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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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That's an argument for revising the death toll downwards. That's not an argument that the holocaust never happened.

Yes, politically correct brigade pretends they are the same thing, but we don't have to accept their framing. At least some mass killings of racial undesirables, mostly Jews, were carried out by the Nazis during WWII, which is the definition of the holocaust.

It is not simply a matter of revising the death toll downwards, it's a demonstration that Revisionists are correct about the fallibility of the body evidence that has been used to "prove" the extraordinary claim that millions of people were murdered inside makeshift gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Revisionists contend that this narrative was psychological warfare, similar to the psych warfare that produced the most infamous propaganda in WWI about the German "corpse factories".

The Holocaust is not simply the claim that there were some killings of Jews, as that is a claim Revisionists do not contest. The Holocaust includes the claim that there was an official policy to exterminate the Jews and that millions were murdered in makeshift gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Those are the claims Revisionists contest, and Majdanek is not simply a revision of the death toll, it's a demonstrated case of the Revisionist model of the narrative being proven true for one of the 6 alleged "extermination camps." It's a case where, as Revisionists say, Soviet investigators, witnesses, courts, and historians all colluded to perpetuate an entirely false narrative that became "history" for decades, until Revisionists did the archival research and proved their case such that even the Majdanek museum could no longer hold the narrative together without abandoning the vast majority of it.

I’m assuming that as a revisionist you acknowledge that at least some Jewish communities were exterminated deliberately by the axis powers?

Because yes, obviously gas chambers is besides the point and the specific death toll doesn’t actually change the valence of the events. I don’t think you can dispute say, the crimes of the iron guard, or that the Nazis did wipe out plenty of Jewish communities.

Gas chambers are not "besides the point", the claim is that about half of all the Jews killed were murdered in these makeshift contraptions. There is no mainstream authority whatsoever that allows you to affirm "the Holocaust" without also affirming the gas chamber story, that story is an indispensable pillar of what constitutes "the Holocaust".

Yes there were communities that were killed, i.e. there were widespread reprisals against Jewish civilians in response to partisan activity, which was tragic but considered legal at the time. There were likewise Russian and Ukrainian and Polish and German communities that were wiped out and ethnically cleansed before, during, and after the war. We are told Jewish suffering is special because there was a specific policy to secretly exterminate them all, a claim which Revisionists refute, and that millions of them were herded into shower rooms and then gassed. "The Holocaust" as such absolutely depends on the truth of those claims, if those claims are false then the Holocaust narrative is also false by the definition put forward by all of its proponents.

Yes, politically correct brigade pretends they are the same thing, but we don't have to accept their framing.

You don't have to accept their framing in the same way that a sovereign citizen doesn't have to accept the framing of a cop writing him a traffic ticket. If you don't want to go to prison (in many countries) or be fired from your job (in the US) then you do have to accept the common definition.

On the motte we can use the literal definitions of words.