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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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"forced into gas chambers one way or the other, with maybe a fig leaf of plausible deniability to make it easier to control the victims".

If Treblinka "witnesses" were to be believed, they genuinely believed they were taking a shower. One of the few witnesses to Treblinka, a Jew, testified that he gave haircuts to the Jews inside the gas chamber and they didn't know they were going to be killed. Does that make any sense at all? No, but it's what he claims.

It is harder to believe that the Allies would have bullshitted about something the scale of the Holocaust than that they would have bullshitted about something like supposed German atrocities in Belgium during WWI.

We know Soviet investigators bullshitted 1.5 million people murdered at Majdanek in 7 gas chambers, months before they rolled into Auschwitz and made the exact same claims with the exact same body of evidence.

We know the Americans bullshitted about gas chambers at the Western camps they liberated. The Americans brought in Hollywood directors to film concentration camp footage, and in the film they submitted as evidence in Nuremberg they bullshited a homicidal gas chamber at Dachau. To the minimum credit of the Western Allies, they soon after abandoned all claims of gas chamber extermination in the camps that they liberated, and those claims only persisted in those camps liberated by the Soviets, where Western observers were denied access for investigation. Though, for years, the Dachau museum had a sign that bizarrely read "gas chamber disguised as a shower room -- never used as a gas chamber."

We can even see here that Simon Wiesenthal bullshitted about 5 million non-Jews being murdered in the Holocaust, in order to psychologically manipulate Gentiles into caring about Jewish suffering.

All of the things you have said the Allies wouldn't do, they absolutely did, and you grossly underestimate the capacity and motive for mass deception.

The German public were largely anti Jew as far as I know, but many would have been outraged by the idea of literally killing all of them. Also, Hitler was constantly hoping to reach a peace agreement with the Western powers, which would have been complicated had his solution to the Jewish question become unquestioned international knowledge.

These are also both points against a motive for the alleged operation. In Germany the euthanasia program was abandoned because of public unpopularity. The story goes, the Germans carried out their secret gas chamber extermination program purely out of racial hatred, at great risk during a time it was fighting a war for its own survival, and against all logic. Revisionists contend the "Final Solution" was the deportation of the Jews from the European sphere, and there's no real reason why they would have switched from deportation to secret gas chamber extermination. There is certainly no documentation pointing to a change in policy, and there's no strategic reason for it, and many strategic reasons it would have been a very bad idea.

whether a random peon or a member of the elite, just genuinely does feel that Hitler's government was more morally outrageous than the Kaiser's government.

You think the cart is driving the horse? Public opinion is molded by these grand narratives, and the Holocaust and gas chambers disguised as shower rooms is the biggest grand narrative to come out of WWII. That would be consistent with my suggestion that Holocaust Remembrance has been sacralized, in part, to prevent historical Revisions that would give a more balanced perspective of that conflict, and dare I say, attribute a measure of war guilt to the United States and Great Britain. That narrative was an essential part of de-nazification and it continues to be considered an important narrative in preventing re-nazification, at least according to its most zealous proponents.

Revisionists contend the "Final Solution" was the deportation of the Jews from the European sphere, and there's no real reason why they would have switched from deportation to secret gas chamber extermination.

There is no evidence for deportation because the vast majority of the pre-war Eastern European Jewish population vanished between 1941 and 1945, never to reappear. They didn't go anywhere, not to the Soviet Union (where Jewish communities noticed no great postwar influx), certainly not to Israel (where immigration records were well-kept1 and the majority of early immigration was of Arab Jews), and certainly not to the West (where again, immigration records and records in Jewish communities were well-kept). They never attempted to contact their lost relatives. The younger ones never tried to move back to the West or Israel after 1991 even though many would presumably have survived until then.

1 For example, approximately 120,000 Polish Jews made Aliyah to Israel between 1945 and 1948. The prewar Polish Jewish population was estimated at 3,000,000-3,500,000.

As @Stefferi says, there isn't a coherent revionist explanation for what happened to the extremely well-documented Jewish communities of Eastern Europe after WW2. Survivors undertook surveys of what remained in 1945 and 1946 and found the vast majority had died. This is evidenced by the fact that revisionists cannot really agree on whether the majority of Eastern European Jews either never existed in the first place, did exist but died in other ways that were not intentional genocide (unlikely given vast disparities in civilian casualty rates between Jews and gentiles even when controlling for geography) or did exist but 'left' mysteriously to the Soviet Union or elsewhere at some point between 1939 and 1946. Many believe in all three depending on what is convenient.

And there's an element of ridiculousness to some of the claims, too. The trauma of internment leading to exaggeration or even fabrication is one accusation, and one that has historical precedent. But the idea that all these Eastern European Holocaust survivors invented, out of whole cloth, dozens of extended family members, a half dozen dead siblings, dead uncles and aunts, dead children in some cases, when they were secretly only children or something seems truly absurd.