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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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There was a big story in Holocaust studies during 2020: it turned out the deputy commander of the alleged Sobibor extermination camp, Johann Niemann, took many photos of the camp during its operation and put them all in a photo album, which were completely unknown until they were published in that year. This was a highly significant story because this was the first set of photographs of the camp to ever be published. It was thought that due to the extreme secrecy of the extermination camps, photography would have been strictly forbidden- although there is a similar photo album of the alleged Treblinka extermination camp. None of the photographs show anything incriminating (although the Treblinka album verifies the surprising fact that the camp had a zoo).

Likewise, the new Sobibor photo album contained nothing incriminating in terms of the alleged homicidal functionality of the camp. The image that became the most prominently featured in the various news reports about this Sobibor photo album was this one, which shows camp officials relaxing at a table drinking with some German women. There are other photos showing similar scenes at the camp.

These photographs were the most "incriminating" photographs of the album, with the news reports invariably mentioning how evil these people must have been to be relaxing so while they are murdering hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children and cremating them on open fires. These photographs certainly do not look like they were taken of people in the process of murdering hundreds of thousands, so these photographs therefore become proof of the banality of evil.

I mention this because so much of the Holocaust is subject to dual interpretation:

  • Homicidal gas chambers disguised as showers -> real showers

  • Zyklon B for extermination -> Zyklon B for delousing

  • "Resettlement was code for gas chamber extermination in documents" -> Resettlement was actually resettlement

  • "Transit camp was code for extermination camp" -> Transit camp meant transit camp

If we assume that Revisionists are correct that Sobibor was a transit camp (which, by the way, is what Himmler said it was in documents), it would no doubt still be a place of suffering and violence (the commander who took these photographs, Niemann, was killed in a prisoner uprising), but it would be far removed from the orthodox narrative of mass murder in gas chambers disguised as showers.

Then, these photographs would not portray the "banality of evil": the greatest murderers of human history, so evil that they carouse and fiddle while they are murdering hundreds of thousands- they would portray normal people acting normally in a difficult situation.

The "banality of evil" trope is used to invert evidence of people acting normally, as if they are not the greatest mass murderers in human history as being incriminating rather than evidence that they didn't do what they are being accused of. Usually in a criminal investigation, the suspect acting as if he had not committed the crime he is being accused of would be interpreted as evidence against the allegation. But in Holocaust studies, it becomes "These people don't look like they are murdering hundreds of thousands of people, this just shows the banality of evil!"

I haven't seen Zone of Interest yet, but presumably it does not portray the brutal torture of Rudolf Höss by his British interrogators, which extracted his absurdly false confession that become the bedrock for the entire Holocaust narrative.

About the only thing that could make the Holocaust not be real is if the entire world isn't real and I'm just a brain in a jar. Otherwise, "evidence" when the probability is 100% with the evidence and also 100% without the evidence is not really evidence in any meaningful sense.

I think you are being disingenuous here and not speaking plainly. Your argument only makes sense if there's sufficient doubt about the Holocaust that "evidence" against it could actually mean anything.

About the only thing that could make the Holocaust not be real is if the entire world isn't real and I'm just a brain in a jar.

That's an interesting choice of words. How many homicidal gas chambers did Majdanek have? It was the very first camp where Soviet investigators revealed to the world the truth of the Nazi gas chamber factories, months before the liberation of Auschwitz.

If the Soviet investigators did at Auschwitz in 1945 exactly what they did at Majdanek in 1944, the entire world isn't real?