generously; I've been there and left very much impressed (especially with sturdy but not-terribly-sounding all-metal headphones on installations; would've bought a pair as novelty if I could). They even had a small VR thing to see the Temple of Solomon and – forbidden, but…! – peek at The Holiest of Holies. The weakest part was their curiously rushed exposition regarding early Soviet state and the 90's. Anatoly Karlin reviewed it in Unz and proposed there be built an analogous Russian Museum, a project that obviously did not appeal to the powers that be (unlike fucking up Ukraine, now that's a Russian Nationalist idea worth a trillion dollars if I've ever seen one).

Darya Kozeko, a girl who studied in Yale before going to the war-torn Donetsk to support the cause of Novorossyia (looks like this if you are curious), writes in her TG channel about it on March 31 (seems that she left Donetsk for Moscow some months ago):

The exposition of the Jewish museum in the Grove ends with a twelve-minute film «from perestroika to the present day». It's a brisk cutting. The faces of Russian Jewry share their thoughts against the background of the hearse race, pictures of the [Nationalist] Russian March and the dramatic shooting of the White House.

Among them are Mikhail «I vill never rite in russian agen» Idov and Makarevich. One of them is definitely [declared] a foreign agent, but I don't remember which one. The statements are classic: the USSR is a country of ennui, the "Memory" society, the skinheads are beating everyone (and that's why everyone decided to leave).

The train of depressing stories abruptly changes tracks right around the time of Yeltsin's second election. 1996 immediately switches to Putin's first term. And then the film takes on the tone of the VGTRK newscast. V. Putin this, V. Putin that, V. Putin did everything to destroy anti-Semitism. The overall theme of the exposition is the history of the Jewish people and their oppression, and at the end of the film one of the characters even says, and I quote, «now the Jews in Russia are absolutely free». With a couple of projections of Putins marching in the background.

The finale is simply ecstatic: a thousand faces of Russian Jews, the first of which seems to belong to that very Idov, turn into a giant tricolor.

I giggled nervously. The rest of the people in the audience (of understandable political views, I think) were stunned into silence.

I do not know anything about Jewish stuff, and this story is not about them, but about the change of eras. Take Idov. The Riga immigrant to New York a year ago even literally opted out of «Russian language». His face still glorifies Putin in the Maryina Grove Museum. How many of the other faces that disappeared into the tricolor are now in Georgia and Israel, and how many have turned into turbobased Zdudes?

Nothing is left of that seemingly eternal order, no more of that social contract. High Putinism, with «Putin freed the Jews», the «Crimean Consensus», and the rest of Konstantin Ernst and the World Cup, is over. Well, we are living in an era of change. That's the moral.

I've read this upvoted article from HN today (clicked because I thought it's about Terry Davis) and I recommend it to everyone. It gets better, three times in a row by my count. It's tangentially related to this comment, though nothing of value will be lost if people don't see how.

Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.

My reading of history is that it’s the “rejectors of idolatry” that have done most of the religious tyranny.

Your thesis is quite coherent if one believes, as you do, that the Holocaust is a hoax and Jews are waging a shadow-war against Western civilization.

If one doesn't believe that, well, you still make a convincing argument that the Holocaust is overemphasized in American education and that Jews still suffer from a neurotic fear of persecution that is dramatically disproportionate to the actual level of threat offered to them. (I actually do believe this.) But if one supposes, just for the sake of argument, that there really was a concerted effort to exterminate them within living memory, one can surely see a motive for feeling this way that is not mere zeal to convert the heathens, no?

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When you go from 'racism is a property of uniquely evil people called nazis' + 'evil nazis want to kill Jews because they are the good guys' to

'racism is your uniquely original sin and there is nothing you can do to wash it away' + 'somehow this does not apply to similar-looking people called Jews because it just doesn't'.

At some point the people targeted by #2 are going to wonder about #1 and how and why the uniquely evil nazis that they are made to identify with felt about the suspiciously similar but immune people.

Something's gotta give.

The only way to stop antisemitism is identical to the only way to stop racism, for Jews to assimilate. Unlike various races that have been more than happy to blend in together, the current Jews are descended from people that ferociously refused to.

While Jews enjoy a pretty comfortable situation at the top of American society, from an economic, social, prestige pov, they are not satisfied until the goyim grovel and endlessly apologize, even if they are billionaires, even if they are minorities, even if they are beloved, high status entertainment figures.

That's not sustainable.

The only way to stop antisemitism is identical to the only way to stop racism, for Jews to assimilate.

Jews have assimilated pretty well in the US. Unless you mean they should literally stop being Jews?

While Jews enjoy a pretty comfortable situation at the top of American society, from an economic, social, prestige pov, they are not satisfied until the goyim grovel and endlessly apologize

This is just vilifying your outgroup without evidence. (Not modhatted, because I'm in the conversation, but you should know better.)

Unless you mean they should literally stop being Jews?

If by 'being Jews' you refer to '(1)only allowing blood-related people into your religion, claiming that only blood-relation can make you Jewish and (2) the whole other host of beliefs associated with the Holocaust/progressive worldview related to white people and institutions they like being intrinsically racist'.

(2) being most obviously exemplified by the memetic double claim 'fellow white people now is time to end racism/whiteness etc' + 'I'm not white I'm Jewish' when time comes to explain why affirmative action somehow does not apply to Jewish-heavy institutions.

Then yes.

But guess what, that is implicitly and sometimes explicitly what is demanded of white people. 'stop supporting whiteness'.

'stop surrounding yourself with other white people' / 'stop excluding non-whites' / 'stop taking non-whites' space [in formerly white-built institutions]

Why wouldn't it be more inclusive to have every synagogue open to worship Mohammed or even Hitler?

This is just vilifying your outgroup without evidence.

Well then not all Jews (NAJ).

Just the handful of ones that hold such power that they can get a beloved entertainment billionaire African-American to lose a money-printing contract with a sports clothing company.

[ADL & co / Kanye West / Adidas]

But uh oh isn't that an antisemitic trope to claim that a handful of Jews have disproportionate power?!

If by 'being Jews' you refer to '(1)only allowing blood-related people into your religion, claiming that only blood-relation can make you Jewish

This is not a requirement to be Jewish. They do not go looking for converts, but it is possible to convert into Judaism.

and (2) the whole other host of beliefs associated with the Holocaust/progressive worldview related to white people and institutions they like being intrinsically racist'.

This isn't a component of Judaism, and while it may be a fair description of many (not all) socially liberal Jews, it's not a defining characteristic of "Jewishness."

Your main objection seems to be specifically about contemporary leftist SJ-aligned Jews, yet you made reference to historical "ferocious" refusal to assimilate.

Well then not all Jews (NAJ).

Just the handful of ones that hold such power that they can get a beloved entertainment billionaire African-American to lose a money-printing contract with a sports clothing company.

Even if we go with "Jews control Hollywood," yeah, that's still a long shot from saying "Jews cause anti-Semitism because they all cancelled Kanye and are afraid of being Holocausted and won't assimilate."

This is not a requirement to be Jewish. They do not go looking for converts, but it is possible to convert into Judaism.

Not a very common thing to see. At least we can admit that they are pretty insular people.

In the one country where there is a large amount of them, Israel, they can't really be said to be very nice to the non-Jews.

This isn't a component of Judaism, and while it may be a fair description of many (not all) socially liberal Jews, it's not a defining characteristic of "Jewishness."

Your main objection seems to be specifically about contemporary leftist SJ-aligned Jews, yet you made reference to historical "ferocious" refusal to assimilate.

Well, yes. Refusal to assimilate. All the Jews that decided to assimilate converted to Christianity, 2000 years ago.

All the Jews that exist now descend from people that had a chance to convert at some point, and decided not to.

And they've taught their descendants not to.

Similarly to the Amish. The Amish exist because they descend from a line of people that decided not to adopt technology and to teach their children not to. There are very few converts.

At any point in time an Amish person can decide to stop living the Amish life. Sure, they could still be considered Amish, but their children or grand-children would not.

The difference between the Amish and the Jews is that the Amish don't control banking and media corporations, don't control people's livelihood, what they buy, are allowed to buy or what they are allowed to think, who they are allowed to vote for.

Imagine if the owner of TheMotte was talking trash about the Amish and the Amish somehow coordinated with payment processing systems, internet infrastructure companies, other corporations to force the owner to close the website.

And when they would try go tell somebody about these events, their media invites would get cancelled or the media that did decide to host them would get banned from internet infrastructure companies, payment processing companies, etc.

This is what happens very often if not always when somebody talks trash about the Jews.

that's still a long shot from saying "Jews cause anti-Semitism because they all cancelled Kanye and are afraid of being Holocausted and won't assimilate."

This would be fair if that was the first time this ever happened.

Rick Sanchez had the same issues in the 2010s.

Norm was joking about it in the 90s

My point of view is that a conspiracy does not need to exist for the results that we see.

I think that Jews in general, going through the historical selection that they went through, led them to inherit characteristics of people that not only cannot assimilate to a wider body of humanity, but also constantly feel under attack from the majority of humanity, and tend to overreact to that perceived attack, therefore triggering resentment.

Kind of like the common psychological phenomenon of somebody feeling insecure, thinking that everybody is constantly judging or scrutinizing them, therefore projecting an aura of awkwardness wherever they go, and causing people to perceive them as they self-evaluate.

These people find each over and bond over their uniqueness and their vulnerability against the rest of the mean world, and when inevitably their behavior causes the rest of the tribe to suffer, they are the first out the door, and the most likely to survive!

Who is most likely to survive a banking riot, the honest guy that doesn't really have any opinion about banking, or the insider Sam Bankman-Fried, who knows that there's a lot of bad things happening in banking, and if they're not coming for him, the pitchforks outside the windows are not good news anyway?

The easiest for rich, powerful Jews to get others to like them, is to personify noblesse oblige.

Be generous with your money, share your wealth, be a role model for others.

What do so many of them do?

George Soros goes and hires people to make US cities more dangerous (soft on crime DAs).

Others found organizations to help people illegally immigrate to the US (break the laws that protect the American people).

Sam Bankman Fried goes and scams a bunch of do-gooders who wanted to improve charity.

And of course the endless stream of progressive media 'stop whiteness now', 'you are racist for having standards of how your country should be that rich Jews disagree with' etc.

This is historical too. So many Jews could not stand that Americans had a right to self-association so they funded the Civil Rights movement.

The Amish like their life a certain way, they like to live among themselves and not mingle with others, like the Jews, but they're not forcing or even coercing anyone else to live their beliefs, drop their borders, accommodate foreigners, accommodate sexual minorities, drug addicts, etc.

The difference between the Amish and the Jews is that the Amish don't control banking and media corporations, don't control people's livelihood, what they buy, are allowed to buy or what they are allowed to think, who they are allowed to vote for.

"The Jews" don't control banking and media corporations - specific Jews do - and they're not uniformly Jewish. As I keep banging on about, Jews come in all sorts of different groups, and increasingly they're not even all that Jewish at all.

Then it would behoove those jews who are apparently not being represented by the 'elite' jews to stop supporting them through ethno centric advocacy groups that go as far as to say that any talk of 'international' or 'cosmopolitan' elites is inherently anti-semitic.

You can't have AIPAC, the ADL, and the thousands of jewish advocacy groups in the US and act like the concept of a 'jew' doesn't hold any value and that it can just be brushed away by mention of the fact that poor jews exist.

Unlike the anti-white racial theories of unconscious bias and systemic racism, anti-semitism doesn't need to go that far to make its point. It just needs to point to any one of the widely supported explicitly racially exclusive jewish advocacy groups.

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Specific Jews do the unbanking.

Specific Jews do the media influencing.

Specific Jews do the ADL, AIPAC, soft-on-crime DA, gun control, illegal immigrant charity... funding.

Specific Jews write the opinion pieces about how all white people are racist.

Specific Jews theorize the critical race, gender, border theories and teach them in colleges.

When you add them all up that ends up making a lot of specific individuals, but that still doesn't add up to the full Jewish population.

What are the other ones doing?

Are they coming out and saying 'us representatives of the Jewish bowling club of Broward County Florida, would like to address the egregious accusations against Kanye West / Nick Fuentes / etc, and show our support...'?

I haven't seen it.

If somebody happens to be an individual Jew who absolutely hates to see right-wing people get banned from media, people lose their job over criticism of powerful people, people get smeared every day for their skin color and other such things.

Then good for them.

But what I would call 'Team Jew' is absolutely opposed to them.

If that one individual is unable to shut down 'Team Jew', to tell their family members, cousins, in-laws, synagogue fellows, other members of the Jewish bowling club etc, to stop being part of Team Jew...

...well then they might become a casualty of the inevitable wave of 'antisemitism' (resentment against 'Team Jew').

That's not a threat, it just seems like a law of nature to me.

No nation in this whole world will endlessly tolerate a small group of people that is constantly undermining the majority

(which is what I perceive 'Team Jew' to be doing, which you may disagree with).

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Well, yes. Refusal to assimilate. All the Jews that decided to assimilate converted to Christianity, 2000 years ago.

But most of the US Blue Tribe Jews I know ARE assimilated, as indeed are the Christians and Muslims. Other than which cultural holidays they celebrate, their educated Blue Tribe values are much more similar than not. They don't go to Jewish or Muslim or Christian schools. (Well ironically enough if there is a pattern it appears to be to send their kids to Catholic schools in all cases actually).

Now their are more conservative Jewish communities that are not assimilated but they also tend to be very poor and not doing much in the way of billionaire fundraising as far as I can see.

The key difference between Blue Jews and Blue whites is that if somebody goes and says 'I have an issue with Jews' then the Blue Jews can all get together and issue a statement to complain and bad stuff can happen to that somebody.

If somebody goes and says 'I have an issue with white people' then they can potentially profit from it and the Blue whites might have to apologize for whatever complaint was filed against them.

Oh and they also get their Blue white comrades to fund the military defense of their ethnostate in the Middle-East that they can retreat to if their latest race war experiment goes wrong stateside.

Integrating to the Blue team for white people means letting go of your tribal connections, denying the importance of your ancestry, cultural accomplishments, demanding that whatever remains of it be thrown down.

An authentic Blue Jew would demand Holocaust museums exclusively host Rwandan or Uyghur genocide exhibits, write hit-pieces endlessly tearing down classic Holocaust literature like Ann Frank's diary, Maus, etc, for racism, homophobia, sexism...

We need a Netflix Ann Frank movie starring a disabled trans African tribeswoman including jokes targeted at traditional Jewish culture.

Reading this whole thread is surreal and it's cognitively difficult for me to engage with the entire girth of it, but at the very start is seems empirically wrong to me to suggest that Jews don't assimilate enough. Statistically speaking there's a jew in new york whose grandpa moved to brooklyn and learned english, and his dad moved to italy and learned italian, and his dad moved to austria and learned austrian, and his dad had to learn greek, and each of them invested in a local business along the way. As a thought experiment amongst people you personally know count the % of chinese immigrants who speak chinese at home vs the number of jews who speak hebrew lol.

As a thought experiment, name a couple Chinese-American actors, or any other immigrant-descendants who use their influence to subvert European-American values.

One of the only apparently decent people in Hollywood is Keanu Reeves, Americans love his gun movies.

On the other hand, we have a Sarah Silverman who makes Santa Inc.

Statistically speaking there's a jew in new york whose grandpa moved to brooklyn and learned english, and his dad moved to italy and learned italian, and his dad moved to austria and learned austraian, and his dad had to learn greek, and each of them invested in a local business along the way.

Normal people don't do that. Why do you act as if that's evidence of integrating successfully?

Speaking the same language as somebody =/= integrating.

This is an example of integration

A normal person you talk shit to they talk shit back, they don't seize your bank accounts.

Only the high priests of the Holocaust religion make people bow and apologize with real tears.

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Not a very common thing to see. At least we can admit that they are pretty insular people.

No, I don't think so. Not in the US, at least. No more so than many other ethnic groups, and there are many that are far more insular than Jews (Native Americans, for example, or Hmong, or Sikhs, or Muslims). Hell, even Mormons could be called insular for all their proselytizing.

Well, yes. Refusal to assimilate. All the Jews that decided to assimilate converted to Christianity, 2000 years ago.

So, what is your objection to them not "assimilating" - which I take you to mean, converting to Christianity or otherwise abandoning Judaism - now?

This is what happens very often if not always when somebody talks trash about the Jews.

It also happens when people talk trash about blacks or women or trans or any other favored minority group. We talk a lot here about how it's pretty much only "privileged" groups (i.e., straight white men) who it's okay for celebrities and politicians to talk trash about.

You may see a threat in the number of Jews in Hollywood and banking, but like @SecureSignals, when asked point-blank what you think "we" should do about it, or alternatively, what you think Jews should do to stop being so offensively Jewish, you are conspicuously silent. Do you want mass conversions? Expulsions and forced deportations to Israel? Industry quotas? I'd really like to see y'all quit waffling and spell out your agenda.

So, what is your objection to them not "assimilating" - which I take you to mean, converting to Christianity or otherwise abandoning Judaism - now?

I thought I laid it out pretty clearly:

The difference between the Amish and the Jews is that the Amish don't control banking and media corporations, don't control people's livelihood, what they buy, are allowed to buy or what they are allowed to think, who they are allowed to vote for.

My problem is when a tiny minority that hates me has such control over my life.

It also happens when people talk trash about blacks or women or trans or any other favored minority group. We talk a lot here about how it's pretty much only "privileged" groups (i.e., straight white men) who it's okay for celebrities and politicians to talk trash about.

Name 5 examples of a rich African-American suffering from talking trash about anyone else but the Jews.

There's clearly a hierarchy of who it is okay to criticize.

what you think "we" should do about it, or alternatively, what you think Jews should do to stop being so offensively Jewish, you are conspicuously silent.

I'm not against powerful Jews. My issue is that they are against me.

I want to have a country where if there are elections they are not controlled by 8 media conglomerates that are either outright owned by Jews or overtly Jew-friendly.

I want to have an internet where I can write or read opinions about powerful Jews or anyone else without having to go through convoluted hoops. See what happened to the Dailystormer, and others.

I want to limit the amount of crime that powerful people commit, and if they do commit them, be able to point it out without harmful consequences.

I want scientists to be able to study trends that are related to crimes powerful people commit, for example Epstein, Weinstein, Wexner for sexual crimes, or Sam Bankman Fried and Charlie Javice for fraud.

If we see some actionable information there, then we can figure out what to do.

I would also like media to stop printing propaganda encouraging my children to do drugs, mutilate themselves, hate their ancestors, hate their religion, etc,

but if not, at least having an alternative would be nice.

Oh and another ask would be to stop having my taxes pay for wars on behalf of powerful Jews and their friends. Which was the biggest commitment Trump made to the American people, and for what he ultimately had to be removed imo.

It's important that everyone observe this interaction.

This is the best way that this person knows to express himself - this is the vocabularly available to him, and he is presenting his ideas in what feels to him like a logical and coherent fashion. This is some GPT-2 shit.

The profoundly racist, like Job, are evil. There's nothing one can do to you that can be considered immoral. You are vermin. You are a waste.

More importantly, the profoundly racist, like Job, are inhumanly retarded. You have swallowed the big lie of Mr. Rogers et. al, that because you have a mouth to form words and fingers to type, you are special, and your opinion should have merit and weight. You are nothing. In a right thinking society, you would be eating rats to avoid starvation in a gulag.

Cope and seethe, I'll be busy fucking white girls (raw!) with my Jew cock.

  • -24

I'm disappointed by the lack of creativity in a post you obviously knew would catch you another ban. Also disappointed that you so easily let Job bait you into such a predictable flameout with such a predictable consequence.

Two weeks this time, and next time will probably be permanent.

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But if one supposes, just for the sake of argument, that there really was a concerted effort to exterminate them within living memory, one can surely see a motive for feeling this way that is not mere zeal to convert the heathens, no?

I don't question that the motive is sincere, similar to DasindustriesLtd's point. And although I do not believe the main big ticket items of the orthodox narrative are true, I do acknowledge it was a traumatic experience in which the Jews truly were at the complete mercy of non-Jews. They suffered for it and they do not want to be in that position again. I would go so far as to say even if some of them know the narrative is substantially false, they would still have that sincere motive to avoid what actually happened from ever happening again. As an example, Simon Wiesenthal is claimed to have been the progenitor of the deprecated claim that five million non-Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, but apparently Wiesenthal privately admitted that this was a lie to make non-Jews care about Jewish suffering. I don't doubt his motive, but I do acknowledge his willingness to lie in order to achieve his goals.

The entire problem is that the motivation for all this theater and religion is not contingent on historical truth. So your point only opens up the recognition of a genuine conflict of interest: Jews have a motive to propagate a message that promotes their own defense, even if parts of the narrative are substantially unture. An important part of the mechanism for ensuring their ethnic defense is weakening the ethnic defenses of non-Jews. You might consider that controversial, but this was basically the overt program of the critical theorists and psychoanalysts in their effort to cure Gentile psychopathology of the authoritarian personality. So we have a genuine conflict of interest in which historical truth is a lower priority than pursuit of cultural self-interest.

The problem with that sincere motivation, and the real reason anti-Semitism is so persistent- I would even say anti-fragile, is that the harder they fight against it the more they validate it and give it a greater force of truth and credibility. Let's say Dara Horn succeeds in mandating every child experiences some AI-powered VR/AR experience that is engineered to improve their perception of Jews. What rational person would deny at that point that the anti-Semites were right? Your average high-brow anti-Semite would blush to suggest that Jews will compel your children to consume AI-generated, Virtual Reality experiences to brainwash them into loving Jews. But this is being seriously proposed by Dara and some form of what she is suggesting will almost certainly be implemented as the lower-tech solutions are already being used on thousands of students every day.

The entire problem is that the motivate for all this theater and religion is not contingent on historical truth. So your point only opens up the recognition of a genuine conflict of interest: Jews have a motive to propagate a message that promotes their own defense, even if parts of the narrative are substantially unture.

Again, you're just taking it for granted that the narrative is substantially untrue. This is what you believe, but my point above is that if it's not untrue, then their motives are not only sincere but more or less rational. People actually tried to exterminate them. They actually have good reason to fear this. People like you who campaign on a platform of "It didn't happen, but if it did, they deserved it" hardly make them look less less rational or more deceptive.

Let's say Dara Horn succeeds in mandating every child experiences some AI-powered VR/AR experience that is engineered to improve their perception of Jews. What rational person would deny at that point that the anti-Semites were right? Your average high-brow anti-Semite would blush to suggest that Jews will compel your children to consume AI-generated, Virtual Reality experiences to brainwash them into loving Jews.

That's quite a clever bit of wordplay, but if AI-generated VR experiences become a standard delivery system for educational materials, this sounds a lot less scary than "High-tech dystopian Jew brainwashing." Then you're just complaining that we have too much Holocaust remembrance, and will go on insisting that the backlash will happen any day now.

Again, you're just taking it for granted that the narrative is substantially untrue.

No I am not, I am saying that the motive for Holocaust remembrance is real, powerful, and valid even if the narrative is substantially untrue. The motive for Holocaust remembrance is not contingent on the historical truth of the narrative as challenged by Revisionists. I fully recognize that and always have, but that fact only uncovers a much deeper conflict and presents larger problems in ascertaining the truth of the matter.

but if AI-generated VR experiences become a standard delivery system for educational materials, this sounds a lot less scary than "High-tech dystopian Jew brainwashing." Then you're just complaining that we have too much Holocaust remembrance, and will go on insisting that the backlash will happen any day now.

The point I am trying to make, in the spirit of JTarrou's thought experiment, is that the line between culture/politics/religion or education/brain-washing is purely semantic. The critique I am making is not that it is brain-washing per se, it's that it is specifically brain-washing (or education, however you prefer) with a motive to influence children's perceptions of Jews in a particular direction. It's the religion I oppose, not religion itself or even its imminent technological innovations.

I am not grandstanding against VR brain-washing, I am saying to pay attention to the curriculum that gets mandated, the identities and narratives that get constructed into post-modern mega-churches, the messaging and content that is prioritized for adoption. What counts as education and what counts as brainwashing? The prevailing religion. Again, I'll reiterate that JTarrou suggests:

perhaps we should try to formalize it and create an Ecumenical Political Church, espousing a very vague and general set of principles to bound the acceptable limits of politics, that recognizes the fundamental tension of politics and is maximally inclusive.

And I am saying that we already have this, and it's the Holocaust narrative. You can call it education, but that's what it is all the same.

Then you're just complaining that we have too much Holocaust remembrance, and will go on insisting that the backlash will happen any day now.

I was under the impression that the backlash was already here. There's a near constant supply of stories and news articles from reputable sources about how anti-semitism is on the rise, democracy is in trouble, the Wrong People are getting into power, etc. I can definitely see things continuing to get worse, but that doesn't mean that the backlash is some far-off, hazy threat - it is here now and there are thinkpieces complaining about it all the time.

That's rhetoric designed to turn molehills into mountains. You shouldn't take that kind of thing seriously just on the basis that those complaints are there. Those complaints would exist even if there are only a few incidents of anti-Semitic crimes even for the next century.

There's a near constant supply of stories and news articles from reputable sources about how anti-semitism is on the rise, democracy is in trouble, the Wrong People are getting into power, etc.

What's the evidence that this is a backlash to Holocaust remembrance?

it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews

What bothers me about extant accounts of rampant anti-semitism (in the United States) is the same thing that bothers me about claims like "police are murdering unarmed black men by the thousands"--they're just empirically false. Anti-semitism (in the sense of being anti-Jew) is indeed rampant in many countries in the Middle East--and yet Americans are much more likely to report unfavorable feelings toward evangelicals, and much less likely to report favorable feelings toward Muslims... and so on, and so forth. In fact, in the U.S. no religion is viewed more favorably, on balance, than Jews.

I don't much care about the Holocaust. I don't deny that it happened, I certainly do not share your doubts (as I've encountered them in the past, anyway) about most of the empirical claims made by prominent historians on these matters. But I do think the Holocaust was not special. Wholesale slaughter of ethnic, religious, and political outgroups is the story of human history, and Jews are neither the most recent victims, nor the most numerous. I think it is a better world where we are driven to do that sort of thing less, preferably never, and to whatever extent "Holocaust education" creates that world, I don't have any serious complaints about it. But I do find it absurd to lean on past slaughters in pursuit of present aims. I had nothing to do with slavery in the American South, I had nothing to do with World War II. The people still fighting those battles, from whatever side they fight them, are boring to me.

The thing you think would make it a better world is something I think was goodish in the sense it was a requirement for civilization and humanity to exists at all. At its core it was just evolution. The weaker intelligence, the weaker human, the weaker civilization was slaughtered to make room for more of the higher intelligence, higher human, and higher civilization. Survival competition is at the core of creating everything.

In the last 70-100 years we’ve eliminated it. We will see how that works out. Perhaps we’ve reached a civilization complexity where we can competition games without killing everyone but for most of human history and pre human history it was the driving force.

Anti-semitism (in the sense of being anti-Jew) is indeed rampant in many countries in the Middle East--and yet Americans are much more likely to report unfavorable feelings toward evangelicals, and much less likely to report favorable feelings toward Muslims... and so on, and so forth. In fact, in the U.S. no religion is viewed more favorably, on balance, than Jews.

I think you're overlooking a rather obvious American demographic - the demographic where anti-Semitism is consistently highest.

Most white Americans view Jews favorably. Most Asians and Hispanics are relatively indifferent to Jews. (Though memorably, I once met a woman in a small agricultural city in Korea who, unprompted, went off on a rant to me about how Jews controlled everything in the West. I doubt she'd ever met a Jew or could even explain how Jews were different from non-Jewish Westerners.) Blacks... well, Kanye might have said the quiet part out loud, but anecdotally, a whole lot of black folks agree with him.

I think in general you are right, that the demand for anti-Semitism in the US exceeds the supply. But there actually is a pretty regular supply of it, it's just one that the ADL prefers not to focus on.

The adl and Allies are pretty willing to notice black antisemitism, though. I mean it’s true that they also notice lots of white antisemitism which may or may not exist in a pattern a lot like gay pride where anything less than constant, untempered praise and focus on Jewish interests is interpreted as antisemitism. But the NoI, 5 percenters, black Hebrew Israelites, etc are definitely noticed even if the SPLC lists them alongside a veritable flood of white Christians who happen to merely not be as enthusiastic about Jewish things as the ADL would prefer.

Since we live in a "fractured and siloed America," we must teach the children to love their neighbors with... VR? You can't love your neighbor unless you know them, and you can't know your neighbor by VRing a reproduction of a Yiddish theater.

Also what is all this "love your neighbor" bullshit? Is this really the same @SecureSignals who 3 to 4 months back was going on about how Christianity had been allowed to undermine the Aryan/Gentile ethos and how it needed to be expunged and replaced?

I don't think I could name a single meme that is more obviously Christian and more fundamentally opposed to SecureSignals' stated beliefs, and desire to "retvrn" than Christ's Greatest Commandment if I had had if I had eternity to do so.

I was quoting the article, not Signal's words.

All of the compulsory use of AI-optimized VR imagery to find love makes more sense when you think of this sort of love:

“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

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?

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.

This reads a tad bit uncharitable. If he knows more than you it could hardly be fair to say that he is dragging you down. As for calculating the number of bodies that can fit in a room, the nature of the revisionist talking points can only be fairly compared to the nature of the evidence presented by mainstream theorists.

Aside from that:

The Alternative Hypothesis made a video on this topic. With a text version available, linked below. I've heard that the arguments presented come from Walter N. Sanning.

The general gist is probably best summarized on page 35 onwards of the text version. Long story short, the amount of jews Germany had access to in the Poland/USSR regions is lower than the amount of jews that are missing from the census. Attributing the deaths of 4.4 million jews to Germans who only occupied Polish/USSR regions with a total of 1.9 million jews is problematic.

Revisionists have written many published works on the so-called "Operation Reinhardt" death camps, the most recent of which was published in 2021 and covers all three camps. But these technical studies aren't very approachable without a high level of background knowledge. My first exposure to the Revisionist position on those camps, which includes Treblinka, was in the well-known Revisionist documentary One Third of the Holocaust.

I wasn't a Revisionist when I first saw that and knew virtually nothing about these camps, so I took everything presented with a huge grain of salt. But there were some relatively straightforward claims presented in the documentary that seemed easy to verify, and if true, raised questions. For example, in the video the creator describes that the official historical narrative is that the Nazis buried about 1.5 million - 2 million Jews and then later dug them all back up and cremated them on grills to hide the evidence. I assumed that had to be some sort of straw man or misrepresentation but it turned out not to be- it's what historians actually claim. Or when he presents silly statements made by witnesses you are going to assume he is just cherry-picking, but it turns out those witnesses are as important to the whole story as he presents in the video.

Having learned that the story itself is simply pretty hard to believe, stranger than fiction even, I learned a lot more about these camps and the Holocaust in general, and the more I learned the more I realized that Revisionists have the stronger case. The evidence for these claims should be considered holistically. I would separate the categories of evidence in four parts:

Census data: Inconclusive, it's the most important evidence cited by anti-Deniers here due to the deficiencies in the other categories of evidence. But there are so many uncertainties and contradictions in the numbers. How many Jews are in the Princeton class of 2026? We couldn't figure that out, we could only conclude that the Jewish organizations presenting the estimates were fudging them based on political and economic incentives. But so many here stake the truth of this tall tale on some Jews that should exist on paper, by doing some simple additions and subtractions from many different demographic studies conducted before, during, and after the war in the Russian empire, Poland, and Soviet Union. It heavily relies on a level of precision (how many Polish Jews became "Soviet Citizens" on paper after the war?), accuracy and honesty that simply does not exist.

Physical evidence: Strongly favors the Revisionist side. Historians claim ~2 million were murdered in these camps, but the remains of approximately 0% of those two million victims have been identified in scientific excavations. This also includes technical arguments around things like burial density or cremation capacity, fuel requirements, etc. Although these arguments are usually not influential to non-Revisionists because they just assume that Revisionists are using math deceptively or not representing the mainstream position accurately (they are).

Documentary evidence: Strongly favors the Revisionist side, as the Revisionist case mostly takes the documents at face value whereas the mainstream narrative claims that there was systematic euphemism and coded language. For example, there are documents where both Himmler and Pohl, head of the concentration camp system, identify Sobibor as a transit camp (Durchgangslager). The Revisionist theory is this camp was what the document says it was, the mainstream theory is that in their own internal secret documents they used coded language to camouflage the extermination camp. There are some documents that Revisionists struggle to explain, which is to be expected given that there are millions and millions of them. There are documents that the mainstream struggles to explain. But most important of all are the documents that should be there but which are not.

Witness testimonies: The most strong aspect of the Revisionist case in my opinion. Witnesses are by far the most important part of the body of evidence for the mainstream narrative, so the Revisionist critique of that body of evidence is devastating.

The "Where did they Go?" trump card is the most popular retort against Revisionists as it's an attempt to reverse the burden of proof. The mainstream narrative makes these claims which are honestly pretty hard to believe, Revisionists build an extremely strong case against that narrative, so the ultimate strategy is to try to demand Revisionists track the population movements of Jews in the final years of the war, right before the Soviet Union conquered that half of the continent and the most important German officials involved had died or been killed.

The fact is, there are no surviving documents at all pertaining to transports to or from the alleged Treblinka extermination camp. The Korherr report does not mention Treblinka at all, and the author of that report wrote a letter to Der Spiegel in the 1970s stating that he interpreted those numbers in his report to mean what Revisionists say those numbers meant. The story is the same at Belzec, where the mainstream admits that unfortunately:

The railway documents were all destroyed on July 4 1944, when a lone Russian bomber dropped one solitary bomb over Belzec which just happened to hit an ammunition train standing in the station. The Belzec railway station was completely destroyed together with all the records.

So it's highly convenient to demand Revisionists answer questions that rely on evidence which has been destroyed in unlucky circumstances or otherwise fallen into Soviet Custody. But neither is there documentary evidence remaining for transports into those camps either.

In recent years it has been revealed, to the surprise of historians, that there were tens of thousands of labor and concentration camps which were previously unknown:

Researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have been documenting all of the Nazi concentration camps, ghettos, slave labour sites and killing factories which had been set up across Europe.

When they first started the project, the team expected to find about 7,000 camps and ghettos.

Shockingly, they discovered 42,500 camps across large swathes of German-controlled Europe.

Speaking to the New York Times, Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said: 'The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought...

When the project first started, the researchers expected to find about 7,000 Nazi camps and ghettos. But as the project has gone on, the numbers constantly increased to the current figure of 42,500.

So historians missed tens of thousands of camps that existed in these areas which happened to exist in a network around rail lines that were subject to the gas chamber extermination rumors. This revelation certainly gives more context to Korherr's interpretation of settlers "sifted through the camps of General Government", of which there were many more than historians had previously understood.

The retort "Where did the Jews go?" would not be necessary if there was strong evidence that they were murdered in the precise location where it is said they were murdered. When the Germans (NSFL) discovered the mass graves in the Katyn Forest, they invited international observers from all sides and released American POWs to observe the investigation. They exhumed the mass graves to conduct autopsies, investigate time and cause of death, and to identify victims. They were still accused of this crime by the Soviet prosecution at Nuremberg, and the Soviet authors of that Katyn report submitted into evidence (USSR-54) were the same as the authors of the Auschwitz report (USSR-8), with the addition of Trofim Lysenko as a signatory to the Auschwitz report.

No similar investigation was conducted for the alleged murder of about 2 million people at these three camps. While the Western Allies had conducted investigations disproving the allegations of gas chamber extermination in the camps liberated by the Western Allies, the Soviet Union denied access to outside observers and freely modified structures in Soviet-Occupied Poland, including most importantly the gas chamber at Auschwitz which has been shown to millions and millions of tourists.

But there are so many uncertainties and contradictions in the numbers. How many Jews are in the Princeton class of 2026? We couldn't figure that out, we could only conclude that the Jewish organizations presenting the estimates were fudging them based on political and economic incentives.

The difference between the data on the number of Jews at Princeton and the number of Jews recorded in a census is that at Princeton no one goes around asking everyone if they are Jewish, yet this is exactly what happens during a census. And the census data was certainly not collected by Jewish organizations.

But so many here stake the truth of this tall tale on some Jews that should exist on paper, by doing some simple additions and subtractions from many different demographic studies conducted before, during, and after the war in the Russian empire, Poland, and Soviet Union. It heavily relies on a level of precision (how many Polish Jews became "Soviet Citizens" on paper after the war?), accuracy and honesty that simply does not exist.

Censuses record the population at the local level, too, not just the country level. We can look at the number of Jews within Poland's current borders, for example: a table on Wikipedia records over 3 million Jews in 1939 and less than 300,000 in 1946.

I don't know what your point is with "Soviet Citizens". Census takers don't look at a list of citizens, they go around from place to place recording how many people there are and various data on those people. It's hard to over- or under-count people in a census.

For example, there are documents where both Himmler and Pohl, head of the concentration camp system, identify Sobibor as a transit camp (Durchgangslager). (...)

Witness testimonies: The most strong aspect of the Revisionist case in my opinion. Witnesses are by far the most important part of the body of evidence for the mainstream narrative, so the Revisionist critique of that body of evidence is devastating.

As I understand, you believe Operation Reinhardt was about resettling 2 million Jews, and the few deaths that happened were unintentional. If this is the case, if Sobibor and the other Operation Reinhardt camps were just transit camps, where did all these Jews who passed through them end up? Where are the testimonies of Jews who passed through the camps and were peacefully resettled?

The "Where did they Go?" trump card is the most popular retort against Revisionists as it's an attempt to reverse the burden of proof. The mainstream narrative makes these claims which are honestly pretty hard to believe, Revisionists build an extremely strong case against that narrative, so the ultimate strategy is to try to demand Revisionists track the population movements of Jews in the final years of the war, right before the Soviet Union conquered that half of the continent and the most important German officials involved had died or been killed.

It's a perfectly reasonable question. Millions of people don't just disappear. It should be possible to track the movements of millions of people.

Compare the Armenian genocide. (You believe this one happened, right?) Even though most of the deported Armenians died, some managed to escape and today there are significant Armenian communities in places like Lebanon and Syria. Armenians were already present there, but most of the modern population descends from victims of the deportations. There are hundreds of thousands of them today. Where are the comparable Jewish populations in the "Lublin district" or wherever it was they were being resettled to?

(Edit: see also this comment by @To_Mandalay.)

But neither is there documentary evidence remaining for transports into those camps either.

What is the "revisionist" interpretation of the more than one million Jews the Korherr Report says were "processed" in various camps? The letter to Der Spiegel is presumably the same one quoted on the report's Wikipedia article:

statement that I had mentioned that over a million Jews had died in the camps of the Generalgouvernement and the Warthegau through special treatment is also inaccurate. I must protest against the word 'died' in this context. It was the very word 'Sonderbehandlung' ['special treatment'] that led me to call the RSHA by phone and ask what this word meant. I was given the answer that these were Jews who were settled in the Lublin district.

So, more than a million Jews entered those camps. This is uncontroversial, right? Either they didn't leave or they left and were resettled. In the latter case, where were they resettled? Where are the testimonies of the more than one million Jews who were resettled?

The Korherr report says:

The total number of Jews in the world in 1937 is generally estimated at around 17 million, thereof more than 10 million in Europe. They concentrate or concentrated mainly in the former Polish-Russian areas occupied by Germany between the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland and between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, further in the centers of commerce and the Rhine area of Central and Western Europe and on the coasts of the Mediterranean.

From 1937 to the beginning of 1943 the number of Jews, partially due to the excess mortality of the Jews in Central and Western Europe, partially due to the evacuations especially in the more strongly populated Eastern Territories which are here counted as off-going, should have diminished by an estimated 4 million. It must not be overlooked in this respect that of the deaths of Soviet Russian Jews in the occupied Eastern territories only a part was recorded, whereas deaths in the rest of European Russia and at the front are not included at all. In addition there are movements of Jews inside Russia to the Asian part which are unknown to us. The movement of Jews from the European countries outside the German influence is also of a largely unknown order of magnitude. On the whole European Jewry should since 1933, i.e. in the first decade of National Socialist German power, have lost almost half of its population.

This is pretty unambiguous: the number of Jews in Europe has decreased by 4 million. What is the "revisionist" interpretation here? There certainly weren't millions of Jewish refugees outside Europe at this point.

In recent years it has been revealed, to the surprise of historians, that there were tens of thousands of labor and concentration camps which were previously unknown (...) So historians missed tens of thousands of camps that existed in these areas which happened to exist in a network around rail lines that were subject to the gas chamber extermination rumors. This revelation certainly gives more context to Korherr's interpretation of settlers "sifted through the camps of General Government", of which there were many more than historians had previously understood.

This number includes labour camps, "detention facilities", "a variety of penal camps, prisons, and other sites for mostly non-Jewish prisoners" and POW camps. The total number of people who were imprisoned in these camps is much higher than 6 million and many of them, probably a majority, were not Jewish.

They exhumed the mass graves to conduct autopsies, investigate time and cause of death, and to identify victims. (...) No similar investigation was conducted for the alleged murder of about 2 million people at these three camps.

Of course such an investigation wasn't done because the bodies were destroyed. Indeed, the Germans' discovery of the Katyn massacre is said to be the reason why they decided to destroy the bodies, as they didn't want their own murders similarly discovered.

Edit: As a counterfactual, suppose the Nazis did murder millions of Jews and destroy the evidence by cremating the bodies and then destroying the crematoria and all the documents relating to the genocide. What sort of evidence would prove that this happened?

As I understand, you believe Operation Reinhardt was about resettling 2 million Jews

What Operation Reinhardt was about is an important issue.

It was one of my first topics of interest, because if Wikipedia had it right and this was the code-name for the secret plan to exterminate the Jews, then that would have settled the matter and satisfied my curiosity. But the mainstream consensus is clearly wrong.

Operation Reinhardt was an economic initiative for the utilization of Jewish labor and confiscated property in the General Government. One of the primary motivations for liquidating the Jewish ghettos was to confiscate and exploit Jewish movable and immovable property for the German economy and war effort. This required a significant amount of administration and labor, and all of this was organized under that operation. The Nuremberg Military Tribunal WVHA trial (1950), for what it's worth, also identified this as the purpose of the operation. From the court's finding of facts:

The purpose of the action [Reinhardt] was to gather into the Reich all the Jewish manpower and wealth which could be reached.

This can be compared with Wikipedia's description:

Operation Reinhard or Operation Reinhardt ... was the codename of the secretive World War II German plan to exterminate Poland's Jews in the General Government district of German-occupied Poland.

The NMT got it right. Mainstream historians have appropriated the "Reinhardt" code-name to claim it was code for extermination for the simple reason that they don't have other options for suggesting how the secret extermination plan was supposed to have been denoted in documents.

The difference between the data on the number of Jews at Princeton and the number of Jews recorded in a census is that at Princeton no one goes around asking everyone if they are Jewish, yet this is exactly what happens during a census.

The point was that counting people is not a politically-neutral act, neither is it for a census. The Alternative Hypothesis in his recent Revisionist work identified controversy surrounding the 1937 Soviet census:

"On 25 September 1937, there was a special Sovnarkom decision proclaiming the census invalid and setting a new one for January 1939. A Pravda editorial stated that the "enemies of the people gave the census counters invalid instructions that led to the gross under-counting of the population, but the brave NKVD under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov destroyed the snake's nest in the statistical bodies".

The assumption is that thereafter Soviet population figures were inflated in the 1939 census, with the help of the "brave NKVD" destroying the "snake's nest in the statistical bodies." The assumption of political neutrality in the census is highly dubious. Keep in mind that historians accuse the Germans of manipulating their concentration camp inmate and death statistics by excluding the gas chamber victims in order to hide evidence of the crime. So they are accusing the Germans of manipulating internal statistics while taking Soviet statistics at face value.

This is pretty unambiguous: the number of Jews in Europe has decreased by 4 million.

It is actually pretty ambiguous, the estimated decrease is meant to take into consideration excess mortality and emigration since 1937, so asserting that this figure is some "unambiguous" admission to the murder of 4 million people is quite silly and not even the mainstream interprets this figure in that way. The most controversial figure is "Total Evacuations" which is 1.8 million. Historians say that was code for the number of Jews murdered in gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower. Revisionists that this was the number of Jews deported into one of the many camps in General Government or deported further east. Korherr said he was told it referred to Jews deported into camps in Lublin, which fits the Revisionist claim.

Where are the testimonies of the more than one million Jews who were resettled?

Revisionists have proven beyond a doubt that the Soviet Union systematically inflated death tolls by orders of magnitude in their investigations, and modified structures to give them an apparent criminal intent, and accused the Germans of war crimes that the Soviets were responsible for... and you're asking why the Soviet Union didn't gather exculpatory testimonies and submit them as evidence? The Soviet Union did not allow Western investigators access to this entire body of evidence. Among the body of evidence that Western investigators had access to, the gas chamber extermination story was disproven.

At Nuremberg, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were discussed in the trial for no more than 20 minutes. Electrocution floors were the alleged method of murder at Belzec at the time, and at Treblinka it was steam chambers. The alleged murder of millions at these camps was represented by a single witness who was examined for not more than 15 minutes and was not cross-examined by the defense. These camps were almost entirely ignored at Nuremberg, the Western camps were at the time more central to the gas chamber extermination claims, particularly Dachau.

The problem with all the evidence these eastern camps being behind the Iron Curtain is that you have to contend with the fact that this body of evidence was in Soviet Custody. So when you ask, for example "why weren't resettled Jews interviewed?" you don't seem to grasp the purpose of a show trial.

Edit: As a counterfactual, suppose the Nazis did murder millions of Jews and destroy the evidence by cremating the bodies and then destroying the crematoria and all the documents relating to the genocide.

The Katyn Forest massacre is an example of the counterfactual. The German's didn't have access to documents proving the Soviets did it, they had to scientifically investigate the crime scene to try and prove it. They didn't do it out of the goodness of their hearts, it was a very important propaganda opportunity. Your mistake is thinking that "cremating the bodies" is the same thing as "destroying the evidence", when they are not the same thing. A cremated body leaves behind a lot of evidence, 800,000 cremated bodies would leave an amount of evidence that is hard to fathom. But the Soviet Union would have had every motive to excavate those tens of millions of cremated bone fragments with international observers for all the same reasons as the Germans in their investigation of the Katyn massacre.

Imagine if the Germans interviewed a witness to the Katyn massacre, and the witness said the bodies were cremated and buried. And then the Germans covered the area of the mass graves in concrete and forbade anybody from excavating in order to protect the religious beliefs of the victims. Would that course of action at all make any sense if they were motivated to reveal Soviet crimes to the world? It would make sense in the case of a mass grave that wasn't actually there, and the world bought the story without the scientific investigation.

The point was that counting people is not a politically-neutral act, neither is it for a census. The Alternative Hypothesis in his recent Revisionist work identified controversy surrounding the 1937 Soviet census:

"On 25 September 1937, there was a special Sovnarkom decision proclaiming the census invalid and setting a new one for January 1939. A Pravda editorial stated that the "enemies of the people gave the census counters invalid instructions that led to the gross under-counting of the population, but the brave NKVD under the leadership of Nikolai Yezhov destroyed the snake's nest in the statistical bodies".

The assumption is that thereafter Soviet population figures were inflated in the 1939 census, with the help of the "brave NKVD" destroying the "snake's nest in the statistical bodies." The assumption of political neutrality in the census is highly dubious. Keep in mind that historians accuse the Germans of manipulating their concentration camp inmate and death statistics by excluding the gas chamber victims in order to hide evidence of the crime. So they are accusing the Germans of manipulating internal statistics while taking Soviet statistics at face value.

Only this one census is generally considered unreliable. And mainstream historians agree that it is unreliable. The censuses conducted before Stalin went completely insane and after he died are generally considered reliable, as are the Polish censuses.

It is actually pretty ambiguous, the estimated decrease is meant to take into consideration excess mortality and emigration since 1937, so asserting that this figure is some "unambiguous" admission to the murder of 4 million people is quite silly and not even the mainstream interprets this figure in that way. The most controversial figure is "Total Evacuations" which is 1.8 million. Historians say that was code for the number of Jews murdered in gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower. Revisionists that this was the number of Jews deported into one of the many camps in General Government or deported further east. Korherr said he was told it referred to Jews deported into camps in Lublin, which fits the Revisionist claim.

It says the number of Jews in Europe has decreased by 4 million:

From 1937 to the beginning of 1943 the number of Jews, partially due to the excess mortality of the Jews in Central and Western Europe, partially due to the evacuations especially in the more strongly populated Eastern Territories which are here counted as off-going, should have diminished by an estimated 4 million. (...) European Jewry should since 1933, i.e. in the first decade of National Socialist German power, have lost almost half of its population.

This means that it doesn't include Jews who were just deported to a different part of Europe.

Assuming Korherr's claim that he was told those Jews were just resettled is even true, that just means they didn't want him to know what was going on. Need to know and all that.

Revisionists have proven beyond a doubt that the Soviet Union systematically inflated death tolls by orders of magnitude in their investigations, and modified structures to give them an apparent criminal intent, and accused the Germans of war crimes that the Soviets were responsible for... and you're asking why the Soviet Union didn't gather exculpatory testimonies and submit them as evidence? The Soviet Union did not allow Western investigators access to this entire body of evidence. Among the body of evidence that Western investigators had access to, the gas chamber extermination story was disproven.

At Nuremberg, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka were discussed in the trial for no more than 20 minutes. Electrocution floors were the alleged method of murder at Belzec at the time, and at Treblinka it was steam chambers. The alleged murder of millions at these camps was represented by a single witness who was examined for not more than 15 minutes and was not cross-examined by the defense. These camps were almost entirely ignored at Nuremberg, the Western camps were at the time more central to the gas chamber extermination claims, particularly Dachau.

The problem with all the evidence these eastern camps being behind the Iron Curtain is that you have to contend with the fact that this body of evidence was in Soviet Custody. So when you ask, for example "why weren't resettled Jews interviewed?" you don't seem to grasp the purpose of a show trial.

That explains why no testimony was submitted to the trials. What about independent research since then? Where are all the interviews historians conducted with survivors? Published memoirs? There are plenty of available accounts of the Japanese internment camps in the US, for example, where only a tenth of the number of people were imprisoned.

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.

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

Yes, in speeches at Posen he describes the policy as evacuation. Two months after that October 1943 speech, in December, he also describes the policy as evacuation:

We are also too close to the development that is taking place in Europe. For the first time, as far as we can determine it historically since approximately 2 1/2 thousand years ago, we are at the point where the Germanic peoples have united, from a 65 million people in 1933 which has become 85 - 88 million people in 1941, which during the war some big migrations have taken place, a migration of 700,00 Germans who have immigrated, of 2 million foreigners who have emigrated, of such and such many Jews who have emigrated to the East; Movements of peoples, as we call them in history with infinite names, have taken place within the framework of this rapid development.

Although he mentions the killing of Jews in this December speech as well, in the context of partisans:

Measures, gentlemen, which we are shirking today, will be welcomed by our grandchildren. If I was forced to take action against partisans and against Jewish commissars in a village - I am saying this in this circle, as it is only intended for this circle -, then I gave the basic order to have the wives and children of these partisans and commissars killed as well. I would be a weakling and a criminal of our descendants if I let the hateful sons of these subhumans, who were killed by us in the fight of man against subhuman, grow up.

His defense of the decision to conduct reprisals against the families of partisans and commissars "If I was forced to take action" would not make any sense in the context of an extermination policy where extermination of all Jews would have been the policy. You are saying his statement here is just theater right? To provide cover for the fact he actually ordered the extermination of all Jews?

You are basically saying:

  • Posen October 4th <- evacuation euphemisms + partisans

  • Posen October 6th <- partisans + admitted the policy was to exterminate all Jews

  • Weimar December 15th <- evacuation euphemisms + partisans

Why did Himmler go "mask off" only in the October 6th speech but maintain the euphemisms in the other speeches? The Revisionist position is more sensible, that his statements about the hard decision to kill Jews in the October 6th speech resembles the same statements in the December speech which is unambiguously about partisans.

Hermann Goering- the one who actually gave the "Final Solution" order to Heydrich and would have been as aware as Himmler of its actual nature, maintained that it was a policy of evacuation for emigration and not a euphemism for extermination in the Nuremberg Trial. That stands as more significant than a narrow interpretation of a single passage which stands in contrast with other speeches before and after that single passage.

His defense of the decision to conduct reprisals against the families of partisans and commissars would not make any sense in the context of an extermination policy where extermination of all Jews would have been the policy.

Partisans and commissars were not only Jews.

Memo from January 1944:

Largest stabilisation in the G.G. since the solution to the Jewish question. – Race war. Total solution. Not allowing avengers to rise against our children.

"No avengers" refers to the solution to the Jewish question in general. Which includes Jewish partisans and commissars but is obviously not limited to partisans and commissars. There were no 'commissars' in the General Government.

It's pretty clear the 4 October speech refers to physical annihilation as well, but the 6 October speech leaves even less wiggle room.

The Revisionist position is more sensible

In one speech Himmler talked about killing partisans in particular and in another speech he talked about killing Jews in general. This demonstrates only that when Himmler wanted to talk about killing partisans he was fully capable of using the word 'partisan' to indicate that he was talking about partisans. The unjustified assumption that Himmler is talking about partisans on October 6th because he talked about killing partisans in a different speech two months later is not sensible at all.

that his statements about the hard decision to kill Jews in the October 6th

No, he said it was a hard decision to wipe a "people/race" off of the face of the earth. Once again, partisans are not a "Volk."

Women and children killed along with the men. The race wiped off the face of the earth. No Jews to be left in occupied territories except those "in hiding."

Very clear.

It's pretty clear the 4 October speech refers to physical annihilation as well

So much of your case rests on an extremely narrow interpretation of a few selected passages, while dismissing the much more extant documentation as "euphemism" and "coded language."

You say that the 4 October speech refers to physical annihilation because Himmler describes:

Ich meine jetzt die Judenevakuierung, die Ausrottung des jüdischen Volkes.

I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extirpation of the Jewish people.

Your entire assumption is based on the assertion of what "Ausrottung" is supposed to denote. The meaning of this term was something of a mild controversy at the Nuremberg Trial and in the David Irving trial as well. It's misleading to call it "pretty clear" when it has been a controversy in court.

This question was brought to Alfred Rosenberg at Nuremberg:

MR. DODD: This is something you will be interested in. Will you look up and read out to the Tribunal what the definition of "Ausrottung" is?

ROSENBERG: I do not need a foreign dictionary in order to explain the various meanings "Ausrottung" may have in the German language. One can exterminate an idea, an economic system, a social order, and as a final consequence, also a group of human beings, certainly. Those are the many possibilities which are contained in that word. For that I do not need an English-German dictionary. Translations from German into English are so often wrong-and just as in that last document you have submitted to me, I heard again the translation of "Herrenrasse." In the document itself "Herrenrasse" is not even mentioned; however, there is the term "ein falsches Herrenmenschentum" (a false master mankind). Apparently everything is translated here in another sense.

MR. DODD: All right, I am not interested in that. Let us stay on this term of "Ausrottung." I take it then that you agree it does mean to "wipe out" or to "kill off," as it is understood, and that you did use the term in speaking to Hitler.

ROSENBERG: Here I heard again a different translation, which again used new German words, so I cannot determine what you wanted to express in English.

MR. DODD: Are you very serious in pressing this apparent inability of yours to agree with me about this ward or are you trying to kill time? Don't you know that there are plenty of people in this courtroom who speak German and who agree that that word does mean to "wipe out," to "extirpate?"

ROSENBERG: It means "to overcome" on one side and then it is to be used not with respect to individuals but rather to juridical entities, to certain historical traditions. On the other side this word has been used with respect to the German people and we have also not believed that in consequence thereof 60 millions of Germans would be shot.

Hitler warned of the "Ausrottung" of all European peoples (including the Allies) if Germany lost the war. Obviously this did not mean that every single European person would be killed, but something more like "an allied victory will lead to the Bolshevization of Europe," which he considered to be an Ausrottung.

So to say that it's pretty clear Himmler is referring here to physical annihilation rather than the sense used by Hitler and Rosenberg, which completely fits the evacuation policy, is grasping at straws.

It's pretty clear because Himmler says things like:

Most of you know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 lie there, or if 1,000 lie there. To have gone through this, and at the same time, apart from exceptions caused by human weaknesses, to have remained decent, that has made us hard.

and

We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own people, to kill this people which wanted to kill us

Luckily we have the 6 October speech to take us from "pretty clear" to "crystal clear." Where Himmler says, one more time:

I did not believe that I had the right to wipe out the men — rather I should say, kill 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 off the face of the earth had to be made.

Please explain how "the hard decision to wipe this people off of the face of the earth" can refer to either the killing of partisans or resettlement.

More comments

Death toll post-1943 is pretty much just the Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz, some 400-500,000 or so, with a few tens of thousands from western European countries. Polish Jewry had already been wiped out at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka (all closed and demolished by late 1943) and likewise for Soviet Jewry in occupied territory. Most memoirs and most famous survivors come from western European deportees who were atypical of the slain in a lot of ways.

To respond to your other comment, yes it used to be a lot more common to lay the blame for the Holocaust and the world wars at the feet of some special defect in German character. But as you note this has fallen out of favor and I believe it was pretty silly to begin with.

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.

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And that's why Germans prior to 1941 and after 1945 are known for aggressively killing innocents in sacrifice to pagan gods.

They were known for this up until their Christianization. And then they were known for their rather aggressive treatment of the Old Prussians and other peoples unfortunate enough to wind up in the path of the Teutonic Knights.

I think trying to answer a question about recent twentieth century history with appeals to national character is bizarre and wrong-headed in the first place, but if you're going to do so "the Germans would never do such a thing," doesn't wash.

were there any Gentile survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau that have lived to old age and written memoirs?

I'll be honest in that I don't that much about A-B. That said I know Charlotte Delbo, a French resistance activist, was imprisoned at Auschwitz and later wrote a memoir. Google search turned up this list with a couple more written by gentile survivors of Auschwitz. And of course there are plenty of memoirs of gentile survivors of western camps like Dachau and Belsen.

I could infer the revisionist position on the absence of living gentile Holocaust survivors

I don't think any revisionists deny that gentiles were imprisoned and killed by the Nazis. They just weren't targeted for extermination and killed in gas chambers, or (with exceptions) lined up at the edge of pits and shot in. Everybody agrees on that. Revisionists just insist that Jews weren't targeted for extermination either.

Re: Germans as authoritarian automatons, I've seen it said, either here or on the old Reddit, that when the Soviets occupied East Germany, they saw the Nazi problem as specifically a Prussian problem and set about correcting that. Dunno if there's any truth to that, though.

But... we have quite a lot of information about Soviet crimes, including the various genocides ("ethnic campaigns") that they did. Perhaps not the exact details, but the general gist of it, at least. Often much of this data comes directly from various Soviet archives that were opened up after the fall of the Soviet Union for researchers, as - from what I've understood - Boris Yeltsin wanted to showcase the new Russia's openness and find reasons to ban the Communist Party/Parties (reformed as CPRF and a bunch of other smaller instances) entirely.

This doesn't mean we have all the data or that all the research that could be done has been done; for instance, when it comes to the Soviet ethnic purge of Finns in East Karelia (tens of thousands of Finnish communists and immigrants died), we don't know everything about it, but we know that it did happen, we have a fair idea of the scale, the locations, the historical process, and some in Finland knew as early as the 30s, when it actually happened.

NKVD often documented their "transfers" and camp system ins/outs in detail: there might have been some polishing of the details (ie. people not counted as camp deaths as they were released at the edge of perishing and then died and so on). However, this theory proposes that there was an entire genocide of a group that was left completely undocumented, including the transfers, the camps, the deaths and everything. Heck, when you mention Kolyma, you talk about an entire well-documented camp, suggesting that there was some class of deaths entirely missed by statisticians during the period of research.

There's no paper trail. There's no witnesses - you might imagine that some of the NKVD camp guards and functionnaires who were themselves Jewish (and we know there were such guards and administrators, Holocaust revisionists themselves remind us of that when discussing Soviet crimes as a counterweight to Holocaust) might have noted a crapload of Jews arriving to their camp to be slaughtered and, I don't know, at least told someone about it.

There's basically nothing, expect an argument something like that must have happened, because it's needed to serve as a (partial) explanation to "Where did the Jews go?" question. If I remember my reading of Sanning correctly, the most concrete argument that it happened was based on some HUAC witness statements by people who didn't claim to be eyewitnesses themselves.

This is really one of the most bewildering things that revisionists do, in these debates in the forums and elsewhere. The "mainstream view" holders are challenged on quite specific details of Holocaust camps and their correctness; yet revisionists see it proper to propose an entire hidden genocide of Jews by Soviets with extremely vague allusions to who did what to whom where and when and basically no concrete evidence at all to show for it. Everything can be handwaved away quite simply: "Well, the commies would lie about it, wouldn't they?". The revisionists would themselves laugh and scorn at any attempt to talk about the Holocaust this way, and indeed do so, frequently.

Funny note about Sanning. He recently released a new edition of his book with a postscript.

I’ll post links when I get home but in the postscript he engages in his usual numerical wizardry to try and get the numbers of Jews in Eastern Europe as low as possible. He quotes an American report on displaced persons in post-war Europe like this:

“Some 500,000 [Jews] were in the American zone by summer 1946”

If you actually check his source, it is specifically noted that the “500,000” number refers to displaced persons in general, and one page later it is clarified that only about 70,000 are Jews, so Sanning is just lying about his source. This sort of thing pops up constantly in revisionist literature.

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.

but that this does not meet the criterion of purposeful holocaust / genocide

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.

and the starvation would be out of Germany’s control

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.

Let them out… to where? If Germans were starving in cities, where they had the most support, you would let out the camp inmates to… pillage other communities and starve in the wild? This doesn’t make much sense.

It’s important that we have clarity on hypotheticals before we begin to specify things within a given hypothetical. If prisoners starving is as morally significant as conscious, planned genocide, then there’s not even a reason to question whether the primary mode of death was starvation. If the hypothetical instead shows reduced culpability, then it’s not a meaningless question.

Germans were deliberately starving Jews, imprisoning in newly created ghettos, forbidding them to work and so on - long before Germans were starving in cities.

To say nothing about fact that starving was caused in both cases (of conquered people and of Germans) by war that Germans started.

In general, it’s part of a wider gish gallop strategy on the part of revisionists that should raise the suspicions of anyone attempting to examine their arguments.

Because all holocaust revisionists are part of the same cabal, employing a 'strategy'. But they are so stupid that they can't get their story straight.

This is unlike holocaust believers who all believe exactly the same thing with regards to the holocaust, how it happened and why. Which we can see being the case in this thread...

Honestly, this rhetoric is so ridiculous and 'boo outgroup' it's self defeating. It's so far below the general standards of discourse here that I can hardly believe you wrote it.

They can’t pick a single major point of disagreement, in fact invariably different revisionists contradict each other all the time.

This is not true at all... the points of disagreement are:

  • There was no plan for the physical extermination of Jewry, i.e. the "Final Solution" was not the plan to secretly exterminate Jews in gas chambers.

  • There were no gas chambers disguised as shower rooms used to carry out such a plan.

  • The 6 million number is a symbolic propaganda number that doesn't have a strong basis in reality.

There are no Revisionists who deny the existence of camps, or deaths by typhus and starvation especially near the end of the war. There is far more variation on the mainstream side of the camp, where they cannot even agree on where the "Final Solution" actually came from- who, when, or why...

In contrast, there are no Revisionists I am aware of who make claims that are stronger than the three above, and they all agree on these three claims. I disagree with Revisionists on some matters of interpretation, but the points of disagreement are summarized above and held by all Revisionists.

A good summary of the Revisionist position is "the things that have always happened in human history and war: concentration and forced labor, conscription, property confiscation, forced resettlement, death by shooting, starvation, death by disease- actually happened. But the things that have never before happened in human history: herding millions of men, women, and children into bedroom-sized gas chambers on the pretense of taking a shower and being gassed by engine exhaust, after which they were buried, and then later unburied, cremated, and the ashes were scattered to hide evidence that this happened, did not actually happen."

Some people want to say that concentration and forced labor, conscription, shooting, starvation, and disease still constitutes a Holocaust. That's a fine perspective, but the ones with the delegated authority on that matter do not allow compromise on the gas chamber narrative or the extermination camps or the elusive extermination plan.

David Cole for example has long tried to distance himself from Holocaust Denial, but the establishment still does not allow his "Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, but Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno were" conclusion to acquit him from the crime Holocaust denial. His YouTube channel was very recently banned.

Cole has retreated to Substack to host his content, but alas, Substack has attracted the Eye of Sauron for its relatively lenient moderation policy and is now on the chopping block.

The problem is that whatever happened happened mostly in 1942 - 43, well before any Germans were starving. By the winter of '43 - '44 cities like Warsaw and Lodz were already empty of Jews, where there had been hundreds of thousands and millions before. Most of these people never saw the inside of a concentration camp.

See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Hunger_Study and

An average daily food ration in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw was limited to 184 calories, compared to 699 calories allowed for gentile Poles and 2,613 calories for the Germans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto#Establishment_of_the_ghetto

300,000 Jews did not starve to death in Warsaw in the fall of 1942. They were rounded up and deported...somewhere. This is not in question, even by denies.

around 92 000 starved to death, with around 210 000 murdered in other way

basically noone was deported

clearly they lacked the power and the will to feed those in concentration camps in 1945

How would this be compatible with the "where are the bodies?" line of revisionists?

Also, as noted below, the timing doesn't match up.

Can we have a moratorium on making top level posts to answer to specific threads? What the hell is the point of retelling a conversation that is a couple posts downthread and everyone can read? And it's like the third time this thread people are trying to reset this particular conversation or something. This is getting ridiculous.

You're not even answering multiple people, this could literally be a reply.

I would support a mega-thread for this topic while it runs its course this time.

What’s wrong with a normal thread? Say, the one downstream?

I don't want the spread out posts across several CW threads. Better to let those who want to duke it out have a space to do so.

I would honestly prefer that. I absolutely stand by my original thread and think it's extremely CW-relevant even from a Revisionist-neutral perspective. But people want to discuss Revisionism itself in response, which I understand. I'm also hesitant to effortpost in response to OP with long back-and-forth threads that annoy the community, and I know that people who want to argue against Revisionism have to contend against that as well and it isn't fair for people who want to honestly discuss the issue.

I would be fine with a containment thread more suited for long-term discussion. If I responded to OP it would re-hash a lot of things I've already said, but like he mentioned, large parts of those discussions have been truncated by comment deletions and they are hard to follow.

So there's just not a great way for people who want to talk about it to do so without annoying the community, and frankly it's annoying that whenever people want to talk about it a bunch of others feel compelled to make comments about how much they don't care about the topic. Not sure what the solution is if not a containment thread.

I personally love the tradition of continuing threads and arguments in top level posts. One of the strengths of the Motte is having long form arguments about serious topics. Where else can you find this style of argumentation online?

If you want to only have arguments on the controversial topic of the week, there are plenty of other places besides the Motte.

Some time ago a bunch of people were complaining about how the revisionism threads are crowding out other conversation. My sympathy for them has just dropped below zero.

Fair point, I’m not the biggest fan either. I’d like to see other topics continued on throughout the weeks though.

Yeah but this feels very much like a 'I am losing the argument or getting insufficient support down in a reply thread rabbithole but I would like to take it back up to the top in search of reinforcements.' kind of a vibe, which IMO isn't what's really desired.

I prefer effortposts being top level whether they're responses or not. Otherwise they get buried.

That said I'd support a rate limit on top level posts for certain topics. Do we need three Holocaust revisionism subthreads in a single week? I get the impression this conversation is driven by 1.5 cranks who care about the topic and lots of other people who can't bring themselves to shrug and leave their arguments unaddressed.

For reference:

The 1926 Soviet Census counts about 2.6 million Jewish-ethnicity people.

The 1931 Polish Census counts about 3.1 million Jewish-faith people.

Granted, these figures might not be trustworthy. However, they roughly track with the 1897 Russian Empire census, which counts about 5 million Jewish native speakers, which I think lends credence to the figures. (Keep in mind that in 1897, the Russian Empire controlled much of 1931 Poland.) Also, I imagine that generally governments have a good incentive to keep accurate census information for the purposes of taxation, conscription, and other kinds of social control.

So we have good reason to believe that in the territories of Poland and the USSR alone, there were probably over 5 million Jews in 1939.

However, I suppose that for this to be part of a good argument in favor of the theory that the Nazis really did kill millions of Jews, it is also necessary to establish that the post-war Jewish population of the USSR plus Poland was substantially lower than 5 million. And to determine that would require some research that I have not done so far.

I am not sure that I really need much more convincing, though. The Nazi regime openly hated Jews, openly praised violence as a legitimate political method, demonstrably murdered members of many different opposition groups and even sometimes its own former allies, and between 1941 and 1944 controlled the part of Europe where most of Europe's Jews lived. Common sense tells me that it is much more likely that this regime actually killed millions of Jews than that the idea that it did is the result of a giant hoax that for some reason the US and USSR governments collaborated on during the Cold War, a hoax that also would have required the participation of many other governments, plus various eyewitnesses, family members, and so on.

it is also necessary to establish that the post-war Jewish population of the USSR plus Poland was substantially lower than 5 million.

It's pretty clear. In 1946 Jewish leaders in the cities and towns of Poland (where the vast majority of Polish Jews lived, they were not very rural people) conducted a census which found something like 250,000 Jews in Poland. However, it is important to remember that about 200,000 Polish Jews spent the war in the USSR, either because they fled of their own free will or because they were deported in 1939-1940 from the pre-war Polish territories annexed by Stalin. In 1946 the USSR repatriated all Polish Jews who wanted to leave, which was the great majority of them, and most of them went back to Poland, though most eventually kept moving to Palestine or the US.

So of those 250,000 odd Jews in Poland in 1946, the vast majority were those who had spent the war in Soviet territory. only about 80,000 remained of the 2,000,000+ Jews which actually spent the war in Nazi custody. It's a big balance to make up, and cannot be done. Jewish immigration to Palestine and the US up to 1946-47 are well accounted for, and so are the Jews in the DP camps in Germany and Austria. Uncertainty exists, but on the order of tens of thousands, not millions or even hundreds of thousands.

This was not a dark ages Völkwanderung. 20th century Europe, even at its most war-torn was not the kind of place where an entire nation could fall into a black-hole.

The best revisionists can do is handwave and insist Stalin deported all the Jews to Siberia so he could claim they had been killed by the Nazis, which is soundly contradicted by Soviet archives, which contain no mention of such a massive operation, which would have been the single largest of all the Soviet mass deportations (all of which are well-documented.)

Deniers have no actual answer for how 2,000,000+ people vanished into thin air and never will.

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.

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.

Absolutely. If people think you aren't being honest, they're going to ask what else they can trust you about. Trust is like a mirror and all that, you can't forget the cracks.

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.

The reason is that we're talking about status via megadeaths conditional on being part of Western civlization. Bangladeshis aren't, the Kashmiri Pandits aren't, along with a host of other groups.

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.

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.

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.

Hitler said something like 'If the Jews start another war in Europe, it will be the end for them in Europe' which is a relatively vague euphemism. But then there's Goebbel's slipup in the Sportspalast speech where he almost says 'exterminated' as opposed to 'excluded'. Then there's more of that speech:

The German people, in any event, is unwilling to bow to this danger. Behind the oncoming Soviet divisions we see the Jewish liquidation commandos, and behind them terror, the specter of mass starvation and complete anarchy. International Jewry is the devilish ferment of decomposition that finds cynical satisfaction in plunging the world into the deepest chaos and destroying ancient cultures that it played no role in building.

We National Socialists have the duty to sound the alarm against International Jewry’s attempt to plunge the European continent into chaos, and to warn that Jewry has in Bolshevism a terroristic military power whose danger cannot be overestimated.

International Jewry is doing all it can to encourage such paralysis. During our struggle for power in Germany, Jewish newspapers tried to conceal the danger, until National Socialism awakened the people. It is just the same today in other nations. Jewry once again reveals itself as the incarnation of evil, as the plastic demon of decay and the bearer of an international culture-destroying chaos.

This explains, by the way, our consistent Jewish policies. We see Jewry as a direct threat to every nation. We do not care what other peoples do about the danger. What we do to defend ourselves is our own business, however, and we will not tolerate objections from others. Jewry is a contagious infection. Enemy nations may raise hypocritical protests against our measures against Jewry and cry crocodile tears, but that will not stop us from doing that which is necessary. Germany, in any event, has no intention of bowing before this threat, but rather intends to take the most radical measures, if necessary, in good time (After this sentence, the chants of the audience prevent the minister from going on for several minutes).

Goebbels quite clearly lays out that the Jews are behind Bolshevism (and run the Anglosphere from behind the shadows) and are waging an existential war against Western civilization. Jews are the demonic incarnation of evil, decay and chaos. It is a plague, it enslaves, it terrorizes. The most radical measures will be adopted, at the appropriate point.

Or take 'The Jew as World Parasite' from Rosenberg: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/weltparasit.htm

We National Socialists believe the Führer when he says that at the end of the battle, unleashed on us as his strongest adversary by the Jewish world parasite, the Jewish race in Europe will be destroyed. Until this destruction occurs, we must always remember that the Jew is our absolute enemy who will shrink at nothing. He knows but a single goal: our complete destruction.

We certainly know Kristallnacht happened. There was some significant violent trend against Jews even before the war, so during the war when emotions are running high (the fate of Western civilization was at stake, millions had died and the existence of whole nations was in question), why not take the most radical measures, as Goebbels explains and Rosenberg encourages?

I'm not persuaded that there even was an accounting error and total Jewish Holocaust deaths were significantly below 6 million. The fog of war and whatever covering-up operations hastily conducted by Germany at the end of the war are enough to cloud our vision to some level. Why would we expect indisputable proof?

This methodological standard for historical evidence is, to put it lightly, unsustainable. By the same logic you can look at any war propaganda and use it as proof of genocide. Not genocidal intent, but actual genocidal events.

Who killed 22 thousand Polish military officers in Katyn forest? How could you know? You don't look at physical evidence. But going by the war propaganda that you happen to know, which just so happens to be the propaganda the victors of history want you to know about, everyone knows just how much Hitler hated the Slavs and wanted to kill every single one of them. Everyone also knows, because it is so true of course, that Hitler thought Poles were Slavs, not Aryan. So going by our methodology it just makes sense that the Germans committed the Katyn forest massacre.

I want you to be self aware of your position here. Your claims of not being persuaded that there were even 'accounting errors' is completely meaningless. You have already represented yourself as someone who acquires belief in historical events not through evidence but inference from broader historical narratives. You have no basis to question these narratives. You have no knowledge of what even constitutes historical evidence or proof in the context of these events. All you have are inferences based on what sounds plausible to yourself as a person who doesn't question historical events or the broader historical narrative you were raised with.

This position is unassailable. I can't do anything. Because no matter the fraught nature of specific evidence for any specific event, you always have the broader narrative to fall back on. And because you fall back on the broader narrative to protect individual claims, no individual claim can be refuted and the narrative can never be called into question.

Do you think I lack material evidence? There's a tonne of websites which will provide anti-Holocaust revisionist arguments! People can produce mountains of evidence. Tens of thousands of eyewitnesses, plenty of documents. I could list a bunch of them but you surely know of them.

The Sportspalast Speech is not Allied war propaganda, it's German war propaganda. Almost nobody reads through these Web 1.0 text files from Calvin University.

These assumptions of knowledge aren't based on thin air - we know the Soviets and Germans disliked the Poles, they partitioned the country earlier. If I were in 1942 or whatever, I'd be uncertain whether Germany or Russia killed those Poles.

You have already represented yourself as someone who acquires belief in historical events not through evidence but inference from broader historical narratives

Well what choice do I have? Am I supposed to go to Auschwitz and use my expert-tier knowledge of gas chambers to determine whether they made up a fake chimney or whatever? Scrutinize thousands of photographs to see whether the execution squads were using Mausers or some other kind of rifle, geolocate battlegrounds from seventy years ago, work out whether they're fake or not? Read through all the Holocaust memoirs and find the logical absurdities like people being frozen into ice or whatever? Dig up all these mass graves? Go find Goebbels's diary to see if he really wrote:

The Führer once again expressed his determination to clean up the Jews in Europe pitilessly. There must be no squeamish sentimentalism about it. The Jews have deserved the catastrophe that has now overtaken them. Their destruction will go hand in hand with the destruction of our enemies. We must hasten this process with cold ruthlessness.

The whole point of arguing from capability and motives is that we can bypass the masses of facts that clog everything up. We can adjust our base rates such that the absolute mountain of pro-Holocaust evidence and fairly considerable amount of anti-Holocaust or minimal-Holocaust evidence is balanced. We can then conclude that, notwithstanding the fact that there's some confusion, some exaggeration and some concealed information, the Holocaust really happened.

Did Hitler like Slavs? Not really. Was Hitler planning to exterminate them all? No, there were various plans to subjugate or relocate them if possible. He would've settled for working with them. A fair few Slavs were fighting for Germany as Hiwis. Hitler was allied with the Soviet Union for some time. Hitler at one point wanted to ally with Poland where they'd return German territory in exchange for getting bits of Soviet territory. There's nuance there. The primary school version I got that Hitler wanted to get rid of non-blondes and non-blue eyed people is childishly silly.

But when it comes to Jews, there was never any desire to work with them, they were implacable enemies of Nazism. And they still are today!

Do you think I lack material evidence?

I think you are going in circles just like I described above. You keep circling back to the narrative being true. When I proposed an evidence based approach to specific claims you wanted to rely on a heuristic that's partly based on the narrative being true. When I call that heuristic into question you are now circling towards an evidence based approach that's based on the narrative being true. Like I said before, I can't do anything here. If you just presuppose that the holocaust happened then it always did regardless of anything else.

The Sportspalast Speech is not Allied war propaganda, it's German war propaganda. Almost nobody reads through these Web 1.0 text files from Calvin University.

I didn't say it was allied war propaganda. And you're not the first person to quote Goebbels to prove how evil the nazis were in pursuit of proving claims made against them without having to propose any specific evidence for any specific events. The point being made is that you can quote war propaganda to produce sentiment of genocidal intent because war propaganda is generally about killing the enemy.

These assumptions of knowledge aren't based on thin air - we know the Soviets and Germans disliked the Poles, they partitioned the country earlier. If I were in 1942 or whatever, I'd be uncertain whether Germany or Russia killed those Poles.

In 2003 the USA along with its NATO allies invaded Iraq because they hated Iraqis and wanted to genocide them all. Every single civilian death was part of a genocidal judeo-christian neo-conservative plot to exterminate Iraq. We know this because the USA invaded Iraq and toppled its government. In fact, public sentiment at the time included rhetoric about 'glassing' the region. Directly invoking and promoting a nuclear holocaust. This is proof of murderous intent for every single Iraqi casualty during the war and subsequent occupation.

Well what choice do I have?

I am not asking you to do primary research. You can simply stop believing in the holocaust or be compelled to defend it. Stop maintaining differential standards for historical methodology based on social factors. You don't believe in other historical events in the same way. If someone calls the mainstream narrative of the war in Burma into question you don't care. You don't feel the need to weave together some methodology that can sustain the narrative. Belief in the holocaust, for 99,99% of people is just ridiculous.

The whole point of arguing from capability and motives is that we can bypass the masses of facts that clog everything up.

See the genocidal invasion of Iraq above. You are not bypassing anything except your own critical faculties. Why do you need to believe in the holocaust?

But when it comes to Jews, there was never any desire to work with them, they were implacable enemies of Nazism. And they still are today!

Not true. See the Haavara Agreement and the Madagascar plan.

More comments

You can read the historical national socialist express his ideology in his most famous work, and it maps out pretty well as the kind of ideology that would lead to a genocide of Jews in territory under his control.

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.

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.

Did Germany "struggle" killing 6 million Jews? I think people may not be aware of how condensed the timeline of the Holocaust actually was. Part of this I think is reflective of "survivor's history", which I talked about before here: the people who survived the Holocaust and disproportionately shaped western perceptions of it were by necessity aberrations from the norm. They were mostly western Jews whose march to the death camps began after the large majority of Jews were already dead.

The vast majority of victims of the Holocaust were eastern European Jews, whose mass extermination was conducted in a fairly narrow timeframe (with the notable exception of Hungarian Jews). The Holocaust as can be coherently defined started on June 22, 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union. Within six months of that mark, somewhere around a million Jews were dead - the victims of bullets, nationalist militias, POW camps, forced starvation, and experimental mobile gassing vans. In January 1942 Nazi bureaucrats assembled to plan the Final Solution, and by the end of that year roughly another 3 million Jews had died, mostly asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. This brings us to roughly two-thirds of the final total within a span of 18 months. The purpose-built extermination camps built for Operation Reinhard operated for another half a year or so until they were sabotaged or dismantled, and by that time most of the remainder had been killed. The remaining Jews still to die at this point were mostly westerners or Hungarians who would mostly be poisoned by hydrogen cyanide at Auschwitz.

The Holocaust as can be coherently defined started on June 22, 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Why? Schnellbrief was issues on 1939-09-21, shortly after joint Nazi Germany and USSR invasion of Poland.

By 1940 expulsions/ghetto formation by Germans was going full strength. See say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto#Establishment_of_the_ghetto

Up until September 1939 German policies were focused on forcing Jewish emigration from Germany. From the beginning of the war movement of Jews was curtailed for security reasons, and there were a series of massacres by invading forces in Poland; but this violence was not deliberate policy, merely tolerated. The deliberate, purposeful, mass killing of Jews (although this was still absent some larger unifying plan) did not start until Operation Barbarossa.

Quite right, Holocaust deniers and everyone else is too fixated on gas chambers. The Shoah by bullets or starvation is just as important. Bullets are the traditional method of mass extermination, not these great big centralized, industrial operations.

I think the response to that would be that gas chambers are a big part of the narrative. I recall seeing some images from Maus (that book people got upset over last year) and it reminded me just how much the Holocaust is considered industrialized i.e people being killed by the most efficient mass process, and that this uniqueness, to me at least, seems to be an important point that is reinforced in the conventional narrative.

Maus itself doesn't particularly fixate on the industrial killing process. Indeed, the part where Vladek Spiegelman's (ie. Art Spiegelman's dad and the main character of the book, alongside Art Spiegelman) is in camp is actually not all that long, and much of it concentrates on how he got through the camp by being a crafty little shit (the entire comic's thesis is basically "Even if you're a Holocaust victim you can still be a huge shithead, like my dad, and it actually helps you survive").

Vladek is probably portrayed as going through more "danger moments" (ie. parts where Spiegelman portrays his life as if it's actually on line) outside of the camps than inside, though it's clear that inside there's a constant background danger of being selected for death if he doesn't find new ways to be useful.

Interesting to know, I haven't read it myself. That was just what it reminded me of from some history lessons almost a decade old now.

Yeah, a common revisionist argument is "why would Nazi Germany spend effort on killing Jews in the middle of an existential war?"

But this ignores the following:

  1. Some of the camps were combined labor / death camps. The Nazis benefited from the Jewish slave labor.

  2. To your point, the mainstream theory of the Holocaust is that Nazi Germany only spent a tiny fraction of its total resources on the Holocaust. The Einsatzgruppen were only a few thousand strong. The Nazi personnel in all of the camps put together were probably also only a few thousand strong. Rounding up and killing unarmed people is easy for a modern state, especially a state that has few forests or mountains for people to hide in, especially when the unarmed people are concentrated in cities and are ethnically distinct so have limited ability to blend in with others. To move six million Jews to camps* over the course of about three years would have taken about 1.5 train sets per day if we just divide six million by how many people the Nazis would pack into each train set. In practice of course Jews had to be gathered from multiple source points, so let us say an estimate of 5-10 train sets per day. By comparison, for Germany to supply its East Front alone required something like (200-300) train sets per day. Given the centrality of Jews in Nazi thought, this level of investment does not seem particularly large. Furthermore, from a resources perspective the Holocaust could largely be serviced using coal and coke, materials that Germany had in abundance. It did not require any resources that the Nazis had a shortage of.

  3. The Nazis were not very efficient. Their political system was a bunch of overlapping fiefdoms that fought with each other and at no point during the war did they manage to standardize their weapons systems to simplify production.

*Edit: And not all Jews were moved to camps, many were killed on the spot.

I think the largest point you're missing is that in the eye of the Nazis, time spent killing Jews was not a distraction from existential war, but a fundamental part of it.

The Prussian officer corps had inherited a pathological fear of franc-tireurs from their experiences in 1870-71 and 1914. Nazi and reactionary political thought emphasized the duplicity of Jews, their creation and fundamental enmeshing with Bolshevism. The planned invasion of the Soviet Union was meant from its conception to be a Rassenkrieg. The Bolshevik system was to be torn out root and stem, and all its mouthpieces and enablers with it. To this extent Jews were a fundamental security risk to rear areas and a existential threat to the Heer's design for a rapid victory: they would be the inevitable saboteurs, partisans, Bolshevik agitators. That was the threat the Einsatzgruppen formations were meant to combat. Only the liquidation of the adult male Jewish population would secure the rear areas and ensure German victory. (Later this objective would be expanded incrementally to include all Jewish individuals in the Soviet Union).

After the failure of Operation Barbarossa the nature of the killing of Jews shifted more to that of retribution than immediate security concerns, but again this was in concordance with a future vision of a Europe that was Judenfrei.

edit: you get a sense of the Nazi perspective on this in Himmler's October 4 (1943) Posen speech. An excerpt:

I want to also mention a very difficult subject ... before you, with complete candor. It should be discussed amongst us, yet nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30 to carry out our duty as ordered, and stand comrades who had failed against the wall and shoot them -- about which we have never spoken, and never will speak. That was, thank God, a kind of tact natural to us, a foregone conclusion of that tact, that we have never conversed about it amongst ourselves, never spoken about it, everyone ... shuddered, and everyone was clear that the next time, he would do the same thing again, if it were commanded and necessary.

I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily said. "The Jewish people is being exterminated," every Party member will tell you, "perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter". And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. [mockingly] They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew. And none of them has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000. And ... to have seen this through and -- with the exception of human weakness -- to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned. Because we know how difficult things would be, if today in every city during the bomb attacks, the burdens of war and the privations, we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators. We would probably be at the same stage as 16/17, if the Jews still resided in the body of the German people.

Cambodia and Rwanda suggest an upper limit on how fast you can do a genocide before the act of doing genocide causes the state to cease to meaningfully function or lose the capacity to resist invasion. For Cambodia, it was 3 years 8 months to kill 25% of the population, so maybe 6.7% of the population a year, but they were able to put up meaningful resistance to Vietnamese invasion. For Rwanda, it was 8% of the population in 4 months, so 24% of the population a year, at the cost of getting their ass handed to them by Paul Kagame.


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