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The baseline assumption for belief, for people who don't know a lot about Holocaust history, is that there is a coherent narrative that makes sense, the historians have consistently agreed on, and the historical evidence has consistently supported.
The problems with this mode of thinking are multiple, but the relevant one here arises when people are asked to evaluate specific parts of the narrative. It becomes a self reinforcing circle. Looking something like: Given that X happened it seems very likely that Y also happened.
Take 3 big Holocaust events that definitely happened. 1, 2, 3. Take one Holocaust event that definitely didn't happen. 4. Say that events 2 and 4 are equally evidenced. Except in the case of 4 there was, by chance, completely exculpatory evidence discovered. Can you still take event 2 as undeniably true?
Both events were equally evidenced. Eyewitness testimony by the hundreds. Both camps were liberated mostly intact. Memoirs written of the horrifying events that unfolded when hundreds of people were crammed into a small chamber to be executed. Infant children trampled under the panicking mass of soon to be slaughtered jews as their mothers wailed in absolute horror. Clawing at the walls, begging for mercy... Except in one case we know for 100% fact that it was all lies conjured up by some guy. Literally just made it all up. Not just that, hundreds of eye witnesses testified jews were being gassed to American investigators. Every single one of them lying.
I have a problem with this. For me, 2 now seems a lot less likely to be true. If 4 was false, but is otherwise exactly the same, the entire catalog of evidence for 2 should now be under serious scrutiny. Eyewitness testimony is no longer enough. You need hard physical evidence because it has been discovered that the bar for evidence that has been set can be met with nothing but lies.
But for people who believe in the narrative, not evidence, they can't do that. 1 happened, 3 happened... What are the odds 2 didn't happen? All the historians agree. All the mainstream. Not even Alex Jones would deny the Holocaust... 2 obviously happened or the Holocaust historians wouldn't say it happened.
I don't know how to better express it. As soon as you find 2 to be within the scope of scrutiny due to the similarity to the standard of evidence used to prove 4, you are a denier. It's no longer 6 million, which it never was. It's no longer 5.2-5.8 million. It's now around 4 million. Congrats. You are a denier. Have fun reasoning with people who, through a reality defying congruence of evidence manage to piece together that every single data point relating to jews from 1900's onwards reinforces the fact that German Nazis killed 6 million of them for ideological reasons between 1939-1945.
It's honestly not worth the effort. You start seeing things. Becoming crazy. Arguing about nothing with people who never looked at any evidence in the first place. The notion never entered their mind. To them it's just a feeling. A self reinforcing circle of things that had to happen.
I find arguing about the holocaust to be strange as it's ultimately quibbling over details that don't really matter in any practical sense.
6 million, 5 million, 4 million, are all the same number and that number is "a lot".
And they are correct, that narrative is that during the second world war the German government deliberately killed a lot of jews on the basis of their ethnicity. This is supported by such a weight of evidence supporting this that it's accepted by pretty much all reasonable people who don't have ulterior motives for trying to weaken said narrative.
Frankly I don't think anyone is surprised that the party who incessantly harped on about the evil of jews, blamed them for pretty much all that they believed was wrong in the world and systematically eroded their rights then went on to go kill large numbers of jews when they got the chance. It's on par with a rapper releasing a song rapping about how they really hate someone and want to murder them, before going out and murdering them.
If the number is not 6 million but 4 million then the Holocaust narrative isn't correct and people would not be correct in believing in it. If you don't believe those kinds of details to be important then your perspective isn't very relevant to a discussion on the Holocaust. Especially not as I defined it in my post.
This is broadening the scope of the topic to a point where any act of war is now proof of a holocaust. Germans deliberately killed Russians as part of the war. Russians deliberately killed Germans as part of the war. If this is your view of the narrative it is just irrelevant to the critiques being made against the historical holocaust narrative.
If your point is that Germans killed jews because they didn't like them, and that's the only important part of the story, then I have to say that you don't have much to stand on when it comes to the complaints Russians have. The Germans sure did kill a lot more of them.
Yes, people dying in WW2 is supported by a lot of evidence. Other than that your sentence is such a shitball I can't believe you wrote it. "pretty much all reasonable people who don't have ulterior motives"? Really?
No one is claiming no jews died. No one is claiming Germans liked jews. But to what end Germans pursued the killing of jews, the actual scope of said killings and the deliberation behind it are all important parts of the historical narrative. Questioning those parts is valid and the truth stands on its own no matter what motives you feel are behind it.
On that point it would be something if all that rhetoric you spout could be turned back at you. Say, for instance, if a jew like Simon Wiesenthal admitted to deliberately lying about how many people died in the Holocaust to make the thing seem more believable to non-jews. I mean, would jews really do that? Just lie to support a narrative like the Holocaust? Would jews really lie about being put into gas chambers? I mean, being the center of victimary discourse in the west sure has its perks. So there's a motive. Can I just paint you as another Simon Wiesenthal or a Dachau jew who lied about gas chambers? After all, we all know that most reasonable people who investigate the evidence for the holocaust come away feeling very skeptical about it! ;)
Seems like your rhetoric fits rather snugly on the other foot. I would say that just as much as some have motive to question the narrative, others have a motive to uphold it. Recognizing that is one thing, but pretending only one side is doing it? Now there's some motivated reasoning.
Both sides certainly killed large numbers of each others soldiers and there were extensive civilian casualties involved with bombing campaigns, starvation and so on throughout the war. But your example doesn’t really make sense. It’s more like the US going to war with, say, Iraq, and the regular civilian casualty rate being 2% of the population but somehow 40% of Iraqi Kurds mysteriously die over the course of 5 years. This would indeed imply a particular targeting of that group on an ethnic basis. Of course, there are other potential explanations, but now imagine that the US had spent a decade demonizing Kurds as part of state ideology and a central pillar of its political program. Again, suspicions mount.
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Of course what you and @SecureSignals do is focus very narrowly on minute details like this, and then stone-facedly insist that anyone who won't consider the possibility that it was 2 or 4 million instead of 6 million isn't to be taken seriously, while also insisting that if you do take it seriously you're a "denier."
@DoW's point was that 2, 4, or 6 million would still be genocide. A Holocaust. A deliberate campaign by the Nazis to murder as many Jews as they could. We're quibbling about just how successful they were and/or how many Jews there actually were to begin with.
You throw chaff like "There was a war in Europe. A lot of people died. The end." But while of course we are very unlikely to be able to get precise figures, even in an event as cataclysmic as World War II, no, literally millions of people do not just untraceably disappear like that.
So you focus hard on that 6 million number because it's so iconic and because if you can crack that, if you can get someone to admit that maybe it was actually 4 million... what, the whole narrative falls apart? It doesn't, but, you also know the reason why people don't really want to argue with you about how many millions it was. Because you don't actually care how many millions it was. Deniers aren't concerned with historical accuracy; they're concerned with The Narrative. The Narrative is that Jews were victims of a genocide, which is generally considered to be a bad thing and something they didn't deserve. Deniers, generally speaking, are in the "It didn't happen and if it did, the Jews had it coming" camp. If we uncovered rock-solid evidence tomorrow of the Holocaust happening and being a planned campaign by the Nazis to exterminate Jews, evidence of such nature that even deniers couldn't pretend it wasn't real (though honestly my imagination fails me when trying to conceive of evidence they wouldn't invent new narratives about, after reading "all the Nazis who admitted what they did were just tortured," "all the Jews who saw the murders are lying," "all the Allied soldiers who found the camps were just finding starving people in work camps and then the Jews lied about what happened to them," and "millions of people vanished into the Soviet hinterlands, the end"), it would not make a difference. Deniers are not, after all, historians in pursuit of correcting the historical record. They are ideologues who hate Jews.
Personally, I have marginally more respect for people who at least are very clear and open about their beliefs and their agendas and don't try to hide them. What Holocaust deniers do is the equivalent of white nationalists who won't openly admit to being white nationalists who think we should segregate into ethnostates, but instead just post endlessly about HBD pretending to be concerned with the shoddy state of biological research. Note that this is not a claim that HBD isn't real, just as I wouldn't be surprised if it was really 4 million Jews instead of 6 million. In a better world where we really are having good faith discussions about "the Truth," I would be a lot more interested in listening to someone talk about IQ differences, or how exactly we get Holocaust casualty figures.
In my comment to Stefferi, which you have obviously read, I give a very specific example where, in fact, millions of people seemingly just untraceably disappeared. The death counts can swing in the millions in specific instances, and sometimes dozens of millions over the course of the entire war, because the data is very inaccurate. Recognizing this fact instead of asserting certainty is a far cry from not caring about historical accuracy.
This is a very obvious truth that is easy to recognize.
As I went over in my comment to Stefferi, The Germans, post war, recognized this and used the most reliable data available. They had two things: A limited number of certified dead, and a rough population based estimate. The rough estimate said 2.2 million. The certified dead said 500k. So 500k it is. This isn't seen as denial, this isn't seen as some psychological ailment fueled by ideology and hate. It's just the most accurate data available.
The historical Holocaust narrative has a problem. The most reliable data available isn't super reliable. It's often based on eyewitness testimony and a lot of the alleged incriminating physical evidence is alleged to have been destroyed, lost in time, or not properly captured. So annoying guys called 'holocaust deniers' start poking holes in specific elements of the story. Those discussions are technical and beyond the scope of most people. So the fallback is generally: Well, then "where did the jews go"?
Well, they went the way of the 1.5 million missing Germans who disappeared post-war. They went the way of many a man who never existed despite being counted as alive and well when a demographer decided to assume a certain population growth when calculating a population size based on an estimate carried out sometime before he was even born.
To make it simple, you are presupposing things to be that are not in any way proven. The only reason you do this is because you already believe in the Holocaust. You already drink the Cool-Aid. In any other neutral situation, like with the ethnic cleansing of Germans from the eastern regions post-war, this isn't a topic of contention for anyone.
My position isn't complex. You don't need to be ideologically motivated to recognize the reasoning behind it because it's not presented as an ideological position. You can assert that motives invalidate reason, and I would respectfully disagree.
As for the rest of your post, both you and DoW seem incapable of understanding the scope of my comment. If you want to argue about something other than the specifics of the claims regarding the Holocaust, why reply to my comment here? It pertained very specifically to people who believe in the historical holocaust narrative. That narrative does not just say that jews were genocided. It makes very specific claims about how many, when, why and how. And the people who believe the historical holocaust narrative do so with great confidence.
I'm not here to tell people what to think beyond the fact that 6 million is, as it stands, highly implausible. And that people have an unexamined and undue confidence in the mainstream historical holocaust narrative.
I think it serves those who are ideologically motivated to inflate the holocaust, for whatever reason, to poison the well of justified skepticism exactly like you are doing now. With uncharitable and unfounded assertions of hate and whatever else.
Yes, I did read your claims.
I believe in the Holocaust in the same way I believe we landed on the moon and that JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald and the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hit by planes. I am aware that there are alternate theories claiming otherwise, and I admit I have not personally done the legwork, interviews, and archival records searches to verify each of them, nor done a deeper dive on those subjects that the average educated layman. But what I have seen is pretty convincing, and your arguments are no more credible than those of the people claiming NASA faked the moon landings or that the Pentagon was actually struck by a missile. (I find the latter claim particularly incredible because while I was not there, I personally know people who saw the plane. Just as I have met people who saw the camps.) Of course people pushing a conspiracy that requires ignoring all evidence except the very carefully curated bits they want to be considered always pull out that "you drank the Kool-aid" line.
Is my claim uncharitable and unfounded? You have frequently argued that Jews are a hostile, tribal people, inimical to all non-Jews, and that the Holocaust is essentially a memetic weapon in their ongoing war against gentiles. You have made your animosity to Jews pretty clear, so while you may consider your hate justified, I don't think you can plausibly deny that it exists or that I am being uncharitable in pointing it out, and that whenever a Holocaust denier posts here, the more overt anti-Jew stuff is sure to follow.
Then why say that millions of people do not just disappear when they do? Whatever.
I guess that's a difference between us then. I try to not hold strong opinions on things I don't know a lot about in general. If someone brings up an alternative hypothesis to something mainstream I'm not super animated that to the point of asserting that they are in fact a hateful person and then try to implicitly lump them in with low status people. That kind of a disposition would, in fact, indicate that I cared a lot despite admitting I don't know a lot. Which is stupid and arrogant.
Considering I just wrote an entire post describing why I consider 4 more plausible than 6, this is just asinine. So is the attempt at psychologizing me as a conspiracy theorist. Jewish eyewitnesses lying about gas chambers in Dachau is not a conspiracy.
Yes, extremely so. You misrepresent my positions as well as asserting that I "hate" when I don't.
You clearly have strong opinions about Jews. What are your credentials in that area?
What makes you think I don't know a lot about the Holocaust in general? What would qualify me as "knowing a lot"? I have read books (yes, actual full-length books) about it. I have watched documentaries and interviews. I have personally spoken to Holocaust survivors and WWII vets who were there. I have not personally traveled to Germany, I have not gone to any national archives to do independent research of my own, but on what basis do you claim to be more knowledgeable than me?
Always this rhetorical gimmick: "You have a consistent position you express frequently: wow, why do you care so much? You're super animated!"
I could as easily ask the same: why are you "so animated" about Jews that you have to comment every time Jews or the Holocaust are mentioned? (And you do.) Yet when I observe this and conclude that you clearly feel some animus towards Jews, that's being "uncharitable."
As for low status, if your goal is for anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers not to be viewed as low status... well, sorry, you can fight history, but I'm on history's side here.
You use lots of insulting, derogatory language, with insults unconnected to what you are replying to. I am much more civil to you, yet if I use even mild sarcasm, you complain about my words and then report me for "antagonism." So to address the specific claim here: no, it is not "asinine" for me to dismiss your "Kool-aid" sneer just because you made an argument for 4 million dead Jews instead of 6 million. If I am unconvinced by your argument that the 6 million figure is wrong, that is not "drinking Kool-aid," metaphorically speaking. And I have in fact already admitted that I don't find it implausible that the 6 million figure is not entirely accurate - I think it was in the millions, and if I were really "super animated" about it, maybe I'd care enough to do the research and see if I agree with you that it was really 4 million. But for reasons we have already discussed, I don't think that's really an important distinction, because while you may think knocking down the 6 million figure would unravel the entire "Holocaust narrative," I don't.
So how would you describe your feeling towards Jews? Contempt? Dislike? Fear? Someone always talking about how Jews are inimical and an existential threat to one's race and culture denying that he feels any "hate" towards them sounds like the white nationalists who insist they don't dislike black people even though they think we should put them in Bantustans. I mean sure, they probably don't personally hate every black person they meet and have an utopian ideal of blacks and whites living peacefully in segregated ethnostates, but (a) I strongly suspect that's just a mask for most of them, and (b) even for the sincere ones, assuming some level of animosity is a motivator is not unreasonable. You want to go on and on about Jews but complain that I am being uncharitable in accusing you of hating Jews. So fine, I'll ask you directly to explain your position and your sentiments clearly, then, if you would like to disabuse me of my misapprehensions, but I suspect that like @SecureSignals, you will dodge the question.
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I do get the impression sometimes that the Holocaust denial argument seems to be premised on the idea that if they can successfully quibble some detail of 'the narrative', this will explode the entire concept of the Holocaust.
Let's retreat to the motte a bit. When I say 'the Holocaust', what I mean is that, between the years of 1939 and 1945, the German state deliberately attempted to kill all the Jews in Europe.
Specific details about how can be quibbled! The exact number of casualties is quibbleable. As noted below, intentionalism versus functionalism is a real debate in mainstream Holocaust studies, and that's an argument about where the initiative came from. Any one location can be quibbled. But none of that contradicts the Holocaust as a whole. The base claim is simple. The German state tried to kill all the Jews.
And that claim specifically seems pretty darn robust.
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You appear to have just completely missed a good chunk of my original post, let me reiterate, those numbers are the same, because they are both "a lot". At this scale, that kind of range just blurs into meaninglessness inside the human brain, which is not able to instinctively understand the difference in the same way it would between 5 and 10. There's nothing practical to be gained by quibbling over the precise figure so long as "wow that's a lot of dead people" is the default reaction.
No it isn't, the deliberate attempt to exterminate Jewish non-combatants on a mass scale is proof of a holocaust. You don't need to be at war to do that.
Because they considered them to be untermensch, who would eventually need to be disposed of and as such were only left alive when it was not more convenient to kill them. The Germans held themselves to different standards when dealing with races that they considered to be inferior than when dealing with those they considered their racial equals. The Oradour-sur-Glane massacre was a shocking barbarity in the west, but standard practise in the east.
The Soviet Union did not place a very high value on the life of its own men, let alone those of a great ideological enemy that had invaded their country, massacred civilians and considered them to be sub-human. The red army didn't care to exert the kind of force it would have needed to rein in their soldiers when they had practically no sympathy for the people the soldiers were murdering and raping.
Yes really. Reasonable people don't tend to care about a topic this niche with this much passion. The only people I've ever encountered to be this invested in the topic are anti-semites that lack the strength of their convictions to just say "yes it happened and I'd do it again if I could", arabs and zionists.
I don't pretend, there are plenty of people who believe they can benefit from trying to play the numbers up and they sound just as motivated to anyone that wasn't born yesterday. That said they also tend not to try and rely on the usual attritional approach of "spew bullshit, try to sound authorative and drown anyone who disagrees with leading questions until they get bored and leave", instead preferring "get very emotional and hope everyone stops thinking".
You are still begging the question. It's the official narrative that claims there was "a deliberate campaign by the Nazis to murder as many Jews as they could." Revisionists claim that there was no such campaign, but that's not to say no Jews were killed. The Allies killed many German civilians before and after the war but it wouldn't be accurate to say they waged a campaign to kill as many as they could. Instead, they had actual policies and strategies, including ethnic cleansing and strategic firebombings of civilian population centers, that resulted in many civilian casualties. But if I were to claim they had a campaign to kill as many Germans as possible I would need to provide strong evidence that such a campaign actually existed. Revisionists claim there was no such campaign, which is why it's a salient issue.
Do you think it matters if the claim you have made, that there was a "deliberate campaign by the Nazis to murder as many Jews as they could" is true or false? Do you think it matters if it turns out no Jews were murdered inside homicidal gas chambers diguised as shower rooms?
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I didn't at all. You make factual assertions that have been the contention of many a holocaust debate in your reply. You act like you are above the details yet rely on them.
Me telling you that your outlook did not belong in the conversation didn't pertain to just the numbers. It pertains to all the pocket anecdotes and tit bits of history that people assume to be true before they make grand sweeping statements about things and why X and Y happened as if all the happenings of history can be reduced to the consequence of things that fit into a soundbite from the History Channel.
The problem with revising the Holocaust is that a lot of the evidence is contingent on other things. If those things didn't happen or happened in a different way or scale then the whole story changes.
You are not just arguing for your pocket theory of the Holocaust and why it matters, you are arguing against mainstream theories like Functionalism in the process.
This describes your own post. I don't know what else you want me to say.
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Not to disagree with the rest of your post, but this place is full of people investing a lot of attention to extremely niche topics in the grand scheme of things. There are very few 'reasonable people' in this thread by such a standard.
It isn't a stretch at all to say that this place is a weirdos' haven, yes.
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