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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   31539 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Given that we've already had our bit of Holocaust "revisionism" this early in the week, I thought I'd share some interesting, trivia, I guess that I recently learned of in that community.

I am given to understand that the most "mainstream" source of Holocaust revisionism is an organization called the Institute For Historical Review (IHR). They appear to be a pretty standard research organization in some ways, publishing papers and web articles and holding conferences and such. While they do not claim to be solely dedicated to the subject, they sure publish a good bit of material that's highly critical of Jews and their influence on the world, the history of the Holocaust, and apologetic towards the Nazi regime. I understand them to be the original source of many of the standard Holocaust denier talking points involving such things as "resettlement in the east".

It turns out that, way back in 2009, the director of the IHR, one Mark Weber, published an article titled "How Relevant is Holocaust Revisionism?" in which he basically admits that the mainstream historical view of the Holocaust is accurate. He hasn't really changed his mind that much - no indication of some cabal "getting to him" somehow. Rather, he now takes the position that while "Jewish-Zionist power is a palpable reality with harmful consequences for America, the Middle East, and the entire global community", the Holocaust basically happened the way it's described, but it's not really that important of a factor in "Jewish Power" and it's not a good use of their time to attack it. Here's a pull quote that I think is representative of the basic point he's making:

In short, the Holocaust assumed an important role in the social-cultural life of America and western Europe in keeping with, and as an expression of, a phenomenal increase in Jewish influence and power. The Holocaust “remembrance” campaign is not so much a source of Jewish-Zionist power as it is an expression of it. For that reason, debunking the Holocaust will not shatter that power.

Suppose The New York Times were to report tomorrow that Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum had announced that no more than one million Jews died during World War II, and that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz. The impact on Jewish-Zionist power would surely be minimal.

There's also a 30 minute video interview with one Jim Rizoli, a considerably more enthusiastic Holocaust denier, in which he expresses basically the same view and goes on in more detail about a few points. IMO, he comes off as pretty calm and reasonable, while Rizoli comes off as rather unhinged and obsessed.

I think I agree with him in the sense that, if you wanna try and make a point about the role and influence of Jews in today's society, go ahead and make it, but quibbling over the details of exactly what happened to how many in the Holocaust is pointless.

Good evening! I checked the rules of the Culture War Roundup before posting this and I think you are in violation of this one:

Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

It also seems very “Boo Outgroup!”y, while we’re on the subject. And while it’s generally agreed that Holocaust revisionists are a safe and acceptable outgroup to boo and sneer at, I don’t believe that makes it any better; rather, it’s just boring at best, and outright insidious at worst. Holocaust revisionists today, Nazis are bad, yes, but what about the theoretical outgroup that supplants them as a safe and acceptable outgroup? Or their followup? The one after?

To wit, this comment thread itself just smacks of intellectual laziness and, if you will pardon a bit of parlance from our digital homeland, circlejerking. Do Holocaust revisionists even need lampooning, however flowery the wording of that lampooning? Is there really anyone noteworthy in the Holocaust revision camp?

  • -12

What's the boo and sneer? It's mostly about one particular person, who I said that I at least somewhat agree with. I don't think it's "Boo Outgroup" to acknowledge that there are some intelligent and reasonable people who find themselves in that camp for a while, and that it's pretty common for those to eventually convince themselves that the mainstream view is basically correct. We definitely do have some revisionists here, and we mostly debate them in a reasonable fashion rather than calling them names and banning them, which I believe is the proper way to do things.

First of all, if you think a post is in violation of the rules, report it.

Second, no, it isn't.

Carp is one of the head honchos over at arrdrama. Just like most of his baitees, he doesn't bite.

One thing I learned from Run Unz's article on Holocaust denial is that it began as a sort of quirky, libertarian-adjacent focus group. Revisionism made a lot of headway in the 1980s and 1990s. The fall of the Soviet Union resulted in some major revisions that were a big victory for the movement, like the downward revision of the official death toll at Auschwitz from 4 million to 1.1 million, and the official revisions at Majdanek that proved the Revisionist archival research and criticisms of that extermination narrative to be correct. The internet promised an increase in reach for heterodox thinking of all stripes, including Revisionism. In 1994 David Cole debated Revisionism on the Phil Donahue show, where the Revisionists wiped the floor with the mainstream on national television. It's unthinkable now that a show with an establishment figure and reach like this would platform a Holocaust denier at all like this.

There was a very real inflection point in the 2000s. September 11th, the Iraq war, spreading Democracy with Israel as the greatest ally and such. There was also much greater pressure to censor and prosecute Holocaust deniers. David Irving, the historian, was arrested in 2005 and sentenced to three years in prison for the crime of Holocaust Denial (then imagine, people here point to his repudiation of Revisionism as being a victory for the mainstream after he was thrown in jail for his position- an academic gets thrown in jail for believing X, and then you celebrate him repudiating X as an academic win?). Most Holocaust Denial laws were not established until after the 2000s, it's a recent phenomenon in response to the Revisionist movement. Canada outlawed Holocaust denial only in 2021.

The internet, which promised the free flow of heterodox thinking, has become much more restrictive of Holocaust revisionism. Revisionism was the very first political content to be 100% censored on YouTube. All Revisionist books were banned from Amazon on 2017, a policy which is still strictly enforced. Revisionist subreddits were the first politically-oriented subreddits that were banned, long before there was any censorship at all.

To illustrate the point, take a look at the ADL's 2023 Online Holocaust Denial Report Card. The first thing you will notice is that no platform has a grade higher than a C+, imagine what these platforms will have to do to get their A from the ADL. You will also notice that there's an Action taken for trusted partner metric, which essentially means "can the ADL get this removed if we flag it", which is "Yes" for all platforms except Fortnite. Why is Fortnite on a report card for Online Holocaust Denial? Are they going to change their content policies as a result of their F?

The point here is that Holocaust Revisionism went from being a quirky movement of libertarian-adjacent autists to a genuine political dissident movement. Being the public face of that movement is the least desirable job in the world. The current man who has that role, Germar Rudolf, is currently in hiding because his application for a Greed Card renewal was denied by the United States and his passport was not renewed by Germany. Despite the fact he has an American wife and American children, he is in hiding so he doesn't face deportation by the United States, prosecution in Germany, and years in jail. As mentioned, David Irving actually did face arrest and prison prior to his repudiation of Revisionism. Likewise, David Cole frequently talks about how threats of violence made against him from Jewish groups motivated him to step away from Revisionism. Weber's organization, the IHR, was firebombed in 1984 and it lost 90% of its inventory.

One pattern that I never respected, even when I was on the fence, was on the mainstream pointing at people who were chilled by authoritarian chilling effects, including threats of violence and prison, and then declaring an academic victory.

Suppose The New York Times were to report tomorrow that Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust center and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum had announced that no more than one million Jews died during World War II, and that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz. The impact on Jewish-Zionist power would surely be minimal.

It's also easy to see Weber's perspective in that 2009 article. Who else here remembers 2009? It was the high watermark of Neoconservative influence on American policy and culture. The big issues of the day were Islamic terrorism, Middle East wars, and Health Care. It's easy to see Weber's perspective that Revisionism is a lost cause, with mounting pressure on Revisionism from all corners and with no apparent saliency to the problems of the day.

2023 is very different from 2009. The culture is radically different. There is a counter-culture of disaffected young people who are highly receptive to radical critiques of post-modernism, and it that does not resemble anything in 2009. Revisionism becomes an extremely potent, radical critique of post-modernism by inverting the work of the critical theorists. The critical theorists used the Holocaust to assert the psychopathology of gentiles, and propose post-modern culture as a therapy for the authoritarian personality. Revisionism turns the tables, it invites a psychoanalysis of Jews and their behavior that has contributed to the state of the culture and the Holocaust's prominence within it. It's not a populist aspiration- Joe Sixpack won't care about the truth of gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. But I suspect it would be highly disruptive to the thinking and world model of smarter people who potentially have more influence and status.

Nobody is acting as if the truth of those claims is irrelevant. The ADL isn't acting as if Revisionism is irrelevant, they and adjacent groups assert nothing less than enormous alarm over any Holocaust denial content anywhere. People here don't seem to think that this the truth is irrelevant, as I frequently see comments like one made only yesterday: "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." I can see how Weber felt that way in 2009, but if Revisionism gained any sort of foothold, even a non-populist foothold like HBD has, it would be highly disruptive to the thinking of many people.

It sounds like you're trying to make a case that Weber's switch is not based on his actual analysis of the available evidence, but on some combination of believing it was a lost cause and fear of the ADL. I think if you read the whole article and the video, he seems pretty genuine in his expression that his mind was changed by the evidence that he researched. If your argument about his true motivation was correct, why would he continue to be critical of "Jewish power" and spill quite a few words to make the case that it should still be fought against, but that this tactic is counter-productive? If he wanted to "go with the flow" or take the easy way out, there's much better ways to do that than this middle position which will likely not appease the likes of the ADL much at all, but will also royally piss off the remaining hard-core revisionists.

This does not seem to be all that unusual of a path to take either - it seems to be fairly common for reasonable and diligent revisionists to come to the conclusion that it's basically correct after all, as another comment in this thread details.

Of course, if you have any other actual evidence that Weber was motivated by something other than reason and evidence, you're welcome to post it.

There's a thing however: the most vocal Holocaust deniers are also very very stupid. I remember arguing with one on this forum and he genuinely didn't understand how fire works, like he couldn't understand that it might be hard to ignite something but after you got it burning it keeps burning if that releases much more energy than is required to evaporate the stuff. That was in the context of whether you could burn a bunch of human bodies in open air with a minimum of external fuel or do you just multiply the amount of fuel modern crematoriums use to burn a single body to ash by the number of bodies. For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.

If you could be teleported to the past and talk to Neanderthals about fire, they would understand it better than a modern day Holocaust "revisionist". Idk, maybe Australopithecs and Denisovans too. Holocaust deniers are inferior to literal subhumans intelligence-wise, and trying to discuss their arguments with them is a waste of time. I tried it again and again just to make sure and no: they are all very very stupid, that's all there is to it.

Being very very stupid seems to be common, but it's the combination of that and the maniacal insistence on continuing to post the same points over and over again even after they've been thoroughly debunked that's the issue. Taking that into consideration, it's not hard to see why many platforms eventually ban it. At a certain point, you're just annoying the crap out of everybody.

There's a thing however: the most vocal Holocaust deniers are also very very stupid. I remember arguing with one on this forum and he genuinely didn't understand how fire works, like he couldn't understand that it might be hard to ignite something but after you got it burning it keeps burning if that releases much more energy than is required to evaporate the stuff.

That would be this post, for which you got a warning last time.

I strongly suspect you did not forget that you just happened to be arguing with exactly the same person you're arguing with now.

Listen: you are not allowed to just call people stupid here. Even if they are espousing stupid ideas. You are not allowed to write a post that is nothing but "Wow, everyone who believes this is just really stupid."

It doesn't matter what "this" is. If a genuine flat-earther showed up here and starting arguing that gravity is something scientists made up to deny God, you would not be allowed to just call him stupid and say all flat-earthers are very very very stupid. You have to actually engage with the arguments, and if you think they are too stupid to engage with, then don't.

For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.

To expand on how I see these things. If a flat earther comes here and not only makes arguments but engages with counter-arguments in good faith, that's all good. If they flat out ignore the strongest counter-argument, because they are literally too stupid to understand how, for example, fire works (which neandertals understood), or maybe even pretend to be that stupid (which is also stupid in its own way), then I think that:

  • It's good for everyone else on the forum to be made aware that the person in question is very very stupid (or pretends to be) so arguing with them is a waste of time.

  • The person in question forfeited their right to be taken seriously by not taking counter-arguments remotely seriously.

  • The forum would benefit from such people being named and shamed for their real or pretend stupidity and be driven away and the land of the heathen consume them.

To expand on how I see these things.

You can see things any way you like, but I'm telling you how we (the mods) see things.

If a flat earther comes here and not only makes arguments but engages with counter-arguments in good faith, that's all good. If they flat out ignore the strongest counter-argument, because they are literally too stupid

Stop this.

It's good for everyone else on the forum to be made aware that the person in question is very very stupid

You do that by shredding their argument and pointing out how they ignored the strongest counter-argument last time. If they are indeed very very stupid, that will be evident without you namecalling. There is no "But they really are stupid!" exception that lets you call people stupid.

You do that by shredding their argument and pointing out how they ignored the strongest counter-argument last time.

Ok, so how often do we have to do this? Because this has happened with this particular person dozens of times, with tremendous amounts of efforts spent by a lot of people. Only for him to deflect, ignore, and divert and then conveniently develop amnesia and push the same old claims again next week without updating on a single thing.

Ok, so how often do we have to do this? Because this has happened with this particular person dozens of times, with tremendous amounts of efforts spent by a lot of people. Only for him to deflect, ignore, and divert and then conveniently develop amnesia and push the same old claims again next week without updating on a single thing.

Yes, I get that it's frustrating. You can decide it's no longer worth engaging with him - I understand that that is also aggravating, because it means ceding ground to him. But you still can't just say he's stupid and call it a day.

At a certain point, we do sometimes tell one-note podium-pounders to give it a rest, and @SecureSignals is wearing out my patience, personally. But whenever we (the mod team) tell someone to stop repeating themselves with their obsessive haterading, we get accused of trying to "hide the truth." It is perhaps one of the failure modes of the Motte - being tolerant of all views as long as they are civilly expressed, we're vulnerable to very civil bad actors with nothing but time on their hands to push their agenda.

It's not so much the volume or frequency of his agenda-pushing that irks me (although that too). It's that he gets to claim A, is painstakingly shown that not-A, only for him to merrily claim A again the following week. Of course he doesn't have to agree with everything his interlocutors tell him but at the rate his selective amnesia is progressing, it at least shows that he is not arguing in good faith. In fact, he is not arguing at all, he is proselytising.

You do that by shredding their argument and pointing out how they ignored the strongest counter-argument last time. If they are indeed very very stupid, that will be evident without you namecalling. There is no "But they really are stupid!" exception that lets you call people stupid.

Why? You're literally telling me that I can't say that the Emperor is naked, even if he is in fact naked. I should point out that he is naked in a round-about way, hoping that everyone goes through my argument and comes to the same conclusion that I'm not allowed to state openly.

And my problem is not even that he's a Holocaust denier, I could tell you some things that I believe about that that would make you uncomfortable probably, it's that he's stupid or pretending to be stupid. Which, by the way, pretending to be stupid to confuse the discussion, is supposed to be the highest degree of anathema to you mods, but you let it slide when it comes from a literal holocaust denier because you assume that everyone who attacks him attacks him because of the object of his claims and not because of the stupidity/pretend stupidity of his arguments.

@SecureSignals is either stupid or is pretending to be stupid to spread his bullshit. This is what I truly believe and I can defend this belief with arguments if anyone is interested.

Why? You're literally telling me that I can't say that the Emperor is naked, even if he is in fact naked.

No one on the mod team is treating SecureSignals as an emperor, least of all @Amadan.

I should point out that he is naked in a round-about way, hoping that everyone goes through my argument and comes to the same conclusion that I'm not allowed to state openly.

Yes.

...it's that he's stupid or pretending to be stupid.

Well, maybe, but you haven't actually assembled the evidence for that. I don't think SecureSignals is either stupid or pretending to be stupid. To the contrary; they post evidence and arguments that are cherry-picked, but they do post evidence and arguments, things you can go check for yourself. And often when someone has gone to the trouble of checking for themselves, it has produced interesting posts that further confirm the fact that Nazi Germany is directly and through second-order effects responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews in the mid-20th century. I have never seen anyone produce evidence that SecureSignals is stupid or lying, only that they tend to engage in isolated demands for rigor and focus only on one side of the argument--which is exactly how the bulk of Holocaust affirmation has proceeded for decades, and exactly how the bulk of most arguments proceeds.

The goal, of course, is to transcend that, and we don't transcend that by calling people names. As we often end up needing to do here, I have to remind you that this is explicitly a place for testing shady thinking, which means that shady thinking is explicitly allowed. In fact the mod team has recently been discussing longer-term bans for SecureSignals, because there is an "egregiously obnoxious" threshold on being a one-note piano. But instead we're spending our mod time dealing with the low hanging fruit of people who are trying to insist that no, they don't have to follow the rules when they are engaged with Holocaust skepticism.

Sorry: yes, you do.

@SecureSignals is either stupid or is pretending to be stupid to spread his bullshit. This is what I truly believe and I can defend this belief with arguments if anyone is interested.

Start by defending that belief with arguments, and you may even get more leniency on your word choice! But doubling down on "stupid" after a direct warning from a mod just gets you another warning. Knock it off.

For the record, IIRC my back of the napkin calculations produced like 10MJ/kg released and 2MJ/kg required to evaporate the water when burning a corpse. The holocaust denier never engaged with these numbers.

Go ahead and point that out, then. But without the insults.

My God. I was getting real deja vu. This is the exact sequence that happened four months ago. Down to the exact evasions about an “American wife” SS deployed after being challenged.

How often is the spouse of an American citizen who applies for a Green Card arrested and deported? He was in the United States illegally because he was actually escaping political persecution unlike the millions of asylum seekers who are welcomed with open arms while their cases are adjudicated, but it did not qualify as such in the eyes of the United States and his application for political asylum was rejected. The United States deported him even though he faced prison for what would be legally protected speech in the United States.

On 11 September 2004, Rudolf married a US citizen and settled in Chicago; the couple later had a child.[8] He applied for political asylum, or at least for the right not to be expelled, but this was rejected in November 2004 on the basis that the application had no merits and was a case of frivolous litigation. Rudolf appealed against this ruling, and in early 2006 the US Federal Court in Atlanta found that his application was not "frivolous", but upheld the decision that it had no merit.[1] The Immigration Services said that Rudolf did not have a right to file an application to remain with his family. On 14 November 2005, Rudolf was extradited to Germany where he was wanted for incitement of racial hatred (Volksverhetzung).[9] On arrival there, he was arrested by the police and transferred to a prison in Rottenburg, then to another in Stuttgart in Baden-Württemberg

Good.

Dude was told he wouldn’t get asylum, then got married, then tried to appeal on grounds of the marriage, then tried to pull procedural nonsense.. No sympathy.

Nobody is asking for your sympathy, just a recognition of the fact that Rudolf has faced unfair treatment from the United States due to his holocaust denial. The US courts declared that he didn't prove he faced persecution "on account of imputed political opinion", and then deported him to a German prison where he was persecuted for his Revisionist work. I don't care if you have sympathy, but don't play dumb and pretend that his role as a prominent Holocaust denier didn't influence his treatment by the US immigration system.

Yeah, I looked into that.

As to Scheerer's first argument, the administrative record is devoid of any evidence that the German government ascribed a political opinion to him and then punished him for that imputed belief. Rather, as the IJ held, the evidence only reflects that Scheerer was "held to account by a highly developed and sophisticated legal system, . . . received due process, was convicted, and sentenced to a term well below the statutorily established maximum." Substantial evidence thus supports the IJ's conclusion that the only inference to be drawn from the record is that "[Scheerer] has been subjected to legitimate prosecution" in Germany.

He wouldn’t have committed a crime in America. That doesn’t mean he was entitled to our legal aegis. Germany would have prosecuted him just as hard if he voted for die Linke. Therefore, it wasn’t political prosecution. I expected a better case for “protected social group,” but for whatever reason, he didn’t make that appeal.

Out of curiosity, do you have a link to the IJ’s actual order? I can only find parts of it as quoted by the appeals courts.

Wait, what? So, if Saudi Arabia passed a law against Christians and then prosecuted them (after full "due process" of course!), they wouldn't be eligible for asylum in the US?

The definition of asylum can't be limited to just due process. It has to account for the laws that said due process is upholding!

More comments

Out of curiosity, do you have a link to the IJ’s actual order? I can only find parts of it as quoted by the appeals courts.

Same, I'll look a bit more into it and let you know if I come across it.

To the extent you're implying that Rudolf's Green Card renewal was denied because of his Holocaust denial, this is misleading. Rudolf was deported in 2005 for allegedly being in the US illegally. Despite his criminal conviction and prison sentence in Germany, he was able to immigrate to the US and acquire permanent residency. If the government is a actively persecuting Holocaust deniers, why would the government grant him a Green Card in the first place?

If his Green Card has in fact not been renewed, it's probably because of his indecent exposure conviction.

@Gdanning might be able to say more on the applicable law here.

SS knows all of this because he has already been corrected. He doesn't care. He just hopes that this time around, he won't be bothered by people who actually know about this case so he can push his falsehoods unopposed.

This was discussed on here several months back.

First of all, it does not make any sense to say that he faces deportation because his green card was not renewed. Although the card itself expires every 10 years, permanent residence does not expire. It is permanent (hence the name), unless it is revoked or abandoned.

Permanent residence can be revoked if the person commits a crime of moral turpitude, but an indecent exposure conviction is not necessarily a crime of moral turpitude. Much depends on the specific statute involved. See Matter of Cortes Medina, 26 I. & N. Dec. 79 (BIA 2013), a Board of Immigration Appeals case which states, "Under long-standing case law, an offense must have two essential elements to constitute a crime involving moral turpitude: a culpable mental state and reprehensible conduct. . . . In cases involving questions of moral turpitude, including those dealing with indecent exposure and lewd behavior, we have analyzed the underlying conduct prohibited by the statute of conviction. We have long held that indecent exposure is not inherently turpitudinous in the absence of lewd or lascivious intent."

According to the appellate decision in his case , he was convicted under a PA statute that says: "A person commits indecent exposure if that person exposes his or her genitals in any public place or in any place where there are present other persons under circumstances in which he or she knows or should know that this conduct is likely to offend, affront or alarm." That does not seem to include a requirement of lewd or lascivious intent.

Hence, I am skeptical that he is subject to revocation of his permanent residence, let alone that it has actually been revoked, let alone that he has been ordered deported. (His appeal was decided in August of 2021, and the INS does not move that fast)

Rudolf was deported in 2005 for allegedly being in the US illegally.

He was married to an American wife. How many people with an American wife would be arrested and deported when they show up to apply for a Green Card? His treatment was obviously due to his Holocaust denial. And now he has children with his American wife who were born in America. To pretend that him facing deportation has nothing to do with his Holocaust denial, and the average person in his situation would face the same treatment, is completely delusional.

To pretend that him facing deportation has nothing to do with his Holocaust denial,

As discussed above, there is no evidence that he currently faces deportation.

How many people with an American wife would be arrested and deported when they show up to apply for a Green Card?

The article says that there was a deportation order against him at the time, which he had ignored. So, probably 100 percent in those circumstances would be arrested.

The evidence that he faces deportation is that the last time he was in a similar situation he was deported. It has already happened to him. If he shows up to an immigration office to apply for a Green Card, how do you know he won't be arrested and deported just like last time?

Last time he was 1) in the country illegally; and 2) had been ordered deported. In contrast, today he is a permanent resident. Again, where is your evidence that his permanent residence has been revoked? And please don't talk about his "green card." As I said above, although the card expires and must be renewed, permanent residence status does not expire.

He has an American wife and children, but his application to be a U.S. citizen was terminally rejected in 2020. The German authorities have issued numerous arrest warrants for him. His passport expired in 2019, and Germany refuses to renew it, and this was followed by the US refusing to issue him a new Green Card after it expired in 2021. His request for political asylum was also rejected many years before. He has every reason to believe that there's coordination between Germany and the US to get him arrested and deported again.

His German arrest warrant, the rejection of his citizen application, the German refusal to renew his passport, and the American refusal to issue him a new Greed Card. Is it 100% certain he would be deported? No, but there's a risk, and it's absurd to think that none of this has to do with his notoriety as a Holocaust denier.

None ofthat is evidence that he is currently subject to deportation, which was the claim. His citizenship application was no doubt rejected because of his conviction; a permanent resident cannot become a citizen with a conviction within the last 3-5 years. It is a temporary bar not a "terminal" one.

There is only a risk of deportation if he does something that is grounds for revocation of his permanent residence status, which he hasn't done.

More comments

My only real question with the Holocaust is why did it go from an over-arching term for Nazi genocide killing 11 million to a Jewish specific genocide term covering 6 million. All my childhood I remember hearing 11 million, 11 million.

I second this. I recall as a kid that the term Holocaust was thrown around to mean everyone killed in Nazi camps. A bit more than half of which were Jews.

It seems like something switched and now it is only referring to the Jews killed and not the other 5 million plus non-Jews killed.

I don't think you fully understand, the "5 million plus non-Jews killed in the Holocaust" was a propaganda hoax created by Jewish Holocaust influencers in order to manipulate gentile feelings towards the Holocaust.

Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims – 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews.

“I said to him, ‘Simon, you are telling a lie,’” Bauer recalled in an interview Tuesday. “He said, ‘Sometimes you need to do that to get the results for things you think are essential.’”

Bauer and other historians who knew Wiesenthal said the Nazi hunter told them that he chose the 5 million number carefully: He wanted a number large enough to attract the attention of non-Jews who might not otherwise care about Jewish suffering, but not larger than the actual number of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, 6 million.

It caught on: President Jimmy Carter, issuing the executive order that would establish the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, referred to the “11 million victims of the Holocaust.”

People don't understand how easy it is for whole-cloth lies to be embraced as truth by masses of people, or as the world's most famous anti-Semite put it in Mein Kampf:

All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true within itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

It's perfectly possible that Holocaust influencers invented the 5 million for their own reasons. However, they would have had no good reason to invent it. As johnfabian has pointed out elsewhere, about 3 million Soviet POWs, most non-Jewish, died in German captivity. The Nazis also killed something like 2 million non-Jewish Poles. Put that together and you already have 5 million without even needing to count German communists, gays, disabled people, Roma, and so on. Some might argue that those Soviet POW and non-Jewish Pole deaths are just what happens in wartime, but that would not explain why Soviet POWs died in German captivity at more than 10 times the rate of Western Allies POWs in German captivity, or why the Germans killed Polish civilians at a vastly higher rate than they killed, for example, French civilians. Pretty clearly the Poles and Soviets died in such huge numbers in part because of Nazi Germany's racial attitudes.

However, they would have had no good reason to invent it.

They did have a good reason to invent it, and the reason is described in the article. Wiesenthal wanted to psychologically manipulate gentiles into caring about Jewish suffering. That is the motive which was identified for the creation of the lie, it's not a mystery.

My point is that they did not need to invent it, they could have just used actual figures about Polish and Soviet deaths, that is at least assuming that those figures were known at the time.

If you include civilians/combatants who died in the war as Holocaust victims you would end up with more than 5 million in any case. The 5 million number was not based on the logic you are proposing, it was just a lie intended to manipulate people. It had no scholarly basis whatsoever.

Late 20s, not Western but very online:

I've always heard the 6 million figure bandied about, but even then that was clearly a reference to the Jews alone, and I've heard larger figured for the total number of people killed in the Holocaust, but not nearly as frequently.

Of course, they never taught us about the Holocaust in India, and a large number of Indians hold neutral to mildly positive opinions about Hitler thanks to him fighting against the Brits. The ones who share the visceral hatred are largely drawn from the very Westernized, though even then it's hardly the biggest concern.

I'm curious how old you are, and where you grew up. Because in the vernacular it has been a Jewish- specific term covering 6 million for a long, long time, in my experience. It was only relatively more recently that the term has sometimes been used more expansively. See discussion here.

Late 30s, Northeastern USA.

That's very surprising. I'm mid 30s, northeastern US, and I've always heard 6 million over and over and Jewish-specific.

The figure of 5 million non-Jewish Holocaust victims was invented from whole cloth:

Five million is frequently cited as the number of non-Jews killed by the Nazis. The figure is inaccurate and was apparently an invention of famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. According to historian Deborah Lipstadt, he began to refer to “eleven million victims” of the Holocaust, six million Jews and five million non-Jews in the 1970s. Wiesenthal later admitted making up the figure to promote interest in the Holocaust among non-Jews. Lipstadt, says “he chose five million because it was almost, but not quite, as large as six million.”

The number of non-Jewish civilians murdered for racial or ideological reasons in concentration camps, historian Yehuda Bauer estimates, was no more than half a million.

I used to get annoyed at people ignoring the non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust until discovering that these were only a tenth as many as I thought they were.

The "Holocaust" does not exclusively refer to Jews killed in concentration/extermination camps though. Roughly a similar number of Jews (~2.5 million) died in mass executions as were gassed to death. While it is true a relatively small number of non-Jews died within the camp system, if you wiped out the Holocaust from existence history's largest genocide would then be the German murder of Soviet POWs (roughly 3.3-3.5 million victims), and if you wiped out that it would be the German genocide of ethnic Poles (2-2.5 million victims)... either that or the genocide against non-Jewish Russians (which is difficult to get an exact bearing on in terms of numbers).

I've mentioned this before but Timothy Snyder provides a simple breakdown: when it comes to the mass murder of civilians in 20th century Europe, there are three prominent cases of roughly equal size: the Nazi murder of Jews, the Nazi murder of Slavs, and the Soviet murder of their own citizens. Whether or not you think the term "The Holocaust" should include both of the first two categories is a matter of debate. For the most part I think they are separate phenomenon and it is more useful for the term "Holocaust" to refer to exclusively Jewish victims.

I was always under the impression that the term "Holocaust" referred to everyone who was killed in Nazi concentration camps, and the term "Shoah" specifically referred to Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps.

It's popularly used IME to refer to the overall campaign of extermination against the Jews in Nazi Germany. Some were killed in concentration camps and death camps by gassing, others by mass executions, and others by starvation or over-work. I haven't heard of it used to refer to the Roma who were killed as well, or to Slavic POWs who also died in large numbers, though were never sent to death camps.

My impression is that generally "the Holocaust" refers to the Nazi mass murder of Jews in general, with "Shoah" just being a Jewish term for the same.

When historians refer to the extermination camps exclusively they speak of "the Final Solution"; the period of mass executions prior to the establishment of the extermination camps I see frequently referred to as "the Holocaust/Shoah by bullets."

The Alternative Hypothesis made a video on this topic. With a text version available. 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.

As for 2, It depends on what you mean by "it". There were camps. They had guards. What exactly is not being denied and what does it prove? The Holocaust narrative that had already been 'litigated' during the Nuremberg Trials? Or the Holocaust narrative that didn't see the light of day until in the late 1960's? Or the Hollywood Holocaust that gets depicted in pop media? If the crime was putting jews into camps then they are guilty of doing that. That's not what Holocaust revisionism is taking issue with for the most part. So I don't see how its proof of any of the contested claims like the total number of deaths, specific number of deaths at specific camps, Zyklon B running through showerheads and whatever else any 'eyewitness' imagined.

The treatment of officials and public figures post-war is best illustrated by looking at someone undeniably influential like Carl Schmitt. Who was barred from teaching by the Allies since he refused to be 'denazified'. In broader terms I think your interpretation of what life was like for those who refused to bow their head to the new world order exists completely outside the bounds of reality.

If you wanted a life, which was hard to come by for a lot of Germans, going out in public and doing Nazi apologetics when you can barely feed your family is probably the last thing you do and very low on the list of immediate things to worry about. No matter how true your position could be. It's not like the German could go out there and post on twitter or make public statements about the kangaroo court that was the Nuremberg Trials on the radio. Or write about it in a newspaper, at least not without getting the same treatment as Schmitt got at the minimum.

I have talked about this before on this board but Sanning's analysis is total nonsense and by extension so is Faulk's. I actually did a long-form write-up of the question a few months ago, but the short version is Sanning dishonestly juggles numbers to force pre-war Jewish demographic numbers down by several millions, grossly overestimates the numbers of evacuees moved eastwards by the USSR, and just generally lies a lot. This isn't like talking about the pre-Columbian Americas where population estimates can differ several times over; and demographic uncertainty in this case is not nearly great enough to rescue the revisionist thesis.

Here's a particularly egregious example. In the latest edition of Sanning's book he says the following:

By the end of January [1946] the flow of [Jewish] refugees into the American zone reached such proportions that it was estimated more than 600,000 persons would be interned in displaced persons camps by March.

His source is here on page 308, and he has inserted "1946" and "Jewish," which makes sense because if you read to the very next page you see that this 600,000 number applies to DPs in general, Jewish or otherwise, and that the number of Jews specifically in the American zone by March of 1946 was not even 50,000.

Revisionism basically just consists of lying like this writ large in more or less obvious ways.

I remember AltHype's videos being huge on YT back when I was in HS and thinking that he certainly seemed like a smart guy since I sure didn't understand the first thing about genetics or psychometrics, but now that he's trying to engage the history of WWII I'm updating substantially towards him being a dumbass.

I'm going to try and separate the rhetorical flair and the numbers, just for my own sake.

For starters, saying that it's "Sanning's numbers" when he quotes a source for said numbers obfuscates things quite a bit. Especially when it is present throughout the entire text. As an example, “Opinion of the Institute for Contemporary History” is not Sanning. They say 100k per year emigrating from Poland between a certain time period. Sanning repeats the claim made. You reference other sources, which give a lower estimate. This is not a competition between your sources and Sanning, which is how you frame things. This is a discrepancy between different sources.

Another example of this sort of thing being that the Polish government can matter of factly undercount the numbers of jewish births by up to 60-some percent and that's completely normal. But to consider they undercount the numbers of jewish emigrants by 80% is somehow very obviously in the realm of absurdity. If it is incompetent enough to do one why not another? For every 'just so' story reason there is a 'just so' story reason for the opposite.

I'm sure Faulk and friends do this as well. But there's an obvious point to be made that everyone is transparently working towards separate finish lines through motivated reasoning.

To make a long story short, if the sources cited by Sanning are closer to reality than the sources cited by you, there is a matter of degree to which the question of 'where did the jews go' is answered. To that end I think the revisionist side has an obvious case that is based on sources and assumptions that are no greater or lesser than the ones used by exterminationists.

I fail to see how laymen can come to an obvious conclusion that the revisionist citations are not 'persuasive' in revising the holocaust narrative considering that, even if wrong to a degree, they would still exist as revisions to the total count and by extension cast aspersions on other claims made that rely on a minimum amount of jews present in the area Germany had access to.

I didn't think there was much rhetoric.

This is a discrepancy between different sources.

Not all sources are created equal. I presented several sources to counter Sanning's single source (which is a huge outlier numerically, while the rest of the sources are in the same ballpark, which casts some doubt on it from the start). If 100,000 Jews left Poland each year, this would be reflected in the growth of the Jewish populations of Palestine and the US, but it isn't. Emigration from Poland also dropped sharply after the onset of the Great Depression.

But actually that's all besides the point: since I wrote that piece, someone let me know where Sanning's source got the "100,000 per year" figure. It apparently comes from the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia of 1942, which refers to 100,000 emigrants per year from the Jewish "zone of suffering" which consisted of central and eastern Europe in general, not Poland specifically. So actually Sanning is just lying about his sources again.

Another example of this sort of thing being that the Polish government can matter of factly undercount the numbers of jewish births by up to 60-some percent and that's completely normal.

It is much easier to be born in a Jewish shtetl unnoticed than to get on a ship to Palestine or the US unnoticed.

If your standard for history is "well this source says one thing but this source says another," without any attempt to discriminate between the quality of various sources, you can't do history at all.

I pointed out where you employed rhetoric and how. Maybe I should have pointed out how repeatedly accusing people of lying isn't productive to anything either so you could have dropped that as well. Otherwise I feel you are on a fast track towards the endpoint of all Holocaust arguments, especially for those who put a lot of time into the game, where both parties default to accusing one another of insanity.

I don't think all sources are created equal. Especially with regards to history. Which is why I said that there is not an obvious conclusion to be drawn. For starters I don't think the practice of looking at estimates like this is all that valid to begin with considering the error margins and the chaotic nature of events. All that is sufficient, from my point of view, is that the error margin for the discrepancy of 'missing' jews can exist as an alternative hypothesis to the question of 'where they went'. Which would also hinge on taking whatever estimates of the total number of jews to begin with as being valid. Keeping in mind that the question is open ended. To whatever extent jews went missing, there exists no baseline that necessitates they went into a camp and not somewhere else.

Any revisions downward seem to pose a rather obvious problem. Which prompts, in my view, a completely unwarranted confidence in any estimates that maintain a sufficient number of jews to fuel the holocaust narrative from the exterminationist side.

It is much easier to be born in a Jewish shtetl unnoticed than to get on a ship to Palestine or the US unnoticed.

Like I said, for every 'just so' story reason there is a 'just so' story for another. What was being pointed out is the aforementioned unwarranted confidence in any estimates that fuel the holocaust narrative. 80% is 'absurd' not because you have any knowledge of actual events, but because it breaks too far from the baseline you need to maintain.

My standard for history is that historical evidence can be extremely bad. Battles and assaults during the war could go overlooked or misreported for decades despite them involving entire frontlines and death tolls in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. The largest tank battle of the war only existed as an anomaly for most of recorded history. To stand up with any degree of confidence and say that they know for sure, down to the 100k is the hallmark of someone who should reconsider their disposition towards what they are doing.

Maybe I should have pointed out how repeatedly accusing people of lying isn't productive to anything either so you could have dropped that as well.

I accuse Sanning of lying because he lies, as the example I gave in my first response to you pretty clearly shows.

For starters I don't think the practice of looking at estimates like this is all that valid to begin with considering the error margins and the chaotic nature of events.

Just saying "it was chaotic" is hand-waving. Where, specifically, was the chaos? What chaos would have caused the British authorities of Mandate Palestine or the US immigration authorities, both quite severe in the restriction of immigration, to underestimate the number of Jews entering their borders by the hundreds of thousands?

Just saying "it was chaotic" is hand-waving.

Thankfully that's not what I 'just' said. As my point pertained to the general inaccuracies of demographic data collection in general confounded by the tumultuous times, where people were moving in great numbers. And not just via boats to Palestine and the US, as your reply suggests. This was said by me to further the broader point that claims of confident certainty, to a degree that the holocaust narrative seems to require to fill its minimum baseline of jews, are unwarranted. Admitting to a certain level of uncertainty with regards to the data in general seems much more prudent. But, again, prudence is not something exterminationists can afford.

Can I just chalk this misrepresentation of yours up to you being a liar? I say this half jokingly.

More comments

I'm not too well versed in the revisionist position, I just know stuff I've seen on 4chan's politics board over the years, but wasn't the argument against the holocaust that Jews did die in camps, but they weren't gassed or purposely executed? From what I recall, they claimed that Jews died from starvation and typhus after supplies to the camps got cut when the Germans started losing the war, and that the gas was used to try to stop the spread of typhus by delousing clothes.

The problem with this is that the majority of Jews in question "disappeared" in 1942 - 43 which was well before German infrastructure began falling apart.

I don't see how it's a problem, anyone taken to the camps would "disappear" when they were imprisoned, not when they died.

When people were kept in concentration camps, they were recorded as such. The Nazis kept records of inmate population at places like Auschwitz and Dachau which makes sense because you want to have a good idea of the size of your labour pool.

What happened in 1942 - 43 is that the Polish General Government was cleared of Jews. As surviving documents attest, 2,000,000 were deported to three camps: Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. These camps were not like Auschwitz or Dachau, they were tiny little outposts in the Polish countryside, not big enough to accommodate ten thousand prisoners, let alone the hundreds of thousands they received. After this point these Jews disappear from Nazi documentation and from history. Revisionists want to claim that these camps were 'transit' centers by which the deportees were resettled in the "Russian east" but the problem is that there is no evidence, testimonial, physical, or documentary for the massive logistical effort that such a resettlement would have entailed. The paper trail ends at Treblinka, so to speak. That's what I mean by "disappear." It's well-documented that these people wound up in these places, but after that there's only a gaping hole in the historical record. Unless you account for the hundreds of testimonies from guards and prisoners at these places identifying them as extermination camps, and the huge quantities of human ash found by more recent archaeological investigations.

Alright, that actually makes sense.

That's the principle issue of Holocaust Denial. I've never been super interested in the field but my very primitive understanding is that there are very few people who are doubting that there were Jews persecuted/killed etc etc.

It's more how it's been a cottage industry for almost a century now to come up with tales of torture, persecution and murder which have forged an unholy Holocaust Extended Suffering Universe in which it is difficult to refute individual claims even ones which violate a lot of logic.

Totally going to start using the phrase Holocaust Extended Suffering Universe. It doesn’t really change the moral character of the Holocaust if 1 million Jews, 6 million Jews, or 200-300 thousand Jews were killed in the Holocaust. It was still a horrible tragedy, and I say that as someone who does not like Jews or gypsies or Russians very much. The claims of radicals who continually expand the numbers to make some political point are obviously at some point stupid, but yes, there is strong evidence that the SS deliberately murdered a large number of Jews(and other groups).

Weber, along with David Cole and David Irving, who were all pretty heavy-hitters in the revisionist scene back in the 90s, have all accepted the reality of the extermination program for some time. I'm not sure about Weber, but Cole and Irving, also accept 'limited' gassings at Auschwitz. For this reason among others the IHR has kind of fallen out of favor with most deniers. CODOH has more or less taken its place. 'Scholarly' Holocaust denial these days is basically just Carlo Mattogno who puts out a book like every two months (though to be fair large chunks of his books tend to be copy-pasted from his older books), with a little help from Jürgen Graf and Thomas Dalton. As you say, there's also Jim Rizoli I guess but he's a total clown. Ryan Faulk (the Alternative Hypothesis) is also dipping his toe into denial lately but he's not doing a very good job of it.

Interestingly there's actually something of a laundry list of 'former deniers.' Eric Hunt (a schizophrenic who once tried to kidnap Elie Wiesel) was probably the biggest name in denial in the early 2010s because of a number of revisionist documentaries he produced which got a lot of exposure on youtube back before they banned all that stuff. In 2016 he caused kind of a stir when he decided that the Holocaust happened after all and revisionism was bankrupt. There's also Jean-Claude Pressac who was sent to Auschwitz archives by French denier Robert Faurisson in hopes of disconfirming the extermination once and for all and instead ended up convinced that it actually happened. There was a pretty prolific/well-known blogger and poster on the various denial and anti-denial forums back in the day who went by "the Black Rabbit of Inlé" and who also ultimately decided that the evidence supported an extermination program.

I know about Cole's turnaround but Irving is news to me. Mind sharing source?

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=jyav1uh0KqA](This is Irving speaking in 2016, the audio is not great but I think decipherable)

This is from his website, where he talks about Jews at Auschwitz being gassed on a "small scale"

Probably worth noting that Irving was never really a "professional" denier. He never wrote an actual book focusing on the Holocaust, it was all tangential to his main interests. Irving's main thing was specifically denying the use of some of the specific buildings in Auschwitz as gas chambers, and I think he still holds to at least some of that. So it's not totally clear to me to what extent Irving ever denied the Holocaust in toto.

Interesting, thanks!

In short, the Holocaust assumed an important role in the social-cultural life of America and western Europe in keeping with, and as an expression of, a phenomenal increase in Jewish influence and power. The Holocaust “remembrance” campaign is not so much a source of Jewish-Zionist power as it is an expression of it. For that reason, debunking the Holocaust will not shatter that power.

Yup. In Eastern Europe it was on the backburner - the powers that be pushed quite a bit harder for the glorious sacrifice and suffering of the USSR. When we learned in school in the late 90s for wwII (after berlin wall but still some cultural inertia left) and holocaust was presented as - there were extermination camps, couple of million of jews died, lets move on to the battle of Kursk.

Given that the Soviets perpetrated their own massive anti-Jewish campaign right after the war ended, emphasizing Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis while sending them to Siberia would not be productive for them. That only changed in the 1960s, with overall "thaw" liberalization, where atrocities like Babi Yar were allowed to be remembered and came into the public view. Even then it was instructed to not over-emphasize the suffering of the Jews over all other peoples of the Soviet Union, but at least the topic has been opened for discussion, though the concept of the Holocaust, as an historical event, I think still didn't exist in Soviet cultural space until the 1990s.

In the 1980s and well into the 1990s the Holocaust was on the back burner in the UK for the same reason - as long as significant numbers of people who remembered the Blitz were still alive, no Briton was going to bellyfeel that anything else was Hitler's worst crime. The way history was taught in British schools was that Hitler was the evil Lord of Evil because he was bent on Alexander the Great/Genghis Khan style world conquest long after this had ceased to be acceptable behaviour. This became a Problem that required large-scale British military intervention to stop him several years before anyone came up with the Holocaust.

During the heroic period of WW2 (for the UK, from the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 to El Alamein in July 1942), we couldn't have been fighting Hitler in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the Holocaust, because the Holocaust hadn't started yet.

FWIW, I still think that the traditional British view is correct (which was also the view of the Nuremberg prosecutors), and that the Holocaust lobby is wrong - Hitler's worst crime was starting WW2. He isn't uniquely evil compared to other warmongering megalomanicas, just uniquely deadly because of the large European population in the 20th century.

This is ultimately how I feel about it as well. The intense focus on the Holocaust in America is largely because our involvement in the european theater was pretty slim. And because it's no longer fashionable to hold racial grudges, our real enemy of the war is no longer a valid target for rage. Because we need some great evil, we had to reanimate Europe's Great Evil in order to pin the tail so to speak, but in doing so we really lose a lot of the focus on why he was so Great and Evil.

Our history courses are dogshit, so all we ever hear about is the holocaust as the main animus for war. It's rarely mentioned, if at all, that Hitler's Final Solution was named so because his economy wasn't doing so hot and moving millions of people forcibly turns out to be a nightmare. If any focus were placed on the Reich's economic policy or Hitler's command economy, it would fit a lot better; the problem is that to speak of such things is taboo. A socialist hitler never existed, dontcha know?

Revisionism is icky, but everyone does it. Finding actual truth requires debate, and in terms of the holocaust narrative very few people are willing to sit down and have a conversation about motives and the economics of the fourth reich. It's simpler to construct The Great Murderer (which he was) and forcefeed mostly-truths to unwitting teenagers, or to Completely Ignore the relevant evidence pertaining to genocide.

If any focus were placed on the Reich's economic policy or Hitler's command economy, it would fit a lot better; the problem is that to speak of such things is taboo. A socialist hitler never existed, dontcha know?

All war economies are command economies - in WW2 the US less so because the war was less total for the US than most other participants, but you still had pervasive wage and price controls, rationing of key commodities, and residual New Deal restrictions still in place. For the duration, the UK was as much of a command economy as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

Hitler's worst crime was starting WW2. He isn't uniquely evil compared to other warmongering megalomanicas

Funny, I wanted to bring Genghis Khan up to make the opposite point. Mass murder is as old as humanity, we can wrap our heads around a conqueror setting our cities on fire, looting our treasure, and basking in the lamentations of our women, but the industrialization of genocide perfected by the Nazis turned into a cold "rational" process, that might have made even Genghis Khan say "bro, that's fucked up!".

If the Mongols felt that it was deserved, they would happily massacre a six-figure number of people after sacking a city (700,000 in Merv, which was the biggest single Mongol massacre). The high-end estimates of the total death toll of the Mongol conquests (military deaths, massacres, and war-related famines) are about half the population of the conquered territory, which is notably worse than Hitler. The macro-demographic impacts of the Mongol conquests can be detected in Arctic ice cores. Once you remember that the Holocaust was mostly the killing of conquered people (the German Jews were encouraged to emigrate, and the majority who did survived), I think you can see the industrialisation of it as the application of modern technology to the old problem of carrying out a wartime massacre.

I think Genghis Khan would have considered the Holocaust militarily stupid, but not ethically fucked up.

Mass murder is as old as humanity, we can wrap our heads around a conqueror setting our cities on fire, looting our treasure, and basking in the lamentations of our women ...

I deliberately put Alexander the Great in my post to make the point that at some point in the past "Conquer the World and kill everyone who resists" was considered OK if it was our guy doing it. But that had ceased to be the case after WW1, and arguably earlier than that. The idea that the 19th-century British Empire required a better moral justification than the sheer rapacity used to justify the 18th-century one seems to have been held pretty universally by the Victorians.

I think Genghis Khan would have considered the Holocaust militarily stupid, but not ethically fucked up.

Germany had a serious problem with food supply during WW2, and they were ready to starve millions of Russians to death.. There were major issues implementing said policy, though still about 4 million died, with a million or two in the rest of Europe.

Holocaust would have been militarily stupid in the long term had Germany won the European war. Had Germany figured out some way of conquering Europe without having to kill millions of the its smartest subpopulation, they'd have had an edge in the subsequent cold war with the US.

German state ideology was thus that the ashkenazim couldn’t be integrated into the power structure.

I think he'd have admired the effort but scowled at the irrationality. His own successes were precisely of the «cold rational industrial» nature.

Personally I have never been able to feel any special terror at the thought that Holocaust was «industrialized». I even suspect this is a rationalization of generic technophobia. «We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death» is a sentiment for peacetime. The civilization is full of inhuman, performance-optimizing industrial processes – such as our economic system with its inscrutable hedge-fund shoggoths and multilayer grift running on the lifeblood of commoners. Nazis themselves, of course, accused «the Jew» of mechanizing and perverting the Aryan way of life; as did Germans before them, lamenting the passing of pre-capitalistic world. In every case, the machine is only a tool wielded by humans.

I even suspect this is a rationalization of generic technophobia.

I beg your pardon! I wear my technophobia proudly, and don't need industrialized genocide to excuse it!

This is also one of the reasons why "the Soviets manufactured all the death camp evidence!" rings a bit false - they did all that just to then mostly ignore it and concentrate on WW2 as a German-Soviet conflict?

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