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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.
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.
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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